WBD419 Audio Transcription

Ethics of Bitcoin Maximalism with Pete Rizzo

Interview date: Thursday 4th November

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 interview, I talk to Pete Rizzo, the Editor at Kraken & Bitcoin Magazine. We discuss the ethics of bitcoin maximalism, its role in protecting bitcoin, and the path to hyperbitcoinisation.

“Humanity has generally progressed by moving through shifts in thought, there was the renaissance, there was the enlightenment, there was the dark ages, and now we live in fiat land...Bitcoin is the reaction to that, bitcoin will fix that problem.”

— Pete Rizzo

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: I don't think you've fully established Rizzo yet, I think it's Pete Rizzo.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I need to get more --

Peter McCormack: You know what you should do, you need to get the handle @rizzo.

Pete Rizzo: Okay, that's cool.

Peter McCormack: It's like Matt Odell, it's @ODELL.

Pete Rizzo: That's fair.  I'm going to write that down, because that's actually good advice!

Peter McCormack: I never think of you as Pete or Rizzo; I think of you as Pete Rizzo!

Pete Rizzo: Well, I think we did the Satoshi show, and then you called me "Rizzo" the whole time and I was like, "I'm just going to go that way".

Peter McCormack: I was sending you a signal, "Back the fuck off"!

Pete Rizzo: You were like, "I now own the real estate"!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I am Pete, I am Bitcoin Pete".

Pete Rizzo: Just wait until Dennis Parker, he's going to come in there and he's going to --

Peter McCormack: Who?  Who's that guy?

Pete Rizzo: The podcaster, he's the podcaster.

Peter McCormack: Never heard of him.

Pete Rizzo: He's the biggest podcast!

Peter McCormack: He's fucking not!  I've never heard of him.

Pete Rizzo: He emails in my inbox, I mean he's got to have a podcast somewhere.

Peter McCormack: There are a few Peters.

Pete Rizzo: There's Peter Todd.

Peter McCormack: Peter Todd, yeah.

Pete Rizzo: But he's always been a two-name bitcoiner, because it's always Peter Todd.

Peter McCormack: But I think you're a two-name bitcoiner.

Pete Rizzo: I don't know, I don't like it.  I want to be a one-name bitcoiner.

Peter McCormack: You've got to own that Rizzo.  We should do a branding campaign.

Pete Rizzo: Saife, or Saylor, Pierre, you know, Held.

Peter McCormack: Pelé, Maradona!

Pete Rizzo: It's like Zendaya.  She's the Gen Z actress that I really like.  She was in Dune.  She's got one name.  Everybody else is out there with two names.

Peter McCormack: Have you watched Dune yet?

Pete Rizzo: Yes, I did.

Peter McCormack: What did you think?

Pete Rizzo: Not great.  Solid.

Peter McCormack: I think it looked good.

Pete Rizzo: Monochromatic to the point of being so restrictive.  Everything was fucking black and gold.  My main takeaway was that at least in Lord of the Rings, people ate and laughed and generally seemed like they gave a shit about other things, other than what was going on.  Whereas, Dune was very…  Who was Oscar Isaac playing in that?  He seemed to be playing Oscar Isaac.  There was no character there.

The only real actor was, Javier Bardem was great, the lady who played Jessica was great.  Then, other than that, it was a wash.

Peter McCormack: Is that Rebecca Ferguson?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, she's --

Pete Rizzo: What else has she been in?

Peter McCormack: I was trying to remember.  I'm trying to remember what she was in.

Pete Rizzo: Is this the podcast?!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're going!  We're going to talk about boxing for 23 minutes!

Pete Rizzo: I mean, I thought it was solid, but it wasn't great.

Peter McCormack: I liked the first hour.

Pete Rizzo: Then it kept kind of going.

Peter McCormack: But the pace dropped. 

Pete Rizzo: Yes.  It's like they didn't really know what to do with it.  They were trying to set up the second one.

Peter McCormack: Exactly, which has been greenlit.  But if it was one movie, you would have that drop, and then you would come back.  But I just felt like suddenly they're having a fight and he stabs a guy, and I was like, "What?"

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.  The other thing that made me realise is that Lord of the Rings, what they did really well is they scaled the action up consecutively over the movies.  Whereas, if you think about it, the action in movie one is just the Hobbits being chased around by horses and shit!  And then the next one is the battle, there's one battle.  Then the next movie, the entirety of the thing is a battle.  So, they scaled the action up with the world as they develop the world, whereas in Dune, they did neither of those things.

The plot was good, the world was bad, everything was black or gold, everybody matched, it was terrible, it was drab, it was boring.

Peter McCormack: That didn't bother me.

Pete Rizzo: That was like, "Wow, black and gold are really in and everyone looks like they are also a model for Kanye West"!

Peter McCormack: They were wearing Yeezys!

Pete Rizzo: In this whole world, they're like --

Peter McCormack: Well, I liked it. 

Pete Rizzo: Is this like a tactic so that people can't tell when the podcast begins?

Peter McCormack: No, this is my tactic to just get out of Bitcoin.  I just gradually bring shit in and transfer people over and then I don't talk about Bitcoin anymore.

Pete Rizzo: Oh, so you're trying to crossover?

Peter McCormack: What do you want to do.  Shall we start with, "So, why is there 21 million?  Let's talk about inflation?"!

Pete Rizzo: No, please not, God, Bitcoin has nothing to do with inflation.  Can we start there; let's at least start there?

Peter McCormack: Let me finish just on Dune by saying the best thing is that it wasn't a major disappointment.  So many of those, the 300, or --

Pete Rizzo: The 300 was great.  Who didn't like the 300?

Peter McCormack: 300 was disappointment.  Foundation --

Pete Rizzo: No one expected anything from 300.

Peter McCormack: I did from the trailer.  I saw the trailer and thought, "This is going to be the best thing ever".  Foundation is disappointing.

Pete Rizzo: A lot of people died in it though.

Peter McCormack: It was just boring.  But look, so much shit's disappointing; it was okay.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, it was solid, it was good.  And that makes it better than all the Hobbits and all the Star Wars.  The ball is on the green, whether they take it home from there.

Peter McCormack: We're getting some good New York sound effects here.

Pete Rizzo: Hey, it's a busy world out there.  People who are living their lives completely unaware of any coins or --

Peter McCormack: We were talking about that in the last one.  Most people have got no idea what's going on, or care.

Pete Rizzo: But I think that that's going to continue.  We are early, and part of being early is just accepting that the world will continue to not care about what we're doing for some large period of time, I think.

Peter McCormack: Well, they might start caring over the next few years.

Pete Rizzo: I don't know.  I'm not a big proponent of the doomsdayism around Bitcoin.  I think predictions to the future, I don't know, I just think it's a very crass thing to predict that there will be some sort of societal collapse.  It just seems like a very bleak way to live your life.  It's like you're rooting for that, sort of thing.

Peter McCormack: Well, the funny thing is that I brought that up in the --

Pete Rizzo: Is this the podcast?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's all the podcast!  We can get back to talking about --

Pete Rizzo: When did it start?!

Peter McCormack: When you're a professional, you just don't know.

Pete Rizzo: When did it start; I don't know?!  Sorry, I'm back, I've pulled myself together again.

Peter McCormack: The first time we did this was two years, here in New York City. 

Pete Rizzo: Except I was the one with the studio.

Peter McCormack: You were the one with the studio, there were no cameras.

Pete Rizzo: Well, there were cameras that were in boxes I think, to be fair. 

Peter McCormack: It was a little bit shitcoin-y.

Pete Rizzo: We weren't confident enough to set up the cameras, but they were present there.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember when it was?

Pete Rizzo: It was after Consensus 2019, yeah, in May.

Peter McCormack: 19 September.

Pete Rizzo: No!  That's when you released the show, but you actually recorded it five months earlier, because you came there after Consensus, didn't think it was interesting enough, and then released it later.

Peter McCormack: Is that what I did?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I have a great memory!

Peter McCormack: I must have been short a show that week.  Yeah, it was released 19 September.

Pete Rizzo: You did, yeah, but it occurred five months earlier, because it was after Consensus.  I remember, because I skipped the after-party, because I thought the event was terrible, so I hung out with you.

Peter McCormack: The event was fucking terrible.

Pete Rizzo: It was pretty bad, yeah.  Is this the podcast?!

Peter McCormack: This is the podcast!  So, Bitcoin, why is there 21 million?

Pete Rizzo: Well, you see, Satoshi realised that he needed to have a finite supply to make number go up.

Peter McCormack: I don't actually care.  We've covered this before.

Pete Rizzo: I like this start that we have.  Maybe we should keep this up.

Peter McCormack: Let me talk about that thing, because you said the doomsday thing.  That's one of the things, "The celebration of scenarios which are good for Bitcoin, but ultimately will cause a lot of people other pain".

Pete Rizzo: I think the word is "gauche" for that.  I think it's something we should frown upon, so if you're listening, just picture me frowning on it.  I mean, is this the podcast yet?  Can I refer to the podcast?

Peter McCormack: This whole time has been the podcast!

Pete Rizzo: This is terrible.  This is going to be the lowest viewed podcast. 

Peter McCormack: I think that this is the most natural one and people will love it!

Pete Rizzo: That's fair.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to call it, "A tale of two Petes"!

Pete Rizzo: Well, I have to re-brand as Rizzo now.

Peter McCormack: "The tale of Rizzo and McCormack".

Pete Rizzo: You see, the problem is we haven't really established these other prior jokes, because we haven't done a reset, right.

Peter McCormack: We don't have to, people are smart when they listen.  They are, they'll figure it out.

Pete Rizzo: Just for anyone who is just tuning in, Peter McCormack is the dominant Peter.  I, Pete Rizzo, formally renounce the "Pete" and I am rebranding myself as "Rizzo" now.  I am acknowledging Peter's claim to the entirety of the word "Pete".

Peter McCormack: I never made a claim; it just established itself.

Pete Rizzo: You don't have to.  You've got SEO, you've the domain authority.  It's just a hard world out there.

Peter McCormack: It just established itself.  I'm sorry I edged you out, because you were probably -- no, Peter Todd was the original Peter.

Pete Rizzo: Peter Todd would have been the original Peter, yeah.  I'm sure there are other Peters around.  Peter Vessenes from the Bitcoin Foundation, a classic one, a classic Peter.  Also, the one who was holding up the Mt. Gox case for years, so there is a proud lineage of Peters that we follow!

Peter McCormack: Do you know, I hate the name, Peter.

Pete Rizzo: Oh, you do?  Well, now's your time to just renounce it. 

Peter McCormack: It's a very plain, nothing fucking name, Peter. 

Pete Rizzo: It means "the Rock" in Christian lore, I think.  That's what my grandmother told me.

Peter McCormack: She might have made that up.  So, yes, we should not celebrate bad events for people, because it's a little bit crass.  And I know, I agree, I do.  Everything I criticise, I can be a hypocrite, so I can tweet and put shit out there, but the collapse of society for the Bitcoin is not --

Pete Rizzo: Well, what I would say is that hyperbitcoinisation, should it occur within our lifetime, will be a very painful, disruptive process for a lot of people.  And, since this is the podcast now, I'll refer to my work and say, as someone who tries to preserve the Bitcoin history, I do think we're going to owe those people some sort of explanation for what happens.

My worry is that hyperbitcoinisation happens really fast, and you get something like what you saw in El Salvador, where you saw that Bitcoin is already politicised.  It's a politicised issue in a single country in the world, and there's no reason to think that that kind of attack against Bitcoin can't scale.  There's a whole group of people in El Salvador, 50% of the population, who probably hate Bitcoin, just because Bukele's for it.  So I think with hyperbitcoinisation --

Peter McCormack: It's definitely a lot less than 50%.  I think it's like 5%.

Pete Rizzo: Of the people who are in the anti-Bukele?

Peter McCormack: The protests have hardly anyone there.  He's got so much popular support.  And, it's arguably working.

Pete Rizzo: Well, I think my point just generally about that is that I think hyperbitcoinisation will be painful for people.  I think people won't understand it, and I think a lot of people, if you look at the cryptocurrency markets broadly, I think it's a good proxy for how people react to Bitcoin.  You can't really understand it.  Part of the thesis behind a lot of where I'm at mentally is I think the history of Bitcoin is a series of human beings trying and failing to understand Bitcoin.  And I don't think that there's anything special about the current time period that we're living in that makes us immune from those mistakes.

So, I look at the other periods of Bitcoin history and I try and maintain a humble perspective, because I know those people were wrong.  Everybody thought they were right, everybody was retweeting them constantly, and they were wrong, you don't hear about them anymore.  So, my worry with the current group of bitcoiners is that I do think they're correct in preaching about the monetisation of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is monetising at an insane rate.  That is a very charitable description for how fast it's monetising. 

That said, we should be very careful about the expectations that we set with new people that are getting in that, okay, it's very easy for people to get into things and then think that they're special.  Now is special; now is a special time because we're here and I'm here and I'm special so this must be special; hyperbitcoinisation must be occurring for the next few months.  I don't think that's an accurate way to look at it. 

My proxy for hyperbitcoinisation is, do people understand Bitcoin?  No.  So, I don't know how hyperbitcoinisation occurs in that, do most people who are in the cryptocurrency industry understand Bitcoin?  No.  So, how are we at a place where hyperbitcoinisation can reasonably occur?  Then if it does, it's going to be completely on the monetary brutality of Bitcoin, and is that how you want people to be introduced to Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: How does somebody objectively claim they understand Bitcoin?

Pete Rizzo: I don't know.  I think you notice the charts or tweets where people are talking about the longer you've been here, the more questions you have, and I think that's because some of those questions are very legitimate.  There are a lot of deeply meaningful questions left to resolve about Bitcoin.  We don't know that Bitcoin is going to work in an environment where the subsidy is not coming out from the supplier, so the continuing inflation; we just don't know.  We don't have that answer.  You can't tell somebody that you know what's going to happen in that environment.

There have been a couple of studies that people have dismissed, but Adam Back was talking about it recently and his answer was, and I've been thinking about this a lot recently, he was, "Yeah, well if Bitcoin's valuable, people will figure out a way to pay for it".  He's like, "We have the internet and people pay for that".  I was like, "Wow, okay!  Wait, am I wrong, because I'm looking for a firm answer here about how Bitcoin is going to pay for itself in perpetuity, whereas Adam Back's just like, 'It'll work, if people like it'?"

Peter McCormack: The really strange thing I find about Bitcoin, I look at something like Ethereum and they're always changing and playing silly bollocks with it.  But with something like Bitcoin, everything seems to always just work out; it does.

Pete Rizzo: Qualify that?

Peter McCormack: Mt. Gox collapses and it could be the end of Bitcoin, but ends up being the start of a movement --

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, but you were just laughing about CREAM Finance earlier, so why does that example not apply?  That's a bad example.

Peter McCormack: Well, because that keeps happening again and again.

Pete Rizzo: It keeps happening in Bitcoin too.

Peter McCormack: Well, I feel like it's -- we don't even have to talk about ETH, but I'm just saying it established the "not your keys, not your Bitcoin", that movement to protect your Bitcoin.  Silk Road could have ended Bitcoin and we had the regulatory crackdown, but we didn't have it.  Everything just seems to work out.  It's like Harry Sudock said.  Harry Sudock said to me, "Everything is good for Bitcoin.  Bad things are good for Bitcoin, good things are good for Bitcoin, but they're always good for Bitcoin".

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I have trouble relating to that, because again, can you apply that perspective to someone in another coin?  So, you look at these other coin communities, the way they develop, and they're almost alternate realities.

Peter McCormack: No, everything's bad for Ethereum!

Pete Rizzo: Again, qualify it; it doesn't make sense?

Peter McCormack: I'm just being a prick.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, well, okay.

Peter McCormack: I don't hate them.

Pete Rizzo: You have to take the alternative perspective.  So, you had Udi on the podcast recently, and I think that was his main point.  I think bitcoiners have become so confident in Bitcoin that by and large, we've become a bit complacent in actually making really argumentation for things.  I agree with him, I think that was a fair point.

Peter McCormack: I don't think I have the reputation of someone who can make solid arguments!  I'm not going to start it right now, I need to think through it.  I'm okay if I can think things through a bit at a time.

Pete Rizzo: Well, I've spent a lot of time thinking things through.

Peter McCormack: "Everything is good for Bitcoin".  Okay, I think what Harry meant by that is, if the price goes up, it's good, because it confirms the thesis that this is a valuable investment; and if the price drops, it's a chance to buy more.  Everything's good for Bitcoin.  I think what it is is we have a way of arguing everything is good for Bitcoin.  Volatility, that's the price you pay for remonetising the world.

Pete Rizzo: Right, but I think what's interesting about the other cryptocurrency communities is (a) they do exist, you can objectively see them, (b) they parrot a lot of the things that Bitcoin does, and (c) they achieve a lot of the same results.  So, somebody said something interesting to me the other day, which was, "Every coin has outperformed Bitcoin since its launch, basically all of them".  From a data perspective, that is a fairly accurate statement.  So, how do you actually disprove that?

So, I'm a fan of argumentation, I'm a bitcoiner who prefers my Bitcoin with some intellectual malaise, you know.

Peter McCormack: Somebody I was talking to, I was out to dinner last night, and they were questioning the podcast and saying, "What's your goal?" and I was like, "I only ever want to have the best one", and she was like, "Does that mean the biggest?"  I was like, "No".  There's no way of measuring this.

Pete Rizzo: As long as you're happy with it, that's fine.  Well, let's apply this as, everything is good for your podcast!

Peter McCormack: No.  I mean, if I get arrested for assaulting someone, that's not good for the podcast.

Pete Rizzo: That's not good for your podcast.

Peter McCormack: If I go out on Twitter and put out homophobic, racist, stupid shit, that's not good.

Pete Rizzo: Right, that's not good for your podcast, okay.

Peter McCormack: No, because my podcast is fragile.

Pete Rizzo: Okay, because it won't operate without -- it's not decentralised; your podcast is not decentralised.

Peter McCormack: My death is not good for my podcast.  It's good for everyone else's podcast!

Pete Rizzo: Right.  Well, certainly for the other Peters like myself, who are competing against your SEO and online presence.  I think that would re-establish some room.

Peter McCormack: You might reclaim the name.  But the point I'm trying to make is --

Pete Rizzo: There's some bitterness in that last remark, by the way, "You might reclaim the name"!  We can freeze-frame that.  There should be a slow pan on that.

Peter McCormack: With a stare.  But the point I'm trying to make is you can say, whatever category of podcast, is it the best one?  It's the biggest.

Pete Rizzo: Oh, it's the best in category.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what makes something that best?  Is it just a number; is it the most downloads?

Pete Rizzo: Well, are you the best Bitcoin podcast, or the best crypto podcast?

Peter McCormack: I would say I'm not the best interviewer, that's for sure.  I think John Vallis is brilliant; I like Brady, he doesn't do enough; I think Marty's a great interviewer.

Pete Rizzo: You listen to a lot of other Bitcoin podcasts?

Peter McCormack: No.  I used to and I stopped doing it.  I listen to specific ones.  I listen to Vallis and Preston.  I think Preston's a great interviewer.  I think I've just created the good entry point and some marketing, that's what it is.  But the point being, what is the best?  If you say, "These other coins have outperformed Bitcoin", does it make them better?  No, it doesn't, because that's not the metric.  It's like cars. 

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, but that's the question though, is what is the metric?  I know you want to talk about Bitcoin maximalism, but there are only so many ways to compare the different coins.  So, you have to sort of understand the lens, you have to have a framework that works.  I think what I've been trying to do with my work recently is present a slight critique on Bitcoin maximalism, but I think we've become too reliant on emphasising certain ideas.

So, I have this new thing that I've been saying, where I think there's only really five ways to argue whether a cryptocurrency is better than another cryptocurrency.  You've got economics, it meets the qualities of money better; there's the network, it's more decentralised by some metric; there's the launch, it's more fair by some determination that you're making; user rights, which I think is the big one that's underdiscussed, is what rights do you have to use that protocol and under what conditions; and then five is really the freedoms, what freedoms do you have to use that money within that system?

I think most of the cryptocurrencies, really what they do that is quite problematic, I think, if you think about it, is they offer you the veneer of more freedoms, often at a cost of weakening the other perspectives.  They are less decentralised, they are less economically strong, and they often weaken your rights as a user within that system.  There is some veneer of, "You can use all these apps", or whatever, but I think this comes down to one of the central issues.  You say, "What is Bitcoin?  21 million", whatever; the other cryptocurrencies are even less defined.

I think at this point, one of the big theories that we're unbundling right now is the crypto asset theory.  I don't know that crypto assets exist.  Please, someone, show me that there is actually a cryptocurrency that is meaningfully differentiated from Bitcoin.  There's a couple of ways you can look at it.  I think they're all competing economies, financial economies, or you should be able to prove that people are using some of these other cryptocurrencies for some reason.

So, a good example would be "privacy coins"; are people using them to do things for privacy?  Then, how do they exist as a meaningfully distinct asset?  It seems like this is just another key player on some chain.  And then, what we're really talking about is all these networks essentially, you can grade them on some sort of curve for something.  But I think they're competing economies, and I think that's really the heart of one of the disagreements between Bitcoin and the Ethereum ecosystem, is they're essentially the two largest crypto economies, but there are real meaningful differences between these things.

I think that if you're someone who is understanding of those things, or you can help the conversation, I think you have a responsibility to do that, because it is very confusing for people.  We, as human beings, are just starting to learn what the differences with these systems are.  But humans are also really great at making large, complex systems that are terrible.  Look at the fiat system, a terrible system of human invention.  So again, I think that we're immune from making these kinds of mistakes in the system. 

I feel like that's where I want to push back against some of the sort of handwaving, where people are like, "Oh well, don't be a Bitcoin maximalist.  You should just let all these other cryptocurrencies exist".  "Well, no, actually these are systems that have meaningfully different attributes for their users and if extrapolated, if allowed to grow into large systems, they could have meaningful effects on the lives of many people".  We're at the stage right now where cryptocurrencies have been launched now in multiple countries.  Venezuela launched a cryptocurrency; everybody forgets about that.

Peter McCormack: Nobody fucking used it!

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, but El Salvador, again, embraced Bitcoin.  Very cool, but again, these things are being applied on a national scale now, and again, the sort of rainbow-type approach that Ethereum has taken had its time and place.  There was a time and place where maybe that was an interesting thing to do, but I think at this point we know a little bit more about these systems.

Peter McCormack: So?  I can't tell your position on this.  I always feel like you're a contrarian, a fair contrarian.

Pete Rizzo: Right, that's fair.

Peter McCormack: Almost like you're a journalist.

Pete Rizzo: That was my occupation for some period of time.

Peter McCormack: But I feel like you've gone through a period of becoming a little bit more pro-Bitcoin.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, for sure.  I would call myself a Bitcoin maximalist.

Peter McCormack: Because, I felt like back in 2019, I'm not sure if it's just you were disillusioned with work, disillusioned with the whole economy, but there was definitely disillusionment; and I left that first interview thinking, "Okay".  And then, with all your recent work, I'm like, "Oh no, he's full Bitcoin maxi".

Pete Rizzo: I didn't have the contacts.  So, I think the thing that helps to understand is I'll explain why I think my story is valuable and I've become a little bit more comfortable telling it.  So, I was someone who became a journalist in 2013, when I discovered Bitcoin, and that was my vehicle to becoming a journalist.  So, I had a relationship where Bitcoin was a means for me to obtain the job that I wanted to do.

So, a lot of my recent statements in being pro-toxic maximalism, I've basically said as such that I was a person that was in a position to do something to educate the public about Bitcoin.  And I think I worked very hard at that.  I worked 12, 14 hours a day, I ultimate built a news source that's still one of the largest in its industry, it scaled to become a global publication that had 50 people by the time I left.  Was that organisation some positive for Bitcoin?  I don't think so.  I didn't have the knowledge at that point to really even understand that -- I didn't have the perception of myself in that role. 

So I think, when I go back and I look at the people who attacked me, and they were ruthlessly attacking my position, they were often right in doing so, because I hadn't taken the time to understand what this thing was, I just didn't have that perspective, because I was doing my job.  My job was to report the news.  The media organisation benefitted from us covering multiple cryptocurrencies, there was better SEO across all fronts.  These are no different than any of the reasons that any of the businesses today do not support multiple cryptocurrencies. 

There's a widespread belief within the cryptocurrency industry that supporting multiple cryptocurrencies is ultimately the best business decision.  How do you argue against them?  You can't.  The business performs meaningfully across all those metrics if you support multiple cryptocurrencies, so that's the direction that business went.

Peter McCormack: Yes and no.  There is a time preference thing.

Pete Rizzo: Well, you countertraded that a bit with your podcast, right.

Peter McCormack: How do you mean?  What, like I went Bitcoin only?

Pete Rizzo: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Yes, but I will accept money for sponsorship from companies that support crypto, I just won't promote their products.  I've had it up on my website, "You have to have a Bitcoin product.  I'm only willing to promote that", because there are not enough Bitcoin-only companies with enough money to pay for the ads to support what this machine has become.  And I'm okay with that, because I only promote Bitcoin.

But there is a time preference argument on this thing.  So for example, there are exchanges that support multiple cryptocurrencies, and then there's River and there's Strike, essentially, and Cash App is kind of only Bitcoin.  What's the long-term trajectory?  These companies that are building their business as a Bitcoin-only company perhaps are building something which is more resilient long term, whereas the other exchanges that support multiple cryptocurrencies, they perhaps aren't building for the same future; they're building for a future of maybe being a securities exchange, and what does that mean?

Pete Rizzo: Well, I would argue that if you look at the cryptocurrencies companies, you could argue that they support multiple cryptocurrencies, but I'm not even sure that that's actually true.  I think that they mostly support tokens within the Ethereum economy.  So again, if you look at them as competing financial economies, you have Bitcoin and Ethereum, then I think it's a little bit easier to slice that, right.

Being a participant of the Ethereum economy is more lucrative for you, more trading fees, more coins, more everything, more news, more data, you name it.  So, I think I've become a bit more of a Bitcoin maximalist, because I left very, very disillusioned, as you said.  I was the Editor during the Blocksize Wars, but you had people who were the foremost experts in the industry fighting with each other every day about what the thing was.  So, I don't know how you don't leave that thing disillusioned, but I resolved to eventually just try to go find my own answer, and I basically said, "Okay, I'm going to give it all up, I'm going to go back to the beginning.  I'll start at page one, and I'm going to actually learn this thing", because I don't know what happened. 

But I think that that, to me, I took some time off between that and ultimately, I was like, okay, I was here, I have to know, I was in a position where I can know, and I think I decided that for me, that was what I wanted to follow up with.  I think we were just talking with your friend over there saying, "These history stories are helpful, they give me context", and I was like, "They give me context, because I knew 30% of this story, but I had to go back and get it, because I didn't know if someone else was going to do that work".

Talking about what we talked about at the beginning, I hope it was the beginning of the podcast, but hyperbitcoinisation, I think we're going to owe some explanation to these people.  And I say "these people" being the people of the world who I think, when Bitcoin becomes a competitive financial economy, that is going to be thrust upon them --

Peter McCormack: When?

Pete Rizzo: When?  What do you mean?

Peter McCormack: It kind of is now.

Pete Rizzo: I think it's still very ignorable.  I think the Bitcoin economy is still very ignorable.  The dollars don't matter; it's not about the dollars.  $60,000 and everybody in the street, nobody's talking about this, nobody in this office is probably talking about this.  The dollars don't matter.  When I started writing about Bitcoin, the price was $50.  I never thought I would see $1,000; I saw $1,000.  Never thought I would see $20,000; I saw $20,000.  Never thought I would see $60,000 and what has been the big change in the world?

I think the thing is that people don't really understand that the Bitcoin price is not correlated to the adoption of Bitcoin; it's correlated to the economic strength of the Bitcoin Network.  Those are two separate things. 

Peter McCormack: Explain that.

Pete Rizzo: Okay.  I'm able to be bullish on the price of Bitcoin without thinking that that bullishness on the price translates into real-world change; I don't think that those things are equal at this point.  I think we have seen that.  Bitcoin, again, has been worth more than $1 for a decade.  Okay, everyone's walking around using dollars!  So, I think we tend to overestimate the effect of the price psychologically on people.  We'll have this conversation in four years and I guarantee you the price will be $600,000 and no one will care.

Peter McCormack: But it could also be counterproductive, it actually turns people off, because they're like, "I've missed it, I'm too late.  Forget this".

Pete Rizzo: But I thought I was too late at $50.  That's just a symptom of the adoption curve.  That's how Bitcoin, I think, works.  I think you have to see over time that it's more beneficial for you to be a participant in the Bitcoin economy.  You are rewarded for being a participant in the Bitcoin economy at an outsized level than the fiat economy.  You're not rewarded in that system.

Peter McCormack: You're punished usually, unless you're the billionaires, the cantillionaires.

Pete Rizzo: That seems to be the case.  I've been appreciative of all the recent macro discussion around Bitcoin.  I certainly didn't understand macroeconomics, I don't think there's been much talk about macroeconomics in Bitcoin prior to this last two or three years.  But again, I still find some of these things, as you were saying, to be wildly over-characteristic.  The price of Bitcoin can go up to $600,000; I just don't think the world meaningfully changes.

As long as you can put Bitcoin in a box as a silly digital gold, then it's not going to change.  The real change is not correlated to price.  I think that the mistake that we made is not predicting higher prices.  I do think the Bitcoin price will continue to go higher; it's thinking that in any way necessitates or equals some sort of meaningful change.

Peter McCormack: What does bring meaningful change to you?

Pete Rizzo: That's the question; I don't know.  And the other flipside question is, are we ready to onboard that many people?  Can we actually handle -- people like to use Bitcoin as the lifeboat analogy.  Okay, great, how many lifeboats do you have; enough for everybody?  Don't look like it, so I don't know how that's going to work out.

Peter McCormack: So, does it end up just being this smallish economy?

Pete Rizzo: No, I'm pro a longer, cyclical theory.  So, you were talking about interviewing; I only had a chance to ask Greg Maxwell one question, and I said, "Do you care if Bitcoin succeeds within your lifetime?" and he said, "No".  And I think I got more from that question than anything else, because I think that we have to understand, we might not see the end of the revolution that we're starting.  This is very common.  I mean, the Founding Fathers never saw America becoming a global superpower; they died well before that.

So, I think we have to sort of appreciate that this thing may take time.  I don't think that's bad.  I don't know who needs Bitcoin to hyperbitcoinise in the next two years, and I think it's mostly on Twitter that need that to happen.  So therefore, I don't think it's a meaningful discussion point.  I guess the question would be, "Is the world better off if people do that?" and I think then the answer is yes.  I think Bitcoin as a financial asset seems to protect people's rights at a higher level than the existing system.

Peter McCormack: I was reading, when I was on holiday, I was reading about the last days of Rome.

Pete Rizzo: Okay!  Were you wearing board shorts, did you have sun lotion on your nose?!

Peter McCormack: Come on!  But this story pans hundreds of years.  They talk about sections which are decades.

Pete Rizzo: This is why history is very dangerous.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but hundreds of years.

Pete Rizzo: Look at you.  You're a person going back to history for answers to understand your time in the present.

Peter McCormack: I'm trying to understand the Fourth Turning and if we're in it.  I'm trying to understand if this is one of those situations.

Pete Rizzo: I like the Fourth Turning as a theory, to be honest.

Peter McCormack: But the Fourth Turning was the fall of Rome.  But the fall of Rome was hundreds of years, right.  People who were at the start were not there at the end, just like you said, exactly as you said.  And so, this hyperbitcoinisation might be something that is decades, maybe a couple of centuries, and it's ugly, messy, painful, bloody.  It could be awful.  But it's what comes out at the end of it.

Pete Rizzo: I think there's a couple of questions that I look at.  I think prior to hyperbitcoinisation, there will be a meaningful transition to something else, and this is what really worries me about the cryptocurrency movement beyond Bitcoin and why I'm increasingly in the columns I write for Forbes or Bitcoin Magazine, or whatever, trying to delineate between those two things; because, I do think that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency movement.

The cryptocurrency movement, I still have very many questions about.  I think the most troubling thing about all the other cryptocurrencies, other than Bitcoin, is that they seem to take a certain attitude towards -- there are common attitudes, right.  So, I think I really like to look at it as, there are two financial ecosystems emerging.  There's the Bitcoin economy and there's the crypto economy.  So, then you start to look at it, "What do people in each of these categories believe?"

Peter McCormack: Well, look, I'm going to be brutal here.  I think Bitcoin is based on a strong set of principles: security, sound money, move slowly, glacial.  And then, you have competing cryptocurrencies which seem to have disaster after disaster and no one gives a fuck.

Pete Rizzo: That's a bad argument, because you already brought up Mt. Gox on Bitcoin already.

Peter McCormack: No, key difference.  People did care about Mt. Gox.  It led to a whole movement of not your keys, not your Bitcoin.  Whereas, what I'm saying is, these cryptocurrencies seem to go from disaster to disaster and nobody gives a fuck.  It becomes more centralised: don't care.  Can't run a node: don't care.  Rug pull for $1 billion: don't care.

Pete Rizzo: But why do those things matter that you just said?  So, I think the reason that they matter, it matters that other cryptocurrencies are not meaningfully decentralised, not because they're not meaningfully decentralised; it's because you, as a user in a system that's not meaningfully decentralised, have less rights, it's more likely for you to be exploited.

So, the way that I could best put it in a recent piece that I wrote was, in other cryptocurrencies, it's possible for political groups to form, for those political groups to take action, and then for you, as a user within that system, to be disenfranchised.  You can lose access to that system.  And I think what's really troubling about the cryptocurrency market is when they look at that situation, they're very majoritarian.  They basically say, "You are using our products.  You don't like it?  You can just go fork our code.  You can just go appeal to the market for whatever you want to use, continue using whatever you want", and it puts the market in a weird position where the market almost adjudicates people's rights.

In Bitcoin, your rights are guaranteed, they're in the code.  There's no political formation that can form that can collude against you where you won't have access to your Bitcoin; we've seen this time and time again.  And there are groups within Bitcoin who have meaningfully dissented that they don't follow the rules of the majority and are still owning Bitcoin.  I think this is a massive delineation between the two systems.

In Bitcoin, the way that we're pursuing changes to the economy are optional, they're voluntary.  Sure, there's debate here about what is use of force and how; but by and large in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, if you don't agree with the majority in whatever coin you're on, take a hike, get lost, go somewhere else.  If you want to fork the code, great.  Go talk to all the exchanges and get them to list your coin.

In certain cases, they have even removed people's rights to their own money.  This was the DAO hack, which I think is again where history has still focused on that event, because it was a situation where the majority of users of Ethereum colluded to rescind somebody's rights and they just took away that guy's money.

So, what worries me, I guess, talking about hyperbitcoinisation is that we're going to pass through some stage where these cryptocurrencies are actually meaningfully subverted by the state apparatus, because if you think that the government is just going to regulate all the cryptocurrencies away, I think you're in for a rude awakening.  They will exploit those systems to their benefit prior to hyperbitcoinisation occurring, because by the time they realise that hyperbitcoinisation is occurring, they will fight it tooth and nail.  I don't think it's going to be a very rosy process for us.

Peter McCormack: It will probably be well too late to fight it. 

Pete Rizzo: Yes, I would agree with that.

Peter McCormack: And there's another argument that we were discussing in the previous interview I had with Lawrence Lepard where we were discussing, actually, the Bitcoin in some ways could be a saviour of the US economy and the US dollar.  We'll come back to that; just keep that in check, because I just want to refer back. 

I think another thing that's an important differential between Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies I think is the objective of not everyone, but some of the people.  I think the overall goal, objective of Bitcoin, outside of everyone wanting to get rich, is there's these issues in society that bad money causes that people think good money can fix.  So, that's the principle of what they're trying to do, fix the money, fix the world.  You might think it's hyperbolic, but that exists.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I mean the way you've framed it is interesting, but we can put that in a box.

Peter McCormack: We can come back to that, but the point being is there's some principles about Bitcoin making the world a better place.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, but whose principles and where do they come from?

Peter McCormack: Again, I know every point I make, we're going to digest the minutiae detail!  But I think with cryptocurrency, they're trying to innovate technology, and it's kind of fintech.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I don't buy that.

Peter McCormack: No, I don't.

Pete Rizzo: I don't think that's an accurate way of looking at it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, tell me why.

Pete Rizzo: Because the shittiest cryptocurrency inherits 90% of the characteristics that make Bitcoin money.  Dogecoin is a great example.  So, if you took fiat, Dogecoin and Bitcoin, Dogecoin's a terrible cryptocurrency, it has absolutely no value, but it still inherits a lot of the characteristics of Bitcoin by roughly being a fork of it.  So, this is one of our arguments of altcoinism, it's that you should have this pure freedom of expression.  Anything you want to be able to do, you should be able to do it. 

But again, Dogecoin, you can create it on the same curve, right.  Economically, is it better than the dollar?  I don't know.  Dogecoin's had a great year.  The network, is it decentralised?  Definitely not, nobody's running that code.  The launch, was it fair?  I don't know.  The guy gave up, he left, fair enough.  User rights?  Okay, well the majority of Elon Musk fans decided to do something else with Dogecoin, you're probably not going to last very long.  And you can trade it anywhere in the world with probably about the same settlement time as Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I don't think it has the same liquidity as Bitcoin, and it certainly doesn't have the same network effects, it doesn't have the same respect.

Pete Rizzo: But what I'm saying is that, one of the interesting things about this argument is that the average cryptocurrency, by virtue of copying what Bitcoin achieves, copies 90% of --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you can copy 100% of what Bitcoin does and you'll still fail, because you don't have the network effect, you don't have the launch, you're not it.  So, not having that 10%, what are we talking about?  You can talk about the percent of features it has.  I think that's a meaningless metric.

Pete Rizzo: I would agree with you, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, all these other cryptocurrencies can launch, but I don't feel behind them there's ever a mission which is like Bitcoin's.  Bitcoin Cash would say it has a similar mission maybe, but it's failed.  What I'm saying is generally speaking, I think Bitcoin has a very different mission.  Can Ethereum define its mission?

Pete Rizzo: I think that's one of the central problems with Ethereum, because you think about cryptocurrencies, most of them are predicted on what they're doing is not Bitcoin.  Because what they're doing is not Bitcoin, they can take liberties with user rights and whatever, network design, whatever.  And this is the most problematic.  The US dollar value of their coin is what approves their decision or not.  They look to the US dollar market to validate their decisions.  That is one of the most overwhelmingly problematic things about most cryptocurrencies that I feel like nobody talks about is that they have a different relationship to the market.

I think with Bitcoin maximalism, Bitcoin is definitional.  It is a neutral monetary system by design, regardless of any approval of the market.  If Bitcoin was worth half as much tomorrow, it would still be a neutral monetary system.  I think with the other cryptocurrencies, one of the things we don't talk about enough is how intertwined they've become with the US dollar cryptocurrency market, which again didn't actually exist at the beginning of Bitcoin.  There was no US dollar Bitcoin market for the first year of Bitcoin, so therefore the US dollar cryptocurrency market is a weird extraction.  It both doesn't actually exist, but is used to validate 99% of the interactions in the cryptocurrency community. 

I think that's one of the things why bitcoiners, as much as you want to cheer on the price, you have to divorce yourself from it a little bit, because to me, Bitcoin maximalism, we're not looking to the price for validation.  I think Bitcoin achieves what it achieves.  If you're looking to the US dollar market for validation, I don't know, I think that's a problem, because what's the score system there?

Peter McCormack: For me, we've gone round in a circle; you've ended up agreeing with my thesis.

Pete Rizzo: Okay, why?

Peter McCormack: Because I believe Bitcoin is based on principles, fix the money, fix the world.  The only US dollar measure is it feels like its growth in --

Pete Rizzo: Well, I don't even know how much principles it is.  It's just that because you own Bitcoin, you can't be disenfranchised, therefore you can never be kicked down.  I don't even know how much of the Bitcoin principles that we load on Bitcoin really matter.  You own your keys in Bitcoin and no one can take them away from you, whereas the other cryptocurrencies, some group or collection of groups can collude to take them away from you.

Peter McCormack: Well, I feel like the roadmap, the technical roadmap for Bitcoin, the development roadmap, has got nothing to do with improving the valuation of Bitcoin.  It's to do with improving the experience of the user, making the network more decentralised, making it more secure.  I feel like it's always for making the technology better.  I feel like when you look at something like Ethereum, where they change the monetary policy multiple times, they try and put an audit --

Pete Rizzo: But I think people focus on the monetary policy and they don't focus on the user.  So, why is it better for you to be a user in a system with a fixed monetary policy?  Well, no one else can influence it.  It's worse for you to be a user in a system with a changing monetary policy, because you might not necessarily be able to influence the outcome, and you might be disenfranchised by the people making the decisions; there has to be someone making the decision there.

So, I think my problem is not with the arguments of decentralisation, or the arguments about the economics being important; I think it all goes back to you as a user.  Are you in a financial economy where you can proceed without some penalty being enacted against you?  And Bitcoin, it seems, overwhelmingly obviously, as much as all of the way we're upgrading Bitcoin now occurs in a way where you are not penalised for non-participation.  In the other cryptocurrencies, definitionally they require participation, or you do not continue being a part of the network.  So, they become almost weirdly authoritarian. 

So, that's why I think the right way to look at it is, Bitcoin, and I think Saifedean said this recently, "It's an economy defined by consent".  And cryptocurrencies are by and large economies defined by political influence.  And again, my worry is that as we're talking about hyperbitcoinisation, I don't think the world accepts hyperbitcoinisation until it goes through some really weird experimentation with the other system.  To me, I expect to see some period of time where it's pretty painful to be a bitcoiner.

Peter McCormack: Because?

Pete Rizzo: Because these systems can be subverted, right.  Let's just say you had a large amount of nation states embrace Ethereum, all launch fiat proxy coins on Ethereum, gather political influence there, most people would probably just go along with their lives, I don't know how much it would affect them.

Peter McCormack: But that's no different from them going along with the fiat currencies we have now; they're just on a different platform.  They're still subject to the same issues.

Pete Rizzo: That's right.  I just think that it will be under the guise of this different change.  People will be saying, "Oh, well this is just like Bitcoin, because it's also decentralised".  So, you'll have this period where I think it will get -- and I think even some of those coins, I think we should prepare ourselves mentally for a point in the future where this US dollar cryptocurrency market is used against us.  Only Bitcoin is going to be number one on that random chart that we all don't believe in forever.  And so then, when it's number two, by some metric, does your whole world view collapse at this point?  I don't know; I don't think so.

Peter McCormack: I don't think so.

Pete Rizzo: I don't think for me.  But I think again, the more we focus on the price and number go up, we become susceptible to those types of attack.  I remember why most people come to cryptocurrency, they come her for, what is it?

Peter McCormack: Come for the gains.

Pete Rizzo: Number go up, Trojan horse, right.

Peter McCormack: Come for the gains, stay for the tech, stay for the sound money.

Pete Rizzo: Right.  So, I think that my thing is, I don't know, I just think that I like, to the extent that I engage in these conversations, to get people to think about situations that might be difficult for us as bitcoiners.  I don't know if we're going to chuckle and meme our way to hyperbitcoinisation, you're going to have women in bikinis working in your citadel, acting as farmhands.  And I think you've seen that tweet, which makes it even funnier!

Peter McCormack: So, look, this Bitcoin maximalism thing and toxic maximalism, it's a topic I've struggled with.  I've gone back and forth on it, and I think I've gone back on it when I've just been attacked myself and I've felt it's brutal.  And there's other times where I've seen people getting attacked and I'm like, "Just shut the fuck up, it's Twitter, it doesn't matter, stop being a pussy".  I have wrestled with it, and I think there are a couple of areas.

There's toxic maximalism around the protocol, and there's toxic maximalism around other cryptocurrencies, and I think they're two kind of separate points that kind of overlap.

Pete Rizzo: Well, also against people, and I think I am pro the toxic maximalists, because I was in a position to enact change, and I wasn't using that position as responsibly as I could have.  I was doing my job, I did my job great, but that doesn't preclude the fact that I didn't really have the contacts to be doing it, and I needed people to be doing that; I needed that.  It took me so long to come to that realisation that I was wrong, because again, you have to remember that we're going to continue this grand experiment and everybody's going to be doing their job.

So, the toxic maximalists, I think, are you in a position to enact change?  If yes, then you should expect people to be acerbic to you, because again, if you really believe that Bitcoin is the great emancipator that is going to give people financial rights and perpetuity into the future, then that is how you justify that action.  I think it becomes justifiable against people who are in a position to do better.

For me, I had to step aside and come back to it and figure out my own way there, because I don't like listening to other people, so for me it was a really painful experience.

Peter McCormack: So, in hindsight, what should you have done differently?

Pete Rizzo: I don't know, I don't know.  Because I think, I was a journalist, I'd built a media company, and I built that media company first to cover Bitcoin, and then to cover cryptocurrency. 

Peter McCormack: I think you can speculate at what you could have done differently.  Like, what should the outcome have been?  Should it have been a Bitcoin media company?

Pete Rizzo: I think I could have had more context to understand what Bitcoin was and why it was important, enough to push back against the people who try to subvert and change that, and who have now largely gone into the cryptocurrency general community and largely still believe the same things they used to believe.

Peter McCormack: So, it's not so much about whether CoinDesk covers Bitcoin or crypto, it's more the editorial angle it took towards those attacks?

Pete Rizzo: I think, yes.  The way that it was adopted at the time was, "You said this, he said that", article with both opinions, proceed.  But again, there wasn't the access to this understanding of the history and context.  Nobody knew how Bitcoin worked.  I remember going to the first Scaling Bitcoin Conference and legitimately, I had no idea how the open-source Bitcoin project functioned.  There wasn't something that was at the conferences. 

You'd go to the conferences and there'd be some libertarian with a cowboy hat yelling about the dollar.  There wasn't some guy, like Joseph Poon, presenting the Lightning Network and saying, "Here's how distributed hashes work, and here's why multilayer payment channels on top of Bitcoin want to be in the network".  Everybody moved past that.

One of the things about the 2013 era that's really interesting is that everybody took for granted that we were here to build start-ups on Bitcoin.  Bitcoin had won, altcoins didn't matter, and all of a sudden there was going to be this great boom of start-up innovation on top of Bitcoin.  Okay, great, nobody learned anything about the Bitcoin protocol.  I didn't have anybody that I worked with at CoinDesk that knew any more than I did.  Who else knew anything?  My CEO was a former pick-up artist; that was his job prior to being CEO of a Bitcoin media company, is that he literally was ranked internationally too.

Peter McCormack: How do you get ranked internationally, what?

Pete Rizzo: He was ranked internationally as a pick-up artist, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Who are we talking about?

Pete Rizzo: I don't know if I can literally say on this podcast, but I've said enough for the internet sleuths out there.

Peter McCormack: Jesus!

Pete Rizzo: But who was I going to ask about Bitcoin?  Nobody knew.  So, this is one of the things where I continue to think that human understanding is lagging Bitcoin's progress, and I don't necessarily think we live in an era right now where we know it all; I don't think we have all the answers.  There are some people that think we do, and I'm happy to disagree with them, but I don't think we know 100% of what Bitcoin is just yet.

Peter McCormack: So, in those fields, protection of protocol, attacks on individuals, attacks versus other cryptocurrencies, what is the role of toxic maximalism and is it anything goes?  I mean, free speech is anything goes, but are there things that you look upon that you consider poor behaviour, or is anything goes?

Pete Rizzo: The way I look at it is differently.  Why does Peter McCormack not have a crypto show?

Peter McCormack: So, the reason Pete McCormack doesn't have a crypto show is he started out as a crypto show and --

Pete Rizzo: You had some meaningful engagement with the Bitcoin community!

Peter McCormack: Toxic maximalists, particularly Shinobi, who I was friends with and now we're not friends.

Pete Rizzo: Oh, you're not friends?  Okay.

Peter McCormack: We got divorced.  We might get back together at some point, but we're having a period off from each other.  He was very upset that I interviewed Pete Rizun, another Pete, fucking Peters everywhere.

Pete Rizzo: Right, I remember that.

Peter McCormack: And, I was about to get on a plane and he was giving me shit, and we had a call and we had an argument, and I ended up getting on this flight from New York to Hong Kong --

Pete Rizzo: Right, so this is where toxic maximalism had an effect on you as a creator?

Peter McCormack: It did, it did.  But there were two effects.  But I get on this flight, it's 15 hours and I land in Hong Kong, and I switch on my phone and it's just gone wild.  My phone went into meltdown, but it was both sides.  There were people supporting, people against.  So, I went to this conference, and it was funny because it was, what was it called?  It was the one in Hong Kong, Token2049.

Pete Rizzo: Oh, okay, that's fun.

Peter McCormack: And I'm hosting people on stage.

Pete Rizzo: That's the one where Vitalik stood up and heckled Craig Wright?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was at a different one though, a different year, and there was a point where I'd introduced Justin Sun on stage.  So, that happened, and at that conference I was like, do you know what, one, I think they're right.

Pete Rizzo: But you had no intellectual basis at the point.

Peter McCormack: No, but I think they're right, because there's Saifedean there selling his book in the corner, and there's Justin Sun with his entourage.  I was like, "This is hard work, this is bullshit".  But the other thing, I was like, "There's so much happening here in this crypto space.  If I can just win Bitcoin, my career's good, I'm going to be good.  So, fuck it, I'll do this, I'll go Bitcoin only".  And it has, I'm like, "I should have been like this from the start.

Pete Rizzo: Right, I feel like this is a good example.  I think the toxic maximalists, while they're much benign, but they're often maligned by the people who seemingly have benefitted the most from following what they're doing.  If you're good to Bitcoin on Twitter, Twitter is great to you, so why not keep doing that?  But again, I question the intellectual basis for some of the stuff.

My problem with Bitcoin maximalism is not that it exists, it's just that I think it becomes a little bit life the wolf policing the sheep.  And then at the end of the day, all you've done is create a bunch of sheep.  So, the toxic maximalism stuff, I think it's good to the extent that it can fulfil its function, which is to hold people accountable.  You had a platform and people attacked you because they didn't feel you were using that platform meaningfully, and you adjusted.

I think I made the same call, but I think at the same time, that came with an intellectual exploration.  You actually adjusted that and your show followed that and you asked people questions and you got the expertise.  So, I don't understand how people can sit there and then argue that toxic maximalism isn't relevant and that it should somehow stop, because it seems to be responsible for a lot of things of other people are using their platforms more correctly.

Peter McCormack: But does it ever go too far, because there is a group?  I feel there are toxic maximalists, and then this group of just fucking morons, who I've blocked them all, who seem to not be based on principle; I think themselves, they're based on, "I get to shout at somebody and people like this, and then I get to harass", and they get this feedback loop and suddenly, they're probably just in life generally losers; they probably are, because you can see by the way they -- I think Adam Back is one of the best toxic maximalists and he never loses his cool.  He's harsh --

Pete Rizzo: Oh, his Twitter's a little --

Peter McCormack: -- but if you read it, he's savage and rational at the right time.

Pete Rizzo: I've never understood an Adam Back tweet.  The amount of likes he gets for a tweet that a normal person would tweet.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he's Adam Back!

Pete Rizzo: Right, so just retweet anything that he says.  Don't trust, verify.

Peter McCormack: But my point is is then there's the people who literally harass, abuse and threaten people.  And I just think these people, they can't make an intellectual argument, but they've probably spent their life as a loser, and they'll probably always be a loser.

Pete Rizzo: But herein lies the thing, and this is where I think the historical lineage of toxic maximalism is that in the Bitcoin system, you cannot be disenfranchised.  The thing about the other inherently political financial systems is in the fiat world, you can be disenfranchised because of your behaviour.  If you do something that someone doesn't like, they can take your bank account away, they can come after you, you can be cancelled.  In Bitcoin, you can't. 

So, I see toxic maximalists as the justification being it is a celebration of how in Bitcoin, you cannot be disenfranchised.  Do some people go too far with that?  Probably, but ultimately what they're doing is still something that is only possible because of the technology of Bitcoin.  In any other context, they would have been people who would have been cancelled, muted, otherwise rejected from the platform.  But in Bitcoin, they remain.

Peter McCormack: But they can be cancelled on the other centralised platforms, be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, which is happening.

Pete Rizzo: Right, which is why toxic Bitcoin maximalism to me is actually a celebration of something that makes the Bitcoin protocol unique.  And if you look at the history of how it emerged, it really tracks well with that.  Toxic Bitcoin maximalism was a tool that people used to check the power of the developers, because it wasn't always the case that we had Bitcoin the way we have now.

Peter McCormack: So, have you come to the conclusion there's no downside to it, therefore we embrace it?  I can buy that!

Pete Rizzo: It just seems like such a silly thing to rail against, because what are you really railing against?  You're railing against people criticising you.  Again, this is why I tweeted something about this.  How you react to it, you get to decide that.  If you can't take criticism --

Peter McCormack: Lyn Alden --

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, she wrote a great tweet about this.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, like aikido; it's brilliant.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I think it's just if you don't have the humility to take what those people are saying, divorce yourself from the emotion of it, and then come to a conclusion, then I don't know what to tell you.  You're probably just no better than them.  So, I think in this situation, going back to my career --

Peter McCormack: There's two things, sorry, just to interrupt: there is that, but also just being able to just have the strength and thick skin to deal with it, because if the internet comes after you, it can be particularly brutal; it's not a fun experience being shouted at and criticised personally, continually.

Pete Rizzo: For sure, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But at the same time, you can build resilience to that, and so it's just I buy the idea that if it's a celebration of not being able to be cancelled, disenfranchised, cancelled from the system, I buy that, I think that's great.  I also think you can just then build the structures around you where you don't have to really give a shit about people.

Pete Rizzo: Sure.  And this is why I think the argument before about toxic maximalism is a bit of a misnomer.  So, I think it's going to continue to exist, it's going to continue to serve a useful function, to the extent that it can keep people with platforms honest and inspire those people to have a meaningful check to what their thought process is.  So, again, as long as you can divorce yourself from whatever people are saying, it doesn't really affect you, it's just them saying whatever the hell they want, you ignoring it.

It's just funny this argument comes from people, and again, I'm going to include you here, but in positions where they have benefitted from that engagement.  I was on the Pomp podcast recently and he was again talking about he doesn't like toxic maximalism.  It's like, "You're a VC.  Why do you only invest in Bitcoin then if it's not because it's better for your metrics, better for your engagement?  Sure, you may believe in it".  I'm just saying, toxic Bitcoin maximalism seems to be an effective tool by which the pleb bitcoiners can hold people in a position of power, accountable for what they're saying and what they're doing.

Peter McCormack: It's a fair point.  Like I say, I have wrestled with it.  I have wrestled with it, because I've been at the end of it sometimes and it's been particularly brutal, but I've never thought about it the other way.  I've never thought, "Actually, how have I benefitted from it?"

Pete Rizzo: You probably have, and I think again, people forget.  Not everyone has a platform.  The plebs don't necessarily have a platform.  The average guy with 300 followers, maybe he doesn't get listened to.  Toxicity is a way for people to empower themselves within the Bitcoin Network.

Peter McCormack: So, what about with regards to the attacks upon other cryptocurrencies?

Pete Rizzo: Well again, I would draw a line between toxicity and legal harassment!  You can rely on all legal definitions to like, is somebody actually -- by the way, when I'm saying toxic maximalism, nobody should threaten you, no one should resort to accusations of violence; that's not what I consider toxic Bitcoin maximalism.

Peter McCormack: Okay, let's forget that, because that does happen.

Pete Rizzo: Right, and there's a legal system that covers all that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but anonymous people coming on Twitter and threatening to attack your children, or smash you in the face.

Pete Rizzo: Okay, and that to me is general harassment; that has nothing to do with Bitcoin.  To me, Bitcoin toxicity has to have some -- if somebody's yelling at you and calling you an A-hole because they don't like what you're saying about Bitcoin, it's still related.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But what about versus other cryptocurrencies?  Are we wasting our time; is it a good thing; does it serve any benefit?

Pete Rizzo: I mean, it doesn't serve a benefit in terms of, I think it's become really easy to shut out, because I don't think their arguments have expanded enough.  So, I go back to my framework for, how can you judge other cryptocurrencies?  A lot of these things, they become really easy to dismiss.  The fact that Bitcoin has the best economics; okay, sure, well there are going to be shittier ones.  The fact that it had a fairer launch; okay, well maybe these don't need that.

I think it really goes back to being a user rights argument.  If these are going to be financial systems that we build that are useful in perpetuity, then we want to build them in such a way where you have the strongest guarantees.  So, I think we should continue to be suspicious and ask meaningful questions about the cryptocurrency community.  I don't know if that always has to be toxicity.  I think some of these ideas are objectively bad, we know that they are bad now, and I think those ideas should be discredited.

A great example would be Shiba Inu.  Cryptocurrencies do not gain value from network effect and that coin will go down as fast as it went up.  There's nothing new that that coin has provided the ecosystem, there's no knowledge to be gained about it; completely meaningless.

Peter McCormack: That's the thing, I just don't think a lot of people care, I just don't.

Pete Rizzo: They might not.

Peter McCormack: I just think they are trying to fast-track to make as much money as quick as possible, and they post-rationalise their arguments.

Pete Rizzo: Sure.  But when they look back in ten years, they sell their Shiba Inu, they spend the next five years on the coast of Greece and then they come back to a world in which Shiba Inu's worthless and Bitcoin's still around, what's your reaction going to be?  You're going to be, "Maybe that asshole's right"!

Peter McCormack: But maybe they thought they were right at the time, they're a great investor, whatever.  Maybe people just don't care about sound money.

Pete Rizzo: Well I think, to me, it has to go back to, the sound money argument needs to be replaced by a financial rights argument.  It needs to be supplanted by something that isn't as easy to dismiss, and this was my problem with, I think you had the people who wrote that paper, Only the Strong Survive on.

Peter McCormack: Allen Farrington?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, a really great paper that I don't think was written in such a way that it would really mean anything to anybody.  Again, the fact that a lot of these cryptocurrencies are running on AWS, so what?  If I can get more US dollars for it, that's what the game is.  So I think, to me, we have to elevate our arguments.  I think Gladstein and Jimmy Song have been great about, Bitcoin is more ethical than the fiat system, but I don't know if anybody's really spent a lot of time to apply it to the cryptocurrency ecosystem. 

To me, that's what I've been trying to do with the recent columns I've been writing, "Okay, is Bitcoin more ethical than the cryptocurrency system?"  I think the answer is yes.

Peter McCormack: Because?

Pete Rizzo: Because you have a stronger guarantee to your rights within the Bitcoin system.  There is literally almost nothing anyone can do to you to take away your access to your private keys, and the utility of those keys within the network.  You alone, as an individual, have the ability to opt in or out of anything within the Bitcoin economy.  That is categorically not true of the cryptocurrency economy.  You are always at the behest of some other group or collection of people who may want to exercise what they want over you.

Peter McCormack: I don't think -- I'm not sure that argument will work.  It works with the sound money people, I just think that there are these people --

Pete Rizzo: I think it will matter a lot when your NFT that you bought for $7 million all of a sudden doesn't have any value, because that thing forked, whatever, shut down, whatever.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they have to go through that painful experience and go, "Huh, I got fucked".  I did it, 2018.  All my fucking shitcoins went to crap, the podcast went Bitcoin only, I went Bitcoin only.

Pete Rizzo: Let's just strip it down.  All cryptocurrencies are capable of being changed.  The question is, what is the process by which they are being changed?  This is, to me, the great unexplored current mystery of what is going on.  I don't even know that most bitcoiners can tell you how Bitcoin changes.  Bitcoin is going to be changed this November, there's going to be an upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol, the most substantive in four years.  I don't know if many people really understand how that occurred, why that occurred, and how that is different than what happens in the other systems.  And I think, to me, that is one of the more meaningful distinctions.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the point I'm coming back to is, I think you have to be really far down the rabbit hole to start caring about this stuff.

Pete Rizzo: I don't think you have to be far down the rabbit hole to say, "In Bitcoin, you have the right to your money in perpetuity forever", and I can't guarantee that to you in any of the other cryptocurrencies.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so we have a bunch of Solana guys sat here and we explain that to them.  Do you think they go, "I'm up 200X, I don't give a fuck"?

Pete Rizzo: Sure, but someone somewhere might take that from you.

Peter McCormack: Well, I like Dan Held's argument.  He said, "Well, you might just want to put a bit of that in Bitcoin", and this is why I just think you sometimes have to go through the painful experience and then afterwards, you're like, "Okay, I got rug-pulled here, I got fucked, okay".

Pete Rizzo: Well, again, I don't think that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is going to fail on a small scale.  My big worry is that when it does fail, the cryptocurrency, the US dollar crypto asset ecosystem, let's just call it that, when it does fail, it's going to fail on a level that is very large.  Example: communism didn't work.  A lot of people thought it was a great idea, seemed all right.  Needed to be tried on a massive scale, adopted by probably upwards of 10 or 20 countries, and there was a massive erosion of human rights and mass deaths resulted from the political experiment that was communism.  Okay, that's an example.

I think with the cryptocurrency ecosystem, what is it?  It's an economic and political revolution.  Bitcoin is an economic and political revolution, cryptocurrencies are an economic and political revolution, and they're very different.  And I think my worry is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it's not going to fail on a small scale.  Everyone's going to make US dollars while the US dollars are good; everybody can think their product is great while the US dollars are good.

What happens when that ecosystem gets larger?  It gets more entrenched, there are more people on it, more value is in it.  I think that's where I start to worry.  This is why I think the hyperbitcoinisation tomorrow gimmick is so strange; you really think that's going to happen?  Everyone's going to lay their guns down?

Peter McCormack: No, I think it's messy.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, it's going to be awful.  And I think the cryptocurrency system, again, the worry here is fundamentally we've seen how it behaves, and it seems co-optable, so those are the questions that I'm starting to ask.  I think hyperbitcoinisation seems to be the inevitable future, but there are going to be stages, and there's not going to be just everybody over to Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: So, how do you judge the cryptocurrency ecosystem?  Do you just think it's an ugly mess, or do you think these are valid experiments?

Pete Rizzo: So, I think going back on a prior position, I think there was a period where I would have said there's a value to those experimentations; and I think there was probably a period of time where that was true, because Bitcoin was still being experimented on.  My thesis really for Bitcoin is that I don't think we really understood Bitcoin completely until the end of 2017.  I don't think it was possible to understand how Bitcoin was meaningfully different from the other cryptocurrency systems.

At that point, they all seemed to be different systems, in which political actors were jockeying to change them in some way.  To me, the significant delineation was when Bitcoin rejected the political actors and it did not change and then continued to prosper.  To me, that was the significant change.  I think there's a lot of naivety.  You can look at the whole 2010s cryptocurrency movement.  You can kind of collapse it into a couple of things.

It was an experiment to see if you could make changes to some of Bitcoin's properties, and "those changes will result in the creation of new assets".  Is that a real actuality that we live in?  I don't know.  I don't know if we have enough data there.  Look, Bitcoin was an invention.  We never had what Bitcoin was before, and now we live in a world with Bitcoin and I think the natural human response was to try a million other versions that failed. 

But after ten years, we have to admit that it's looking pretty good for Bitcoin right now; it's looking pretty nice!  It's not looking like any of the weird things us, as human beings, have done to any of the other coins is really working out.  So, we have to at least look at it at this point and say, "Okay, I think the likelihood that Bitcoin got everything right, especially as we understand these other cryptocurrency ecosystems, is starting to look pretty good".

Peter McCormack: But these cryptocurrencies still exist.

Pete Rizzo: They do, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Like, Ethereum has managed to survive through to a second cycle, and could survive to a third cycle.

Pete Rizzo: It will highly like continue, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's like, at what point do they fail?

Pete Rizzo: Because I think they're all monies, and they're all economies.  The question here, I think, is what is the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, really?  And I think they're both competing economies.  I think you have to then look at how they operate.

In Bitcoin, you have an absolute guarantee to your money, and you know, with almost absolute guarantee, that that will never be revoked from you.  The other cryptocurrencies at large, you just don't have that guarantee.  To me, when you start to see that system fail, it will start to fail because of those kinds of things.  But they're going to large and systemic.  They're not going to be, "Oh, I lost my CREAMcoin".  That guy's just going to go right back and buy another coin.

Peter McCormack: It's going to be a more fundamental collapse of the protocol?

Pete Rizzo: Well again, I think we can look at systems.  So, if it is true that Bitcoin is not beholden to majoritarianism, we live in a world where democracy is viewed as the best political system for ensuring human rights.  I think what becomes interesting is, is Bitcoin better at ensuring human rights than a democratic system?  Because, I think a lot of the cryptocurrencies, what they do is they map over the democratic system to their operational principles.  And they say, "Okay, we agree, if you form a majority and the majority wants to enforce something, then that is what is".

So, I think it's really important, actually, when you delineate Bitcoin, not really just as an economic creation, but as a political creation, the ability for you to say you cannot be disenfranchised from Bitcoin, you can't be kicked out of that system by any political actor, is a strong differentiator, not from just our existing fiat system as a money, but the political system that manages the fiat money.  They're intertwined, they're the same thing.

There's no fiat without the political system attached to it.  So then, you have to look, "Okay, what is the cryptocurrency as money, and then what is the political system that is attached to it?"  In Bitcoin, there is no political system, it's absolute.  You can form coalitions and those coalitions can enact change, but they seem to so far not be able to take away basic user rights.  That's very powerful.  If that continues, that is a game-changing differentiator, not just on the economic level, but also on the political level.

Peter McCormack: Is that actually true, because if there was a requirement for an emergency patch on Bitcoin, because something was found --

Pete Rizzo: Right, this is the passive argument, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I implicitly trust the people who have access to the GitHub.

Pete Rizzo: So, this is the old argument that in an emergency, does democracy exist, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Pete Rizzo: I think the thing is, what I would say to that, in a doomsday scenario, there is no minority.  Here's a great example, right.  Let's just say we all live on planet Earth and tomorrow, the Earth is going to be destroyed.  Who's the political minority in that case?  The people who want to stay on the planet Earth; are they a meaningful political minority?  Not really.  I think the universal consensus in a doomsday scenario is to do the thing that does not result in absolute death; it becomes pretty cut and dried.

So, I think the way that I would look at that is Bitcoin is not necessarily technically -- there's nothing really technical about Bitcoin's protection of minority rights.  It's entirely cultural.  It's saying that we will not proceed with any change within our economy if it requires someone being forced to do something.  And again, look at the cryptocurrency ecosystem; that does not map out.  So, that's why I think the way to look at the other cryptocurrencies is that they are competing with Bitcoin largely on time preference and political machinations.  Often, those things are intertwined.  Why do they have all these new features?  Why are they moving so fast?  Well, the political gears are moving to allow those things.

So, if you don't want the fiat system because all these things happen, well why are you okay with them happening in the cryptocurrency world?  Because they're worth more fiat.  Okay, great!

Peter McCormack: What was the tipping point for you going back to look through all this; what were the key things where you went, "Okay, I fucking get this now"?

Pete Rizzo: What was the point where I got it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  What was the thing; there must have been something where you're like, "Oh, shit, yes"?

Pete Rizzo: Well, I'd become quite comfortable calling myself a Bitcoin maximalist again, because I think if you look at the ways to judge a cryptocurrency against another cryptocurrency, I think Bitcoin is meaningfully better on each of those: the economics are better; the network's more decentralised; the launch was fair; and in the US, the user rights, I think you have absolute user rights within Bitcoin.

So, I think for me, that was when I got comfortable.  I actually went and did the research and I came to the conclusion and I feel like I wrestled with what I needed to wrestle with which was, look, I mean I said in this tweet for the last column I wrote, I went to every other cryptocurrency's conference, I talked to all those people.  Strength of argument ultimately, but sometimes you have to get there yourself. 

For me, I had to get there myself.  I think for some people, that's just going to be how it is, I don't know.  I'm not someone who likes to be told what to do or what to think, and I think that's why people reject bitcoiners to some degree.  People feel like bitcoiners are telling them what to think.  That's what I think when people are angry about toxic maximalism, what I think they're really angry about is they're really angry about being told what to think.  I think that tells us something really dangerous about what's going on in Bitcoin.  We shouldn't be telling people how to think, we should be giving them the means to understand; very big difference.

Peter McCormack: Okay, separate the two, because I'm with you --

Pete Rizzo: Telling you what to think, you don't want to just let me have that nice thing?  That was a nice thing and then we can end the podcast!

Peter McCormack: No, because one of my things is that this expands into asymmetric topics, where we tell people what to think, which are non-Bitcoin topics.  And then, it can become a little bit cult-y, "Oh, you're a carnivore?  I'm a carnivore.  You shoot guns?  I shoot guns.  You're not vaccinated?  I'm not vaccinated", and it creates a social pressure that I believe sometimes, people can follow what other people do, because maybe they're like, "Oh, I trust that person.  If that person thinks that, that's maybe what I should be doing".  Maybe others, they feel like, "Shit, I want to be in the in-group".

Pete Rizzo: Well, that's why I also said that there are no bitcoiners.  If you consider me a bitcoiner, great, I'm flattered.  But I don't think that -- either your actions align with Bitcoin, or they don't.  And your actions might not align with Bitcoin, that might be fine.

Peter McCormack: Then, what is aligning with Bitcoin?  Aligning with consensus, and that's it?

Pete Rizzo: No, I think it's about, okay, if you believe that Bitcoin is ultimately about providing financial freedoms to the world, then you sort of can view every action on the prism of, "Does this advance Bitcoin?  Is what you're doing actually a meaningful advance for that; or if not, could you be better?"  I think toxic maximalism exists to encourage people to be better.

You went a bought a coffee, didn't use Bitcoin, didn't talk to the person about Bitcoin, didn't do anything for Bitcoin ever.  You probably weren't a bitcoiner in that moment; that's fine.  But you can always be better.  That's the point, I think; we should strive to be a bitcoiner, and to evangelise Bitcoin.  We will ultimately fall short of that, but I think that I look back now and I say, "Man, those hotel clerks that I could have just told that I was at a Bitcoin Conference or Dubai, or wherever the fuck, Bitcoin could have changed their whole fucking life?"  I think about that.  I didn't, I don't, I still don't.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's funny, because I've wrestled this idea recently of wanting to cast a wider net, talk about wider subjects, and I talked to Willy Woo about this.  He's like, "What the fuck are you doing?"

Pete Rizzo: He's just like, "Here's the turn, it's going up and then you'll buy my newsletter!"

Peter McCormack: Then sometimes, I veer off, and I really enjoy the chat and I feel like I've missed something here.  Then I come back and I have the conversation with you and the ones I've just had and I'm like, "No, I've got to do this", but how do you relay that message?  But I like the idea of helping people to understand, rather than telling them, but can you be toxic while helping people understand; or, when you're being toxic, do you have to kind of tell people?

Pete Rizzo: I think it depends on the context.  I think toxicity is appropriate against the people who have platforms that could be used more effectively.  If you really believe that Bitcoin is aligned with human rights and the advancement of humanity --

Peter McCormack: Steve Hanke.

Pete Rizzo: -- then, you're right, you can be toxic to that guy.  He has a platform, he is in a position to enact change.  I think toxic maximalism is appropriate in situations where it is against some group that is capable of enacting change.  A16z, great example.  Are they capable of enacting change?  They sure as shit are.

Peter McCormack: Well, Worldcoin.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, well, there you go.

Peter McCormack: What the fuck did you make of that? 

Pete Rizzo: Silicon Valley is part of the problem.  They benefit from the loose money environments, they're not going to give that up, they have no incentive to understand Bitcoin, and they will go down fighting, just like Wall Street will go down fighting, just like the government will go down fighting.  They will all fight this to the end.  They would rather scan your eyeball.

Peter McCormack: I think it's the worst cryptocurrency ever invented. 

Pete Rizzo: There was also Robot Sex Nickels, which I do like to namecheck sometimes, because it's really funny.

Peter McCormack: No, but if you look at the list of investors --

Pete Rizzo: No reaction on Robot Sex Nickels.

Peter McCormack: Sorry.  You've got Coinbase in there; I'm like, what?  Coinbase are investing in Worldcoin?  You've got those fucking idiots at Multicoin, who believe they are geniuses, but really all they're doing is they're --

Pete Rizzo: Well again, this is why I think it becomes, for people who are in a position to know better, you have to take more of a role in speaking out against those people.  I used to look up to Brian Armstrong of Coinbase.  I thought he built a great, credible business in the early days of Bitcoin; I thought that mattered.  Today, I look at what Brian Armstrong is doing and I say, "This is going to look so horrible in 30 years.  I can't believe that you're still on that train".

Peter McCormack: There's one good thing he did recently, where he said, "We're not going to be a political business.  If you want to be part of that, here's your severance package; you can go elsewhere".  That was one of those moments where like, "Huh?  Brian did that?"  Fucking great. 

But going back to Worldcoin, you've got all these people; I think what Multicoin Capital is doing is fundamentally wrong.  They are spinning up investments in new platforms, getting in early, turning millions into billions and thinking they're geniuses, and I just think it's fundamentally a broken system.  And I think they think they're geniuses; perhaps they are, perhaps I'm the moron.  But I feel like they're creating huge winners out of lots of losers.

Pete Rizzo: What we're doing is not Bitcoin; because what we're doing is not Bitcoin, we can take liberties with users' rights, up to and including scanning their entire personal human existence.  And then, "Oh, the US dollar valuation justifies this action".  I think when you look at the deep systemic flaws in cryptocurrency, it will be because they had intertwined the cryptocurrency market with what they're doing.  The cryptocurrency market, whatever's happening here, the cryptocurrency market is one of the great evils.  I think it will be looked at with a lot of suspicion in hindsight.  But we're still blind to it.  Every day, you just go on core market cap.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think Worldcoin, there's an instant reaction of, "What the fuck?"

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, they just don't care, right?

Peter McCormack: Shit investors, scanning your iris.  There's people trying to justify that.

Pete Rizzo: No, I think they really think, if Sam Altman was here, what he would tell you is that, "We're competing with Bitcoin by providing a fairer launch to humanity.  And launch is one of the mechanisms that which we grade cryptocurrencies.  This is why we need to go into Third World countries and scan people's bodies and give them cryptocurrency".

Peter McCormack: And create an MLM structure like OneCoin.

Pete Rizzo: Well again, I think it's a testament to human beings are great at trying -- you could kind of look at it as back to the theme of the initial conversation.  I think we're in this grand comedy of human beings trying and failing to understand Bitcoin.  If you think Worldcoin is bad, in four years there's going to be something worse. 

Peter McCormack: Of course, they're going to continue to do this.

Pete Rizzo: Sure.  There's probably going to be a Country Worldcoin, where they scan you every five seconds; I don't know.

Peter McCormack: CBDCs.

Pete Rizzo: They're coming.

Peter McCormack: They're coming.

Pete Rizzo: I mean, look, I think the future for bitcoiners, we're so good at panning -- the confidence merchants are out, "Hyperbitcoinisation is here in two or three months, etc"; maybe, maybe not.  Can you live with it not?  I can live with it not being.  I can live with Bitcoin being number five on core market cap; I can live with Bitcoin being shit on by every government.  I don't need hyperbitcoinisation tomorrow.

Peter McCormack: No, we talked about it.  I've done my first tour of duty.  When you do four years of Bitcoin, you've completed your first tour of duty, it then gets easier.  So, whether it's number five or number one, I think number one's important.  But if it loses it, am I fine?

Pete Rizzo: That's the first thing I would attack.

Peter McCormack: Do I have my rights?  Do I have access to my Bitcoin?  Is it appreciating in value?  Do I feel protected?  It still does what I need it to do.  I can still live on a Bitcoin standard.  It would be a sad signal for it to lose the top spot, but you know.

Pete Rizzo: I think we need to mentally prepare for it and, to the extent that I can use my platform to get people to think about that, I would rather put that scenario to them, than a scenario where they're on the Cayman Islands tomorrow on a Bitcoin citadel, because I don't think that's a likely future.

Peter McCormack: So, this makes a great conversation.  You've obviously thought about this a lot.  And I know the research you've done; we did an interview previously with the history of Satoshi.  What meaningful change would you like to see from bitcoiners, then?

Pete Rizzo: Again, I'm just trying to do my part, right.  The thing that I'm trying to work to address is that the world will need to understand what happened in Bitcoin, and we owe it to them to give them some reasonable explanation of what occurred.  And I don't know if we can do that now.  You can spend a lot of time trying to argue with somebody, but I don't think we understand enough about what we have achieved, what we've thought through, the things that we haven't, that we failed on. 

That's the stuff that I'm working in my document because again, when I think about what does hyperbitcoinisation mean, and the world being thrust onto a new system, it's going to mean that a lot of people are going to have a lot of questions about that kind of new system, and they're going to be in a position where they may be distrustful of Bitcoin.  I think we owe it to think about those people.

Peter McCormack: So, you're sole-searching for this huge shift that's going to come in society at some point in the future that is going to have positives, but a lot of negatives maybe, that's going to lead to --

Pete Rizzo: What's happening in El Salvador.  That's going to happen on a global scale.  If hyperbitcoinisation really occurred, "Oh, you had social security?  Oh, you were going to retire next year?"  That person's going to be real happy about Bitcoin!

Peter McCormack: So, they need to understand why --

Pete Rizzo: They'll be like, "Hey, you need to work on this Bitcoin standard now, so you don't have benefits from the government anymore".  It's going to be a really unpleasant scenario.  And when we were talking about the fun price speculation and stuff earlier, we were born into the fiat system, we are all creatures of the fiat system on some level.

Peter McCormack: Okay, have you thought about whether the net result could be worse?  Some people listening will be, "Shut the fuck up, Pete, or course it's better".  I'm just saying, sometimes you need to think these through.  Could we end up in a net worse position?

Pete Rizzo: Because of Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Pete Rizzo: Oh, yeah, 100%, because every human invention inevitably crests on this -- democracy was great and now we all don't like democracy anymore.  Every human movement exists to just move the human race forward.  There will be some period in the future where Bitcoin is a maligned movement that has failed, because that is the nature of every movement that advances humanity.  Bitcoin will reach some point with that.  But the question is, is it good now?  Is it better than where we're at now?  Does it advance us?

Peter McCormack: Okay, define "advance".  Like, take us to the next stage; or, make us a better society?

Pete Rizzo: I think that's kind of up to humanity.  If you look at how humanity has generally progressed by moving through shifts and thought.  There was the renaissance, there was the enlightenment, there was the dark ages.  Now, we live in fiat land.  The product of democracy is that democracy's emerged and the political organisations within other societies, they took a controlling stake in the economics of those countries. 

Bitcoin is the reaction to that.  Bitcoin will fix that problem, if it meant on a large scale.  But it can only advance so far, in the same way democracy can only advance so far.  Someone will try something and something will happen.  It's all, live long enough to become the villain.  The Founding Fathers created democracy.  It is a great human invention.  It advanced us.  For 200 years, it was the best way for us to enshrine our rights and values.

I don't think there are many people in Bitcoin who still believe that democracy serves that function.  That does not mean that democracy was not a valuable human creation; it was.  We've moved past it, we need something new, it's Bitcoin; something else will follow that.  That's the nature of human progress.

Peter McCormack: There's a lot to think about there.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.  Thanks for giving me that pause there, that was nice!  A good pause there.  Got to end the podcast on a nice pause.

Peter McCormack: It's a lot to contemplate, because it's a whole show in itself.  It's like, "Okay, what are the consequences?"  I haven't listened yet, but I believe that's the show Vallis and Preston Pysh made.

Pete Rizzo: Well, I think Dhruv Bansal has written a lot, probably the only real science fiction about Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Did you hear the show I made with him about that?

Pete Rizzo: I don't think I listened to that, but I read it all a couple of times.

Peter McCormack: It's wild, man.

Pete Rizzo: Amazing, amazing stuff.  Yeah, but to me, that's sort of, at least someone's thinking about it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's thinking hundreds of years ahead.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I love Bitcoin, I'm a huge fan of Bitcoin Astronomy; it's probably one of my favourite pieces of Bitcoin writing, and I think the only real Bitcoin science fiction that's been written.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know somebody who's working on something else, which I look forward to.  So, what are you working on next; what's the next big topic for you?

Pete Rizzo: I'm still writing the next big Bitcoin history piece that I've been working on for a little while.

Peter McCormack: Okay, can you talk about the period you're covering?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, just the origins of Bitcoin toxicity and Bitcoin maximalism.

Peter McCormack: Nice.  So, are you awarding it to Bitcoin, or to Vitalik?

Pete Rizzo: Oh, no, Vitalik's not -- well, I guess he would be in the story, yeah.  He's not part of the story, but yeah.

Peter McCormack: When can we expect it?

Pete Rizzo: After the bull market.  You've got to make hay while the sun shines.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.

Pete Rizzo: So, I'm hoping at the top of next year, but I'm a big believer in Bitcoin cycles.  I think we're coming to the end of this cycle, looking forward to taking a bit of a break.  I take a lot of time trying to become someone who could contribute something valuable to Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: You have, and you are, especially now.  I don't know how you like taking compliments.

Pete Rizzo: As long as you don't call me Peter at the beginning of it!

Peter McCormack: Rizzo, I think what you did at CoinDesk was great, I still think it was valuable for Bitcoin, and I understand how you reflect on it, and I can agree with that at the same time.  But I think everything you've done since CoinDesk, this soul-searching, the place you've come to, you're taking quite a unique position in that you're challenging a lot of assumptions. 

I think, in some ways, take this in the right way, in some ways you're a little bit like Udi, but you're not trolling people.  You're like Udi without the trolling.

Pete Rizzo: That's a small niche.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's like a check and a balance.  You make people think.  I'm thinking during this and I'm having pauses.  I'm almost wishing I was keeping notes, because I'm like, "I need to go and rethink that".  I'm really, at the moment, really worrying about, or thinking about the implications of Bitcoin on society, the net good, and the net bad and what happens, and I see positive and I see negative, and I'm having a question.

Pete Rizzo: That's everything.  Why should we expect anything else?  We shouldn't thrust any greater expectation on the Bitcoin.  Is Bitcoin currently a tool for human advancement?  Emphatically yes.

Peter McCormack: But what does that mean and what is the transition?

Pete Rizzo: But I don't think it's hyperbitcoinisation tomorrow.  I do want to make a bumper sticker that just says, "Hyperbitcoinisation tomorrow!"

Peter McCormack: You should do it, man.  All right, Rizzo, tell people where to find you.

Pete Rizzo: On Twitter @pete_rizzo_.  You can fine me, Editor of Bitcoin Magazine, so publishing stuff over there; do a column for Forbes; and also, run the open-source charitable grants for Kraken cryptocurrency exchange.  So, if you're working on a great Bitcoin project that needs some funding, let me know.

Peter McCormack: All right, man.  Well, listen, enjoy the rest of the bull run.  Let's make hay and I'm sure we'll do something together next year.

Pete Rizzo: All right, man. Podcast over.