WBD546 Audio Transcription

Has Ethereum Been State Captured? With Mark Goodwin

Release date: Friday 26th August

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Mark Goodwin. 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.

Mark Goodwin is the director of print editorial at Bitcoin Magazine. In this interview, we discuss the US government's sanctions on Tornado Cash, the upcoming Ethereum merge, and why this is vitally important for the future of Bitcoin.

“This is the US government and the dollar system beating an open-source project and a free speech project… this isn’t like, oh, Bitcoin’s winning because Eth is losing. No, this is a big change that’s happening.”

— Mark Goodwin

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Are we on?  We're on!  What do you mean, you made a record?

Mark Goodwin: Well, when I'm not doing just Bitcoin --

Peter McCormack: You do other shit?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I know.  Very rarely; it's pretty much Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: You're not a maxi!

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I know, I'm not!  No, I am.  But yeah, I went to a school for music actually, for jazz drums, at a conservatory in Boston.  And then, I hated having to rely on other people.  So, I'm the target audience for a jazz solo drum show, and I would never go to that, you know what I mean?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Mark Goodwin: So, I got sick of relying on band mates and stuff to do anything, so I started learning all the other instruments.  So, this record I just did, it's guitar-focused and there's no drums; it's all digital drums, so it's the total opposite of everything I do.

Peter McCormack: Are you putting it on?

Danny Knowles: This can be the intro for the show!

Peter McCormack: It sounds like the kind of thing we would use for an intro, yeah.  It sounds a little bit Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Mark Goodwin: It's a little Bay Area psychedelia, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Do you know Black Rebel Motorcycle Club?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: The first time I saw them, they supported Oasis and they were the better band.

Mark Goodwin: Oh, yeah, totally.

Peter McCormack: This is badass!

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, man.

Peter McCormack: This is one of those times I don't have to pretend I like it!

Mark Goodwin: I mean, I can replace the lyrics and talk about What Bitcoin Did and you guys can take it.

Danny Knowles: Yeah you go; let's get commission.

Mark Goodwin: Any time you want, man, of course; open source, baby.

Peter McCormack: You know when somebody's like, "Look at my picture [or] listen to my song", and you're like, "Yeah, it's really cool", and you're like, "Fuck, man, that's fucking terrible"; that's actually badass.  We would use that.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack: We haven't changed it for a while, have we?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think we might have found the spot.

Peter McCormack: Look at you in your Bedford shirt.

Danny Knowles: We're going to the game.

Peter McCormack: Shit, I should have put mine on.

Mark Goodwin: I'm going to get one, and then I'll be repping.

Peter McCormack: It's an away game, you can't get one.

Danny Knowles: Tom said he might bring some.

Mark Goodwin: They're coming.

Peter McCormack: Did he?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Mark Goodwin: I think Emma said she'd take care of me.  I put in an order.

Peter McCormack: Sweet!

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I'm stoked.

Peter McCormack: Did they take your money?

Mark Goodwin: Not yet, but they will, don't worry.

Peter McCormack: I wonder if they charge you Bedford or international prices?  Make sure they charge you Bedford prices.

Mark Goodwin: I think they were like, "Do it here", because I was like, "If it's too much, I'll just do it online", and they're like, "No, let's take care of you".

Peter McCormack: I would have told you to do it online!  Welcome to Bedford, man.

Mark Goodwin: Hey thanks, man, thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack: Thanks for coming in.  You are the rap show of this sprint, and you're also the person who travelled the furthest.

Mark Goodwin: What an honour.  I think I got about six hours of sleep in the last two days, so if I'm a little slow, that's what it is.  But I'm so stoked to be here, and I haven't been to the UK in like 15 years and it's great to be back, man.

Peter McCormack: Well, thank you for coming.  I mean, it's a hell of a journey.  Do you like Bedford?

Mark Goodwin: I actually do a lot.  I'm a huge sucker for -- I'm sort of an amateur gardener, and the British have the best gardens, English cottage gardens.

Peter McCormack: We do.

Mark Goodwin: You really do, you know.  So, I've been loving it, walking around the river and just checking shit out.

Peter McCormack: Saw the Corn Exchange?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, amazing.

Peter McCormack: Oh, man, well listen, thank you for coming in, thank you for answering our call.  We wanted to get some new guests on the show, some people we haven't spoken to before, so it's great to have you here.  Also, thank you for all the great work you do at Bitcoin Magazine.  Bitcoin Magazine generally, I think ever since I would say Bitcoin 2019, Bitcoin Magazine has just been raising its game to new levels every year.  It just gets bigger and better, the magazine gets better, the website gets better, the writers get better, the event gets better.  We've now got an event in Amsterdam soon, which I'm going to. 

I don't know how Bailey's done it, I don't know if he takes a credit or the team takes a credit or what, but Bitcoin Magazine's crushing it.

Mark Goodwin: I mean, I'm just a tiny cog in a great, wonderful machine.  I mean, first up, Bitcoin is just growing and Bitcoin Magazine is really a platform for bitcoiners.  So, Bitcoin doing well and growing means Bitcoin Magazine is doing well, if we're doing our job right, right?  And our contributor network is just -- I can swear?

Peter McCormack: You can say what the fuck you like!

Mark Goodwin: It's just the fucking shit, right, and the team is just so good at pulling people.  I mean, I just submitted, completely blindly wrote an article, less than a year ago, it was in September, and submitted it in and just was like, "Hey, I don't know, maybe you'd be interested?"  And they pulled me out and they're like, "This is really good, you clearly understand this".  They invited me to come on and do a show, they did a Spaces and talked to me, asked me if I wanted to write more.  And I was then a paid writer within a few months of doing other stuff, and they basically invited me to come on.

Peter McCormack: What were you doing before?

Mark Goodwin: I was in hospitality, you know, restaurant and bartender stuff for a decade.

Peter McCormack: So, you got to ditch a fiat job and come and do a Bitcoin job?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Sweet, man.

Mark Goodwin: It was great.  I bartendered in the Bay Area, so the way I actually first heard about Bitcoin was, the guy who put up Silk Road 2.0 the next day was a regular at my bar, who came in basically every day.

Peter McCormack: What, the dude who got two weeks in prison compared to Ross's life in prison?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, exactly.

Danny Knowles: Double life in prison.

Peter McCormack: Double life plus 40 years.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, it's insane.  He was just a regular at my bar and he just came in, and it was probably the beginning of 2014-ish, right?

Danny Knowles: That makes sense.

Peter McCormack: He was like, "Do you smoke weed?  Have I got the website for you!"

Mark Goodwin: Exactly!  No actually, he had just bought a Tesla, which back then, that was kind of a rare thing.  And he was like, "I bought it with Bitcoin" and I was like, "I don't know what that is".  And so, I went around the block with him and he drove me around and he told me the basics about it.  Then literally, I just started getting interested in it and working all the parties for all these companies, and I actually worked Bitcoin 2019 as a bartender, which is so weird!

Peter McCormack: You did?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, really weird.  Being in the Bay Area, just the proximity of it was so, you know -- and of course, I didn't pay enough attention and didn't actually in earnest start doing anything until 2017.

Peter McCormack: Everyone has a story; everyone could be a billionaire.

Mark Goodwin: Nothing like losing 50 Bitcoin on Silk Road, or anything like that.

Peter McCormack: Tim Draper's got 3 of my Bitcoin.

Mark Goodwin: There you go.  Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  We were talking about this the other day.  When Silk Road went down, I had 3 Bitcoin on there I was using to buy books you can't buy in normal stores.

Mark Goodwin: Smart man, it's all about the books.

Peter McCormack: All about the books.

Mark Goodwin: All about the books.  I'm a big book man as well, yeah.  So, Tim Draper got it in the auction?

Peter McCormack: He got it in the auction.  I told him, I was like, "Tim, can I have my Bitcoin back?  You've got a lot of Bitcoin there, 3 of those were mine, come on, man".

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, come on, it's only fair.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "You're profiteering off theft from me".

Mark Goodwin: Absolutely, government-sanctioned theft.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Come on, Draper, you're a bitcoiner, give me my Bitcoin back.

Mark Goodwin: Are you a freedom maxi or what?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I see you there with your Bitcoin tie, going around talking about Bitcoin".  Anyway, he can have those 3 Bitcoin, he probably needs them!  Well, listen, you're crushing it, man, and now we have the print magazine, which I am a subscriber to.

Mark Goodwin: And I brought a copy here for you.

Peter McCormack: What have you got over there?

Mark Goodwin: I have the Censorship Resistant --

Peter McCormack: I mean, I think I already have this one.

Mark Goodwin: Yes, I do believe that one, you probably already do.

Peter McCormack: I went in and subscribed immediately.  It's beautiful.

Mark Goodwin: The team that works on it, I came in and joined Annabelle and Joe Rogers and Pete Rizzo and Germano on that team.  They're just so talented and savvy and incredible and just really, they just care so much.  When I started there, I'm on the West Coast, and they're the East Coast, everyone's all over the place --

Peter McCormack: Let me give that one to Danny, because I've got this one.

Mark Goodwin: Oh, yeah, fuck yeah.  I've got more for you guys too, yeah.  But I asked, I was like, "What are the hours that we all work?  When am I expected to be at my computer doing this?"  CK just laughed, he was like, "Dude, we're bitcoiners!"

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what the fuck are you on about?!

Mark Goodwin: And I was like, "All right, cool, let's go!"

Peter McCormack: Danny, what are your hours?

Danny Knowles: All the fucking time!

Mark Goodwin: Bitcoiner hours, yeah.

Danny Knowles: Bitcoiner hours.

Peter McCormack: But what are your actual hours?

Danny Knowles: I mean, I don't know.  I have no routine, no schedule.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  When do I check up on you?

Danny Knowles: Never.

Peter McCormack: How much holiday are you allowed to take?

Danny Knowles: I don't even -- as much as I want?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's Bitcoin hours, man.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, man, 100%.

Peter McCormack: You know your job, do your hours.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, as long as you get the work done.

Mark Goodwin: And when there's a deadline, I work way more than I probably would work, we go boom boom boom, and it's the best.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what the difference is; do you know why this is?  Me and Danny were talking about this the other day.  We don't have jobs.

Danny Knowles: That's the difference.

Peter McCormack: I think it's a really important thing to distinguish.  A job is something you feel obliged to go to, you have to turn up.  There are set hours, you go, you're a slave, you pick up your wage and you go down the bar.  It's bullshit.

Mark Goodwin: And you're working someone else's dream.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but sometimes you can work someone else's dream and it's not a job.

Mark Goodwin: That's true.

Peter McCormack: Danny not only works on the podcast, well I guess, I don't know, I've never even asked Danny this: is it your dream to be a producer of a podcast?

Danny Knowles: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: But you're living the dream, right?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, exactly.

Peter McCormack: He flies around the world.

Mark Goodwin: The dream versus living the dream is different; the ideal dream versus like, "I don't know how I got here, but this is the best".  That's kind of how I feel.

Danny Knowles: Just fly around the world and talk to cool people.

Peter McCormack: Like a year ago, whatever, then you get a phone call, "Come to the UK, come hang out".  Yeah, I mean it's cool, because people earn the right for this to happen.  But the football club is my dream.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.

Peter McCormack: Danny works on that, Tom works on that, Emma, they all work on that, they're all helping someone else's dream, but they enjoy it.  I think the thing is, I don't consider this a job, I just consider this what I do and I get paid for it.  It's just my life.  Because, I've had shit jobs, right.  Dude, worst job I ever had, I used to hammer handles on umbrellas for eight hours a day, literally go in, hammer handles on umbrellas.

Mark Goodwin: That's the most UK thing I've ever heard!

Peter McCormack: I was a teenager, it was in a factory down in a place called Kempston, near Bedford.  It was fucked up for two reasons.  The place was split into two with a big wall down the middle.  One side was where they printed all the triangles of the umbrella; and the other side was where they stitched them together and put the handles on, and I was on the handle bit.  But I was the only handle-hammerer-onner!  But all the ladies who stitched the triangle sections together were that side as well, but they were all Indian, they didn't speak English, so I didn't have anything to talk to them about.  But I could hear over the wall all the lads doing the printing just having fun all day.

I was like, "Can I just go to that side and put the handles on?" and they were like, "No, because the way the production line works, once the… you have to be there".  So, I used to come up with games, because what would happen is I'd hammer a few and I'd look up and 15 minutes had gone, "I've got another seven hours of this shit", so I used to come up with games like, "How many can I do in an hour?  How many can I do in 15 minutes?  Can I beat that 15 minutes?"  I was like, "This is fucking bullshit, I'm not doing this for my life". 

That was a long time ago, but that's a job and it's bullshit and I hated it.  This isn't a job.  We just get up and work and we hang out, whatever.

Mark Goodwin: It's like, if I close my work laptop after a day of working and maybe I open my personal, music-production one, I very often just continue working on the exact same thing and just reading about and researching Bitcoin or whatever.  It's this idea of clocking in, punch out, "Oh, let me just leave that behind".  It's like, "No, this is --", I feel a huge responsibility and really an honour that I have this platform to work with editorially.  I feel so responsible to the community to make sure that I'm honouring the space that has taken care of me so much.

I'm not trying to run this editorial and jam shit down people's throats.  Yeah, we're going to do badass stuff, like Censorship Resistant, whatever, but we have a political issue coming out.  And I'm not doing my job if I don't show every side of this thing.  Bitcoin is for anyone.

Peter McCormack: That's funny you should say that.  I'll say another thing as well, by the way.  I think when it's not a job, you actually work more hours, because you're not watching the clock.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.  I work way harder for Bitcoin Magazine than any bar job or anything I've ever had.

Peter McCormack: Because you're not watching the clock, you've got goals, so you just work as much as you can, because you just want it to be brilliant.  But that other thing about that sense of responsibility, I get that.  And we do, and I say we; I mean, the show is me and Danny now.  He is as much a part of this as I am, and in some ways more than me.  He runs it; he allows me to do other things, but we feel a huge sense of responsibility.

You can't get away from your own bias and opinion.  People know my biases, they know my opinions, but we're consciously aware that the show should not be a platform for my opinions, it should be a platform for everyone else's, and that's why we feel the sense of responsibility for two things: to get as broad a range of people on as possible, every political idea; but also, try to elevate voices that maybe haven't been heard before, try and get new people out there.  We've had some successes on that.  Troy Cross --

Mark Goodwin: Oh, yeah, he's the man.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's been a huge success.

Mark Goodwin: He's blown up, and it's such a testament to what you guys are doing, really.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a testament to him as well.  All he needed was a fuse lighting under him, and then off he went.  Jason Maier, who we recently had on --

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, a book coming out.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because we were conscious where there was a long period of time where a lot of our guests' opinions were maybe from the right of libertarian, we weren't giving enough of a voice to people from the left.  So, for a couple of months, we've been doing that, and we've elevated some voices.  Hopefully, that crosses the aisle

Mark Goodwin: It's huge.

Peter McCormack: But that sense of responsibility's important, and I'm not sure everyone gets that.  I think some people get lost in what their agenda is, where we have an agenda for everyone, because Bitcoin is for all.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.  I think people use Bitcoin because they're like, "I made this crazy, contrarian bet five, six, seven, eight years ago and now I'm a multi-millionaire", or whatever, it's like, "Of course I'm going to be an egotistical maniac"; that kind of makes sense!  But you're doing a great disservice to Bitcoin by doing that, and the way I look at it is, in many ways it is information warfare, if we want to use the terms of that sort of party, sure, "Why are you continually handing ammunition to the other side that makes you look bad and makes them easily dismiss this?"

When I see this and I talk to people, whether it's in my company, whether it's friends, whatever, and when I see people doing stuff like that, I'm not going to shame you or make you feel bad, or whatever, but you realise that you've just discredited all of this stuff by calling that person this thing, or saying that name or this.  You've proven their bias against you that they decided before they walked in; you've confirmed it.

Peter McCormack: Because it's cool to be based, and also you get a lot of social capital from being an arsehole sometimes.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  We've got to move towards waters more maximalism, where we are bringing in people with logic and not exclusion.  I think the battlefield has changed, and Bitcoin is much more about, we need waters warm and logical arguments, and less, "Are we going to be socially manipulated?"  There's less social attack vectors in Bitcoin now than there were five, six or seven years ago.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, by the way, this isn't an anti-maxi thing, this is an anti-arsehole thing.

Mark Goodwin: Of course.

Peter McCormack: I think maximalism is, what I understand it to be, I think is super-important.  And I think you will see a gradual change in the guard with some people as well.  Look, Lyn Alden, fucking crushing it, she's unbelievable.  And I think she's crushing it not only because she's smart, but she comes with really good reasoned, rational arguments.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.

Peter McCormack: She's not attacking people, she's not insulting people.  And actually, if you want somebody out there on a platform, educating nocoiners, regulators or the media, she's perfect.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.  And Andreas, that guy, yeah, there's things I disagree with him about with some things, but what a nice, sweet guy.

Peter McCormack: Where's he gone?  Come back, Andreas.  I miss that dude so much.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, me too.  I'm so glad that I really came into Bitcoin in 2018 bear and was just able to go to sleep every night listening to Andreas and learning!  I mean, what a teacher.

Peter McCormack: I've got a couple of weeks off now, and I think I'm going to have a week of going back and watching old Andreas videos, reading Nakamoto Institute articles, and just refreshing on the old stuff.

Mark Goodwin: 100%, because we've become a culture of preaching instead of a culture of teaching, and that is just the incorrect way to go forward.  The idea of heterodoxy being the path that succeeds with Bitcoin is just ridiculous.  We want to try and be as decentralised and anti-fragile as possible, and yet if you don't agree to only eat meat, and anyone that is LGBT is disregarded, or whatever, that's ridiculous.  That's so antithetical to Bitcoin's ideals and just being a good person.  And you're also not bringing in more people to the network, which is you're doing everything wrong.

Peter McCormack: I heard a really good argument on the LGBT thing recently in that, by the way, I do think there are some issues with teaching about sexuality to people too young, and talking about gender stuff too young.  I've got kids, I don't need them to be going to be school and giving them that; teach them maths and English and French and history.  That stuff can come later, and I think parents can do a lot of that work.  At the same time, what I think that has done has led to some discriminatory behaviour towards the LGBT community. 

But somebody made a really good point to me recently.  They said, "The bitcoiners should feel an affiliation with the LGBT community, because they're two communities that have been attacked by the state".  For a long time, even prior to the trans issues being fought for, prior to that when we just had, it was illegal to be homosexual, I mean we're not far from Bletchley Park, where the Turing machine is.  Was he prosecuted for being gay, Alan Turing?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, worse than prosecuted.

Peter McCormack: I mean, he went through some shit than that.

Danny Knowles: Wasn't he chemically castrated or something?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, certain some manipulation.

Peter McCormack: But I'm just saying, that's not too long ago in distant history.  So, gay and lesbian people had to fight to just get basic equal rights from the state.  We're fighting for basic economic rights from the state.  We've both fought the state, so there should be an affiliation with that.  So, separate what you disagree with on how maybe certain parts of these groups campaign from the fact that these people deserve equal rights, and I thought that was a really good argument.

Mark Goodwin: Totally.  And then also, "You know who loves gun ownership and stuff?  Karl Marx!"  No, it's like, "Yeah, the working class should own guns".  I'm not necessarily, "Do whatever you want", but there's so much common ground between these groups that heterodox bitcoiners just immediately write off, and it's like, "Why are you shutting yourself off to that?"  It just doesn't make any sense.

Peter McCormack: But I think that's changing.  We are seeing, as Bitcoin goes more mainstream, some of the libertarian ideas might be difficult to sell into other people.  And so, as Bitcoin spreads to the mainstream, we're going to get more people who are traditional conservatives and traditional progressives coming in, and they're not all going to be converted to the ideas of libertarians, and therefore these voices are going to be elevated, and they're going to share their view maybe from a progressive background, or conservative background; and hopefully we're going to have a more, how do I put it, secular, for a better choice of words, but a more, I don't know…

Hopefully, what I think it is, during a culture war where everything's been highly politicised, I hope Bitcoin is the thing that brings people across the aisle and works together, and that's my hope.  I hope that if this show can do a little bit towards that by bringing people together and saying, "You know what, we disagree on this", like with Jason.  You might disagree with Jason Maier on his politics, but you can't disagree with him on Bitcoin; he believes in Bitcoin, he believes in censorship -- he believes in the rules on consensus, exactly the same as you, but he just sees a different use for it from you.

Mark Goodwin: Totally.  I've been in communication with a lot of leftie bitcoiners, and I know you had Margot on, who's amazing, and yeah, I think the biggest subculture or culture that will adopt Bitcoin next is the walkaway leftists, like myself.  I will never vote for a Democrat ever again.

Peter McCormack: Because?

Mark Goodwin: Because they've abandoned me completely.  I consider myself working class, and I feel that they no longer represent us at all.  I mean, they've sold us down the river; it's just ridiculous.

Peter McCormack: Great, I want to hear this, and I'll tell you why, because one of my frustrations is, we post a show with a progressive or a leftist and the YouTube comments you get are, "Why are you talking to them?  They just want to groom children".  It's just like, hold on a second, you cannot categorise everybody on the left based on what you've seen on Libs of TikTok.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.

Peter McCormack: Libs of TikTok picks out the worst ideas that have come from the left; you cannot attribute it to that.  That's like attributing white supremacy to all people from the right, and that's just bullshit.

Mark Goodwin: That's what I was going to say.  It's like you're doing the same game here, you're doing lazy bucketing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just don't do that.

Mark Goodwin: It's such a disservice; it doesn't make any sense.

Peter McCormack: Do you think the Democrat Party can recover?

Mark Goodwin: I think at this point, no, and I think it needs to implode in the sense that I think America needs to break the purple party dichotomy, it's just ridiculous.  I think it does need to break down, I think it needs to have a true progressive party again.  I'm sorry, voting to expand NATO is not progressive; voting to print a ton of money and send a bunch of money off for military stuff is not really super-progressive; again, printing a bunch of money and giving it to banks to dole out as a pandemic response is not necessarily super-progressive.

Yeah, I think we need a new party, new leaders.  I just think the institution of the DNC, they've just proven time and time again, they're too corrupt to be trusted.  I realised that a bit ago; I think people are realising that now.  Channelling that and giving them a, you know, "Come over here, jump in the water, the water's warm", Bitcoin can actually actualise this shit that Elizabeth Warren says she cares about.  You want to bank minorities and fight Wall Street and big banks, but you think Bitcoin's the devil and you're going to do everything you can to make sure Bitcoin loses; what are really your incentives here?

This would actually probably -- and this is why we're seeing all these leftie voices come up, because it does answer a lot of these questions; Bitcoin does fix a lot of this stuff.

Peter McCormack: Well, they're going to lose the next election.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I really think so.

Peter McCormack: It's a very strange scenario, because I mean I'm not a Trump fan, but I can't help but feel like they're doing everything they can to make sure he can't run.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, because I think they're probably pretty scared.  And I'm with you too.  To me, there's really no difference between a Biden and a Trump; it's purple party.  I think, why do all the right let Trump get away -- I mean, he printed the trillions of dollars, he locked down everybody.  Why does the right get a pass and they say, "Oh, these Democratic mayors"?  They fucked shit up too, but Trump did the lockdowns.

Peter McCormack: Trump signed the cheques.

Mark Goodwin: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: He signed the cheques.

Mark Goodwin: Exactly, and that's what he does.  Maybe that's why he was there in the first place.  He bankrupted his way -- he knows what debt is, he bankrupted his way into the presidency, as the President continually was trying to say, "Lower rates, go to zero, let's go negative".  He basically did everything he possibly could to destroy and cause inflation really, to destroy the purchasing power of the dollar, and yet everyone blames Biden for that.

I mean, yeah, I don't think Biden necessarily helped, but to say that Biden did that because gas prices are high, it's like, well yes, Trump moved us towards a bit more isolationist and a bit more energy independent for sure, but these issues of monetary expansion, this is 2008 stuff, this is 1971 shit, we're really going to blame Biden for that?  I don't like Biden at all, I think he's one of the worst politicians.  I mean, the Drug Bill, the Crime Bill.  I think he's one of the greatest systemic racists of all time and I think people saying, "Defund the police, Black Lives Matter, vote Biden no matter what", that doesn't make sense to me personally.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think you have an issue, which we have a similar issue here in the country, and I wish people would recognise this more.  Whether or not it's Trump or Biden in power, day-to-day your life, your economic position is not going to change hardly anything at all.  They've all got a very similar economic policy.  There might be some tweaks here on tax on the right, they might reduce taxes for the super-rich a little bit more, etc.  There are some slight policy changes, but I just feel like it doesn't matter who's in power, our lives are going to be almost exactly the same, because people don't represent -- they don't represent anything anymore.

I mean, what do people stand for?  Do I honestly think whether we have a Labour or a Conservative Party, my life's going to materially change?  Absolutely fucking not here, it's just not going to change.  Tax is going to be very similar, policy is going to be very similar.  It's almost like everyone's converged to the centre to try and win as many votes as possible, and there's very little difference anymore, and I wish people would recognise that.

Mark Goodwin: I feel the same with music production.  It's like algorithms and festivals have driven the mean to the top, and so now you have bands that don't even have their own fan bases, but they're headliners at festivals.  But if they tried to do their own thing, they're festival bands, they're Spotify algorithm bands.

Peter McCormack: Dude, I had tickets for Rage Against the Machine headlining Reading --

Mark Goodwin: Fuck yeah!

Peter McCormack: No, they've pulled out, because Zack de la Rocha busted his knee at a show, by the way which he did at Madison Square Garden, still fulfilled the next two nights, but says he's not coming to do Reading.  That's disappointing.

Mark Goodwin: That's very disappointing.

Peter McCormack: They replaced them with The 1975.

Mark Goodwin: What?

Peter McCormack: Like, what?  You should have replaced them with Slipknot or Metallica or something.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, Slayer, anything that -- yeah, The 1975 is pretty much the exact opposite.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, thanks, I'm no longer going.  But interestingly when you talk about music, I'm just going off on a tangent here, I just bought a record player.

Mark Goodwin: Oh, nice!

Peter McCormack: Danny was saying, "Well, you need to get some records now".   So, I went on Discogs and bought 30 or 40 records to get myself going.  It's quite interesting; it may be because I'm old, but I didn't buy any new records, it was all old stuff.

Danny Knowles: What was the newest, Amy Winehouse?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, which I, by the way, think is the last great album ever made.

Mark Goodwin: So, I have a theory and I think you're exactly right.  I think interesting new music stopped rising to the top when Spotify took over, and it was founded in 2006, but it didn't really get huge market share until 2011, 2010.  Have we had a great record since 2010, 2011?

Peter McCormack: When did Back to Black come out?

Danny Knowles: I think that was 2007.

Mark Goodwin: Earlier even, maybe.

Peter McCormack: Danny disagrees with me.

Danny Knowles: It's not my favourite Kendrick album, but I think To Pimp a Butterfly is a great album.

Mark Goodwin: For sure, yeah.  I'm not a huge Kendrick fan, but I agree that it's definitely certainly incredibly culturally important and very influential as a producer and bringing free jazz to the popular -- you know, I'm a big jazz guy and I love him for that.  That's the shit.

Peter McCormack: I think when you go another 25 years down the line, you say, "Name the 50 best albums of all time", I think Amy Winehouse's was the last great album to be made of genuinely brilliant music.  People can disagree, that's just my opinion, but I think -- I don't like Kendrick Lamar, I'm not a fan.  I think it's the last great album.  And I attribute it also, because I think she was the last artist to really make a record on drugs!

Mark Goodwin: Well yeah, I mean I think that's part of this festival algorithm shit.  It's like people don't want to take risks on these, because they're like, "Why would we do that when there's eight other cookie-cutter C-plus bands, B-minus bands; why would we take a risk on maybe a drug addict giving us an A-minus record, or maybe not even delivering?"  They can't take the risks on the margins anymore, so it's all homogenised into this -- and I think the political world has done that exact thing.  When was the last time we had a great politician?  The last person that inspired hope was around that same time; Obama did that.  And then he dropped more bombs than Bush and deported more people than Trump.  Okay, great, good!

Peter McCormack: But now he makes a Netflix show and lives in a mansion by the ocean.

Mark Goodwin: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Saifedean would call it fiat music; yeah, maybe.  Just out of interest, what's your favourite album of all time?  Favourite and the best.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, great point.  I mean, just first reaction, I think my favourite would probably be In a Silent Way by Miles Davis, and I noticed you had a Miles Davis picture when I came in.

Peter McCormack: Wow!  Yes, I do.  If I'd known, I'm a member of Ronnie Scott's, I could have taken you.

Mark Goodwin: Oh, wow!  Oh, shit!  Yeah, big jazz guy.  Went to school for jazz drums, I think I might have said that earlier.  But best, I mean it's funny, because I don't even think I would include it in my top five by that band, but I think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the best album of all time, because of what it did.  But it's not even close to my favourite Beatles album, I never put it on.  But the way that it changed music, it broke everything open, you can do anything you want, production, song writing; just the most unbelievable.  I mean, A Day in The Life is probably my favourite song.

Peter McCormack: I've never been a fan of the Beatles, I've never had a Beatles moment.

Mark Goodwin: Oh, man.

Peter McCormack: I know, I feel bad for it.  I just never did.

Mark Goodwin: No, don't feel bad.

Peter McCormack: I was into thrash metal and shit.  What about you, Danny; best and greatest?

Danny Knowles: Best is hard.  My favourite is probably Illmatic.

Mark Goodwin: Oh, Nas.

Peter McCormack: That's a great shout.  I mean, that's definitely the best hip-hop album.

Danny Knowles: That's back-to-back great songs.

Peter McCormack: Have you watched the Nas documentary about it?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: That is a good album.  That's one of those few albums that doesn't have a single weak song.

Mark Goodwin: It's a fantastic record, yeah.

Peter McCormack: For me, I'm going to go back to Rage Against the Machine as the best.  The reason that I pick it as the best is that also, every single song is incredible.

Mark Goodwin: And there's a lot of songs on there!

Peter McCormack: 10 or 12.  But all the way through, Bullet in the Head, Wake Up, Killing in the Name, Take the Power Back; every single song's brilliant.  There's not a filler in the slightest.  Every single song could be the first single.  But my favourite album is probably, it's a tough one…  Use Your Illusion II by Guns N' Roses.

Mark Goodwin: There you go, very nice.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I controversially think Use Your Illusions are better than Appetite.

Mark Goodwin: Nice, I like that.  I'm a contrarian.  My record label, just me and my friends, is called Contrarian Records, so I'm all about the contrarian take, even though I literally just said that I think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is the most boring answer of literally all time, great; but I really do think, in terms of what it did, it just broke everything open, the progressive rock guys, the Canterbury kids, like Yes and Genesis were like, "Oh wow, we can do anything we want".  It just broke everything open, and for that reason.  But again, I wouldn't even put it in my top three Beatles albums.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you an interesting thing about having children, is you get introduced to new music you never would have listened to before.  So, my son introduced me to Twenty One Pilots; I would never have listened to them, I think they're pretty good.  But the one that stuck out to me, by the way I'm not a fan of her and what she says publicly, and I wouldn't go and see her in concert unless I was with my daughter, but I thought that Billy Eilish album was pretty good, and it's not something I would ever choose to listen to.

Mark Goodwin: 1,000%.  That's one of the best radio songs ever.

Peter McCormack: Bad guy?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: The production on that's insane.

Mark Goodwin: Get me out of here, yeah, it's incredible.

Peter McCormack: It was all done in her bedroom as well. 

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen the documentary about that?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: So, there's a documentary about them making that record.  It's her and her brother in her bedroom making that record.  They made the whole record in there.  But the lyrics of Bad Guy are kind of concerning when you've got an 11-year-old saying, "Dad, can we put on Billie Eilish?"

Mark Goodwin: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: What's she up to?  I think she's sucking dick!  But yeah, I think that was -- I was impressed with that album.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I mean the hardest thing to do in music is write pop, it's the hardest thing.  People love to say that it's formulaic; sure, but the formula doesn't mean that it always works.  And that to me, I mean I'm such a sucker for really good radio pop songs, even though I love avant-garde jazz and let me listen to Can and This Heat and weird Krautrock shit, and whatever, but then I'll hear Bad Guy on the radio and then put it on Spotify and listen to it a dozen times in a row, because I'm like, "What the fuck?"  I love earworms, dude, I'm all about radio singles like that.

Peter McCormack: You're quite eclectic with your taste then?

Mark Goodwin: There's a Duke Ellington quote that I really like that, "There's only two kinds of music: good music and bad music".

Peter McCormack: I like that.

Mark Goodwin: That's how I feel about pretty much movies, everything.  Obviously, I have my bias towards certain styles that I like.  I know you're a huge metal fun; metal is one of the ones that it takes a group transcending it and then if they do transcend it, they're some of my favourite bands of all time.  Like Metallica, Tool, come on, man.

Peter McCormack: Nirvana?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  You can't fuck with that shit.  Actually, Nirvana was very late in life for me, like recently.

Peter McCormack: Oh, really?

Mark Goodwin: In the last couple of years, I've been like, "Wait?"  Because I'm such a contrarian, I just sort of dismissed it, until now it's cool again to like Nirvana, and it's so good.

Peter McCormack: Well, my tip on Nirvana is In Utero was their best album.  The quality of writing on that.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  No Apologies, dude, that was one of those earworm songs where it clicked for me.  I think it was live at Reading, actually, and it was just a repeat one.

Peter McCormack: Heart-Shaped Box for me.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, so good.

Peter McCormack: I had tickets to go and see them at Brixton Academy.  They announced, I think it was four nights at Brixton Academy, and I was watching MTV, and I think it was Kurt Loder came on and announced that Kurt Cobain had been found dead, so I never got to see Nirvana.  Nirvana at Brixton Academy would have been incredible.  Same, I never got to see Alice In Chains, so this is my Alice In Chains arm.  So, that's Layne Staley --

Mark Goodwin: Oh, fuck yeah.

Peter McCormack: -- the lyrics from Nutshell, the lyrics from Black Gives Way to Blue.  I'm a huge fan, never got to see them live.

Mark Goodwin: I'm a huge harmony person.  Simon and Garfunkel, okay, Bookends and Bridge Over Troubled Water are another two of my top favourite albums of all time, and I would say Bookends, because it's more fun.  I'm a huge harmony person.  Alice In Chains does not get enough credit for their harmonies, at all, period.

Peter McCormack: They're the best of the grunge, best of the four.  To me, they were the most unique, most groundbreaking.

Mark Goodwin: 100% agree.

Peter McCormack: But they weren't the most commercial.  Pearl Jam were certainly, I mean Jeremy was such a well-written commercial song and Nirvana just crushed it with Come As You Are.  But Alice in Chains for me just wrote the best stuff.  Facelift for me is an incredible album, Dirt's an incredible album.  Jar of Flies, when you listen to Nutshell unplugged, I mean it's my favourite song, it just blows my mind.  Dude, we're going on and on here, we should probably talk about some Bitcoin stuff --

Mark Goodwin: I guess, yeah!

Peter McCormack: -- because people listening are going to go, "You're still trying to be Joe Rogan".

Danny Knowles: We've not even got into Whiplash, your favourite film, with the jazz drummer.

Peter McCormack: That's true.  Have you seen Whiplash; you must have?

Mark Goodwin: I have, I have.  And I have to say, I think this is another contrarian thing where I totally understand why everybody loves it, because visually and J K Simmons?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he got the Oscar for it.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, incredible.  But it's such a bastardisation of my life that I just can't -- I watched it and just laughed the whole time.  When he got hit by a car, I was like -- sorry, spoilers -- I was like, "What, that's the peak of the drama of a conservatory story?"  But I understand everyone really loves it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so I love it, I put it up there, top three film.  ET, Casino and that.

Mark Goodwin: ET, Casino; now, that's amazing!  That's a great list.  Casino is key though.  I love Casino.

Peter McCormack: Contrarian again; Casino's better than GoodFellas.

Mark Goodwin: I really like GoodFellas, but I respect that a lot.  It's just a badass thing to say!

Peter McCormack: I just can't respect anyone who thinks GoodFellas is better than Casino, because it's distinctly better writing, better acting, better story.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah?

Peter McCormack: I mean, if Danny said --

Danny Knowles: I prefer GoodFellas.

Peter McCormack: You're fired, you're done, you're finished.  Jeremy, can you handle audio?  Yeah, but it's not.  Have you ever watched them back-to-back?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, watch them back-to-back, and then --

Danny Knowles: That's a lot of movie.

Peter McCormack: What them back-to-back two days in a row, and tell me if you honestly think GoodFellas is a better film. 

Danny Knowles: All right, I'll do it.

Peter McCormack: And you can't be swayed just because Gimme Shelter is in Goodfellas.  That Gimme Shelter moment I think wins everyone, but it's not about that.

Danny Knowles: All right, I'll try it.

Peter McCormack: So, what are we missing in Whiplash, what do you see that we don't see?  I just see a relationship between two people where you have to make a decision whether it's abusive or it's mentorship.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, and to me, I think it was very clearly abusive, and just not really -- that's not what conservatory's like, that's not what mentorship should be like.  No one should attempt a mastery like that.  I just think it's a really weird precedent to set.

Peter McCormack: But if he'd never thrown the cymbal and whatshisname's head!

Mark Goodwin: I mean, tough love is important, right?

Peter McCormack: What is it, Bird; would he have -- Bird?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  Man, I don't know.  I think he almost fetishizes jazz a little bit, and I think that there's kind of a little bit of a misunderstanding sometimes.  And, I don't know, I'm not saying you're missing anything, it's just I have too much context.

Peter McCormack: The film wasn't about jazz though for me, so I don't have to know jazz, understand jazz, or even like jazz to enjoy the film.

Mark Goodwin: Totally, right.

Peter McCormack: For me, it was about that fine line between mentorship and being clearly abusive, but there's that moment at the end when he pulls out that performance, they have that look and you're like, "Fuck yeah!"

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I mean I respect it, I do, I just think it was too close to home and too not close enough to home at the same time.

Peter McCormack: Did you have a J K Simmons in your life?

Mark Goodwin: No, I mean I had some amazing teachers.  I studied under Bob Gilardi, who's the man in Boston, and Tom Giampietro, Steve Langone, shoutouts.  No one ever threw a cymbal or a chair at me.  I've definitely bled on my drums for playing so hard!  At Bitcoin Magazine, they throw shit at me all the time, but no drummers!

Peter McCormack: I bet this means you hated La La Land?

Mark Goodwin: You know actually, I liked La La Land more than Whiplash, I think because of that; it wasn't so directly my life.  But there were definitely some things in there where it's like, "You know why they called Charlie Parker a bird?  It's because he liked chicken so much".  Well, that's not really true!  It's like, Yardbird -- I don't really know, man.  So, some of the things like that, I say he sort of fetishizes jazz and he's obsessed with it but doesn't -- I don't know, I think it's missing some of the point, I guess.

Peter McCormack: Right, we should really do some work here.  Danny, you threw us down another rabbit hole here.

Danny Knowles: I know, I'm sorry.

Peter McCormack: Okay, listen.  I didn't follow the Tornado Cash thing too closely to begin with, because I just don't pay attention to ETH too much, and also I'm just less and less on Twitter these days, I'm just spending a lot less time on it.  But a really good thread, I think it was from Miles Suter.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, Miles did a really good thread, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Miles Suter did a really great thread where he said, "Bitcoiners need to pay attention".

Mark Goodwin: 100%.

Peter McCormack: So, for anyone who hasn't been following what happened with Tornado Cash, can you just do the TL;DR what happened?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, for sure.  And I agree with you, I don't care about ETH at all, I don't think about it very much, but I do think about stablecoins and the dollar and regulatory action and privacy and open-source code, and all of the things that connect all those things.  And I mean, I think it's such an important learning opportunity to really differentiate why our incentives are the way they are, why our consensus is the way that it is; and even though Bitcoin is very clunky and blockchain is not this magical wand thing that's awesome, blockchains are kind of clunky and suck, but that's exactly what you want.  You want that in hard money.  You don't want it to be easy, you don't want it to be cheap. 

So, I think to not learn from, I would say failure, potential failure certainly, and co-option by dollar-backed entities, I think if you ignore that, potentially you're opening attack vectors in Bitcoin.  And Bitcoin can't nearly be as co-opted or dollarised at the consensus layer as Ethereum.  Just because you have more Bitcoin, that doesn't mean that you have any consensus authority, and that's not as true in Ethereum.

So Tornado Cash, to get to that, it's just an open-source non-custodial tumbler, runs on Ethereum virtual machines, so EVM, and similar to a mixer or CoinJoin kind of situation.  Obviously, there are some pretty big differences.  Ethereum doesn't have a UTXO model, they're all account-based, which is why there's that, "Well, how many Ethereum even are there?"  It's like, well it does exist in there, it's just harder to find, because every account is a debit or credit versus you can just do "gettxout" and you can see the literal UTXO set. 

So Ethereum, because of that, has a lot more ability for regulatory fuckery.  You can have a Bitcoin wallet or a private key and you can make a new public address ad infinitum basically, and then I can continue to pay that to you, and I'd have no idea what other balances you have.  On ETH, I know everything you have, I know all of the other coins you have, all the little tokens, all the stuff; it's very, very transparent.

Tornado Cash is one of the more popular things on Ethereum, and it's kind of an infrastructural bright light actually; it's actually pretty great.  On 8 August, the OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is like a subset of the US Treasury that controls sanctions from the government, blacklisted Tornado Cash and said that it was connected to a North Korean money-laundering, terrorist hacking group.  And basically, if you're using this or associated with it, you're committing illicit activity.  It was really, really strange the way that it was all done.

The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, put out a tweet that specifically called out the protocol, and there were actually no specific sanctions made to developers or businesses.  It was literally, if you're associated with the protocol, this is the illicit thing, which is kind of new.  Any time they've made an attack on a mixing service or a tumbler, and it's happened before, it's always been directed at the people running it, "Oh, you're running a mixing service?" 

But Tornado Cash is a smart contract.  It's still running, it's just no one's putting -- the volume has completely imploded.  It's still running, there's nothing you can do to stop it.  It's just, if you used it and then wanted to do anything else on Ethereum, Circle, which runs USDC, has already agreed to blacklist all of the addresses that the OFAC asked them to.

Peter McCormack: But what's the implication of this, because we've had Bitcoin addresses which have been blacklisted?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, it's been attempted before.  I think Marathon put out a thing not too long ago where they're like, "We're going to start doing OFAC-compliant".

Peter McCormack: Didn't they want a signal in the blocks?

Mark Goodwin: Yes, and then basically immediately, Fred Thiel put out a video and was like, "It's not really possible, we can't really do it, it's not profitable".  Just the way mining works in Bitcoin, it's much harder to censor transactions in Bitcoin.  Even if you have 51% of the hashrate, which no one has, let's say you had 51%, all you would have to do if they were censoring, I would only just have to wait 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes.

Peter McCormack: You're eventually going to get in the block.

Mark Goodwin: Of course.  And is it possible that a dollarised entity could subsidise unprofitable Bitcoin mining with the dollar to try to create some sort of censorship ability in Bitcoin?  It's possible, but man is it expensive, man would you need a ton of energy, and you'd need billions and billions of hardware that needs to be machined, which can't happen.  So, it's not impossible, but it's practically impossible.

Peter McCormack: But there's two things to separate here.  There's the censoring of transactions from the blockchain, which absolutely you can't really do; as you've explained, it's too difficult.  But at the same time, when an address is sanctioned, me as an individual, if it's sanctioned and blacklisted by OFAC, I'm unlikely to be somebody who's going to want to transact with that address.  I'm not going to want to receive Bitcoin from it or send Bitcoin to it, as somebody maybe has an address which has been KYC'd, connected; I'd just want to avoid that association, it's too risky for me.

Mark Goodwin: Totally, yeah.  And there's just huge differences in a proof-of-work system to a proof-of-stake system. 

Peter McCormack: So, what I want to get to here is, what is the difference, you were about to answer it, what is the difference here; what are the implications of Tornado Cash?

Mark Goodwin: There's so many.  I would say the biggest one right off the bat is the implication that regulatory entities are here, the fight has started, open-source developers are being arrested for writing code, which is free speech and they absolutely should not be arrested for that, and it's incredibly dangerous precedent.

Peter McCormack: Well, let's explore that, not just take it as a given, there's the writing of code.  What if you wrote code that allowed you to steal money from a bank, is that free speech?

Mark Goodwin: Sure.  I mean, that's like building a road and then getting mad that criminals are trafficking or bootlegging on it.

Peter McCormack: But are we separating somebody using that code?  So, is it the writing of the code, or the using of the code, for the action?  If I write code that you use to rob a bank, steal the money from a bank, you're saying I shouldn't be arrested for writing the code?  But what if I write the code --

Mark Goodwin: Explicitly to break the law?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so if I hack into a bank and steal their money with code I've written?

Danny Knowles: But the hack's the crime, not writing the code.

Mark Goodwin: The hack is the crime, the theft is the crime, not the code you wrote to brute-force in, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but okay, if somebody writes code to allow people to mix something, where is the crime at this point?

Mark Goodwin: There shouldn't be any, because there's no reason that privacy should be anything but a fundamental right.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so that's the separation, that's what we're saying?

Mark Goodwin: 100%.

Peter McCormack: So, writing allowed.

Mark Goodwin: But there's tons of legitimate reasons to use Tornado Cash specifically.

Peter McCormack: Oh no, I get it, I'm just trying to break down the differences, just so people understand, I'm not supporting any of this.  But if I wrote the code specifically for a criminal organisation to use it, so if I was contracted by a criminal organisation to write them code to launder money, have I then committed a crime?

Mark Goodwin: I mean, I think that's what the state is saying, is that this is a North Korean monetary-laundering, I think it's like the Lazarus Group, or whatever, that there's this hacking group that's using cryptocurrency in the extended space to avoid US sanctions.  Yes, that would be illegal, but it would be the avoiding of sanctions; that would be the illegal thing.  It would be the theft, it would be the hacking.

There's an infinite amount of reasons why -- and in Ethereum, it's actually more important, because of that xPub public address, private key stuff we were talking about; it's much more important in Ethereum, because it's account based.  So, I can see Jimmy Fallon's entire ETH history, whereas I could put up a public address and you can't see anything that I've done in Bitcoin, even if it literally came out of the same private key.

Peter McCormack: They need xPubs.

Mark Goodwin: They need xPubs, that's right.  Oh, Shinobi says hi, by the way, he told me to give you a hello.

Peter McCormack: Oh, are we back friends, me and Shinobi?

Mark Goodwin: I hope so.  The water's warm, come on.

Peter McCormack: I hope so.  Send it back, send some love back.

Mark Goodwin: I will, of course, man.  I'm trying to break all that shit down, everybody. 

Peter McCormack: Honestly, I want to be friends with everybody I've fallen out with, anyone.  Even Saifedean can get in touch.  I'm happy to be friends with everyone.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.  And if you can't be friends with people you disagree with, do some checking in on yourself.

Peter McCormack: I always think the people you disagree with are the people you should spend more time with.  You should try and understand them, have a beer with them, try and understand them.  Don't block people just because -- block someone who's a dick, don't block them because you disagree with them, it's fucking ridiculous.

Mark Goodwin: Totally.  I actually use Twitter mostly to break the echo chamber and it gets me in trouble a lot.  But people think I'm this all-right guy, because I love Pepe and I'm a free speech maxi, or whatever.  It's like, "No, I'm actually pretty progressive in a lot of ways, pretty libertarian in a lot of ways". 

Peter McCormack: You don't even eat animals.

Mark Goodwin: I don't even eat animals.

Peter McCormack: Can I talk about that?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, you can, yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you don't even eat animals.

Mark Goodwin: I thought it was really funny when they dropped off the thing last night.  They were like, "And the vegetarian?"  I was like, "You could have just said, 'Risotto', you didn't really need to call me out here!"

Peter McCormack: "Fucking freak, we've got the freak's meal.  Go and sit on the freak table!"

Mark Goodwin: We got the food for our food --

Peter McCormack: I was a vegetarian for 16 years.

Mark Goodwin: Wow!

Peter McCormack: For 16 years, 2 years a vegan, and I've been toying with going back for a little bit.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I'm actually toying with doing the opposite.  I've done about ten years.

Peter McCormack: It's good to mix it up.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, totally, and you just eat a lot of carbs and that shit sucks, and it's just bad for you.  I've had some psoriasis stuff bust out, I think because of it, and if I don't take my supplements, I feel really shitty.

Peter McCormack: Dude, when I wasn't working and I was a vegan making every meal, I was the healthiest I've ever been.  When I went back to work, I got ill, because I was eating carbs and shit.

Mark Goodwin: 100%, yeah.  I mean, how many dinners as a bartender did I have that were just CLIF Bars and Red Bulls above a trash can?  You want to know what bartending is, that's what it is!  It's just so bad for you.  But yeah, back to Tornado Cash and stuff. 

So, yeah, there's just a lot of big differences.  I think one of the more interesting main differences between proof of work and proof of stake is how validation and mining works.  And again, we already mentioned, just because you have over 50% of the hashrate, really doesn't do much.  You need an extreme amount of the hashrate to really do any sort of censorship, and then continue to run and keep pace on everyone else.  It's just not really incentivised to do that.

Then also, you look at the mempool, and if there are transactions that aren't getting put into blocks that normally would, then you can kind of start to see very clearly that there's censorship happening, because why wasn't this high-value-fee transaction recorded in the last block, but one that cost less was?  You can very tangibly see the value in a candidate block, like a block template, on Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: And so, the guy who created Tornado Cash, he's been arrested?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I believe so, yeah, and is still in jail, as far as I know.

Peter McCormack: And we as bitcoiners, I would help support his legal costs, because we should.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  This isn't about Bitcoin, this is the US Government and the dollar system beating an open-source project and a free speech project.  If you don't think this is a horribly bad precedent and something bitcoiners should care about -- this isn't like, "Oh, Bitcoin's winning because ETH is losing", no. 

This is a big change that's happening, and I don't give a shit about ETH at all economically, I think people are very utopic and naïve in many ways in the system, but I don't think that everyone involved in ETH is a bad person or a bad-faith actor.  I think that there probably are bad-faith actors involved and I think that Joe Lubin in the pre-ICO era saying, "Hey, this is how you avoid KYC and investing limits, here's how you do it".  I think that's pretty shady and there was a lot of banking that was involved right away at the beginning.  JPMorgan has a huge part of Ethereum infrastructure.

So, this idea that, "Oh, man, it's a user-activated soft fork, let's slash away Coinbase and let's slash away all these government entities and regulatory entities and banks"; that's a verdict, they've been in there from the get-go.  But my point now it's irrelevant whether or not you think Ethereum is a good faith product or a bad faith product; it's been compromised by the US dollar system, by stablecoins, by using the actual economic weight of the reserve asset.  So, let's get into that for two seconds.  What's going to happen versus the user-activated soft fork in the Big Block Wars?

Bitcoin, as a native asset, can exist on any fork, and we probably have forks that we don't even know that exist and we could go sign and put our economic weight into and sell them, and a lot of us did that with Bcash, or whatever, but there's so many more that exist that we've never looked at.  Bitcoin can exist as a native asset on as many chains as it wants, because it is an asset directly related to that chain; there's no reserve asset to it.

Stablecoins are the total opposite of that.  You can't have a stablecoin that's $1 possibly exist with $1 value on multiple chains, it can only be pegged one-to-one.  So, this merge that's about to happen, where there's going to be proof-of-work ETH that still exist; we still have Ethereum Classic, that will probably get a lot of stuff; there's going to be, like, USDC ETH and there'll be this sort of, "Okay, where's the fork going to go; where are the economic nodes going to go?"

Peter McCormack: Does it come down to whoever has the reserve which backs it claims where it is?  So, if Circle say, "We're rejecting proof of work and we're going with proof of stake --"

Mark Goodwin: Which they are.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, which they are, then if anyone held the USDC that -- USDC is Circle, right?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, if they held that, then people who were trading that know it has no value?

Mark Goodwin: Correct.  And it's not just like, "Okay, it splits the fork and now it's 50 cents on one chain --", no.  It's $1 and it's pegged to one chain, and that's it.  So, USDC itself has $55 billion worth of value and then Tether has another $45 billion or something, and then all of the other algorithmic stablecoins that people use for DeFi, a lot of them are backed by USDC or Tether.

Peter McCormack: So, what about Dai, because that's slightly different?

Mark Goodwin: Yes, but it's backed --

Peter McCormack: 50% backed, right?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, but that's humungous. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but does that mean the one that stays on proof of work only loses part of its value?

Mark Goodwin: But a de-peg of a stablecoin is sort of a fundamental.

Peter McCormack: It just sounds like a huge --

Danny Knowles: But presumably, they'll just have to go to the proof-of-stake system, though, they won't really have a choice, and that's kind of the point of this, right?

Peter McCormack: It sounds like such a huge shitshow.

Mark Goodwin: I mean, we think the Fed is walking into a buzzsaw; Ethereum is sprinting headfirst into a buzzsaw.

Peter McCormack: When is the merge?

Danny Knowles: I think it's meant to be 15 September.

Peter McCormack: I bet it doesn't happen.

Mark Goodwin: I think it probably does, but I don't think it should.

Danny Knowles: I don't think it should.

Mark Goodwin: They should not -- ETH is not the worst idea in the world, it's just one of the worst executions in the world.  A supercomputer that's unstoppable code, where you pay people to run code for you, genius.  Trying to make it economically important or rare or scarce, why are you making your block space artificially scarce if you want to run supercomputer code?  Why are you artificially burning it?  You don't want it to be rare, you don't want code to be scarce, you want people to be able to run code as cheaply as possible and to artificially do it; this hard money, ultra-sound money meme, is destroying Ethereum, it really is.

Peter McCormack: The problem is, it's never known what it really is; it's tried to be everything.  It's tried to be a bit of Bitcoin, a bit of smart contracts, a bit of this, bit of that, bit of everything.  Is the primary issue with the merge in that, post-merge, it becomes state captured?

Mark Goodwin: I think it already is state captured, yeah, I really do.  You're perverting the incentives away from the miners and giving it to the stake validators and the holders, which is going to only compound over years.

Peter McCormack: So, it's more state captured.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: But of those validators, the large ones are generally in the US, and those are the ones that are going to be OFAC-compliant, so then the entire network becomes OFAC-compliant.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  I think there's like 11 pools that have almost 70% of all staked ETH, and one of them, Lido, is 35%; it's half of that.  The way that Ethereum validation works is it's difficult.  Again, we talked about, it's easy to tell which would be the competitive candidate block.  So, I was thinking of this analogy of Bitcoin mining is like a monocrop.  Did we talk about this earlier?

Peter McCormack: No.

Mark Goodwin: I know we talked about it.

Danny Knowles: We talked about it.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, it's strawberries.  So, if you want to go build a candidate block, you go out to the field of the mempool and you look at all the strawberries and you just pick the biggest, juiciest ones, and it's super-easy and it's not that hard; the reddest, biggest, boom, and you fill your 2 MB-basket, or whatever, 4 MB-basket; and, yeah, fill it with the biggest, juiciest strawberries.

Miner-extracted value and staking pools is like you go to -- building the candidate blocks is very complicated and it takes skill, because to actually extract the value to be like, "Run this smart contract first, then this, front run this one, front run that trade first and then --" because you can see what people are doing, so you can actually make a move before their thing goes through, and you can take out the juicier -- that's what MEV is, Miner-Extracted Value.

So, that's like going to a huge farm that does tons of crazy stuff, and you don't know anything about farming or vegetables or fruit, and you have a basket and you see the strawberries and you go, "Okay, these are the juicy ones", and you put them in, but you miss that there's a huge potato crop under there, because you didn't know that potatoes grow underground, you didn't know that there's an apple that's 30 feet above you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but so what, that's life; go and figure it out?

Mark Goodwin: Well, what it does is it centralises staking pools even more, so you have to be in the biggest staking pool.  Me and you could create a mining pool on Bitcoin that would 99.999% produce the exact same candidate block as the biggest mining pool, like Slush Pool, or whatever.  But Lido versus the next staking pool in ETH, they're going to have very different strategies, different techniques.  And when you see one pool that's doing better than the others, you go to that one, and so you stay there.  And not only do you stay there, they don't even have the code for you to be able to leave at this point.

Peter McCormack: Because the economic incentive will always be --

Mark Goodwin: To stay there, and they'll make it very difficult to move pools.  Right now, you literally can't even, they haven't even built that code.  Do you think the developers are now going to want to build that code to be able to slash Coinbase after they just arrested a developer?  No, I really don't think that they will.

Peter McCormack: I think this is why Harry Sudock says that Bitcoin mining pools will eventually trend to zero commissions, because that's all they can compete on.

Mark Goodwin: 100%, yeah.  Stratum V2 is super-important, and we have to figure out ways to distribute mining rewards in a safe and private way.  There's a lot of stuff we do need to figure out with mining pools, but the incentives are always, if you see a mining pool that is perverting the financial incentives of just mining the most expensive fees, you would leave that pool, because it's not the most profitable pool.  And you could do it in 30 seconds too.

Peter McCormack: And the issue isn't so much itself with OFAC compliance, in that we don't have to have the argument about sanctions and whether they're beneficial or not, etc.  I don't particularly want to support any terrorist group --

Mark Goodwin: No, totally.

Peter McCormack: -- but once you are captured by OFAC compliance, you can be captured for any reason at all, because you're captured.  The state has full control at that point.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I mean that's why I said ETH is really running into a buzzsaw, because the only thing right now that is keeping this supercomputer decentralised code thing is the miners, is the proof-of-work miners.

Peter McCormack: Well to me, it just becomes essentially a company that has to follow any regulation that's thrown at it, and the people that want to use it have to follow any regulation that's thrown at it.  It will still operate.

Mark Goodwin: It's not an asset, it's like a social network company.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's basically a social network on a blockchain.

Mark Goodwin: 100%.

Peter McCormack: But it can no longer ever make any claim to be hard money, even though its current claims are ludicrous, it's even more ludicrous now.  It can never make any claims to be a hard money, it can never make any claim to be decentralised.  You could say it's distributed to some extent, but in no way is it decentralised, no way is it censorship resistant.

Mark Goodwin: And the merge is going to make all that worse, because there's all this data DEC, all these smart contracts; it's thousands of gigabytes.  And so, they're going to create a point where you don't actually have to validate from Genesis anymore, because it's so ludicrously expensive, computation-wise, that they're going to set a checkpoint and everyone's going to start validating from this point, which only allows that perverse chain to exist.  Validating from Genesis, complete fidelity to Genesis is an incredibly important thing in Bitcoin; that's a CK term, shout out to CK.

Peter McCormack: Love you, CK.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, love you too, thanks for everything.  It's an incredibly important part that you can validate everything back to the beginning.  In ETH, it's going to be impossible to do that, and it already is incredibly hard, but it will literally be like you can't do it.  There larping on a lot of that stuff.  In my opinion, it seems like decentralisation theatre.  I don't know why you want to do a blockchain for a lot of this stuff, I don't know why you would want to artificially make block space scarce.  I just think they're doing a lot of stuff that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

They've every right to do it; open source, do whatever the hell you want, I don't care.  I do think that pushing these narratives of ultra sound money and, "We are decentralised and we are a supercomputer that's unstoppable code", it's very clearly that's not true.  None of that stuff is true, we're seeing that.

Danny Knowles: The thing that I think's super-interesting is, if they go ahead with this merge, there's going to be the proof-of-stake Ethereum, and they used to say, I think, I mean I don't pay too much attention to this, that there was going to be no proof-of-work fork from this, that it was just going to move across to be entirely proof of stake.  That now seems just clearly not true.  There's enough people that I think want to stay on proof of work.

Peter McCormack: Is somebody actually forking it?

Danny Knowles: I mean, I'm sure it will happen.  But if it doesn't, they're fucking stupid if that doesn't happen.  But does it then become a choice, like do you go with the decentralised, completely compliant Ethereum, and then there still is a censorship resistant Ethereum?

Mark Goodwin: That's what I think is going to happen.  I think Ethereum is going to be around for a really long time.  I just think it's going to be completely co-opted and not be a supercomputer, and just be this CBDC generator, basically.

Danny Knowles: Ethereum Classic Classic.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Would you say USDC is essentially a CBDC, or is becoming a CBDC?  Do we even think that it could be captured by the US Government going, "Well, hold on, they've done the work for us here, we've got this shit?"

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I mean I'm of the theory that CBDCs are almost a red herring, where I actually think the government would much rather have a private-entity-run money, and would much rather -- because, I think a private entity, a private company, has much more rights to be exclusive and to not give services to everyone, whereas a government-directly-issued state money would probably have a lot more restrictions on what they can restrict. 

Whereas, I think a private entity, like USDC, they're very intertwined with the US dollar system and regulations, but they could choose to not service someone if they didn't want to, because they're a private company, and they reserve that right; whereas, I don't think a government issued money could reject a citizen from using it, it would be more difficult.

So, yes, I do think USDC is essentially the CBDC of the US and I don't know if the Fed will actually print a dollar coin, or anything like that.  I think USDC is probably what will be used.  I don't see its market share going away, I don't think what it's just done to take over Ethereum, they're going to just compound that and just get more and more powerful.  So, yeah, I'm less worried about a CBDC coming out and more worried about mass adoption from governments of private entities that issue their own currency.

Peter McCormack: I mean, 15 September is going to be a date for the diary.  Get your Butterkist Popcorn in.

Danny Knowles: I would take a bet that it doesn't happen on that day.

Peter McCormack: I've got a feeling it's not going to happen; I've got a feeling.

Mark Goodwin: I mean, we'll see.  There's a lot of interesting stuff, like I think there's even the ETH 2.0 contract, where everyone staking their ETH was directly funded from a Tornado Cash thing, which is like, what does that mean?  Does that mean that they can just comp --

Danny Knowles: Oh, shit!

Mark Goodwin: We don't know what that means, we don't know what the implications of that mean, because it depends on how they want to regulate that.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, could somebody dust the network with small amounts of Ethereum?

Mark Goodwin: That's actually what's happening.

Danny Knowles: That's what's happening right now.

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean that's a way to fight it.

Danny Knowles: 100%.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just dust everyone with Tornado Cash.

Mark Goodwin: Totally. 

Danny Knowles: Flick shit on everyone!

Mark Goodwin: That's kind of what they're doing right now, and that's one of their main defences, "Let's throw mud everywhere and then we're all muddy", and then hope that they just go, "It's just too much work".  Or, they just hired 87,000 IRS agents, and they're about to -- I mean, blockchain is not not transparent; it's very transparent.

Peter McCormack: But didn't something similar happen with the OFAC Bitcoin addresses, that people started sending Bitcoin to them with messages of like, "Fuck you!"?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, some OP_RETURN stuff.  I don't know a ton on that.

Peter McCormack: All right, a good place to finish on this, because we've got to go and watch a football match.

Mark Goodwin: Fuck yeah, we do.

Peter McCormack: Three wins in three, we want.  What are the implications therefore for Bitcoin?  Can this happen to Bitcoin?  What have we got to be aware of; where have we got to have our defences up here?

Mark Goodwin: Well, I would say that the Bitcoin system is very dollarised, and I think people are really naïve about that.  I wrote an article called The Bitcoin Dollar, and it's about this idea that it's entirely possible that maybe Bitcoin is actually very good for the dollar system.  And we've seen nothing but the dollar go up for the last year, and there's two different values of ways you can look at the dollar system.  There's the individual purchasing power of the dollar, which is obviously going to shit in many ways, inflation-wise; but versus other foreign currencies, it's obviously doing very well, and that is the crux.  There's then the net purchasing power of the dollar system.

So, we can actually use Bitcoin, and I say we as the US Government, could use Bitcoin to hyperinflate or inflate the dollar system into a reserve asset that doesn't care about the demand, and basically recreate the petrodollar system, where we're forcing people to buy dollars first to buy Bitcoin, and that's essentially what's happened.  95% of Bitcoin trading pairs are US dollar based.  Everyone uses stablecoins.  This idea that the government doesn't want Tether around is ludicrous; of course they do.  They want as many people using the dollar as possible across the world so they can shovel inflationary effects into it.

The government loves USDC, they love Tether, in my opinion; I think they do.  And the fact that they've gotten away with it for this long kind of proves that, I think, in a lot of ways.  So, there's a dollarisation of Bitcoin that's definitely possible, perverting some incentives.  The way that's going to happen is dollar incentives perverting away from good custodial practices, like someone offering USDC yield on your Bitcoin so you put your Bitcoin there; that's an attack vector.  Potentially, someone could subsidise a not-profitable miner that's censoring stuff with dollars.  You could even end up paying mining fees with USDC at some point.  There's some perversion that the dollar system could do, and certainly with second-layer stuff.

But I think on the actual base layer, Bitcoin is just so simple and it has a much smaller attack vector for centralising forces.

Peter McCormack: Satoshi got so much right, and everyone since.  Keep this fucking thing simple.

Mark Goodwin: Yeah.  I mean, simplicity is a feature of Bitcoin, and people say that it's not, "Oh, well ETH does this, and whatever this thing does that, and you can't do this on Bitcoin", etc.  It's like, "Good".  We want Bitcoin to be as clunky --

Peter McCormack: As basic, boring.

Mark Goodwin: -- as possible.  And then also, let's innovate, do really cool stuff.  Let's do Federated Chaumian Mints, let's talk about covenants, let's talk about ordinals.  Let's do really cool shit on top of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: What are ordinals?  Come on, man!

Mark Goodwin: It's a really cool system.  Basically, the idea is an ordinal is just a number, so there's cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers.  So, ordinal is just your order.  So, "the third duck" would be an ordinal versus, "there's three ducks"; that would be cardinal.  Does that make sense?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Mark Goodwin: So, ordinals is a system where every satoshi in a block is just numbered first in, first out.  So the Genesis block had satoshi 1 through 50 million, whatever; there are way more than that.  So, ordinals is a system where you actually look at -- it's just a fun way to look at it!  But you look at, "This was the first satoshi right after a halving", and you can look at the very specific sat, and "This is satoshi 1 billion", and it's like, "You've got a bunch of zeros", and you can create artificial value on cool-looking satoshis.

Peter McCormack: You know what this is?  It's number plates, it's personalised number plates.

Mark Goodwin: Yes.

Danny Knowles: Does that not kind of ruin fungibility though?

Mark Goodwin: It doesn't affect base layer at all.

Danny Knowles: Okay, it's just a fun game?

Mark Goodwin: It's all just a way to look at it, ordinal theory, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but back to the implications.  What about people who are working on privacy tools for Bitcoin; how should they feel right now?

Mark Goodwin: I think everybody should be prepared for the worst, and they should do everything -- I think GitHub censoring people, government arresting developers is just such a bad precedent.  I really would just be so afraid if developers stopped developing and were so afraid, but I do think that many should probably publicly say they're no longer doing it, and I think a lot of people are already doing that. 

We're seeing a lot of people step down that probably aren't really stepping down, and I think more of that is really good.  I think we need a lot more anonymity in development, and we need more support and we need more avenues for bitcoiners to give to developers to actually enable that to happen.  We can't be larps.  We make all of our money on hard-working devs, and we should give back and support them.

Peter McCormack: Well, I want to give back and support the legal case for this ETH guy.  We should absolutely support him.

Mark Goodwin: Me too, I really do, and I don't believe in ETH, but I believe in open source and I believe in developers and free speech.  Aren't we bitcoiners?  I'm obviously anti-US dollar and I don't want the dollar to win, even though I think the dollar will be around for an incredibly long time, and I don't see Bitcoin removing the dollar's existence.  I actually see them being very sympatico moving forward; I think they both help each other a lot in a very strange way.

Peter McCormack: All right, man, well are you ready to go and watch your first soccer match?  Soccer!  Soccerball!

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I am.  Believe it or not, even though I look like I'm 4' 2", I was a keeper in high school for a bit.

Peter McCormack: Well, I would like to have played you, because I would have chipped the ball a lot!

Danny Knowles: You told us last night that you were a goalkeeper and a basketball player, and I don't believe either!

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, I mean I'm a pretty bad point guard.  I've got a 15% three-point shot, probably, on a good day.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, this is the rap show, and that's a wrap!

Mark Goodwin: Hey, thanks for having me, brother.

Peter McCormack: Dude, any time, man.  Well listen, we'll be up in California soon, November-time, we'll hang out again, talk again.  Enjoyed having you on the show.  And, how do people find you and what you're doing?

Mark Goodwin: Yeah, next time I promise I won't be six hours of sleep in 48 hours.

Peter McCormack: No, dude, you killed it, you're fine.

Mark Goodwin: Appreciate that.

Peter McCormack: Dude, if we weren't going to watch a football match, we'd probably run for another hour!

Mark Goodwin: Love that!  You can find me on Twitter @markgoodw_in.  Also, my website, markgoodw.in/.  And then, subscribe to Bitcoin Magazine print issue, and support the good shit, support authors, support developers.

Peter McCormack: Peace out, bro.  All right, we did it, take care.