zasad@ made the strategic error of telling me I had until the end of November to respond -- so you get a WALL OF TEXT.
Questions:1. When and why did you become interested in cryptocurrencies?Some time prior to Aug 2004-- since that was >16 years ago, I can't say for sure before then but at least by Aug 2004 I was using Hal's RPOW system and talking to him about it, and I have those emails.
I was particularly interested in natively online money that didn't depend on traditional banks. Like many other people I'd been screwed by paypal randomly freezing my account, and I wanted there to be some kind of electronic money that you could use to pay for resources on distributed services like P2P file sharing that would probably get shut down by banks.
Reading "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson may have been a factor in my interest, but was also I long time follower of the various cipherpunky mailing-lists where these sorts of things were discussed-- along with a lot of libertarian and hard money philosophy. I'm old enough that computer hacking in the unauthorised access sense was made illegal in my lifetime and in my youth we got access to the Internet like real men: by sneaking in and running gopher over a shell at 2400 baud and we liked it that way. I was long interested in cryptography, -- somewhere I think I have a PGP key that I created in 1993 and long since lost the passphrase too -- I bet if I dug it up I could factor its public key now. I contributed some to some open source crypto protocols, for example the automatic establishment part of the OTR protocol came from me.
On the RPOW side, among other things I wrote to Hal to propose adding what we'd now call "smart contracting" to RPOW-- basically making it so that transfers were conditional on programmed rules specified by the payer. It seemed to me that it wasn't good enough to have money that operated without state authorities if you had to use state authorities to resolve disputes... we needed money where users could resolve disputes mechanically without trusting a third party or needing state agency to enforce their agreement. I was really happy to see these concepts in Bitcoin, clearly it was an idea whos time had come. If we want automated systems to be able to
act autonomously we need money that doesn't depend on constant human intervention.
Beyond submitting bug reports and some ideas, I put in a bit of effort advocating RPOW (
e.g. suggesting anonymous remailers could use it.). Hal tried to get me to write a GUI for RPOW but like him I'm really not a big fan of GUI programming. Ultimately RPOW kinda petered out without seeing much use, in fact: I don't believe I've ever spoke to anyone else who used it, other than Hal.
2. When and why did you buy your first bitcoin?A long time after I obtained my first Bitcoin. Like a lot of early participants my first Bitcoin was mined. When I first started the software there was only a windows version, so I ran it in wine and pretty much instantly forgot about it. Like RPOW there were no users and so it wasn't that exciting-- though I became aware of it pretty early, I'd missed the white paper until the end of 2010 and so I had kind of assumed it was a less secure distributed version of RPOW-- an exciting novelty, but not likely to be world changing.
In Dec 2010 or so I had some GPUs that had been given to me as part of a job-- I'd been paid to crack some cryptosystem used to control licensing on wimax radios and had written some software for doing that. I don't game so I didn't have anything to do with the GPUs and went searching for something to use them on. This was right around the time that GPU based Bitcoin mining started so there was a lot of discussion related to that and I ran into Bitcoin again. It seemed to have caught a lot more attention than RPOW ever did so I looked into it again and I found the whitepaper. As soon as I read it I was hooked: this was something that could actually work.
In addition to my GPUs I had a 160 core opteron cluster that I'd been using to develop the Opus audio codec, so its idle time also went to mining. Not too long after I read the entire source code (it wasn't very big at the time) and started contributing on the technical side.
I did also eventually buy Bitcoin for fiat but that wasn't until late 2011 after some crashes took the price from a high of ~$30 down to something like $3.5. At the time exchanging Bitcoin for fiat was a huge PITA and required dealing with sketchy exchanges and payment processors or risking getting ripped off and having your paypal account banned. Until I started maxing out my power I preferred to spend money on hardware/power to mine.
Probably the best moral equivalent for me to first buying Bitcoin is the first time I bought computer hardware with no other purpose than Bitcoin. In May 2011 I bought a ATI 5870 GPU for $150 from someone on craigslist. I met the seller in person and I have a vivid memory of my hands
shaking as I handed over the money, feeling like I was mugging the guy and afraid he was going to cancel the trade.
A 5870 did about 350MH/s (about the same order of magnitude as my whole cluster, I think) and at the time the difficulty was about 100k, so that GPU would have produced about 3.2 BTC per day and would pay for itself super quick.
I lived in northern Virginia and had really inexpensive power-- something like $0.055/KWH. I went on to fill my basement with GPUs and had quite an adventure convincing random staff at AMD distributors to go search their warehouse for extra cases of GPUs as they all sold out due to mining demand. After the crash in 2011 my hashrate kept going up. At two points I was >1% of the network hashrate personally (once during the GPU era, and again after ASICs were a thing). My house was heated entirely by mining, in the winter you could see where the power lines were buried because it melted the snow there first. I had the police show up poking around, I think because either my power usage or due to unlawful use of FLIR had them thinking I had a grow op.
I wish I had pictures of my setup. I screwed 1x2" boards to the walls and then screwed the GPUs directly to them. Motherboards were attached to the GPUs with pci extension cables. Motherboards and PSUs were hung of the gpus (and walls in the case of the PSU) with zip ties. "Look Ma! No case required!". Everything running at 240v to maximise psu efficiency. I used 6 gpus to a board and wired the serial port of each board to the reset pins of the board next to it, so if the kernel hung I could restart the machines remotely.
The cheap consumer GPUs really weren't made for extended heavy usage. Fans would fail all the time and start making an awful noise. I'd get up in the middle of the night to fix them-- I hated dealing with it but wanted the Bitcoins more. For years after I suffered the mild traumatic effect of waking up thinking I heard a failing fan and hoping out of bed to go fix it.
My big GPU farm came to an end when I went to work for Mozilla and moved to California where power isn't so cheap... around that time though GPU based litecoin mining had started and I was able to RMA all my GPUs then sold them all for more than I paid for them! (this wasn't the end of my mining ... as real ASIC miners came not too long after)
3. How did you get on the forum?My first interaction with the Bitcoin community was on IRC and email, but a lot of the discussion back then was on the forum. Personally, I never really liked web forums (though I eventually warmed up to BCT) but this was the obvious place to be.
Fun fact: I think after Theymos (of course) and Hostfat I am the third longest tenured still active moderator.
4.1.I heard that you have been one of the most active Bitcoin developers since 2011. What did you see important in this project and why did you decide to work in it?I've only ever been most active in terms of talking to people, including non-developers. When it comes to actually writing software I'm not especially productive, my contributions are usually related to protocol design, incentives, review, system effects.. stuff like that.
Early on in Bitcoin's life it was clear that while in one sense the system was complete there was still a tremendous amount of work required to make it usable (esp while preserving its awesome properties). My first big and lasting contribution was probably the public address derivation (which was later standardised by BIP32): I'd talked to the FSF about taking Bitcoin donations and there was a desire to use a separate address per donation for invoicing purposes but it wouldn't be good to have the private keys on the webserver. So I came up with a cryptographic way of generating new Bitcoin addresses online while keeping the private keys offline. Somewhat ironically that original purpose is still not well covered by software today.
Prior to working on Bitcoin one of my big open source efforts was working on patent unencumbered audio codecs. I worked on the Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the Opus audio codec among other things. Codecs are a basically a billion dollar per year scam: Standards compatibility forces people to use various codecs and then patent holders extract money from every device and service that sends media over the internet while legally threatening inventors that come up with better stuff. To the limited extent that the patents are valid at all the value they provide over the alternatives is negligible, but you're forced to pay because of compatibility. Those costs are an unearned tax and a drag on innovation everywhere online (even in places where the patents aren't enforceable). The licensing discriminates against various business models (like open source) and people's personal freedom too. But just by giving people a credible alternative the playing field is made more fair: When Vorbis was published MP3 licensing fees halved pretty much over night, so its mere existence benefited people who never even used it. Vorbis only reached moderate adoption but today virtually every one of you has used Opus-- it's the mandatory codec for web based video conferencing and it's been shipped to literally billions of users.
So with codecs I was able to take some rocket sciency math and engineering stuff that I'm good at and enjoy and use it to make a tremendous benefit to the world. --- my interest in codecs freedom has it's own fun origin story (in short: I added VBR support to one of the earliest MP3 encoders, deployed it at my job, and had a vendor imply that they might get me sued/fired due to patent infringement after I told them we wouldn't be buying any more of their commercial streaming product).
In finance there are many comparable examples, where rent seekers cut a fee out of everyone elses business without really adding any value. Their mere presence harms your personal freedom and privacy and prevents many valid forms of commerce from existing. Central banks manage currencies in ways that aren't in your personal best interests. Instead of patents their lock in is achieved through banking and AML rules, government imposed currencies, and a whole lot of inertia: In codecs you get forced into using formats you might not want to use by network effects, but for money those effects are much stronger. The biggest difference though is that instead of being a billion dollar scam there are a few more zeros in the figure for finance.
I hope Bitcoin can someday be even as successful as Opus. In that world, people may not even know that they're using Bitcoin -- but it's there, as an alternative or in the backend of their activities amplifying their freedom and keeping the old centralised alternatives on their toes. But to get there it has to be good enough and the properties that make it valuable have to be protected. Opus might still have been widely used but wouldn't have improved people's freedom if it had been stuffed full of restrictively licensed patents at the last minute. Likewise, Bitcoin that became paypal 2.0 might still be popular but it would be a waste of time. And unlike codecs, the nature of money means that there may be no near term second chance if Bitcoin fails: Switching codecs doesn't have a big cost, but if the money you're using fails you're going to be extremely shy about adopting some other new alternative.
Obviously privacy is a big area where Bitcoin needs improvement and I've tried to come up with fancy technology to improve the situation, but it's always a balancing act. Privacy is the one area where if Bitcoin doesn't get better at it ... it might leave the world a worse off place than if Bitcoin hadn't existed. The worst case for Bitcoin privacy is pretty bad. There has been a lot of progress but more is needed.
4.2.What was the main reason for founding Blockstream?Back when that effort started there wasn't any "blockchain" industry. There were a lot of people who wanted to spend more time working on Bitcoin but they had existing well paid jobs. Bitcoin had become valuable enough that in theory early Bitcoiners could just fund themselves-- but instead of earning a good paycheck and using it to BUY bitcoin, you'd have to SELL bitcoin. Not exactly the most appealing move to someone who really believes in it.
People had tried doing donations but they weren't very sustainable, and often ended up with the donors thinking they owned you in a way that even employers wouldn't (and early orgs like Bitcoin foundation were full of kinda sketchy folks).
At the same time there is just a ton of transitional work needed to bridge the rest of the world onto Bitcoin-- and plenty of interesting technologies from Bitcoin that could be applied to traditional systems to make them more bitcoin like: more secure, more private, more accountable.
During the development of Opus I made a bit of money on the side for myself developing a bespoke station-to-transmitter links system used (perhaps still used) by a really big Canadian radio station to hook up all their remote transmitter stations across Canada. Having cool open technology is one thing, but there are plenty of businesses that will pay to help integrate it for their use.
So I hoped that we could create a company to build that bridge tech and providing way for long time Bitcoin developers to spend a lot of their time working on Bitcoin, while also helping to prepare the world for a more Bitcoin centric future.
Why did you leave Blockstream and why did you decide to devote yourself to developing protocols for Bitcoin?Shortly after starting blockstream a huge amount of "blockchain" hype began which you'd think would be good, but it undermined our ability to set the agenda around the kinds of technology we wanted to work on (or at least my ability to set it from within Blockstream). Basically even big firm and their brother wanted to talk to us (good!) but they were mostly pre-spun up on borderline pointless applications of technology, or even outright scams. Simultaneously, in the Bitcoin space the mere existence of blockstream was highly weaponized and created a constant campaign of harassment-- against developers in general, against blockstream, and against me personally. Getting death threats is just not fun. I wasn't sure if getting out would really fix the situation at all, but at least if I felt tired of it I could unplug and ignore it for a month without letting anyone down.
The Bcash spinoff (and later futures on the ill-fated 'S2X' split) gave me a way to cash out without diminishing my long term bitcoin holdings much. Blockstream had also worked out pretty well for me financially-- everyone there was (and I assume still is) partially paid with a fixed amount of Bitcoin the company pre-purchases at hire time and bitcoin had increased by something like a factor of 45 while I was there. In short, I didn't need any more money and I figured I could have more fun not working there. It was also clear that blockstream could continue on fine without me and there were several other orgs funding developers by that point-- so to the extent that I got involved to create a place to fund my colleagues to work on Bitcoin my work was done.
I hear that they made some changes after I left that I think I would have enjoyed working there more, but I don't regret leaving at all.
4.4.What future do you think bitcoin will have?I think Bitcoin is here to stay. What form it'll take in our lives is still an open question-- will people be using it more directly or will it take on more of a role as a high powered industrial money used to transport value across borders, across time, and protect people's freedom? Will humans be the most frequent users of it, or will machines?
Most people couldn't have imagined the world using anything like Bitcoin as recently as ten years ago-- even though Bitcoin already existed. Twenty years ago the question wouldn't even had made sense to most people. I think it would be presumptuous for us to guess too much about how the future will use Bitcoin. I don't know what the future will look like but I'm confident that there will be Bitcoin in it.
4.5.What prevents mass adoption of cryptocurrencies?Above all: Time. If you successfully convince someone that Bitcoin could become the defacto world currency, they'll quickly do the math and realise that this would result in an unfathomable wealth transfer. This, naturally, seems unrealistic so they then conclude that it can't happen because the consequences will be too dire. As time goes on Bitcoin value flows through the economy, the price goes up, and the amount of wealth transfer remaining becomes less extreme and the whole idea seems a little more credible. More people adopt it, wash/rinse/repeat.
Overnight world domination is physically and economically impossible and that's fine because it if it did happen over night it would be highly disruptive and probably get a lot of people killed.
Beyond general adoption specific uses have their own impediments. Computers are far too insecure, software is too buggy, we haven't solved the self-custody risk problems, and in the US the tax treatment is pretty good for long term hodl but pretty bad for use for small payments: You have to report cap gains/losses on every purchase, which is a utter reporting nightmare. There aren't any fundamental impediments to solving these problems-- they'll just take time.
5. What do you think of the current Merit system and signature campaigns? Do they harm the forum?I like the merit system but I suppose I should since I have among the highest merit on the forum.
I thing signature campaigns are toxic and end up attached to a lot of spam/low value posts that really harm the forum. But it isn't clear to me that we'd be better off without them: Without the signatures the spam would probably still happen, based on links inside the spam or just shilling scamcoins by name-- the signatures ads are just a path of least resistance. ... and at least they make the spam more identifiable.
In the subforums I moderate if there is a post which is pretty worthless and maybe spam-- if there is no signature campaign it'll usually get the benefit of doubt. If there is... bye bye.
6. The most useful forum topic? Most helpful users?I think it's hard to say. I feel like the forum these days isn't living up to its potential because it's not a place that new people show up as much... and a lot of the long time expert contributors have given up on it.
Basically any interesting discussion that give people with expertise a reason to show up here and mix with the newbies is a really useful topic.
7. 3 things you would implement on the forum?As you're probably aware there is a long standing forum rewrite that has been ongoing. The work there contains about a zillion new ideas, many of which I thought were pretty interesting at the time. Probably nothing I could suggest is as interesting or important as getting that done.
One thing I've really hurt for the lack of is the ability to ban specific users from specific subforums and threads. By design BCT is extremely open and permissive, but sometimes someone who contributes usefully in one subforum just constantly makes a nuisance of themselves in other discussions. Sure, readers can ignore people they don't like, but it's difficult to coordinate that so in practice people can continually derail threads repeating the same boring crap over and over again. Experts can pick and choose where they spend their time and they don't usually enjoy wasting it in places where the conversation is derailed by the same idiots over and over again.
Many of these disruptive folks end up getting banned forum wide, but it takes a long time-- and in the mean time a lot of valuable posters just give up and go elsewhere. If we could thread and subforum scope bans we could better balance the ability of everyone to participate with people's freedom to not have every discussion get disrupted.
8. Do you trade on exchanges or invest in projects?I trade options on Bitcoin at LedgerX with a portion of my stash. Most of my trading could be characterised as selling moon insurance (deep out of the money calls) and crash insurance (deep out of the money puts). For the most part, the activity hedges my substantial Bitcoin exposure-- and it more than covers all of my living expenses which gives me peace of mind. I've averaged a ~20%/yr return on investment (not including Bitcoin's gain in value, of course) since I opened the account in December 2017.
I think more people trading Bitcoin should be interested in options: They can be used to better reflect the kinds of opinions people have about Bitcoin's price and can be shaped to better match people's risk tolerance. For people who want more risk options (esp physically delivered ones like LedgerX) can be a lot safer than the leveraged Bitcoin products traded elsewhere. They can also be more tax efficient.
Of course any kind of trading activity has risks, including custody risks on top of the volatility ones. I don't think anyone should be trading with all of their coins.
9. Tell a story about your big profit or big loss?For me the biggest "profit" is all the damn fork coins and spinoffs. I find it extremely ironic that the very people that relentlessly attacked and harassed me for *years* went on to make me more money than anything else (other than owning Bitcoin in the first place) by a wide margin.
Most people know that BCH traded at over 0.2 BTC/BCH (and also hit $4k in fiat terms), but the S2X futures also traded at >0.2 (and heavily between 0.1 and 0.2). This means that well timed sells could have got you 20% of your Bitcoin holdings _each_. Bitgold, BitcoinDiamond, Sbitcoin, BitcoinX -- each was small but combined with decent timing they also added up to another 20%.
So you could receive 50%-70% of your Bitcoin stash over again from these things (depending on timing and if you compounded them), with no risk to your Bitcoin position other than the risk of making some screw-up handling your keys. ... And I pretty much did and did so at near (thus far) ATH Bitcoin prices.
A lot of people don't realize how profitable the forks were, especially with well timed trades and the patience and technical expertise to go through and dump them. I owe a lot of thanks to the community on the #bitcoin-forks IRC channel for helping gather and disseminate good information all the forks at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018.
I hated dealing with them, hated their disruption, hated their bad incentives, hated reading their crappy source code, hated the abuse from their promoters. But the profits would make even a ferengi blush.
As far as losses go-- I bought some goxcoins, mostly at 20% off face though some at higher prices. Mark lied to my (virtual) face about the causes of his issues, I computed the upper bound losses from malleability and thought the goxcoins were a pretty good deal. Oh well-- that's what you get for believing a Bitcoin Foundation founder.
Depending on how you account for it and when the insolvency pays out this might be a small loss (percentage wise). Given the same info I would have gladly done it again. In practice having coins held up in the gox insolvency discouraged me from selling any in the $200-$3000 price range, so it arguably was a big gain too... Either way I have no regrets.
10. What do you think about the DEFI ecosystem?Most of it is midway between pointless and an outright scam. Some of the BTC 'distributed custody' systems are essentially give one side a free option on the BTC/ETH exchange rate (basically: at most they lose some ETH if they steal the Bitcoin they're holding-- but this is irrelevant if the ETH price has crashed enough relative to Bitcoin). Some are auto-zhoutongers that will crush participants due to volatility with behaviour they don't understand: Their users are picking up pennies in front of a steam roller and have no idea. Others are just HYIP with a layer of technobabble obfuscation on top. When these things go tits up I hope they don't create contagion that depresses the Bitcoin price, but if that does happen-- it'll recover eventually and I'll be buying the cheap coins along the way.
11. Is your anonymity a vital necessity or precaution?I'm not anonymous. Being anonymous and having a persistent identity is extremely hard, maybe impossible. Plus you run the risk that you think you're anonymous but then your identity gets leaked and you're not prepared for it.
I think it's critically important that people be able to communicate anonymously, but right now I think no one really knows how to have a strongly anonymous persistent identity.
12. The last cryptocurrency book you read?I've never read a cryptocurrency book. I doubt many will ever be as good as drinking from the firehose of mailing lists, bitcointalk, irc, etc.
Now, if you want to talk about books with cryptocurrency in them--
I read a lot of science fiction (
a flatter rendering of the shelves that might be easier to read). Non-fiction is useful if you someone's idea of how it is or how it was, but ideas about how it might be are best found in fiction where authors aren't stuck with telling the truth (or at least pretending to...). "Shadow Flock" a short story in Instantiation by Greg Egan was a fun read and clearly Bitcoin inspired. "Neptune's Brood" by Charles Stross is an obviously somewhat Bitcoin inspired novel which I enjoyed.
13. Advise 3 cryptocurrencies/tokens for investment in the next 1-2 years?Other than Bitcoin I don't think there is a lot of cause to own anything else "crypto" unless you have a specific need. On BCT I think more people need to be preached to about the value of
diversifying into non-cryptocurrency assets and managing their risk.
There are many possible futures and I think the best advice is to take each credible, if unlikely, future seriously and think about what decisions you can make today which you would or wouldn't regret making. I think it's better to minimise regret across the various possibilities rather than seek the greatest benefit in the situation you hope for best. It can even be good to invest *against* what you hope and think will happen, so that at least you get the consolation of a pay off if your expectations turn out wrong.
14. How much will Bitcoin cost at the end of 2020?I believe that for sufficiently liquid assets the current market price is almost always the best generally available estimate of the near term future market price-- it's not perfect or even good, but that doesn't mean that anyone knows better. In any situation where I felt differently, I would be trading to profit from the difference and move the price closer to the truth-- and not posting about it here.
Don't believe anyone who is extremely confident about future prices of any speculative asset. They're fools at best, scammers at worse. If we knew what the future price would be it would already be there.
But I can tell you that due to good risk management and policy-driven unemotional trading that I will be perfectly content with the price, whatever it is.
Cheers,
