On Bitcoin Takeover podcast, I’ve interviewed 3 of the people sitting at this dinner table (Sergio Lerner, Zooko & @Peter Todd) And over the next couple of months I think I will have 3 more (this is a picture from 2014, taken by Matthew D. Green at Princeton University)

I told you Zcash is the revenge chain against the current mental derangement in Bitcoin. Just like Ethereum was the revenge chain for builders who were fed up with the block size war in 2016-2017. To many investors, Bitcoin is not sound money digital energy banana. It’s a tech stock which promises to accomplish the goal outlined in the whitepaper: peer to peer electronic cash. If the goalpost shifts from “let’s make bitcoin the ultimate form of money, with contracts, fungibility & quantum resistance” to “Bitcoin is already perfect, let’s fight about jpeg inscriptions instead”, investors will notice and try to minimize their exposure to risk. So far, Ocean mining has been the most destructive actor in Bitcoin since Craig Wright. The hatred, infighting & division they caused will take years to heal. Meanwhile, Zcash is just building stuff. It’s technologically interesting, way ahead of its time, but still familiar thanks to its Bitcoin roots. Zcash is bringing devs on board to work on privacy that scales to billions of people (Tachyon). Zcash is working on shielded assets (imagine stablecoins that are truly censorship resistant because you cannot know who sent them, to whom, and in which amount). Zcash is the Bitcoin we were promised more than a decade ago, refined and improved over the years. While Bitcoin is dangerously stagnant, Zcash is evolving. And investors love throwing their money at something that’s vibrant and promising. Haters will point out that Zcash was dead until a few months ago. Well, that’s also when bitcoiners lost the plot. Think about it. Also, some of the same things that were being said about Bitcoin in 2013 (that it’s persistent, mathematically sound & usable as both a store of value and a medium of exchange) can be said about Zcash too. There’s a lot of virtue in not giving up… and this industry provides more incentives for developers to pivot to new VC-funded projects. But the Zcash team has been consistent over the last 9 years and honestly deserves this influx of users & developers. It’s fine to be in denial when confronted by new information. But don’t let any ideology blind you. In 2017, it was infighting bitcoiners who guaranteed Ethereum’s status as the number 2 coin. Eight years later, some of the same names are causing an exodus to Zcash. There’s also a narrative shift that’s going on, with privacy (something bitcoiners of today fear) becoming more important in everyday life. A decade ago, financial privacy was for paranoid nerds. Today, it’s what billions of CBDC forced adopters need. Embrace the change, or else stay zidelined and bitter. Either way, you can’t say nobody tried to explain to you what’s happening.

> endorse Trump to put an end to Operation Chokepoint 2.0 > Trump gets elected, says he will stop lawfare & let crypto in the USA thrive > start Bitcoin treasury companies, get rekt by the market > Blame Chokepoint 3.0

Up until last year I was really upset that I never get invited to any of the Bitcoin Magazine conferences Not in Nashville/Vegas, not in Amsterdam, not in Abu Dhabi I used to write for BM, currently run one of the most popular podcasts & also produced competing magazines Ironically, now I get invited to Ethereum conferences despite holding no ETH and not doing anything relevant for their community 🤷🏻‍♂️ But now I also understand the value of being counterculture and not selling out to the suits. While brushing shoulders with politicians and corporate CEOs can be educational, I feel more at home among idealistic nerds who want to change the world with their code. Punk rock is not played in every large expo hall. And I like punk rock quite a lot.

Steve Bannon to Jeffrey Epstein, about people evading taxes with bitcoin: “NSA has ‘em”

Bitcoin is a tech stock, whether you like it or not. Not a digital commodity galaxy brain store of value sound money whatever Most people buy it because they hope it becomes the money of the future. Something that you can use for all payments. And when it drifts away so much from this expected outcome, don’t be surprised that these people sell their bitcoin and look for something else that looks promising. The US dollar is still king, cash still rules everything around us, and Bitcoin no longer poses a threat (or even competes) with the status quo.

Someone should do a Taylor Swift “Blank Space” parody Except that it’s from the point of view of Matthew Krater and the chorus goes “I got a Blank Slate, Coretard and I’ll write your name”.

2013 was the most important year in Bitcoin history It’s when traditional finance guys came up with “Bitcoin 2.0” to lay the foundations of DeFi (Counterparty, Mastercoin, Ethereum) It’s also when cypherpunks created Zerocoin & Zerocash to improve Bitcoin’s privacy with zero knowledge proofs The sad part is that Bitcoin itself didn’t benefit too much from this due to the community’s conservatism. The happy part is that today we have Ethereum + Solana for the contracts/DeFi side and Zcash for the ZK privacy side.

What I like about altcoins is their ability to do what Bitcoin cannot and test ideas that are too experimental for Bitcoin. Privacy, contracts, scalability, anything that is useful to the entire open source money world. What I don’t like about altcoins is arrogance, zero sum thinking, stagnation & virtue signaling. You were not the first one to hit the market, you don’t have the largest community of users, your coin is not the most accepted for payments of them all, and it most likely underperforms Bitcoin for bear market saving. Act like it, build cool stuff to compete for users and market share. Push the research beyond the known boundaries. Refine the user experience. Give people something so cool they didn’t know they wanted it. But don’t stagnate and simply add more years under the belt.

You should really listen to this Time stamps in the description https://www.youtube.com/live/nWeTcQHyryw