Richard Moot: It’s kind of funky, because I think most people think of it as separate companies. And I think they were kind of operated functionally that way… But as far as I’ve understood this, it’s all Block. And each one of these other things are brands that are part of Block. But I joined before we became block, so it’s I still have this thing burned in my brain that I work for Square … Recently that’s changed a little bit, so I work on all Block products, doing developer relations now.

So yeah the relationship is each one of these divisions kind of focused on a different audience in the economy. Square is focused on businesses, and trying to run small businesses, midsize businesses… We even have some enterprises. And then cash is all about consumers; trying to give financial tools to people who are “Hey, I want to go invest in Bitcoin”, or “I want to go buy stocks”, or “I want to send money to my barber.” It really helps essentially act as a consumer banking product. And so that’s kind of where there’s a little bit of – getting both sides of the counter is kind of what we talk about.

And then we have our other brands, Tidal with streaming… And that’s kind of focused on artists, and we’re trying to figure out what ways can we enhance artists… Because they kind of operate their own business. And then we’ve got some of the more out there things, like Spiral doing Bitcoin grants, and open source Bitcoin, trying to really transform Bitcoin into the digital currency of the internet. And so yeah.

Jack Dorsey: I don’t think there’ll ever be a replacement for any of these things, but I do think there will be one that’s more dominant, and I think there’s a very strong potential that the U.S. dollar loses its global singular reserve currency status. And there may be a second one in the Chinese yuan. And there might be a third one in Bitcoin. And I think that’s a net positive. I’m obviously rooting for Bitcoin because of the properties behind it, because it’s transparent, because no company or individual controls it, because no government controls it, because it’s resilient, it’s secure, it’s never been hacked, it’s never gone down… That’s what I want out of my money. But I want the transparency, I want it to be owned by the people as well. So having a world reserve currency that is owned by the people and developed in the way that Bitcoin is developed I think is very, very powerful, and I think it would be ideal for everyone on the planet not to be controlled by the dominance of any one government’s currency. But I do think that we’re moving away from a time when there’s one, and there will probably be many, and then maybe one will become dominant.

Jack Dorsey: I don't think there'll ever be a replacement for any of these things, but I do think there will be one that's more dominant, and I think there's a very strong potential that the U.S. dollar loses its global singular reserve currency status. And there may be a second one in the Chinese yuan. And there might be a third one in Bitcoin. And I think that's a net positive. I'm obviously rooting for Bitcoin because of the properties behind it, because it's transparent, because no company or individual controls it, because no government controls it, because it's resilient, it's secure, it's never been hacked, it's never gone down… That's what I want out of my money. But I want the transparency, I want it to be owned by the people as well. So having a world reserve currency that is owned by the people and developed in the way that Bitcoin is developed I think is very, very powerful, and I think it would be ideal for everyone on the planet not to be controlled by the dominance of any one government's currency.

But I do think that we're moving away from a time when there's one, and there will probably be many, and then maybe one will become dominant.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, exactly. I just changed it to Radiohead. Okay. Well, now you are doubling me in points. Let’s see if we can get back on track. Headline six. “Exxon is mining Bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions.”

Song: [04:47]

One day I asked my teacher, What use is math to me?

She answered: When you’re older, someday my boy you’ll see…

There’s a world of computer systems out there

Full of valuable data and not secured with care

And you can make a fortune in ransomware…

With a little bit of math!

It’s called encryption,

Just a little bit of math,

Cause a conniption;

Lock the data, hide the key;

They’ll pay up eventually,

It’s all just math.

Ransomware is big now

Because it’s organized.

You can buy it as a service

And sell it for a prize.

There’s a whole world of tempting targets to hack -

Governments, hospitals, schools to attack

And they pay up in Bitcoin, hard to trace back…

It’s all just math!

We call it crypto - just a little bit of math.

No need to tiptoe,

Hackers whisper, don’t be nervous,

We take pride in customer service…

Well then I told my teacher, I’m feeling terrified;

How can we protect ourselves from all this cybercrime?

She said, “Don’t click weird links, or use “password123”.

Make offline backups, invest in security.”

And that’s when I realized how screwed we might be…

Just do the math!

So many systems.

If they all took a bath,

Wouldn’t we miss them?

Next time there’s no meat or water or gas,

And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath

You can blame IT, or some Russian sociopath,

But personally, I blame math.

Paul Orlando: [48:10] Yeah, engagement is through the roof, so we wanna boost these posts. And of course, it was doing like the opposite of what they wanted. So in this case, it was a much more modest financial reward for whoever the scammer was. I think it was only around $100,000 in Bitcoin that they ended up getting away with… But you have scams that can scale. So you can scale through a social network, like Twitter, or you have something like the Garmin ransomware situation, where I’m dependent upon this one piece of tech, and now I cannot do the thing that I need to do at this moment. Or now navigating for me is impossible, or it’s really dangerous. So yeah, I like just bringing attention to these things.

For me, when I wrote them, I think I was calling back to some of the writing I did about autonomous vehicles, in both of these examples… If you don’t mind, I’ll loop in the thought on autonomous vehicles there.

Nader Dabit: Yeah, we have a way to actually get around that by programming our own digital scarcity. All you have to have is an internet browser. You can now receive and send payments between parties.

The other thing is state. So to save information - how do we do that today? Well, we have a centralized database somewhere, like AWS, that if we don’t pay the bill, goes away forever and we lose all of our information. Maybe the data leaks, maybe it gets hacked, or maybe we just – I don’t know, there’s all types of stuff… Maybe it goes down because AWS has an outage in U.S. East 1. But there are a lot of things that are not ideal, and I think that with blockchain technology we’ve unlocked native payments and native state… And early on, with Bitcoin, it kind of jsut showed that these types of decentralized protocols were possible, but you couldn’t really write a program in Bitcoin. And I think the reason that you’re seeing it start to become a thing now is that the evolution of that technology and the improvement - you’ve had increased transactions per second, so higher throughput per second, reduced costs…

[40:07] For instance, Solana is a good example of a blockchain that has fractions of a penny for a transaction… So you have all of these things that are kind of happening, that are now starting to become mature enough for people to build on, that people are taking advantage of them… And the things that they’re unleashing are also, I would say, really interesting to people that are developers already, but they also enable people to make money. In the United States, where we can make like a couple hundred grand a year for a senior developer, we might not be that interested in this stuff… But let’s say you’re making 10k as an intermediate or senior developer somewhere else in the world, and you can partake in a protocol and increase your wage by 10x because all these projects are international and they’re completely decentralized, and they’ll hire anyone, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where you live… It’s just very, very interesting to a lot of people.

Adam Stacoviak: Right. “I’ve put all my savings in Bitcoin.” “You did what?!”

Nick Nisi: Mine’s gonna be in Bitcoin.

Brian Bondy: Exactly, yeah. And also, we couldn’t find anyone to give us several hundred million dollars in Bitcoin to give out to users for free to grow our user base. [laughter] So that was part of it as well.

Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. I’ll be honest, one of the things that I’m always excited by are problems that are not figured out, and blockchain is definitely one of them in the sense that there is this amazing technology that got created, but the actual applications and use cases have yet to be created, and there’s so much room for creativity and innovation. I’d say that’s one of the main reasons why I’m so attracted to this industry… Because I naturally have the entrepreneurial spirit, I wanna solve unsolved problems, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m gravitating to it. But at a more fundamental level, I think the technology itself is super interesting.

I think earlier you were saying how blockchain is interesting as a digital currency… I’d go a little bit further than that and say I actually don’t get excited by digital currency per se, because digital currency is just one application of the blockchain. There’s so many other applications that I think have potential that haven’t been created yet, and I’m more excited about those applications. In my opinion, it’s really hard for the current currency system in any nation – for example, take the U.S. For cryptocurrency or digital currency to replace fiat currency, that would take a lot. The government has a really tight control over the monetary policy and I just don’t see what benefits digital currencies provide today that would make people switch over, that would make the government friendly to this, and so forth… Because in the end, what digital currency is - it’s completely decentralized, completely open, completely censorship-resistant, which is not something any government really wants.

So for me, I’m more excited by what else blockchain enables. At a fundamental level, blockchain is a decentralized technology where it’s maintaining a ledger of transactions or basically state changes, and the state changes are cryptographically secure because they are maintained by something called the consensus process. This consensus process in Bitcoin or Ethereum is called proof of work, where a bunch of miners are there and they run a bunch of complex computations to validate these transactions, and they get paid for validating this blockchain. So the entire chain is decentralized, it’s trustless, because there’s no need to trust any central party to maintain this database or this ledger, and then it’s completely censorship-resistant because you can’t have really any central authority trying to censor it… And it’s completely secure, because it’s cryptographically secure. So with those primitives you can do just so much on top, and that’s kind of what I’m excited by.

Chris Beams: [01:41:54.10] That’s right. And you actually are kind of touching here on the power of basically programmable money. We can encode into the logic of BSQ itself certain semantics. For example - this isn’t the way that it’s designed right now, but it easily could be and it may turn to this as we actually roll this stuff out… It could be that the only people who have the right to vote are people who have newly-minted BSQ. When you issue a compensation request and it gets accepted, that’s the issuance of new BSQ, actually new BSQ coming to existence when you get a compensation request accepted, like voted in the affirmative.

That’s because, by the way, remember, BSQ is ultimately backed by Bitcoin; it’s this colored coin riding on top of Bitcoin. Well, what that means is that when you issue a compensation request saying “Hey, I want 10,000 BSQ for this work”, that means that you must actually spend the equivalent in Bitcoin of 10,000 BSQ. You have to actually issue a Bitcoin transaction for 1,000 Satoshis times 10,000 BSQ. It actually costs money for people to issue compensation requests.

The reason that we do that is 1) anti-spam, so that we don’t just have people throwing compensation requests at us because it’s free. People actually have to pay for it, which means they’re gonna wanna have a reasonable degree of certainty that this is gonna be accepted, which means that they have all the correct social incentives to be out there, talking to other people in the network and saying “Hey, do you think this is good work? What should I ask for it?” etc, because they don’t wanna waste that compensation request transaction fee.

Well, when they do that and their compensation request gets accepted, that Bitcoin that they spent on the compensation request becomes BSQ, gets colored as BSQ, by the logic in the BSQ validation processing software that we’ve built. So when I say newly issued, newly minted BSQ, what I actually mean there is somebody who just earned it. And because it’s a blockchain, we can see the movement of every coin, for all of time. We can know that the BSQ that that contributor earned has not moved anywhere; it hasn’t been transferred to anybody else, say. So we can know that’s the BSQ of somebody who just earned it. Maybe only those people should be able to vote. That’s just an example of what you can do.

There are constraints, right? Not anything is possible, but there’s a remarkable degree of creativity that’s happening, and it begins to become evident just how limiting our current monetary world is. You don’t have programmable money. Look at what we’ve done with being able to program the rest of the world. Here it comes, here comes programmable money.

Mikeal Rogers: There actually is a company right now doing mortgages in Bitcoin, but if you buy that house, it’s – say you put $5 into Bitcoin really early on, and that’s worth half a million dollars. So you buy a half a million dollar house with Bitcoin, with that mortgage, you’re good until you sell that house. Then when you sell that house, you owe capital gains from the $5 that you initially put into the currency.

Mikeal Rogers: I think even just beyond privacy, these ad networks have actually also become vectors for people to do different phishing attacks, and things like that… And not just phishing, but also getting you to download something and then taking over your entire computer and having that kind of extortionware model where you have to pay them Bitcoin in order to get your computer back. A lot of that stuff is actually delivered over these ad networks.

Most people, when they put an ad on their site, they don’t do the content deals to get that ad placed; they rely on some kind of ad network to do that placement, and those ad networks are being constantly scammed by incredibly sophisticated attacks to get these ads in. So literally, these are not verifiable; it’s not possible to get them out without just saying “No, we’re not gonna have ads anymore.” Just like it’s not possible to protect privacy without saying “You know what, we’re just not going to allow certain features in the browser that allow this kind of tracking as well.”
Brave has been incredibly aggressive about ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, and as a result a couple sites won’t work, because they’re reliant on those features. But if you look at some of the announcements that came out from Safari, and I know that even some of the Chrome people are looking at it - some of these features that we have on the web that certain sites depend on may actually get turned off because of these concerns.

Anna Derbakova: Yeah, that’s the basic concept; that’s still there, because in Bitcoin you’re exchanging essentially value, right? You would be exchanging value of Bitcoin, but in Ethereum you could be exchanging some kind of coin, but you could also be exchanging an asset, because they have the idea of a smart contract. But the idea is it’s a different type of blockchain, it’s a different implementation, and Hyperledger also is slightly different. But who owns it? That’s a good question. I mean, there’s not gonna be one blockchain to rule them all. They are gonna be different, and I think that’s a very good forward-looking question, because then people will wonder, “If we have this blockchain here for this group of banks, and this blockchain here for supply chain, if they ever need to interoperate, or something of as far as transferring records from one to the other, what are we gonna do?”

So I think that’s a question that’s definitely gonna need to be explored fairly soon. If you have two different blockchains with different consensus algorithms, how do you deal with that? These questions… I’m not sure if IBM, for example, is researching anything into that - at least I’m not directly involved in it - but if it doesn’t come up soon, it will in the very near future.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Yeah, they had malware twice, getting into their installer files on their websites. I’m not really sure how that happened, they didn’t really give a full explanation of how they got hacked, but it was pretty sad. If you installed transmission from their website during a certain period of time, you would get this BitCoin ransomware on your computer that would encrypt all your files and then try to get you to pay a BitCoin in order to get your files back.

Autumn Nash: Dude, and people were going in on Bitcoin, which - you know, justifiable. But then we came up with something worse, and they were like “It’s going to be great.” And it still doesn’t do anything for us. The mom in me – like, during COVID, I wanted to sit all the adults down and make them listen to Daniel Tiger and Elmo, so they could be nice to each other. I just want to be like “Did y’all watch WALL-E? Did you? Did you?” We need to watch – what’s that one movie, The Lorax? Y’all, I want to be able to exist, and my kids to have somewhere to just – like, what are we doing? We’re not even getting a good product. You know what I mean?

Shawn Wang: Well, first of all, I’m not the most informed person on security. Probably Feross would be a better person to talk to about this… I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. I’m just kind of neutral on it. I don’t think it’s like a focus of anyone, apart from Feross, who is the founder at socket.dev. [laughter] And his approach is “Let’s just audit everything and give you ten different reports telling you that–” And we have some of these automated audits as well. It’s not clear exactly how venture funding was gonna affect this either way. Obviously, you can have people who are paid better to maintain these repos, but supply chain attacks happen in perfectly well-funded companies as well. It’s not just like someone’s acting out in open source… Which has happened repeatedly, and just puts a Bitcoin miner in a repo, or something like that.

I think it really has to be fixed at the runtime level, or the toolchain level. Deno has an attempt at doing this by locking down the permissions. People are realizing, unfortunately, that it’s just not that useful. You’re just gonna enable all the flags anyway. So it has to be per-module, and as far as I know, nobody’s tackling that, except for a company that I’m hopefully invested in, that might be trying to solve that issue. But it’s kind of an open question right now. I’m not aware of anyone else really tackling sort of per-package permissioning and just reinventing the npm ecosystem. For better or worse, the npm ecosystem is what we have, and therefore the security defaults that they choose - which is none [laughs] - we inherit those decisions.

Mat Ryer: [15:48] There you go. Exactly right. So I wanted to just see the Bitcoin price in my menu bar. And there wasn’t really a way to do it. There was no app to do it, so I started to build the little project just for myself. That’s why it’s called Bitbar, because it comes from Bitcoin.

Johan Vos: No, but there might be signs… For example, with the same quantum computer you could also trick the whole Bitcoin system and do the mining… So you would see that in the Bitcoin price, for example. Now, not to worry people, but even if we think that breaking encryption is ten years away, that is still something to worry about today.

Jerod Santo: So because of that, the languages, the Solidity and these other ways that you go about writing programs on Ethereum or for Ethereum are more like higher level languages, scripting languages, as opposed to perhaps lower-level C or Assembly - I don’t know what you write Bitcoin applications in. Is that a good way of thinking about it? We have the scripting level of Ethereum, whereas Bitcoin is kind of like a lower level language…?

Bruce Schneier: [16:11] But there are organizations that do this, ransomware as a service. You can rent ransomware capability. There are criminal organizations that specialize in getting in, there are ones specialized in getting money, there are ones that specialize in turning the Bitcoin into actual cash you can spend. There’s a whole supply chain, international criminal supply chain. That’s incredibly sophisticated. That all is in the service of ransomware.

Jerod Santo: So, since Bitcoin is back in its bull run… It’s just been a few years in a bear market and then came roaring back from something like $4,000 a year ago, to 60k per coin, and around there today… People are interested once again in this crazy world of cryptocurrencies, and so we thought it’d be fun to explain Bitcoin like you’re five, because it is a difficult thing to explain, difficult to talk about, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous…

[19:57] The first way I would like to explain this is by stealing a tweet from Theophite on Twitter, which I thought that was a hilarious way to explain Bitcoin… Somebody tweeted out “I still don’t get Bitcoin”, and Theophite replied “Imagine if keeping your [unintelligible 00:20:13.18] for 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade in for heroin.” [laughter] That’s pretty classic, right?

So of course, there’s your bear explanation, and there are lots of downsides with Bitcoin specifically around energy use and whatnot… But there is also some real value to the network. And I’m not gonna explain how Bitcoin works like we’re five, but I thought maybe I’d try to explain why some people think it’s valuable like you’re five… So here we go.

Imagine that you’re playing Monopoly with some friends… And one person decides - maybe they’re the homeowner. Usually house rules… They decide that they’re gonna be both the banker and the rule enforcer. Pretty typical. Everything starts off okay, but then the banker starts doing some things that you don’t appreciate as someone who plays the game. For example, they start injecting new money into the game, but not equally to everyone. Just to themselves and some of their friends.

They change the rules about how much money you get for passing Go, what you can go to jail for and for how long, they create over-the-top transfer fees and laws about who can trade with whom, etc.

Eventually, you and a few other people in the game decide that you want to transact without the banker’s rules, permissions, fees and so on. But you can’t use the Monopoly bucks, because the banker runs that whole system of things. So instead, you start a grouptext on your phones. And each time you wanna transfer money to and from each other, you put that in a text. Maybe you text “I’ll send five Schrute Bucks to Kball.” And then you text that out.

Everyone involved in this new way of sending money is in the grouptext, so that’s how you keep each other honest. Bitcoin is the grouptext. The end. What do you think?

Tim Coulter: Yeah, sure. The short version of it is when the Bitcoin boom hit in 2013 when it went from $5,000 to $1,000, I got into cryptocurrency after that, and got really excited about what it is and what it could do. In early 2014 I started mining, I mined on a bunch of different altcoins at the time now worth nothing… It was a fun experience for me, and I did it mostly on the side. I was working for startups and have worked for startups my whole career coming out of college, and the startup I was working at I eventually got laid off, and by that time I had been doing other work in cryptocurrency, I had built an application on my own time to track all of the price data for a bunch of different trading pairs; basically, every trading pair on ever exchange available at the time. I was trying to aggregate all those and eventually sell that data…

In any case, that whole thing got me in interested in the blockchain world itself, so when I got laid off from this company, I told myself “You know what, I’m gonna go work in blockchain.” So I searched around, I eventually found a post on angel.co, and that led me to consensus. That was around April of 2015. The post was actually for a web designer job. Excuse me, not web design, a graphic designer job… And I can’t actually do graphic design, but I sent them a message anyway and said “Hey look, I could try this. I’m really excited to work in the blockchain world, I’d love to work with you”, and they responded the next day.

[04:13] The rest from there is kind of history, but as far as Truffle is concerned, my past history in software development is actually in the software testing world. In college – I have a software engineering degree, but I worked a lot with a professor in software testing, and that was big in the software testing community… So when I came out of college, I used that network to find jobs in the software testing world.

What that means is that for most of my career, effectively 8 years leading up to coming into the Ethereum world, I was doing developer support. This is everything from performing manual testing, to writing software testing frameworks around new technologies. When I came to Ethereum, it was very clear that there were no tools at all; you had a compiler and a JavaScript library for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, and that was about it. From there, it seemed very easy to fall back into this developer support role, and I ended up building tools through the Ethereum ecosystem.

Samuel Goff: So a couple of things. First of all, when it comes to blockchain, specifically Bitcoin and others that are based on proof of work, not proof of stake, I have a real issue with… Because the energy intensity of the computation is so high that you could power multiple countries now. Right? And so what’s happening is a lot of dirty energy sources such as natural gas, coal, oil, things that, where increasingly, it is economically unsustainable, because grid-powered solar and wind have completely leapfrogged them in terms of cost efficiency. If you’re building brand new energy sources right now, by far, you can build anywhere from six to nine times more grid-scale, solar or wind, compared to nuclear, which is the second cheapest, or third cheapest, I should say… But everything else is more expensive by comparison. But the problem is, you go to an oilfield where they have these toxic gases, and they set fire to those toxic gases as a way of making it safe. Well, that’s wasted energy.

So what’s happening here in Texas is a bunch of Bitcoin miners set up in the oil fields, and they’ve harvested that heat energy, what would normally be just waste heat. And that becomes an additional revenue stream for those oil extractors, those oil companies. And so it basically takes what was a dying revenue model, a dying, industry, and it breathes new life into it, and it slows down our adoption of renewables. And it takes – basically, it vastly increases our risk of transforming our environment to a place where it’s going to kill people to go outside, whether it’s due to the extreme heat and humidity, or the extreme cold, because the natural conveyor belt that used to exist has kind of collapsed, or it’s sometimes collapsing.