Matt, was that a compromise that was made amongst developers that, hey, we're going to experience some level of this, let's create this small amount of arbitrary data, this operative for that specific purpose, and then that was supposed to

be it? I think that's a good way of putting it, though.

I wouldn't say it was a compromise with spammers.

It was a compromise with ethical people who wanted to...

So, for example, you might want to... hash a business document or something to prove that it existed at a certain point in time.

And then you stick it in the blockchain and everyone knows because a hash is basically a unique fingerprint of a document.

So it sort of functions as proof of existence at a certain point in time.

Why don't you give just the quick overview of what it is? And then I think more importantly, what do you think the likelihood of it activating is? And if it doesn't, what's the fallout?

So how did those play out, 2014, 2017? How is it connected to what we're seeing today?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So the debate about non-monetary data, or you could even call it Bitcoin spam, and all online systems, everything on the internet, all digital things suffer from the spam problem.

Obviously, email, voice calls, and voicemail.

And so this is a general problem in Bitcoin.

in online systems.

But what makes it a little bit different for Bitcoin is there's no one in control of Bitcoin.

You have your convertible and other debt holders, you have your preferred holders, and then you have your common equity.

And so

I decided to just build my own.

I think he first tried to build it on a different blockchain, but then he eventually created Ethereum.

which I like to call an idiot container.

And it was great because all the people who didn't really understand Bitcoin and all the devs who wanted to create lots of bills and whistles and fancy things, they all left Bitcoin and went to work on Ethereum.

Many of them became very rich as a byproduct.

But we had a period of relative peace in Bitcoin history where the... where all the shit coins and tokens and NFTs and garbage was on Ethereum and other chains, later Solana and Cardano in part.

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Where were you cutting your teeth? What's kind of your background? University to getting your first job and then creating your career?

Yeah, so I was an undergraduate at Stanford University in the late 80s, early 90s, and I studied English literature and music composition.

It was sort of a double major, English and music.

I actually started out in physics.

I did a year of physics as well, which was always my love.

but found that it was more fun in the humanities and it was a little more time to sit back and drink pints with people and drink some coffee and talk literature, et cetera.

Then when I graduated from Stanford, the job market was quite bad.

And when they shipped version 30, uh yes there's a huge amount of fanboys for that and um you know all the power to you if that's the software that you want to run that's great uh but nobody wanted to really listen to like the the reasons that people were offering up is like hey this is just a bad idea like you know like in all of the stuff that we just uh went through there uh and it they obviously shipped it with the bug which um is not a good look.

Uh, maybe just for those people who haven't heard a little bit of your background and whatnot, can you just start off there by a brief introduction, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure.

So, um, I, uh, there's sort of three, three epics to my life.

I started as kind of an academic, uh, studied music and English literature, thought about becoming a professor, and then, uh, got into, got into investing and trading in the stock market in the really early days, in the, in the mid-'90s when, uh, retail online brokerages were really beginning to take off, and, um, fell down that rabbit hole, got very interested in global macro as well.

Uh, ended up working for Peter Thiel at his hedge fund, had this career in, uh, traditional finance, and then, uh, took some time off and, um, started writing books, uh, mostly for my kids about various trading strategies and trying to sort of record some of the knowledge I had, uh, accumulated.

And then as part of that, I decided to, uh, uh, in order to promote these Kindle books, I start-- decided to start a, uh, a YouTube channel, and, um, did that for a few years, and then really began to fall down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and began to, uh, um, start buying and HODLing in, uh, third quarter, I would say, of 2019.

So I'm basically class of 2019.

Matt, what are some of, like, three to five or, or the top things where you see as red flags as potential issues for Bitcoin? I know you've been, um, pretty loud about voicing your opinion, which I appreciate, for one, and I know you get a lot of criticis- criticism for it, but I, for one, respect it.