Gigi - 00:00:00:
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, everyone still has one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, both of us have two ideas. This is how information works. That's one of the properties of information. That's why information is so beautiful. The cost of reproduction, the marginal cost, is zero. You are streaming money to Netflix, to Spotify, to Amazon Prime and all the rest of it, like millions of people do. And the thing is that the companies behind the names I just mentioned, they decide where the value flows, and I think we can do better than that. I hope that no platforms will emerge anymore. I hope that we can stick with protocols. I get streaming sets every minute and also for my written content. Everything is value for value. If you take the online advertisement industry in general, that's a very large market, and I think that value for value, for example, can take a big fight out of this market.
Kevin Rooke - 00:01:00:
Gigi is a synonymous Bitcoin developer and author and is full of compelling ideas about Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. In our discussion, Gigi explained how today's adfunded Internet business models are broken, the ways in which value for value can offer a solution, and his views on paywalls, micro payments, and freedom in the Information age. I've also added GG to today's show splits, along with one listener who sent in a great question. So if you want to support the show, the best way you can do that is by sending in sats over the Lightning Network that reflect the value you got out of this episode. If you want to earn some stats, the best way you can do that is go follow me on Twitter and keep an eye out for my future guest announcements on this podcast. Every time I'm about to film with a guest, I share an update on Twitter the day before, letting you guys, all the listeners, send in questions over the Lightning Network using fountain and anyone sending in a question, I will have that question ready for the guest the following day. And the best one, as picked by the guest, will get a share of the show splits for that episode. Quick shout out before we get into today's episode. Today's show is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard and next generation provider for Lightning Network infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Zebedee, and Zebedee is your portal into the world of bitcoin gaming. We'll have more from Voltage and Zebedee later in the show. Gigi, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today, and I can't wait for a discussion about monetization on the Internet, the problems with it today, and value for value. But before we get into that, maybe we can start with a little background get into that, maybe we can start with a little background on your background in bitcoin. The moment you understood that this was going to be an important technology and then we can go from there.
Gigi - 00:03:04:
All right? So as I mentioned, I have a bit of a week. That the connection you just dropped for like 5 seconds. I think the question was to give a like 5 seconds. I think the question was to give a little bit of my background and who I am and where I'm coming from. I like to think of myself as a bitcoin first and foremost because I think bitcoin is a terribly important thing and I think the world would be a better place if more people understood bitcoin and the importance of money. My background, though, is in computer science and software engineering. So I studied computer science. I also studied a little bit of physics. This is also why some of my writings touch on physics a little bit, because I believe that a lot of people don't grasp how fundamental of the problems are that bitcoin is actually solving from systems and physics perspective. And after a couple of years in academia, I left for the software world. And yeah, I was a full stack developer and I switched to mobile development and I built a couple of apps and those kind of things. I told this story a bunch of times. I think I was the slowest learner when it comes to bitcoin because I heard about bitcoin very early, but I also dismissed it very early and I was insanely dismissive when it comes to bitcoin. So I thought it was stupid. Yeah, it couldn't work, I thought it would be hacked and so on. And so it took me many touch points to actually have a second look. I don't really know what it was, but it finally clicked that this thing is actually insanely important and it also won't go away. And so I kind of burned down my old life and my old career and went into bitcoin full time. So that's the gist of it, I into bitcoin full time. So that's the gist of it, I guess.
Kevin Rooke - 00:05:10:
That's interesting. Do you remember the first moment? Bitcoin as an asset and bitcoin as a network. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people. There's this one kind of like interesting use case that's emerging now with the Lightning Network and with some of the payments on the internet. Do you remember the moment you first discovered that as a use case? And the importance outside of the store to value and some of the inflation hedge use cases, this internet payments use case, do you remember hedge use cases, this internet payments use case, do you remember when you first recognized that as important?
Gigi - 00:05:48:
Yeah, I do, actually. That was very early. That was kind of the first thing that I thought was cool about it, that finally the internet has money and we can do payments and so on. A lot of bitcoin has noticed that we always had these arrow codes in Http with payment required and those kind of things, and we were never able to implement it because there was just no internet money that ever worked. So we only had payment systems that were, of course, companies and centralized and still are. So my first kind of context with Bitcoin, I think was in part with Paywalls and those kinds of things that you can just have something online somewhere and you pay back. Then it was Bitcoins. So I don't know, like two bitcoins to download this file or whatever. And I kind of got into contact with the payment side of things. I think in the beginning that Kind was payments period. No I think in the beginning that Kind was payments period. No one realized, most people did not realize that the money was so broken and the field system was so the money was so broken and the field system was so broken. And the sound money use case came later on, I think. Of course, Satoshi knew, it's apparent in his writings that he wanted to replace the broken fiat system and he wanted to build a system that is resistant to inflation, like a sound money system. We would say now. And I think now with Lightning, the payment use case, so to speak, is reemerging. And finally we can do micropayments. We actually can, we actually And finally we can do micropayments. We actually can, we actually can do micro payments at scale. And I think that's very exciting because of payments at scale. And I think that's very exciting because of course it enables things like streaming money. And we see this now with Podcasting 2.0 and Paywalls again to my chagrin making a comeback. And I think now with micro payments that actually work in scale and can be used by absolutely anyone because they don't require an identity, doesn't require any sign ups or those kind of things, I think there are great things ahead for what can be done online that was previously not possible.
Kevin Rooke - 00:08:03:
Now I want to maybe start this discussion about internet payments from the perspective of the current business models on the internet. What is broken about the monetization methods used in the internet today? Why do we need PeerToPeer payments on Lightning? Why can't we just use the existing business models that are common on the internet today?
Gigi - 00:08:33:
Well, I think everyone kind of knows now that the Internet is not perfect and a lot of things, how the online world works are kind of broken. Most people are aware nowadays that the main model that is used online, which is that the service is free and you're basically the product, it's not a very ethical way of running a business because Google is not only specializing on how to improve their search results, they are also specializing in how to gather as much data from their users as they can. So every single business is into multiple businesses at once, and everyone is just spied upon and user data is collected as much as possible and sold to the highest bidder. And I think that's in part why the internet is so broken and everyone does it. I mean, the big five bank companies, it doesn't matter if it's Facebook or Amazon or Google or Bing or Netflix, it doesn't matter. Everyone is kind of in the business of gathering user data and selling it to the highest bidder. And I think the reason is very simple that you were not able to do payments properly. Micro payments never worked and micropays have their own kind of problems but the way that companies were able to truly monetize was to give it away for free and either kind of make the users addicted to the service or platform or software and charge them later on. So just like the crack dealer in the parts give the first couple of the crack dealer in the parts give the first couple of hits away for free and then you actually have to sign up or like with just having it for free always and monetizing your advertisements. And of course the whole industry figured out that the way to actually maximize advertisement gains is by targeted advertisements. If you're actually able to know the user better than the user knows himself, then you can actually show ads where people will actually click on it and buy stuff and buy a lot of stuff. This turns out works really well. And the downside is of course that you have to spy on all the users all the time and you have to build up those user profiles. So just the old school way of going to a corner shop with cash in hand and handing over the cash and the clerk doesn't even have to know your name or something like that is kind of gone online. Like every service knows absolutely everything about you basically. And I hope that we can move away from this world because I think it's a very dangerous world as well, which I think we see some societal issues playing out right now and they have been like that's the case for the last couple of years. These things are problematic and I think most people are waking up currently that these things are problematic.
Kevin Rooke - 00:11:45:
One company in specific that has been in the spotlight for all these issues is Facebook. So maybe we could use that as an example. If it were possible to kind of like fork Facebook and have the same network effect, have the same user base all this and have this mirrored version where it's built on let's say Lightning payments or like seamless microtransactions and there is no need to collect user data to serve ads. Do you think that version with micro payments would be more profitable for Facebook, the company?
Gigi - 00:12:28:
That's a good question. I have no way of answering this.
Kevin Rooke - 00:12:33:
It does flip the equation a bit, right? Because it all of a sudden says users have to pay to access a service now. So I wonder does that change the like from Facebook's perspective, they want as many people on as possible, have that addressable market be as large as possible. Does it change the way you onboard new users? Because I think that what I'm trying to understand is if we have this new monetization method for the internet, but it cannot be a business model that's as profitable as the kind of like ad business model they have today, does it actually have the impact that we hope it will?
Gigi - 00:13:21:
You know what I do. The reason why it took me so long to think about an answer is if the underlying model switches, I think the world will look very, very differently. And so I don't think that a company as big as Facebook would exist. So, for example, compare the current world of ecommerce and commerce in general with how things were before Amazon existed and before the Internet existed and before Amazon was able to make every single shop obsolete, basically. And I think that the value for value model obsolete, basically. And I think that the value for value model in particular, micro payments, okay, let's get into it. There is no way of dancing around those issues anyway. So micro payments do not work. Paywalls do not work. I wrote a very long article about this, and I think the reason why micro payments do not work is because the mental transaction cost is too high. If you have to think about, do I want to pay two cent for reading this blog post? This will never work. It just doesn't. And that's why I also mentioned in the beginning, to my chagrin, paywalls are making a comeback. I think paywalls are insanely stupid. It's a broken model to begin with. And that's why we see absolutely everyone. Like no one is using transaction based payments. Like everyone is using subscription payments because then you don't have to think about it. You sign up for Spotify or for Netflix or for Amazon Prime or whatever. You pay it once and you know, kind of the cost and you're fine with it and you click it and then you never have to think about it again. And we also know from the charity world, for example, that's how you maximize giving. That's how people actually give to charities. They are in a very good mood, they are in a generous mood. And then they think about it and they want to do this, and they kind of take care about their future decisions and they set it up once and then you give like $50 a month to the charity of your choice or whatever. And so we kind of know this. It's a psychological problem. It's not a technical problem necessarily. It used to be a technical problem. So who knows how the internet would have developed if we would have had micro payments from the get go? But we hadn't. And that's how the advertisement model and the data collection model came creeping in. I think in the app development software development world, a lot of people know that this is unethical and not the right way people know that this is unethical and not the right way to do things. So there is a movement against this and it's basically just, okay, pay for the software outright. Not everything can be free. It's not a good situation to be in because if this thing is free, we have to spy on you. And so there are people that are creating awesome software, but they are very outspoken about this. Like you will have to pay for it, period. There is no other way that we can do this. And to answer your question, if Facebook could make more or as much money as they do now, there is no way to answer it because if this transition happens, Facebook will not exist. Facebook would be a good comparison, might be like the postal service. If something like the internet comes along, will the postal service make as much money as it did before? The answer is obviously like the postal service is irrelevant, it doesn't exist anymore. You have a neutral protocol that connects people and everyone can use it basically free of charge, more or less. I mean you have to pay your ISP and so on. But that's the transition. I see. I hope that no platforms will emerge anymore. I hope that we can stick with protocols. And email is a great example, and just websites are a great example, where you have direct publishing, you have direct communication, and you don't have a middleman that takes a cut and takes a profit. And that's the revolution that I see. And it is enabled by micro payments. But it won't be paywalls. Paywalls do not work. Period. They absolutely do not work. As I said, information wants to be free if someone is able to break the paywall. And one way to break the pay wall is by simply paying it. way to break the pay wall is by simply paying it. So you pay twenty cents, two dollars, whatever, then you have the blog post and you take a screenshot and then you share it wherever, and then the information is free. I think just looking at the market, I know you wanted to use Facebook as an example, but I don't have the numbers from the top of my head. Facebook makes money by spying on their users and they head. Facebook makes money by spying on their users and they make a lot of money. But just if you take the online advertisement industry in general, that's a very large market. And I think that value for value for example, can take a big bite out of this market. I don't think that advertisement will go away completely and so on, but I think it is just a different way of doing things. And Adam Curry talks about this all the time. The value for value model. It's not like a flip that you switch and then everything works automatically. It's a very different relationship to the content opens up and also to the producers of the content and the consumers of the content are like it's a way tighter relationship. And there is this feedback loop of providing value and giving value back. And what I think is also beautiful, by cutting out the middle man, by encouraging people to do by cutting out the middle man, by encouraging people to do it in a self sovereign way, in a way that you cannot be deployed, you cannot be censored, your accounts cannot be frozen, your transactions cannot be frozen. I think we will have a more diverse, more lively, more broad ecosystem where you can monetize with a very small audience. And this is currently not true. Currently it's a numbers game with advertisements and all the rest of it. You need to be quite and all the rest of it. You need to be quite big to make a living on I don't know what YouTube or Spotify or what have you. You really need to rake in the numbers. And I hope with a more direct way of giving, this can change. And we know that this works. And that's also the example I gave in the article that I wrote about the freedom of value and how I look at the whole value for value movement and streaming money and Podcasting 20 and those kinds of things is with busking. So we know in every city, in every town, there are street musicians and they perform and they perform for free. But there is this implicit kind of expectation that people will give, a certain percentage of people will give. It doesn't have to be much, it just has to be enough to keep the music going, so to speak. And that's the way I look at it. With Podcasting 20 and those kind of value for value ideas as well, the content is free. But if you like the show, if you like the person, if you like the content, you kind of know that you have to give back from time to time, or certain people have to give back from time, from time to time, otherwise the music will stop. And we kind of know that this works. Like, Wikipedia works on that principle. And I mean, Wikipedia figured out that the way to do this is slap very big banners in the faces of everyone. And I think we will figure out how to properly do this over time. So that's my perspective in general.
Kevin Rooke - 00:20:45:
There's so much here I want to dig into, but I want to start back with the difference. No, that was great. It was really insightful. I want to start with the different ways in which you can make payments. So you mentioned microtransactions don't work, paywalls don't work, value for value is probably the correct solution. In your view, why do those first two not work on the Internet? Can you dig into that a bit more?
Gigi - 00:21:13:
Well, I think microtransactions do work, but thinking about microtransactions doesn't work. Like, microtransactions obviously work, but the way that you have to do it is that your podcast app, for example, takes care of it. So you decide once, okay, how many sets am I willing to spend per minute? Or like, this is my allowance for one week or whatever. Let's say my allowance for one week is 20,000 sets or whatever. And then your podcast app figures out, okay, like, there's so much money in the spending wallet and it sets itself automatically up so that a certain amount gets streamed. And when you hit the boost button, then a certain amount gets boosted and so on. The reason why having to think about micropayments doesn't work is because of the mental transaction costs that are incurring. Like, if you have to think about, do I want to spend two cent or 15 sets or whatever, or two sets to read this blog post? The answer will always be no. Like, it will always be no. We know this very well. There's a lot of psychological research on this topic. Mixtable wrote about this at length. There are many people that looked into this in quite some detail, and they figured out that if you have to think about it, then pretty much everyone will just be like, no, it's like a pop up in your face. It's like, no, I don't want this. And you click it away and that's it. You have to automate it. That's what I term the MPX problem. So it's MPX stands for mental transaction costs. So that's the micro payment spot. And the thing with the pay walls, the pay walls are terrible because they box information in. So you build an artificial cage around information. And like we said before, information wants to be free. Like, that's stupid. You want to capture as large of an audience as you can. So putting a paywall around stuff is already the wrong approach. And second of all, because information can be copied with perfect fidelity, always. Like, if you can read it, you can take a screenshot of it, you can copy paste it if it comes out of your earbuds or out of your loudspeakers. You can plug in a different device and record it with perfect fidelity. Same is true for movies, for everything. Like, every digital information that gets decrypted at the end, so to speak, you can just store, save, rip, whatever without the encryption. So DRM can and will never work. That's kind of the DRM paradox is what I call it, the article. So it's the paradox of paywalls. If you box information in, if you build a pay wall around an article, if the article is really good, people will read it for free. Because then someone will share a screenshot of the article on social media or copy paste it into paste bin and just share this around or whatever. So only the very shitty content stays behind paywalls. That's why paywalls are insanely stupid. Like, you limit yourself, first and foremost. And second of all, again, information wants to be free. Information can be copied, and so it will be copied. And that's why every single song that's actually worth listening to, you can listen for free. It doesn't matter where if it's SoundCloud or YouTube or you targeted or whatever, it's like a tautology like, this will always be true. This is how information works. That's one of the properties of information. That's why information is so beautiful. The cost of reproduction, the marginal cost is zero. Like, it's near zero marginal cost. A second thing that is really important to understand, especially when it comes to value for value. It's again, in regards to boxing in, you don't want to box in your information because information wants to be free and it's beneficial if it can circulate freely and you want to have the largest audience that you can usually. And the second boxing in is like with the price historically, because to sell things in the real world, this always takes time and effort and so on. Like to reproduce something, you always have marginal costs. And so the way we priced something was on a per item basis or per hour, like how much work is it to produce this? And then you're charged by your charging. And with information, selling information, especially once the information is there because it can be copied freely, it doesn't work. Do you want to charge for every download of the blog post or every time someone views it or refreshes the browser? That's nonsensical. Do you want to charge people by the number of words or how long it took them to come up with the blog post? That's also nonsensical. So what value for value does is it removes the value ceiling. It's like how valuable was this for you? Maybe you want to stream like one full bitcoin per minute by listening to a podcast episode. I don't know. I don't know how rich you are and maybe it was really bad and you don't like the host and then you set it to zero so you can do that too. And I think these things are the most important concept to grasp that to sell digital information out, right, you have to think about things very differently because an information, an idea is not an apple. I always like this. It really drives home the point. It's the charge burner charge. If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, everyone still has one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, both of us have two ideas. And that's how digital information, information itself, ideas are very, very different from physical things. And that's why you also have to think about monetizing this stuff very differently.
Kevin Rooke - 00:26:58:
Yeah, I thought that was a great example in your blog post, the apple and idea comparison. And that makes sense, that makes total sense on the friction in the cost of making microtransactions the boxing paywalls and value for value, how it opens up some of these opportunities to charge whatever you want or let anyone pay whatever they want. Now, I am going to play devil's advocate, though, because one criticism that I've heard about value for value and I don't know that I've experienced it myself yet, I haven't heard people directly say that this is not the correct approach for them. But I've heard other people complain about value for value in this way and they say there's a mental cost to determine how much value you got out of an episode, right? Like how am I, the listener, supposed to guess how valuable this conversation was? Was it one dollars or $8 or $4 or $25? It also incurs a mental overhead, like the mental overhead from the microtransactions. Do you think this may be something that we use technology to solve and we kind of automate in the same way? Because it seems like that was the way to get around the microtransaction issue is you just have it automated and you can kind of like eliminate that mental overhead. Do you think that's also true for the value for value side of things?
Gigi - 00:28:28:
Yeah, I think so. I mean there are some efforts underway to kind of abstract this out more generally. So LB comes to mind, which is the browser extension, which kind of tries to embed the value for value idea into absolutely everything basically. And the way that the stuff that they are currently working on is you set yourself an allowance basically no matter what content you consume, whether it's a YouTube video or like blog posts and so on. If there is a Lightning address present, then you will just tip to this Lightning address and you assume that the description of the YouTube video contains the Lightning address of the creator, for example, or what have you. And so I think that's an interesting idea. And then you can set an allowance per day, per week, per month, whatever. And that's just basically your donation to the content that you consume. What I like about it is it's very, very direct and there is like no one takes a cut. Like the problem with Patreon, which is simple ideas. Like you build up a group of people that support you and it's very direct in terms of how the support structure works. So there is no central committee who decides which creators get the money and so on. So you choose yourself directly which creators you want to support. But the problem with patron is the problem of platforms. They take a large cut first and foremost because that's how they make their money. And second of all, they have the power to censor. And if you have the power to censor, you will use it or you will be forced to use it. Because if this possibility exists then on a long enough timeline, some government will come knocking and go like okay, you have to kick this person from your platform because they are dangerous or they have dangerous ideas or whatever, like they are the enemy of the state. I think again, the solution to all of this is protocols and not patrons. That's why I'm so insanely bullish on the specification of the podcast index, like the value specification of podcasting, 2.0, of bitcoin and Lightning in general. All of these things are protocols and we know that this works and it's kind of. Sad that we moved away from a lot of the protocols that were really big in the past. So we had protocols for chat applications. For example, XMPP comes to mind and all the chat operations back in the day were more or less interruptable. So you could have a client that speaks to all the other clients of the different software implementations of the chat systems. And we had it also for RSS feeds before we had the Facebook news feed and the Twitter feed and so on. We had just feed readers and every single blog and every single new site had an RSS feed that you could plug into your reader and that's how you would non algorithmically. So without the evil algorithm that selects and sorts for you, that's how you would gather all the information, I think. And we can do the same, and we need to do the same with the value flows. Currently we are already living in this world on a platform basis because you are streaming money to Netflix, to Spotify, to Amazon Prime and all the rest of it like millions of people do. And the thing is that the companies behind the names I just mentioned, they decide where the value flows and I think we can do better than that. And we can build protocols. In fact, we are building protocols that this already exists and this already works where you can very selectively tell where the money is flowing. And I think a more direct relationship and cutting out middleman is always beneficial.
Kevin Rooke - 00:32:32:
Yeah, it seems like specifically on podcasting, there's so many different protocols at play here, whether it's Lightning or even RSS feeds, all are kind of contributing to this open standard and everyone can participate and everyone can see then where the money is flowing, which is really cool in a world though, where protocols, we have Internet protocols and not Internet platforms. Is there a role for like what happens to the platforms of today? What happens to the Netflix and the Amazons and the Googles and the Facebook's? Do they carve out a niche? Can the two coexist platforms and protocols or is this complete disruption of a business model?
Gigi - 00:33:18:
It depends on how smart they are, I think. Because the difference between platforms and protocols are platforms can go bankrupt. And on a long enough time scale, every platform will go bankrupt and protocols can't protocols will always be around by default. The thing that never dies wins. And that's also why Linux is winning in the very long run. Just look at what kind of operating systems are running the internet. Basically, it's not Microsoft. Well, that's something to keep in mind because companies come and go and platforms are run by companies and platforms also come and go. When I discovered Bitcoin, the first kind of penny drop moment for me was, okay, that's BitTorrent for money and BitTorrent does not go away. And you know, bitcoin is still around and used widely and even though Netflix exists and so on. So I think not only will they coexistence. If the platforms and companies are smart. They will build on top of bitcoin and on top of Lightning and utilize this themselves because it's cheaper. It's better. It's more efficient. Very much like a lot of. I mean. At least back in the day now with AWS and so on. But back in the day. A lot of companies use torrents to distribute their install things because they were large files and it was just way cheaper and more efficient to do so. You just created a torrent or I know a lot of game installers, they still use torrents in the background to distribute the very, very large files between people. And you have a very small file that you launch the game with and the game will, in the background, you know, connect to the torrent network and download all the files from other peers to get the big chunks of data. And it's, again, a very long rant. But I think the only way to stay competitive is to use the open protocols. Because, for example, YouTube, you can already see they are integrating exactly the value of a value model, but not on Lightning yet. So you can tip creators, you can leave comments with money attached to it, and then there will be a little hard with a dollar symbol in it and it says, that was an awesome video and someone paid $25 to support the creator. And YouTube is currently in both worlds and of course on fiat rails, but there's no doubt in my mind that settling on bitcoin and using Lightning will be cheaper than the Fiat Rails and also it will be interoperable. And as you mentioned, it's an open protocol. These are open systems, so everyone can work on it and improve it. There will be things that are just there will be only available on Lightning, they will only work on Lightning, it will only work on bitcoin because someone comes up with an ingenious idea and then it will only work in the open protocol world on a long enough time scale. The open stuff wins. That's why AOL lost and that's why we have the Internet. And that's also why it's stupid too. If you want to do something new, if you want to build a cool feature for the Internet inventing a second, internet is terribly, terribly stupid. It's not how these things work. And that's why I believe that it's kind of a winner takes all scenario in terms of, well, open money, which is bitcoin, and open payment networks, which is Lightning.
Kevin Rooke - 00:36:38:
I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard for Lightning Network infrastructure, creating layer two applications and services on top of bitcoin starts with Voltage, where you can spin up nodes, get access to liquidity optimize your node and much more. Voltage is leading the way as the next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. And if you want to get a free trial and start using voltage today, you can do so at Voltage Cloud. That was a really interesting point you made about YouTube starting to step into the value for value world. I've noticed that as well. Like there's memberships now. You can join someone, you can be a member of someone's group, you can send them direct one time payments. And I wonder if this is YouTube saying we're kind of maxing out on our ads. It seems like every YouTube video I watch, it's like everyone's got a preroll ad, a midroll ad, a little banner on the bottom, like an ad at the end. And I got to think like at some point they're just going to tap out of the maximum number of impressions they can get for ads and the maximum value they can extract. Another thing they're pushing lately I think is I can't remember what it's called, YouTube Red or something or one of the premium feature where you don't have to see ads if you pay. And Twitter also has that. I think Twitter blue and Twitter now also has tips. So it seems like platforms are trending in that direction of saying, okay, maybe the ads weren't the right solution or maybe we just can't take them any further. We got to find a new avenue for growth and that seems to be through money. It's really interesting to think that that might be and maybe this is an opening for Lightning because the money side of YouTube's business has to be a lot smaller than their ad portion right now. And I wonder if, I don't know that if YouTube was doing a trillion dollars in direct payments, I don't know that people would have that same. Like it would be a lot harder for the Lightning Network to compete against something like that. But Lightning is growing. The ecosystem is flourishing right now at a time when all the biggest social media networks are just beginning their push into value. And I wonder if that's an advantage, like a kind of like foot in the door where we can say, hey, everything's small right now. YouTube's value business is small, twitter's tipping business is small. The Lightning Network is relatively small, but we've got the open network. I wonder if that's like something that tips us over the edge.
Gigi - 00:39:25:
Yeah, I don't know. I think the killer feature will be censorship, resistance to deep platforming. So there will be very quickly there will be creators on YouTube, we see this all the time, everyone is getting demonetized. Like if you say something that's only slightly controversial, then you'll be demonetised and you won't get any ad income. And the same will be true for these direct payments and those tipping features and so on. Like if it's a video that is labeled as problematic by YouTube, then you won't be able to send money to this video, to the creator or what have you. And so I think it's interesting because most creators on YouTube that are actually big, they are dancing right on this line because you want to be controversial to maximize your virality and audience and so on, but you don't want to step over the line because then you're getting demonetized. So we are already in this weird territory where people are basically flirting with censorship because it maximizes your gains. And so I think for centralized platforms this will always be the case because the platform rank orders the results for you and decide what you will watch next and it will do the selection for you. If you are actually the platform and push on the ground like, I don't know, someone like Alex Jones or whatever, like pick your name, there's like 10,000 examples. Then you will have to do it differently in the sense that you're not on the platforms anymore. I'm missing the right words to talk about this in a good way because I think the beautiful thing of being off the platforms is that you can actually grow your own audience without having to trick the algorithms and without having to play the platform game. So it's more honest and more direct and I think also more sustainable because you also less prone to self censorship, for example, because you can actually talk about whatever you want basically. And if your audience still likes you and wants to support you, then you'll be good. That's what Adam Curry also talks about all the time. How big do you actually have to be? Not everyone has to be a Joe Rogan to make it. Because in the end, if you're doing something that you absolutely love to do and it might be very niche, I don't know what, just growing a certain underwater kind of flower or underwater basketball, whatever. Pick your strange hobby. And if you do it in a value for value way, then 200 supporters might be enough. It might be enough and it's like if you have 2000 people listening and like a certain percentage supports you, that might be enough. And maybe you can do it as a part time or full time thing then. And I think that's very beautiful. And you can do it, you can do it without any like you don't have to be nervous about it. If you keep doing what you're doing, people will still keep giving you money. If your content remains interesting and engaging and those kinds of things, then you can just keep doing it because you don't have to be afraid of the platform risk. And the platform risk is censorship deplatforming and also bank risk. You can be debanked. Canada was the perfect example, honk twice for getting the platform from society and we will only see in the fiat world, so to speak, or in the centralized world we will only see an increase of these kind of phenomena where you have to be very careful about what you say and you have to self censor a lot and you have to constantly watch out about the topics you choose, the interests you choose, the words you use. Because also this changes all the time. A discussion about biological gender ten years ago wouldn't have been problematic probably. And now if you want to do biology lectures on YouTube, you're probably getting demonetized just by talking about biological sex differences or what have you. And it changes all the time. Who knows what it will be in five years from now. I see it as an exit option. As an alternative to kind of the ridiculousness of this overbearing governance which is coming from all sides. It's coming from politics. It's in the end there's a problem of centralization because if you centralize things. You have centralized control and it's impossible for you to figure out like what is okay to say and what is okay to say for this group of people. For this culture. For example. A gaming culture. For example. Has very different standards about what is actually an insult and what is acceptable to say. I mentioned this because one of the platforms that champion direct monetization was Twitch. And Twitch grew out of the gaming world and it grew out of streaming and watching other people play computer games and streaming tournaments and so on, you could tip money directly. And I think all of this will exist in Lightning very soon. In fact, people like RFPC, they already implemented plugins like the stream of Copilot and those kind of things. So this already kind of works. But of course it's beyond early for value, for value and streaming money on Lightning and all those kinds of things. But the reason why I point all of this out is that on Twitch there were a lot of deep platforming events in the past and in my opinion it was all ridiculous because it's just gamer culture. You cannot have one central decision body that decides what is OK and what is not. And we figured this out all in the past. That's why we have the First Amendment. Like free speech. I cannot say what is okay to say and what is not okay to say. And that's also like in Christianity, that's why the logos is sacred. We figured this out like 3000 years ago probably. That just never works. To police speech and censorship of thoughts and ideas and speeches is always bad. And I think if you have a central entity, the central entity can decide. It wants to decide what is OK and what is not. And this never scales and so it eats itself.
Kevin Rooke - 00:46:05:
So when you look into the future then, and you think about an internet ruled by protocols rather than platforms, what are some of the second order effects of that. What are the biggest changes?
Gigi - 00:46:24:
It's a good question. I think we can't know. I think we really can't know. I can only say from personal experience, kind of I mentioned some of the things I think less censorship and less self censorship. We see this already that I should have put it like 25 years ago. Everyone consumed the same media, the same news, watch the same shows, watch the same movies. We had the same culture. Like if you look at the Western culture in the US. In particular, but also us. And Europe and so on, there were only like five shows on TV and you watched them, and there were only like ten big blockbuster movies a year. And everyone watched all the movies. And this already exists. It does not exist anymore because now everyone is in their own filter bubble of their own making and also of the algorithms making. And it doesn't matter if it's the YouTube algorithm or the Netflix algorithm or the Google algorithm, or like Facebook, Twitter, it doesn't matter. I think if we move to a more decentralized, more protocol focused world, the same thing will happen for more areas. Like we saw when the Internet came up. There was a blog or a home page or whatever for absolutely everything. And if you have a certain interest, you will find it online, and you will find a small community or group of people online that is interested in that. And I think we will see kind of more of this. But I think these effects will even be stronger because now there is money and monetization behind it and there is value behind it. And I really hope that it will kind of I think you have to kind of take the good with the bad. So there will be just like with the internet, the utopia of the Internet did not play out because it turns out that making information and a very powerful information system available to everyone, absolutely everyone, has certain side effects as well. And we all know the kind of hashtags, basically, of fake news and misinformation and those kind of things. And I think it will change in the sense that it will be harder. It will be harder to censor people. And this can be very good. For example, if you look at movements like the Arab Spring or if you want to topple the dictator, the first thing that dictator will do is try to find out who you are, freeze your bank accounts, those kind of things. And this will be harder as the technology around Bitcoin improves. And this is already quite hard. Monetizing a cost. Getting money to a cause is already something that's, thanks to bitcoin, it's more of a line, impossible to stop if you know what you're doing. And I think this can be a good thing. And it can also, of course, it can be a bad, even dangerous thing, as well. So I don't know what the future brings. I'm basically eternally optimistic because I believe that most people are good and I think we can see this already on YouTube. You can learn absolutely everything on YouTube, doesn't matter what kind of subject. There will be some Indian guide that explains it to you way better than anyone else can and I think we will see more of that. I think people will be able to follow their passion. I think people will be able to actually do what they love and monetize this and make a living of it and so on. And I mentioned in the beginning of this brand that I can only speak from experience because that's what I'm doing. I switched all my stuff to a value for value model and I get streaming sets every minute and also for my written content. Everything is value for value and so I get micro payments for the written content every hour and sometimes I get bigger payments. And if the current trajectory of bitcoin and Lightning and the whole value for value idea and those kind of things continues, then very soon, I mean, I already don't do anything else basically, but I think a lot of people will be able to follow their passion and just monetize it directly. I think that's how it will shake out.
Kevin Rooke - 00:50:54:
Do you think that when we look at if we bundle all creators together, internet creators and we think about how much they earn today through ads and we think about how much they could earn through value for value at a time maybe when Lightning payments are ubiquitous on the internet, let's imagine we get there and everyone knows how to use Lightning. How do you think about how much well, first off, do you think creators will earn more than they are today? And how much more? How do you think about how many new people can be enabled to start a career around something they really care about because of the monetization and the ease of sending payments across the internet?
Gigi - 00:51:46:
I think it will be terribly hard to measure or I hope what will happen. If my kind of thoughts around this and my base assumptions are correct, then Lightning and value for value and censorship resistant technologies around it. Because the thing is also, let's take YouTube for example. If your content is extremely spicy, YouTube will just delete the video. So you will have to self host your videos or your app, three files if it's a podcast and so on. And so the same is true for blog posts and those kind of things. We saw this already. It's always the same story. Like something starts out very ideologically aligned and now everyone is riding on substance. Previously it was medium or what have you and then the thing gets big enough and then it gets political and then blog posts get deleted or what have you. And so this is always the same story. That's why I say free speech platforms cannot and will never exist. Only free speech protocols can exist because if someone else can delete your stuff, they will delete your stuff on a long enough timeline. Like you will say something stupid or something wrong or something politically incorrect and then it will be deleted. So I think with all of this being said in terms of how much money will you make, how much money will create us make and so on, I think that we always have a pareto distribution of who are actually the people that are making the most money. And I think with online there is the 1% principle. Online it's like you have 1% of people that write comments on Reddit or what have you or on YouTube and 99% that just lurk the chest, watch the chest consume. And so I think with the centralized platforms, let's take YouTube again, you will have the algorithm decide what is viral, what is presented, what is in play next and so on. And in the current landscape you have a very, very long tale of people that make very, very little. And I think what bitcoin and Lightning and censorship resistant technologies can do is to fatten this long tail that more of the people that made less with advertisements and so on will make more. And I think if we move away, we don't necessarily have to move away from centralized platforms completely because content discovery is an insanely tricky problem. But what I hope will pop up is that we will have different ways of discovering content. Not only just word of mouth and so on, but maybe different specialized portals or algorithms and so on that you can select. I mean, Jack Doris talked about this as well. That's his idea for Twitter and the Twitter feed and decentralizing the Twitter feed where it's not some black box magic that actually selects and sorts and rank orders and filters your feed, but you have 25 different algorithms or like 100 different algorithms that you can choose from and then you can whatever floats your boat. You can do your own or help with your own content discovery. And I think this will be increasingly important. We see this already with books. Like everyone who reads a lot knows this, even if your interest is very limited, there are more books on this topic that are really good than you will ever have time to read. There are so many insanely good books. You have to be very selective with what you put in your queue, so to speak. I think the same will be true for it's already true for videos and podcasts and so on. Like bitcoin podcasts are a great example. I still listen to a lot of Bitcoin podcasts but there's way too much in the English speaking and now also in the German speaking world. I have no chance ever of listening to all of it even it would be very interesting to me so we will have to resort to some form of centralization just to do the selection and I think depending on the content selection and depending on kind of how people are able to grow their audience size. We will see a fattening of the fat tail and hopefully more fair distribution than what we currently see because it's not even perido. It's like 99% versus the 1% that make all the money. Like how many big YouTubers are there? There's like 50 that make all the money or 20 or I don't know and they make like millions and millions and millions and everyone else is in comparison to small fish so to speak. And in terms of monetizing your stuff on YouTube, like those content creators on YouTube itself as well, I don't know how long it took them to figure out how to be insanely profitable but probably like ten years or so. How can you maximize ad revenue? The platform had to evolve. The way that ads are presented had to evolve. The algorithms had to get better and the creators had to learn how to interact with the audience so that they won't switch off the video just because there are ads in it and so on and so everyone knows when YouTube was small like and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell and so nothing of that existed and so everyone had to figure this out. How to deal with the monetization side of things and I think we will see the same now with value for value like how to include boost the grams into your show. How to ask people to give value. Actually let them know that there is a new set of podcasting apps at newpodcasting apps.com that you can download and then you can put sets on it and then you can stream value and you can send a boost to grab and if you're lucky it will be right on the show and so on and so forth and I think we will all figure this out and I think if we do it correctly again. I think Lightning and Value for Value and podcasting 20 and all those things. They will fatten the long tail of content creators.
Kevin Rooke - 00:57:38:
Yeah. I agree and my personal anecdote here is just that I've seen in the last month or so. Maybe it's mostly in the last month but maybe in the last two months as well the number of people supporting this show has just exploded like every single time now I'm just seeing new people participating sats coming in from new users and I'm like I remember the first few months it was like there was like five or ten users and I knew all of them by name almost. Now it's like all the people who are setting in sets, I've never heard of them before, they're all brand new and so it's great to see that at least my personal anecdote is that this is getting traction. I think that is true more broadly as well. And I can say also, like already it earns more on the show, earns more on value for value sat streaming than it does on YouTube because I do post these episodes to YouTube as well. And so it's quite impressive to see how this is already makes sense for a certain subset of creators. Like, I might be biased because the topic that I discuss is mostly Lightning Network itself, but as this expands, I think it starts to make sense for more and more creators.
Gigi - 00:58:52:
Oh, absolutely. We saw this on Twitch that no one has to know or care, like what the technology is that runs below it. We don't have to call it Sets or Lightning or Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin definitely has like a marketing problem, so you definitely should not call it Bitcoin ever. It's like Linux. It sounds scary and bad and I don't know what so you have to rebrand as Android and suddenly it takes off. And for Twitch it was like they have like 25 different emojis and every emoji is a different value and so on. And that's how I think it will find its way into the broader consciousness that you just have these kind of things, these weird things that you send around and everyone knows that this is valuable. No one knows how it works. And you can actually redeem it and then you have something that's like cold sets in your wallet and you can actually either spend them directly or just go somewhere and then you get $100 for a couple of sets or whatever. And I think that's like it's just like with the internet. I always say the same thing. No one knows how the Internet works, no one knows how the smartphone works, no one knows works, no one knows how the smartphone works, no one knows how a car works. No one will know that Lightning is used underneath. People make phone calls all the time. At the point where we switched to voiceover IP, people were making phone calls with the regular old phones and they were making phone calls with the regular old phones and they had no idea that they were using the internet. That's always how it works. But I think your data point is an excellent one because I see the same thing. It blows my mind that almost every single second I get some Satoshi stream lead from somewhere and I second I get some Satoshi stream lead from somewhere and I don't even have my own podcast. Not really. It's insane how don't even have my own podcast. Not really. It's insane how well it works for you as well. I think for me it's especially mind blowing because I know some at least of the technical details of the Lightning Network and I know all the problems. It's amazing to me that it actually works as Hecky as it is now. It was never intended for these kinds of things. It's a key sent hack currently, and it will get better and better and better and better with amp. It will get better. There's. So many improvements ahead still and it already works. It's amazing. It's amazing. Like you mentioned, you don't even know these people. And for me as well, sometimes people include comments with the payments or with bootstraps and so on and they with the payments or with bootstraps and so on and they are like from halfway across the world. It's so amazing. And also one thing that's worth mentioning that I always love, I always love this idea because I have it in the article as well and I brought it up before with the example of busking. The thing about busking of a street performer, of a street musician in the town square is that it's both limited in time and in space. The town square is very small. Like how many people can you gather around a hat, a real world hat where you throw money in it's? Like 200 people, 500 max, something like that. I don't know, but it's not millions of people. And how long does the performance last? Like an hour max, like 30 long does the performance last? Like an hour max, like 30 minutes, whatever. This podcast will, if you take care of your hosting and so on and so forth, it will stay online forever basically. And if we take care of our Lightning nodes, they will stay online for basically forever as well. And so like ten years from now, someone could stream a lot of money towards the nodes and who knows who will get it and who knows if it still works as well. But I think it will still work because all of these things work right now and they are open protocols and so things work right now and they are open protocols and so they will only improve and it will always be there, just like email is still there and RSS feeds are still there and so on and it's all kinds of amazing. So value for value is unlimited in time and space. So potentially, if something truly goes unlimited in time and space. So potentially, if something truly goes viral or is really good and stays alive for a long time and gets shared around and so alive for a long time and gets shared around and so on, we see this with old donation addresses on very old bitcoin content. But over the years you look into the static reused address that is there, like you look into the static reused address that is there, like no one should do it, it's very bad for privacy. But still, that's how we did it back in the day and you can see that over the years there was like 25 bitcoin donated for this block post or whatever. Mind blowing. The same will be true if the assumptions I hold are somewhat true. The same will be true for the podcast episodes that are receiving the first streaming sets now and the first kind of value for value payments now on Lightning.
Kevin Rooke - 01:03:17:
Yeah, it's incredible to think about if you were to guess what the if you think about what the first value for value application to find product Market Fit will be and when I mean Product Market Fit, I mean it on a global scale. Like you're walking down the street and you see some people on their phone and they're doing value for value for something. What is that first application? What do you think is going to kind of, like, ignite the fuse here and help this value for value movement really get attention globally and outside of the kind of Lightning ecosystem that it's in right now?
Gigi - 01:03:57:
I think value for value only makes sense for very specific things, and I think it's mostly for selling information outright, basically. And you're not really selling information because that's the wrong way to think about it. If the thing you give away is free in the sense of zero marginal cost when it comes to reproduction, like, you can copy paste the thing. That's where value for value shines. So I think it will be for digital content, and I think we are experiencing this right now. I think it's just a matter of time until this finds broader use and broader awareness. It's mostly an education and awareness issue currently. And of course, I'm aware that Lightning can scale indefinitely and those kind of things that there are a lot of problems to be solved. But still, the main problem is that people have no idea that this exists. It takes a while to kind of move away from the payroll and like, okay, I'm just charging by the item kind of idea. I think that takes a long time to because it's a bit of a deep like the main criticism that I hear from people that have no idea, never used it and have never experienced it and never participated in a value thing. It's like no one will pay for it. That's the main crisis. It's like if it's available for free, no one will pay for it, period. And I can tell you that this is completely wrong. It's completely wrong. We know that not everyone will pay for it, but like, 2-1-5 of people will pay for it depending on how good you are in terms of asking people to pay for it. This is a constant. This is true. So the assumption that if it's available for free, no one will pay for it is plainly wrong. You're uninformed. You don't know what you're talking about. That's not how human psychology works. It seems like not everyone is a scammer all the time. Again, I think most people are good, and if they actually enjoy something, they are willing to give back. And they were like, oh, man, this movie was so great that it was available for free. And so this was worth, like, $50 easily. And I don't care. I think it was amazing. And if you have the money and they're willing to support it, people will actually support it. I'm not talking out of my ass here because I participated in a movie a friend of mine made which is called Human V, and it's a Bitcoin movie. It's about Bitcoinness, and it's a German movie, so most people don't know about it. English subtitles do exist. So if you're a subtitle guy, feel free to watch it and it's run completely on value for value. So I managed to convince the guy who made it to run it on a value for value basis and he really liked the idea and he was like, he was not doing this for the money anyway, so might as well give it a try. And someone this was during the height of the bull market, basically someone liked it a lot and gave a whole bitcoin and that's a fair value for value payment. So we know that this works and that's, again, you don't want to box in the content itself and you also don't want to box in the value, so just leave it open. It's like how much was it worth to you for this person? I assume he has a lot of bitcoin or whatever, he or she, who knows. And it was worth a lot and it's like, okay, one bitcoin. I don't know what the price was, I have no idea, but probably like $50,000. And that was like for some it might feel like an expensive movie ticket, but for this person it was like, I want to support the creator and send a signal that this was valuable to me and that's what happened. So I think we will see more and more of this because how should they put it? It's a very nihilistic and dark idea that people are not willing to give back. I think the opposite is true. I think people are willing to give back. I think in general, people are good and understand these things that you have to give back to keep the music going and don't fall into the traps of spying and selling ads while selling crap basically to newbies.
Kevin Rooke - 01:08:04:
Yeah, and I mean, we're seeing this also. Another example is stacker news. Like every single day you scroll through the top page there and you can kind of like hover over the number of stats and you can see how many people have sent stats now that every post has dozens of people, some of those top posts get dozens of people sending in stats and it's like three months ago that was like four people. Yes, and now it's like you can clearly see there's this like if you watch these numbers, they're growing really, really quickly and it's happening in all sorts of contexts, right? Podcasting, movies, it's stacker news. I feel like we're going to have a dozen more use cases to talk about this time next year and it's really promising to see.
Gigi - 01:08:51:
One of the things that's popped into my mind, if you don't mind, namely, we talked before about YouTube moving towards the kind of tipping value for value idea, those kind of things. And just keep in mind, you know, that the philosophy behind value for value is currently being worked out by Adam Curry because it's all in his head and he's about to publish like manifesto flash book, whatever, where he goes into detail why you shouldn't call it tipping. Because a tip, like one BTC is not a tip, it's something else. Tipping always implies low value and it's not it's value for value. It's like however high you think it should go. So thinking about it in tipping, that's already what YouTube is doing wrong. The second thing that YouTube is doing wrong, and it's not necessarily a problem for YouTube because they are big, but what all the platforms will run into is to integrate payments and do those kinds of things. You will effectively become a money transmitter or a bank. And this is not a game you probably want to play. And that's where Lightning and this protocol idea really shines because you can specialize on, I don't know, like video streaming or like a podcast app or what have you, and you can just like to receive payments, put your Lightning address into this field and that's it, that's all you have to do. And the rest will be taken care of by the Lightning Network, like externally basically and so on. And again, we still need something like bolt twelve or whatever to have offline reusable invoices, so to speak, that don't change. And we still need to make a lot of improvements on the Lightning front for these ideas to fully play out. But they will play out because the opposite is that every single service that you use will need its own money transmission or banking license and that's just not feasible at all.
Kevin Rooke - 01:10:41:
Yeah, okay. I have one more question before we get into the Lightning round. You briefly said one of the bad reasons for why value for value won't work is that no one's going to tip, right? Like that was a bad argument against value for value. I want to know what you think are the best arguments against value for value. Like if this doesn't work, steelman this argument for me. What is the reason? If value for value does not take off and it does not become the system that everyone uses on the internet to pay for these certain types of content, what will the reason be?
Gigi - 01:11:19:
That's a good question. So I think let me go back like two steps or so. The way that I see it is fiat money is broken and it has to be replaced by something. I think that something will be Bitcoin. I think there are very good reasons to think that. I think that the monetary space is limited. I think Bitcoin is basically perfect money and I think all money is in competition with each other because all money competes for liquidity, all money competes for store of value, all assets compete for store of value. Basically everything competes for attention and mindshare and so on. And I think Bitcoin already won the race. Just look at the hash rate graph. Only proof of work works. All proof of work chains are in competition with each other. Bitcoin has like 100% of the hash rate basically. So this competition is over. I won't even go into the merging of the energy sector with the mining market and so on. So this game is kind of over. I think Bitcoin will replace will be the new monetary standard. If this assumption is correct, I believe a payment mechanism on Bitcoin will emerge that is something like Lightning or Lightning itself that will replace all other payment mechanisms, which is like the layer three, layer four payment mechanisms of the Fiat system, which is Visa and Mastercard and Venmo and PayPal and all the rest of it. These are very high layer abstractions. On top of the fear system, we also have like interbank settlement with Swift and ACH and so on. This will also like this will be replaced by either Bitcoin directly or like a lay off top. On top of the settlement. I say a lay on top because we also want to have like other privacy guarantees, for example. We want to have patching, probably those kinds of things, whatever. I'm just speculating now and this is like 2030 years out or what have you. Who knows how far out it is. It might only be like six years. Like who knows? Anyway, I think it's clear that the first thing where Bitcoin really shines and has shined in the past and will continue to shine and the same is true for Lightning is online stuff because for global merchant adoption in every single country and so on, you will have to fight with every single jurisdiction and all the rest of it. So online stuff is perfect. So I think podcasting 20 and the value for value idea for that is perfect. All that being said, I think that the trade off of doing truly peer to peer noncustodial payments, there will always be a trade off in terms of comfort, in terms of speed, in terms of fees and custodial. Lightning solutions are superior in respect to comfort, only comfort, comfort and fees and stuff. They are superior to doing it the proper way. And so doing it the proper way takes more work, takes more user involvement, takes also more development work and so on. And so if value for value, as I have it in my head right now, fails in the next couple of years, it will be because it will be done on custodial solutions, that's not necessarily bad because it might be a necessary step towards something that is truly noncustodial. And also keep in mind that there is no, like, custodial solutions. I'm not a big fan of custodial solutions, but they have the place and if you're not at risk of being deep platform, then if you live in a free country, in a nice jurisdiction and so on, you might be able to use them. The important part. And that's true for Bitcoin because also Lightning and so on and all the Value for Value podcasting, two point ideas. The important part is that your exit cost is very low. That there is no. Like vendor lock in or anything like that. That you can take your podcast and you just got the platform and can move to something else and self host or what have you and just do as if nothing happened and all your fans. All the whole user base. Will be able to find you and stream money again instantly. And it's just a different keys address or whatever. The second thing that I can see is that, I don't know, it might remain niche. It might remain niche in the sense that most people don't care about this stuff and most people are fine with the brave new world of Google and Facebook and Twitter dictating their thoughts, basically, and their interests and they might be fine. It will be a merge of brave new world and idiocracy. But that's a very cynical take and I try not to be a cynical person. So I really hope that we are not running into this future head on.
Kevin Rooke - 01:16:34:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, I think we're ready for the final round here. It's called the Lightning round. I ask listeners to send in questions. Are you ready for the Lightning round?
Gigi - 01:16:47:
Let's go. Let's do this.
Kevin Rooke - 01:16:48:
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Gigi - 01:17:40:
Yeah, good question. I mean, there is a lot of talk currently around privacy in bitcoin. I think we went through all of this before. It was just a different bitcoin before it was litecoin. And everyone was like, you really should use Litecoin because bitcoin is not fast enough. And if you want to have actually fast transaction, then you have to use Litecoin. It's always like, bitcoin is not x enough. That's why you have to use bitcoin. Why that's the formula. And it used to be bitcoin is not fast enough. So you have to use Litecoin. And now bitcoin is not private enough, so you have to use bitcoin. Another one. And the way I look at it is most people that are actually working on bitcoin and also on the protocol level, they are aware of the problems and are trying to work on solutions. And I think there is a path forward and it's going to be like a death of 1000 paper cuts to make Bitcoin more private. It's also in the interest I mentioned before, the in the bank settlement layer. Once the big money, the really big money comes in and you have more microstrategies on Bitcoin and more like banks actually switching to Bitcoin. If you have the voice over IP moment of Bitcoin that banks settle against each other on chain, you kind of want to have better privacy guarantee. So it will come and I think the investments will be made, the protocol upgrades will be made. We also know how we can kind of do it. I mean, accounting, for example, a collaborative transaction is nothing but a batch transaction with multiple participants. So exchanges already do batching and it took a long, long time for them to implement batching, even though the incentive was there and the technology was there and so on. I think it will also, again, it will take a long time for this upgrade to happen. I wrote about this in a recent piece, which is called Freedom and Privacy two sides of the same Coin that I think we are currently witnessing to transition. The analogy that I made is the transition from Http to Https. So not too long ago, everything online was plain text, unencrypted. You could sit in an internet cafe and sniff network network traffic and read all the emails, watch what people are doing and so on. And it took the Https and standard, like the specifications on it's like 25 years old or something. So it took almost like 30 years to switch from Http to Https. And I think it took the revelations of Edwards Node to really get going. Everyone suddenly realized, all right, this is actually important, having everything in playtex is not a good idea and we need to get going to fix this. And I don't think it will take as long for Bitcoin, even though Bitcoin is harder to change. But I think saying that Bitcoin is not private is not correct. Bitcoin is synonymous. And if you know how to use Bitcoin, bitcoin is already private. So it will be a mix of having certain protocol upgrades, using higher layers and also defaulting to better privacy practices to kind of deal with this issue. And I think it's always kind of a cut and mouse game.
Kevin Rooke - 01:20:58:
I like that answer.
Gigi - 01:21:00:
Why should you care about it if you're living in a free state, that you're not being like the government will not come after you if you send a transaction to some other person. But if you do live in such a country and your life is at risk, you will find a way to use Bitcoin privately, no problem. That's kind of my view of things. And also, just as a last comment, for example, if we get crossinput signature aggregation into bitcoin, and we already have tap root. There is a monetary incentive. Like, coincidence will actually be cheaper than regular transactions, basically. So collaborative batch transactions will be a thing because the monetary incentive is here. That's all future talk. And the pessimists of the developers are like, okay, next software activation would be like, ten years from now. And who knows? I don't know. But a lot of people were also surprised by how quickly tap activated. And I'm not saying that it's a good thing. It might have been a bad thing that we set this president of Activating something rather quickly, but we'll see. I'm very optimistic, and I think on the base chain, for example, I think bitcoin, it's basically fine. Like, we'll manage Lightning is already way more private, way better than on chain bitcoin. And Lightning has its flaws, and Lightning needs to be improved, and Lightning privacy is not perfect, but the quote unquote lightcoin shows, they ignore Lightning completely all the time, and you shouldn't ignore it.
Kevin Rooke - 01:22:35:
Okay, I like that answer. Another list of questions was from Nico at Work. And Nico at work says, can you steal man the case that we have too many philosophers or too few builders in bitcoin?
Gigi - 01:22:49:
How do we change that? I don't even need to deal with this. I think that's definitely true. We have way too many Think Boys and word sell it people and be wary of this. And I know I'm borderline one of those two. I'm very aware of that. But I'm also a software engineer, and I actually work on bitcoin software, and I at least know some things about the technicalities of bitcoin and so on. But yeah, just get building. Like, we definitely need more builders. I don't need to steal man this at all. I think it's definitely true. Like, it's very easy. Talk is cheap. Show me the code. That's what Leonard Travel said, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like, think bowing about issues is super easy, but actually building something that people use that is useful and that is engineered in a solid way is very hard.
Kevin Rooke - 01:23:44:
All right, I have a couple of questions for you now. First one is, are there any books that have meaningfully changed your view of the world?
Gigi - 01:23:52:
Oh, yeah, definitely many. But it's always hard to pick, like, one or two or three or so. I read a lot, and I don't know, I think sometimes it's also I would also recommend, especially if a book is shorter, so read a book like, twice. A book will hit very differently in different stages of your life. So one book that I reread, for example, is Herman Hesse Sidata, which, you know, it's like a cliche book. A lot of people read this one and reread this one and kind of recommended and so on. It's like one of those Think boy philosophical books. But, yeah, I'm not sure if it changed me. I like all kinds of books. I think there were some science fiction books that definitely changed me. And this game comes to mind. I don't know why, but I really enjoyed it. And Endless Game is in part to blame for my pseudonymous appearance, for example, because there's a character in there that write something basically online, synonymously and so on. And I don't want to spoil the whole book now, but what was another one? Endurance was something that a book that I have to think about often. It's about Commander Shackleton and it's about how cold people end up. That's probably one way of summing it up. And every time I'm cold, I always think about this book and I'm like, you're such a pussy. You're actually not cold. You're so comfortable right now. You have no idea. So I think great books put things into perspective. One like non science or nonfiction book that I really liked and that also changed my perspective on things was from Hans Roselling Factfulness, which is an excellent book. Unfortunately, he died not too long ago, a couple of years ago. He has also excellent Ted Talks. I know a lot of people hate Ted Talks nowadays because they got inflated. They have the inflation problem of TEDx and they're not excellent anymore. But they used to be excellent. And Hunch Rosling gave some excellent Ted talks. And it's about viewing the world through data, basically, and actually visualizing data in a way that you can see what's going on. He had a very nice way of thinking about the world in that sense. One book that probably the most influential book. I read this a very long time ago. I was rather young, but it probably had the most profound impact on my life was Surely You're Choking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman, who was a physicist, and it's one of my favorite people on Earth. He's also not alive anymore because it was my kind of the reason why this book changed me so much is because I was very good in school. But I was very good in school because I was very good at learning stuff by heart and just very good at writing tests and so on. And when I read this book and when I went into higher education, I made a point. It was very obvious to me that Feynman understood things insanely deeply and he did not remember stuff. He really understood stuff. And I was like, okay, I want to give this a try, too. So even if I know the right answer, if I don't understand it, I try to forget it. I want to really understand things deeply. And then there's no way to forget the answer because you just know how it works and then you just can deduce the answer right on the spot, the correct one. And so I think that changed my life quite a bit. I don't know. There's so many it's very hard to pick individual ones.
Kevin Rooke - 01:27:56:
That's a great list, though. I like all those recommendations.
Gigi - 01:28:01:
You read them all.
Kevin Rooke - 01:28:02:
One final question for you. I haven't read all of them, but I've read Shirtly. You're joking. Mr. Fineman. I've read Endurance and I've heard of the others.
Gigi - 01:28:12:
I have one more just popped into my mind. It's also something that kind of I don't know why, but it always stuck with me and I have to think about it often. It's a roundabout book on AI, on artificial intelligence, because I think that's the second most important part after Bitcoin. I think artificial intelligence is kind of an important thing going on now in the world. And it's called Flowers of Algonon, and it's about a story about a guy who just gets smarter all the time and gets very smart and very dumb again. And I think it's really good. It's a short little book.
Kevin Rooke - 01:28:51:
Interesting. One final question. If you had ten years and you had to hold one asset entirely, all your net worth and one asset for the next decade and it couldn't be Bitcoin, what asset would you pick?
Gigi - 01:29:10:
That's only possible question. I don't know. It's an impossible question in so many ways, because I truly believe that everything else is a shit coin. Basically, I'm one of those people.
Kevin Rooke - 01:29:28:
It's one of those questions, though, that it kind of illuminates the idea that, what do people do? Before we had Bitcoin, because you're having such a hard time figure out what's the second best? 15 years ago, yeah, we had to compete between the second, the third and fourth best, and we had no idea that there was going to be this other asset. It puts into perspective how hard the decision was before.
Gigi - 01:30:02:
I think I would pick no assets and just live very, very minimal life. There are some people like that. The Richard Stallman is one example where I never cared about wealthy in the first place, I never cared about money in the first place. So I think I would just do that and just be a hippie and just have no money and no assets. I think that would be.
Kevin Rooke - 01:30:25:
Dollars. Keep it in Fiat money. So the answer would be just keep it in Fiat money.
Gigi - 01:30:34:
No, have no money. Have zero money. Pick nothing. Like, give everything away. Just walk around, drink water from drink water from his dream and collect some rice. And that's all you need.
Kevin Rooke - 01:30:56:
Interesting. Be self sufficient. I like it. All right, I really enjoyed this conversation. I know we've gone a little over time, but thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I learned a ton about value for value. This was a great deep dive. I've been dying to do, like, a deep dive on this topic specifically, so I'm glad we could do that. Before you go, is there anywhere where can people go to learn more about you and your work?
Gigi - 01:31:22:
Well, the best place to. Keep up to date is Twitter, which of course, the irony is not lost on me because Twitter is a centralized platform. But I also post all my writings on their Gg.com. So my Twitter handle Dergigi, and my Twitterhandle.com is my site where there are links to everything else. And for everyone listening, I would highly recommend to give the article about Value for Value a read. You'll be able to find it on Rtg.com and it's actually combusque. Yeah, thanks. And, yeah, I enjoyed this massively. Thanks for the slight connection problems, especially in the beginning. I told you it's my travel setup and so running the whole operation, including video streaming from a mobile hotspot, it has its problems, but it's amazing that it works. It's just like Lightning, it breaks sometimes a little bit, but it's amazing that it works in the first place.
Kevin Rooke - 01:32:26:
We made it work. Thank you again for taking the time and I hope we can do it again soon.
Gigi - 01:32:31:
Thanks for having me, Kevin. I had a good time.
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