Preston Pysh (00:03:09):
Couldn’t agree with you more. What are you most excited about in 2022? Because so many in this space just look at the price action and they say, “Oh, Bitcoin, it’s not good this year. It’s down,” but it is way more involved than just that, especially from a fundamental standpoint. So what is it that you’re looking at right now that you’re most excited about?

Gigi (00:03:31):
That’s a good question, and I have multiple answers. I think what I’m most excited about is the continuation of the grassroots movement that is Bitcoin, that it is spreading not top down, but it’s spreading bottom up, and more and more people are proud about the values that Bitcoin stands for. They are speaking out about the insanity that’s going on in the current system and they are like, “We need Bitcoin, and I’m a Bitcoiner, and I’m not shy about it, and we need sound money,” and so on, and they are building those strong communities and connecting with people and trying to truly opt out of the system that is falling apart.

Gigi (00:04:05):
So I’m really excited about that because what Bitcoin is and what it will be in the future, it’s like a moving target, and we definitely made some transitions. Not too long ago, Bitcoin was equivalent to buying drugs on the silk road. Now, we are in a completely different territory. To me, Bitcoin is for the people, by the people. It’s people’s money, and people are finally learning about Bitcoin and are motivated enough to use it and to make something of it and, again, as I said, opting out of the failing system and using Bitcoin as they see fit. I’m really excited about that this is happening all over the world.

Preston Pysh (00:04:46):
Why do you think that it is grassroots? Why is it starting from the grassroots and not from the top down? Then a follow up to that would be there are a few people that are figuring it out that you would think would not be early adopters to the scene because they have so much wealth and they have no real reason to really be paying attention to this. So how about them? What’s the thing that’s causing them to see it where so many of their counterparts are not?

Gigi (00:05:19):
Yeah. One of these guys, he has the domain, hope.com, and I think that explains a lot. I think Bitcoin is hope to a lot of people because Bitcoin, the reason why it moves bottom up instead of top down is that Bitcoin puts the individual at the center, and no one forces you to use Bitcoin. It’s a voluntary choice and you are in full control if you want to be. You can hold your own keys. You can run your own node. You can even mine yourself. You can produce your own blocks and have your own hedge rate hat on. That’s very, very different than other systems or the current banking and fiat system, how it operates. You don’t have the option to do it yourself. You’re always in this client-server, master-slave relationship. You don’t have the possibility to run your own node.

Gigi (00:06:06):
For example, also, try to find out how many euros are in existence or how many US dollars are in existence. In Bitcoin, it’s one commander away, and you can verify yourself with your own hood. I think all these technical based realities, they’re responsible for this bottom up movement because you can actually do it yourself. You don’t need anyone’s permission to use Bitcoin, and that’s insanely important because, depending on your situation, you might be forced to use Bitcoin. There are countries, as you know, where Bitcoin is the only savings vehicle that works for you and where people have access to, and you have access to it because you can do everything yourself, and no one can stop you from using Bitcoin.

Gigi (00:06:47):
What Bitcoin is and what using Bitcoin means is very different. It’s different for different people that are in different situations. If you just need to generate a private key, for example, which allows you to receive funds, you can lock yourself in the bathroom and flip a coin 256 times. That’s all you need to do. That’s literally all you need to do, and the rest is just pen and paper, and then you can derive Bitcoiners from that, and you post it on your social media profile or whatever channel you want to use and people can send you funds.

Preston Pysh (00:07:15):
How long would that take if somebody wanted to generate their own key and do the math? How long do you think that process would take based on the way you described it?

Gigi (00:07:24):
It doesn’t take too long. It doesn’t take too long. I mean, if you have access to some computing device and some tool that even works offline like a calculator, it doesn’t take you too long. There are tools where you can enter the series and once if the coin flips, and it will spit out a valid address. If you use something like that, it will only take you a couple of minutes. If you actually do the math by hand, it depends on how good you’re at math. It’s a bit involved, but you can actually do it. That’s why it’s so powerful.

Gigi (00:07:51):
Literally, no one can stop you. That’s how Bitcoin works and that’s how it operates. That’s very, very different than creating a PayPal account or opening a bank account with some random bank ads on, and that’s why it’s so powerful, and bottom up, in my opinion.

Preston Pysh (00:08:05):
That’s unbelievable when you just take a step back and think about the ramifications of what you just described.

Gigi (00:08:10):
Yeah. Again, I always come back to the base reality of Bitcoin and how it operates because this is what makes it so powerful. This is also the fact that all you need is a private key to receive and spend funds, the consequence of that is that you can have your money in your head, and people are not … The full consequences of this reality are not clear to most yet because you can just generate a private key. It doesn’t matter if you do it alone on a toilet or you use a hardware wallet or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. As long as it’s random, as long as the entropy is good, you’re fine, and then you can convert it to 12 or 24 words, and you can actually remember 12 words. That’s doable, especially if you are in a situation where you have to flee your country or what have you. Then putting 12 words in your head, you can actually do it.

Gigi (00:09:02):
This works because of the base reality of Bitcoin, of how it operates. Bitcoin is just pure information, and then you have 12 words in your head and you can be as wealthy as the Bitcoin network allows. Saylor can do it, and that’s a lot of wealth, and he could run around naked and still be very, very wealthy. That’s why we say Bitcoin is unconfiscatable and all the things. Take everything with a grain of salt. It’s not advisable to do if you have a stroke, you’re suddenly not as wealthy anymore.

Gigi (00:09:33):
So I would advise you to do this, but there are situations where people did this and where people are doing this, and this is so powerful, it boggles their mind. It all comes back to the fact of Bitcoin’s operation, and that Bitcoin is pure information and the private key is pure information. It’s why you can transform it to 12 words and then you have it in your head. Literally, this is the money. It’s not like you’re logged in to a bank account or whatever. The value itself is in these bits of information, and this is just amazing. Again, like I said in the beginning, once I figured this out, Bitcoin blew my mind, and I’m just trying to put the pieces back together, and sometimes an article pops out.

Preston Pysh (00:10:14):
You even describe it in one of your articles as just being magical, and what you’re just describing to me almost doesn’t even seem like, I mean, Michael Saylor’s a great example. He’s got, what, seven billion in Bitcoin, and to think that you could memorize 12 words in your head and go anywhere on the planet and have access to that spending power and that buying power is just, it defies how our brains can even process that, right?

Gigi (00:10:51):
Yeah. It’s like in a fairytale. You have this magic spell, and if you know it, you can do very powerful things. If you would know Michael Saylor’s 12 words, that would be something. Now, if you’re not well-versed in entropy and the numbers that are involved in making all this work, then people will start to try to guess the different combinations of 12 or 24 words because it sounds so ridiculous. It’s only 12 words. How hard will it be to guess? Yeah. It turns out that all the computers in the world will guess for a couple million years, and you won’t even be close.

Gigi (00:11:30):
Bitcoin works because there’s a certain power in large numbers, and that’s also why I think it’s bottom up as opposed to top down because Bitcoin favors the defender. Cryptography favors the defender, and we never had this. You have a military background. You know this very well. Usually, it’s the guy with the biggest stick has the upper hand. If you have, again, the largest stick, the bigger battle shape, the larger army and so on, this is usually the party who makes the rules. If there is a conflict, the conflict resolution happens with power and with show of force and so on and so forth.

Gigi (00:12:05):
In Bitcoin, this is different. In cryptography, in general, it’s different. No army in the world could ever break strong cryptography. That’s not how this works. It doesn’t help you to solve a math problem, and it’s not even a math problem, really. Oftentimes in the mainstream media you see that Bitcoin miners, they solve complicated math problems. No, no, no. That’s not what they’re doing. They’re trying to find a very specific number. A set of numbers is valid. The search space is so large that you have to roll the dice so many times. The chance is so minuscule that you find this number, that all they’re doing is guessing. It’s not complicated. It’s not complicated at all. They’re just trying to find the right number.

Gigi (00:12:45):
That’s also why cryptography favors the defender and favors the individual. If you use strong cryptography to defend yourself, it doesn’t matter if all the armies in the world conspire against you. If China and the US and Russia conspire against you, they won’t be able to break strong cryptography. They won’t be able to get to your secret. They won’t be able to get the 12 words out of your head, for example, and that’s why it empowers the individual, and that’s why I think it’s so beautiful because it will always be like this.

Gigi (00:13:11):
This is how Bitcoin operates, and there is no way of changing that. This will never change. This is now the truth that exists in the universe. This is now a given fact. If you know about this, you can make use of it. That’s why I think it’s so insanely beautiful and so empowering for so many people.

Preston Pysh (00:13:28):
It’s interesting that you brought up the idea of power and military projection and things like that. Michael Saylor recently did an interview where I was listening to him and he made this really interesting comment. He said that the most powerful apex predator is the one that can organize the energy the best. So when we think about Bitcoin and what you’re describing here through encryption, we’re taking energy that’s in tons of entropy and it’s just in disarray and we’re organizing it into these neat blocks approximately every 10 minutes that organizes what one party possesses and what they’re able to spend in the future based on what that energy organized onto the blockchain is. Is that how you would describe that? How would you describe this because you’re so much more eloquent than I am in the way that I’m thinking about this?

Gigi (00:14:27):
The problem with Bitcoin is that it does five or six impossible things before breakfast. It does it all at once. So I think this analogy is correctly, and what it does, it uses stranded energy to protect the information of everyone. If a new block is mined, it’s an accumulative layer of protection on the whole UTX outside of the world, on everyone’s wallet, on everyone’s public information because the way it works is we have this public letter and it records basically who owes what to, and if you have a private key, you can move some of the funds in this public letter. Take everything I say with a grain of salt. Technically, it’s a bit different, but that’s how you can visualize it.

Gigi (00:15:08):
I say technically it’s a bit different because nothing ever really moves like messages assigned and on and so forth. You cannot move information, really. You can only copy information. This is a very important point because this is at the core of the double spend problem. If I cannot have information in my head and move it to your head, I will always remember the information. The speaker retains the information. That’s the core of the double spend problem, but yeah, that’s what Bitcoin does. It uses this energy because you need a protective layer around the publicly available information, which is Bitcoin’s proof of work.

Gigi (00:15:41):
Proof of work does many other things as well, but it also protects the integrity of the public information, and that’s the only way how you can protect public information without private information. The other way would be to encrypt something or to sign something and then you need a private key for it, and then someone holds the private key and then you have a quorum of signers and all this, everything we have in the field world, and you have some key holders that are almighty and can do all that.

Gigi (00:16:06):
You see this very clearly also with some of the privacy technology. Why do you think C-CASH had a signing ceremony? You need the private key material in the first place. So the only way to trustlessly secure the integrity of public information is by more public information that everyone can verify, and you cannot do it with private information because that would imply a private key holder and we don’t want to have that. Then you would have central banks again that can decide what is true and what is not true.

Gigi (00:16:37):
So Bitcoin uses this energy, as you say, and it organizes it. It organizes it around the very valuable information that we all value. It is a record of what happened in the system, a record of who owes what to whom, and it protects accumulatively the past of all these transactions. That’s why what I also wrote in Bitcoin is time. The way you can think about Bitcoin from this perspective is that Bitcoin creates its own arrow of time because in the digital realm, you don’t have a trustless arrow of time. You will always have to refer to an external input that will tell you the time.

Preston Pysh (00:17:15):
Explain that. Why is that in the digital realm that you have such a difficulty placing time and time stamping?

Gigi (00:17:25):
Look at a piece of paper and let the piece of paper tell you how late it is. It’s an impossible problem. You need an external source and you need to feed it into the system. This external source can always lie, and that’s the problem. There is a disconnect between what is written on the piece of paper and what is happening in the real world, so to speak. So that’s why I say the map is not a territory. The map of something is not the thing in itself. That’s also why bananas on the blockchain will never work. Bananas rot in the warehouse, and what happens to the data? What happens to your sheet of paper? Don’t think about it as a blockchain. Think, you have a sheet of paper and you draw a banana for every banana that’s in the warehouse, and then you wait half a year and then does this sheet magically update itself? No, it doesn’t. It’s ridiculous.

Gigi (00:18:10):
So there is no link between the informational realm and the physical realm. Proof of work is the only thing that works that creates this link in a probabilistic fashion because it creates information that speaks for itself. It’s very much like in a game of cards or what have you. Rolling dice is the perfect example. If you watch someone roll dice, and let’s say they roll 10 dice at once, and they all land on one. That’s a perfect Bitcoin example because that’s what Bitcoin does as well. Then if you know that no shenanigans are going on and you watched him roll 20 times already, then you know he probably did this for a long, long, long while until every single dice was landing at one.

Gigi (00:18:56):
That’s information that speaks for itself. You can look at this, you can look at just the information, and you can infer what happened in the real world, what had to happen. This is such an unlikely event. This had to happen multiple times probably. If it didn’t happen multiple times, then someone was just very, very, very, very lucky, but usually, people are not that lucky. So he was probably sitting there and doing this for five hours or whatnot, depending on how many dice he rolls.

Gigi (00:19:23):
This is how Bitcoin mining works. Bitcoin miners, they find this random number that in a process, in a game that you can’t cheat, and then they announce, “Yahtzee! I found this number,” and it fits the difficulty target and so on, and everyone is like, “Okay. Yeah, this guy won, and we all have to work on the next round now,” because there’s something to win. The Bitcoin network will reward you in good sets, in good heart Bitcoin for the work that you are doing, for participating in building up this era of time and also for participating in providing energy for this productive layer around Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:20:01):
So going back to the 2022 question, what is something that’s happening in the space that you think is underappreciated right now?

Gigi (00:20:10):
Lightning.

Preston Pysh (00:20:12):
Yeah?

Gigi (00:20:14):
Yeah. I think Lightning is still very underappreciated. I think everything that’s happening around podcasting 2.0 and the work Adam Curry is doing, and just direct peer-to-peer, micropayments, and streaming money, and authentication layers, those things, I think all of it is very underutilized and underappreciated. I think it’s insanely magical. We call it magic internet money for a reason. If you’re playing around with this stuff and if it works, come and enter early days, payment still fail, Lightning is not perfect, Bitcoin is not perfect, and so on, but it’s improving at such a rapid pace.

Gigi (00:20:51):
If you’re listening to this in a podcasting 2.0 app, you can stream sets right now. It’s not hard to set this up on either side. This is insanely magical, and I think it’s still. A lot of people are sleeping on this. The fact that this exists is amazing. I think it has the power to disrupt advertisement models. I think it has the power to create whole new spaces in cyberspace that can work and monetize themselves. I think all of it is very underappreciated still.

Preston Pysh (00:21:26):
What timeline do you have based on an S curve? When we just look at Bitcoin adoption, you were talking about how it’s just taking off at this point. We have so many different entities involved in Bitcoin now that it just seems so inevitable. How about on the Lightning side, and if you can maybe talk to the incentives that are going to drive the adoption in lightning?

Gigi (00:21:50):
Yeah. That’s a really good question. There are multiple things here at play. First and foremost, the technology has to mature and we have to build out certain layers around just providing liquidity for users and also making it easy to use, making it easier to understand. All the concepts are very foreign and novel, and people don’t know what Bitcoin is and what sets are and how this works, and why do we need to write down words or what have you, but all of that is improving.

Gigi (00:22:22):
So I’m incredibly optimistic in that regard, but I think what’s even harder to put a year on or harder to put on a timeline is the psychological change that is necessary of how to use this technology and also how to use the internet and how the internet could look like, and how is audio content and video content produced, and what is expected, and should it be free or not, and is there an expectation of supporting creators directly.

Gigi (00:22:57):
I think this will come as well because as we see, I think censorship is at an all time high, self-censorship is at an all time high, deplatforming is at an all time high. So it’s a very necessary technology as well, but this societal shift, I think, as they say, the old guard has to die and make room for the young leagues that will figure this out on their own and intuitively. It’s very similar. When email came around for the first time, most people were just still using fax machines for the longest time. Even though something way, way, way superior was here, they just didn’t see the need and they didn’t figure it out. So I think this transition will take longer than the technological majority will take.

Preston Pysh (00:23:38):
Any other things that you think are maybe happening in the space that is underappreciated?

Gigi (00:23:44):
Well, I think the whole energy question, the whole merging of the Bitcoin mining sector with the energy sector is still also underappreciated. I think it’s getting more traction now, and more people are waking up to it I think in part because of the work of people like Marty Bent and Steve Barber and so on that are very open about this and sharing their thoughts very widely. I really like the way that Marty’s thinking about it, that it’s going to be a question of what will happen first. Will Bitcoin miners become energy providers or will energy providers become Bitcoin miners?

Gigi (00:24:22):
The race is on. As you said before, Bitcoin, it eats up this unorganized entropy. It eats up all this stranded energy, and it does something useful with it. This is so massive because the energy sector, it’s not a straightforward thing supplying civilization with energy, depending on the geography, deploying different industry sectors and supplying just the population in general with energy. It’s a very complex issue. Bitcoin is the perfect fit because it is the buy off last resort when it comes to energy.

Gigi (00:25:02):
Bitcoin mining is very unique in its energy load profile. You can switch it on and off at a whim. Bitcoin mining is progressless. So you don’t need to power it up or power it down, not really. It’s not like aluminum smelting or what have you or other things that were eating up stranded energy before Bitcoin came along. So I think it will disrupt, yeah, basically all of the energy sector in the next 10 or 20 years and it will, yeah, it will take some time for the energy people to realize this as well.

Preston Pysh (00:25:37):
I think they’re coming around to it, though. If we compare where we were at a year ago to right now, it almost seems like there are tons of energy producers that are looking at Texas, and they’re looking at some of these other parts in the world and they’re saying, “Oh, my Lord! What do you mean I can monetize all this excess energy?” I mean, I think there’s something massive brewing on this front, and I think it’s happening very quickly.

Gigi (00:26:04):
Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. I would definitely agree. I think there are some situations where it’s a no-brainer. It’s a match made in heaven. With the flare gas mining, for example, you have to flare the gas. Usually, you don’t utilize it at all and now you can. As you say, you can monetize it, and it’s good for oil production, it’s good for Bitcoin, it’s good for the environment. Everyone is making money of it. It’s a win, win, win situation. I think it will spread from these no-brainer opportunities to the wider energy sector. Yeah. I think a lot of people are also working on using Bitcoin to accelerate the energy transition and build out energy sites that would otherwise be not feasible.

Gigi (00:26:59):
If you have to, I don’t know, build out a hybrid project and it would be economically not feasible to do so, Bitcoin miners can step in and go, “Okay. For the first five years or whatever, we’re going to take the energy. We’re going to put some containers there and mine,” and suddenly it makes sense economically to build up this project. Yeah. As you say, all of it is happening, but it’s also a slow process, I think, because you don’t change your mind on Bitcoin overnight.

Preston Pysh (00:27:29):
No, it takes time.

Gigi (00:27:34):
Yeah. It definitely takes time, and I think-

Preston Pysh (00:27:36):
I think the bottom line for some of these companies it’s going to become so obvious when their competitors are just adding so much to their bottom line by incorporating this strategy into it that it’s almost going to be impossible to ignore.

Gigi (00:27:52):
Yeah. Again, I have to fall back to one of the Bitcoin memes. It’s going to happen readily and then suddenly. I think with the news, Exxon is now being outspoken about Bitcoin mining and those things. In a lot of modern rooms, I think a lot of discussions are going on. It’s like, “Okay. What are these people doing? What do they know that we do not know?”

Preston Pysh (00:28:15):
Don’t know, yes. Yeah. So let’s talk about proof of stake versus proof of work. This is, in my opinion, one of the most important things. The difference between these two is probably one of the most important things for somebody that’s new coming into this space to fully understand. So if you were going to characterize the two of them, please do so, and then talk to us about the concerns that you have for proof of stake because I know you have quite a few.

Gigi (00:28:46):
Okay. I’ll try. I’ll have to collect myself. I did not anticipate this question, I have to be honest. Okay. Proof of sake is basically a scam, period. It doesn’t work, it cannot work. Just in terms of timing, proof of stake systems always need to do some proof of work in secret to fight off these race conditions and so on. Okay.

Preston Pysh (00:29:10):
Explain. Explain.

Gigi (00:29:10):
Where should I even start?

Preston Pysh (00:29:12):
Well, no, explain that because I’ve never heard that. I’ve never heard that point of view before. Explain that.

Gigi (00:29:18):
Either they’re doing some proof of work secretly just a little bit as an anti-cheat mechanism or they have a centralized timing server. There is no other way. There is no global time on earth. There is no global time in the universe. There just isn’t because of relativity. So a light signal takes 50 milliseconds to travel from one place of the earth to the other. So there is no global state. You cannot snap with your finger and decide this is the global state of the world because you will always have a 50 millisecond fussy period where it’s in the terminate. Signals need to travel back and forth. There is no global state in the universe and there is no global state on earth.

Gigi (00:30:03):
So if you reduce the block time to lower than 50 milliseconds, for example, it would be absolutely impossible to find consensus, and that’s also why chains that have slower, shorter block times, they have more orphan blocks because the risk of running into consensus problems is higher, and Bitcoin’s 10 minutes is just like, “Okay. That’s good enough.” Even if you have latency issues and so on, 10 minutes is long enough for the earth to agree on the state, and this is a physical problem, and proof of stake cannot solve this problem. Period. You need to have timestamp service that are centralized, two or three of them, that tell you the time because for transactions and in order of transactions, you need to know the time because, otherwise, you would be able to spend money that you do not have. You would be able to spend money that didn’t arrive yet.

Gigi (00:30:55):
For consensus to arise, you need an absolute order of events. In the universe, there is no absolute order of events. It’s all relative. That’s why you need to build up your own arrow of time, and so proof of work is the only thing that works. All right. That’s one thing. That’s just the time aspect.

Gigi (00:31:11):
With the proof of stake, one of the biggest problems that we can’t solve was who gets the tokens, who gets the initial supply, how do you distribute the money. First of all, who is allowed to print the money and how do you distribute? How does proof of stake solve it? Who decides who can print? Who decides about the money supply, and who gets it? Are you aware of the term stake grinding and validator selection and all those kind of things?

Preston Pysh (00:31:44):
I’ve heard some of it through the Ethereum.

Gigi (00:31:46):
Yeah. That’s a big problem. You know what solves this? Proof of work. If you’re a validator or if you control most validators, you are the one who selects the next validator. So who gets the money next? If you control all of it, then you just give yourself the next slot, and so on and so forth and so on and so forth. The systems that run into that, do you know how they solve it most of the time? With something that’s truly random, which is proof of work. It’s all stupid.

Gigi (00:32:11):
Why are we playing these games? Bitcoin exists. Bitcoin works. Bitcoin is fair. Why are you trying to print your own money? Why are you trying to print your own money into your own bucket? It’s all unethical. It’s all very, very unethical. I’m starting to lose my patience because Bitcoin has been around for a very long time, and your proof of work, proof of stake, shitcoin token, did you mine yourself or pre-mine yourself? Most people don’t know. Ethereum had a 70% pre-mine, 7-0, 70% pre-mine. Very few people, five or six people had 70% of the Ethereum supply before it launched, and all the other projects are very similar. There’s a few select people that print the money because it’s a hard problem.

Gigi (00:32:58):
How do you generate money fairly and distribute it across the earth just like gold was distributed? It distributed fairly all around the earth without anyone deciding who gets the money. It’s a really, really hard problem. Satoshi solved it and he didn’t take anything for himself and he disappeared. That’s why Bitcoin can’t be repeated. It’s the immaculate conception of sound money. So why do people continue to improve upon that? They don’t even know the problems that proof of work solves. That’s the thing.

Gigi (00:33:31):
The proof of stake people have no idea what kind of problems proof of work solves. So they are not even understanding the problem correctly, and they’re trying to come up with a solution and all the solutions are flawed. As I said in the beginning, you always have a certain quorum of people that decide what the truth is. In summary, in one sentence, proof of work relies on physics to tell you what is true, and proof of stake relies on human judgment, and I will tell you what is true, and that’s the big difference.

Gigi (00:34:03):
We want to move away from human judgment. We want to remove humans from the equation when it comes to the very moral and ethical question of money production and who can control the monetary flows. We have to remove humans from the equation. Proof of stake does not remove the humans from the equation. It reintroduces them. That’s why I’m so worked up about it, and apologies to all the listeners that I’m ranting so hard on that, but it’s a moral and ethical question. Who should be able to print the money and who should be able to deplatform you? Who can stop the money flows? Who can freeze the accounts? Who says what is true and what is not?

Gigi (00:34:48):
Bitcoin and proof of work, it uses physics and mathematics, and something you cannot cheat. All the other systems like proof of stake and also the current fiat system, it’s all the same thing. It’s a quorum of people that decides what’s true. It’s the central bank. It’s the 12 people in the room that decide on monetary policy. We see this all the time. Just look at the proof of stake systems that exist. It’s human judgment all the way down. That’s why these systems, they pause and they restart, they change the monetary supply, and they blacklist people and deplatform people, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’re back to the old system.

Gigi (00:35:22):
Proof of stake is the system, the central bank system that we currently have, and it’s immoral, it’s unethical. Proof of work is a safe and secure and fair system that is based in reality, that is based in mathematics, that is based in physics itself, and it actually solves these problems all the other people try to solve.

Preston Pysh (00:35:44):
I want to read something here from one of your articles. So I’m reading this article and I’m just blown away at the intellect coming out of this article. So the title of this is Proof of Life. “What is life? The question of whether something is alive or not obviously hinges on one’s defined definition of life. Life is endlessly complex, so it is no surprise that the answer of the question what is life leads to a multitude of answers. New age speculation aside, it seems that life is a process, not a substance. We can try to describe this process by looking at things which are alive and looking at what they do. They tend to grow, reproduce, and respond. The inherent traits are made up of smaller units, cells, and use energy to maintain their internal structure in the face of entropy.” I love this sentence, “They use energy to maintain their internal structure in the face of entropy.”

Preston Pysh (00:36:49):
I’m going to keep reading here. I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you, Gigi. “From a physics perspective, living things are thermodynamic systems. They utilize the energy differences in their surroundings to maintain a specific molecular organization and create copies of themselves. Thermodynamically speaking, living systems are able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of free energy taken in from the environment. In short, living things create order out of chaos.” Then you write, “Bitcoin is doing exactly that. It takes energy from the environment and puts things in order, i.e., it decreases its internal entropy.”

Preston Pysh (00:37:32):
So you have an incredible gift for writing and explaining things so clearly. The rest of this article is mind blowing. Here’s my question. It’s not about Bitcoin. It’s, where does this ability to write so clearly of an insanely complex topic, I mean, we’re talking about life itself here, and what you just described here in a way with energy and entropy and order is just, I just took a step back when I’m reading this and I’m saying, “My God! How does a person take something that’s so complex and distill it down into something so understandable?” How do you do that?

Gigi (00:38:11):
Yeah. I think one of my favorite educators was Richard Feynman, and he had this saying, “It’s not complex, it’s just a lot of it.” What he meant by that is that when you break it down to first principles, it’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s just the world is, there’s so much of it going on at once that it becomes complex, and it has the appearance of insane complexity, but the passage you just read, it’s very, very simple. If you’re not living, you’re decaying because the world is chaotic and you have radiation and all kinds of things that will just rip molecules apart and just do all kinds of things, and give it a long time, everything will fall apart, and that’s just the way the universe works.

Gigi (00:38:59):
We have these forces that they’re constantly going on and there’s also the … I can’t remember who said it, but a couple thousand years ago, the only constant is change, and that’s the universe for you. It’s all just the dance of the molecules. So again, it’s very simple. If you want to have something that has a certain internal structure, you need to fight against it. You need to use energy to keep the structure alive, and this is true for buildings. This is true for companies. This is true for everything that’s living, and this is true for Bitcoin.

Gigi (00:39:30):
The motivation to write this article, Bitcoin is Life or Proof of Life, I mix this up now because I’m working on a chapter that is related to these thoughts, which is named differently. It was almost obvious to me that Bitcoin is this living, breathing thing. Again, these are not my ideas. The first one who came to this conclusion was Ralph Merkle, who is the namesake of the Merkle tree that most Bitcoiners should know. If you put hashes into hashes and so on, you have one hash at the top and it’s the Merkle tree. So it’s a very nice way to produce a fingerprint of a data basically that Bitcoin uses. So Bitcoin is made up of Merkle tree, so to speak.

Gigi (00:40:14):
He came to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the first cybernetic form of life, this first cybernetic organism because it keeps itself alive and it pays us to keep it alive. Bitcoin pays miners to keep it alive, and it’s all about the internal structure. Of course, the internal structure of Bitcoin is data, but you still need someone to keep the data intact and alive and find it useful enough to pass it around. Again, with data, you have to reproduce it to different mediums. Every hard drive will die and deteriorate. It doesn’t matter what you use. If you use CD-ROMs, to pick a very stupid example, CD-ROMs are not a good … Shout out to one of the Twitter fights that is always going on, but CD-ROMs are terrible in terms of storage. Try to read a CD-ROM that’s 20 years old. You will have no fun with that.

Gigi (00:41:10):
So I bring all of this up because we have informational constructs that behave very similarly. There are some things, some informational things that outlasted empires. Religious texts would be one of those examples, and they are also, if you allow me to stretch the metaphor by a lot, it’s also a living thing because it started in one language and then it got translated to another language and it keeps itself alive because people find it useful and they repeat it and they replicate it and so on.

Gigi (00:41:43):
Bitcoin falls in that category as well, but with Bitcoin, it actually is a very high frequency living and breathing system. We saw it. One of the best examples was the mining exodus in China. 50% of the hash rate gone from the network or I don’t even know how much it was, 50% or 60%, something like that, and it recovered without missing a beat. The heart rate of the Bitcoin network, as we said before, is 10 minutes approximately, and approximately every 10 minutes, a new block came in. It doesn’t matter that just a whole, really, really large country went offline and made Bitcoin mining illegal.

Gigi (00:42:23):
Very organically, all the cells of this organism, of this worldwide organism, they found another jurisdiction. They moved there, they reassembled themselves, and the hash rate came back online. Most ASICs were not destroyed. They just moved somewhere else, and this wound was healed and Bitcoin marches on.

Gigi (00:42:43):
So I think the life metaphor, the metaphor of an organism is a very apt one. Again, coming back to Ralph Merkle, he said the same thing. He was like, “If nuclear war destroyed half of the planet, Bitcoin would march on unhindered.” He understood very deeply how this system operates, and you only need a couple of people mining and the difficulty adjustment will do the rest.

Preston Pysh (00:43:08):
So I want to jump over to this question that you have proposed to people because I find this question so interesting. What’s the single best question you can ask someone to gain an understanding of how much they know about Bitcoin? I know your answer.

Gigi (00:43:27):
I always use the same one, which is let’s say the last Bitcoin block arrived eight minutes ago. Preston, how long will it take for the next Bitcoin block to come? When will the next Bitcoin block come?

Preston Pysh (00:43:44):
I don’t even want answer this because I don’t want to be judged.

Gigi (00:43:45):
So the last one was eight minutes ago. When will the next Bitcoin block come approximately?

Preston Pysh (00:43:50):
So I saw this thread and I saw some really intelligent answers that people would put there and answers that I hadn’t really … because when a person hears this, they’re like, “Oh, well, two minutes, right, because every block is 10 minutes,” but that just shows you how little you really understand about the math and all the other inner workings that are at play. So one of the points that somebody brought up is, well, let’s just say China banned Bitcoin and we are dealing with a giant difficulty issue because all this processing power has gone offline. Maybe the average blocks are 16 minutes at that point. So maybe the answer would be you would maybe expect another eight minutes from now or whatnot, but so much of it is probability base. So I don’t even know that you can answer that question with any type of confidence without somebody who’s a mathematical genius rolling their eyes at you.

Gigi (00:44:49):
Well, the short correct answer is 10 minutes. It’s always 10 minutes. The reason for that is it’s very similar to the gambler’s fallacy. It’s like you’re standing at the roulette table, and let’s just pick red and black, and let’s say red came up 10 times in a row. What’s the chance that black will come up next? People are like, “Oh, yeah. Black has to come now.” It’s almost guaranteed that black is coming, but no, it’s wrong. Again, we’re back to coin flips. So it’s 50/50. The chance hasn’t changed, and the same is true for Bitcoin mining. It’s like every individual hash that you do has the same chance of finding a valid block, given that your nonce is picked randomly.

Gigi (00:45:30):
So it’s like rolling a dice, which has many, many, many, many sides, trillions of sides, and it averages out that if you roll this dice all the time, that it takes about 10 minutes until you actually manage to roll the right number. Again, it’s memoryless. So every single role has a minuscule chance of success. That’s why the correct answer is like 10 minutes from now, always, and it’s also always wrong. It’s always wrong. Its probability is all the way down, but it’s a very good question to see where someone is at in their understanding of how Bitcoin works on the technical level.

Preston Pysh (00:46:15):
I loved it. Now, have you received any questions that you thought were good questions beyond that one that you just asked because I think that question is brilliant, by the way?

Gigi (00:46:25):
I think there were a couple of good ones, but it was a while ago when I asked it. So I don’t have it at the top of mind.

Preston Pysh (00:46:33):
Here’s a strange one for you. Why are you so obsessed with knowledge because, I mean, I’m looking at you there and you got your library behind you? You obviously, you were talking about Feynman and how you got all this stuff and you just got to condense it down to the stuff that’s actually first principles, but in order to do something like that, you have to have this foundation and this breadth of knowledge to start with in order to be able to piece that together and to know where to look for the first principle. So for you, personally, what has incentivized you to become so knowledgeable and to be so well-read and to be a knowledge pig?

Gigi (00:47:16):
No one ever asked me this question. So I’ll have to give you that something, I don’t know. I think I always just thought that stuff was super, super interesting. It’s amazing. The universe is amazing and the world is amazing, and I always wanted to find out how the world works and how this stuff actually works, how it actually works. It’s almost like a child. It’s like ask why five times. I know you like this as well, right?

Preston Pysh (00:47:45):
Yes, yes.

Gigi (00:47:48):
That was you, right? It’s just keep asking why and you will see that absolutely everything, everything is interesting. So yeah, I always like computers. So computer science came naturally to me like, “How do computers actually work? What makes all this magic work?” Make no mistake, it is absolutely magical. What we have now, the fact that we are speaking and I can be an invisible man, and you don’t know who I am and where I am, and we are speaking through these tubes that are the internet and no one really knows how it works, but it works, and people are listening while they’re on the run and they have their magical beans in their ears that speak to them and everything is connected wirelessly, you don’t even see what’s going on, but it just works, and so on. All of it, it’s pure magic. Not only Bitcoin is magic, but all of this stuff, it’s insane that it works.

Gigi (00:48:39):
Of course, once you figure this out or once you realize this, then you realize, “Okay. What’s biology?” It’s doing the same thing, just way more complex.

Preston Pysh (00:48:52):
Yeah. Oh, God! God!

Gigi (00:48:53):
We can’t build those machines that is a cell or that is a worm or they fly or what have you. Those are incredibly complex things. I don’t even want to call them machines because I think it’s more complicated than that. You can’t reduce absolutely everything down to a pure machine thinking, I think. Yeah. It just went from there, and then you go into, for example, with the cryptography stuff, the root of physics and mathematics. Why does the universe work in that way? Why is it allowed?

Gigi (00:49:32):
There was this thing. I think it was Julian Assange who said, “For some reason, the universe smiles on encryption.” Why do we have this asymmetric defense? Why is it that I can do a little bit of math and no government in the world can extract the secret from me? Why is that? You go down that route and it will blow your mind with days on end, I think. It’s one of the reasons why some of the mathematicians go insane. It’s like you study infinity long enough and your brain will implode.

Gigi (00:50:02):
I found some things interesting, and it just spread from there. I figured out that everything is interesting if you dig down into it for long enough. With Bitcoin, it just, as I said before, it completely blew my brains out. How can this thing create information that is value applied because I dismissed Bitcoin for the longest time because I thought I knew my computer science and I knew that every computer system can be hacked, and there’s copy, paste. You can’t have bits that are actually valuable without the central authority. You can’t have it.

Gigi (00:50:32):
Then I realized, “Okay. Bitcoin is actually created. How does it do it, and who was genius enough to figure this out?” That’s a reason why a lot of people say it’s alien technology. It boggles their mind. Coming back to magic internet money, more and more people are waking up to this realization as well. It’s almost too good to be true. It’s like a fairytale. There comes this shadowy figure, and he manages to not duck himself and not mess up his anonymity, and he creates this thing and he stays around for a while to just make sure that he gets out the door and then he disappears. It’s straight from a movie or a fairy tale.

Gigi (00:51:16):
That’s why I still keep breeding about Bitcoin and digging into all the aspects it touches, which will eventually be everything, but I had to study up on economics and monetary theory and monetary history. I knew nothing about this stuff. I was coming from the computer science crowd. I knew what a hashing algorithm is and what the public private key pair was, and that was my start with Bitcoin. I knew nothing about money and I didn’t care about money. Paradoxically, I still don’t. I care about fixing the money, but that’s about it.

Preston Pysh (00:51:52):
You have a really great quote in your article about time and Bitcoin, and the quote is, “The time stamping was the root problem to be solved, is always apparent by examining the references at the end of the Bitcoin white paper. Out of the eight references in total, three are about time stamping itself,” and you list the three things there. You’ve really helped me personally understand why that is so important and why that’s the revolutionary breakthrough into what Bitcoin is fundamentally doing is this ability to timestamp a ledger and for it to become immutable. Just brilliant writing, just brilliant writing.

Gigi (00:52:38):
A lot of people … It’s interesting because coming back to the proof of state discussion and all of those things, I truly think that a lot of people that are working on these projects have not read those papers because then they would realize how difficult the problem is. A lot of people, they know the Byzantine Generals Problem. They know at least the phrase Byzantine Generals Problem and so on, and Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals Problem, but it solves it in this roundabout weird probabilistic way where you create this piece of information, and you can all agree on the truthfulness of this piece of information.

Gigi (00:53:13):
The reason why you could do it is because you have these absolute things that behave like timestamps. You can map them to our time in Bitcoin because, again, a block comes in every 10 minutes approximately. So the way I explain it that Bitcoin is time is every clock, it doesn’t matter if you take a grandfather’s clock or one that uses a cesium or one that use the atomic clock that’s on, you always have something that swings and something that produces a tick, like a tick tock of a clock. Bitcoin does the same thing. It’s just that every tick is one block.

Gigi (00:53:51):
So you can use this to build up a sequence of events that everyone can agree upon. Again, a lot of people misunderstand the piece. They just see the title and think, “Yeah, Bitcoin is time,” in the sense of money is stored time and so on. That’s not what this is about. It’s about building up a purely informational construct, something that is just information that creates an arrow of time where everyone can agree this is what happened first, and this is what happened next, and this is what happened next, and no one was able to modify this information, no one was able to mess with this information.

Gigi (00:54:28):
This is why Bitcoin, every single block is linked. That’s why we call it the blockchain. It’s chained together, it’s linked. Every block header contains the hash of the previous block. What this means is that every single block speaks for the entirety of the Bitcoin network, and that’s why it works. That’s why you can’t be so sure that this is what happened. It’s all linked together, and removing those links and they’re doing it anew, it takes a lot of time and energy, and that’s why you can look at it and you say, “Okay. I can say basically with certainty, with virtual certainty, this is what happened, and I know this because of the underlying game theory, the underlying mathematics, the underlying physics.”

Gigi (00:55:14):
A lot of computers had to crunch a lot of numbers for a long time and use a lot of energy for this number to appear in the universe. There is no other way, and that’s how Bitcoin solves the coordination problem, the Byzantine Generals problem, and all the chance, and it has to do it via time stamping. You need to have an absolute measure of time in the sense that A came before B came before C and so on. This is what Bitcoin does, and this is what only Bitcoin can do in a trustless manner.

Gigi (00:55:42):
If you don’t use proof of work and if you don’t use, to use Adam Gibson’s term, the reification of information, that information speaks for itself, information itself behaves like a physical, tangible thing or like Hugo Nguyen put it, “With proof of work, we give blocks weight.” We give them real physical weight and they behave like physical things. Without debt, you will always fall back to just trust us, trust us this is what happened because we, the quorum, we signed up. Just look, we signed it with our keys, and we tell you this is what happened. We are the central bank and we tell you A happened before B and before C and it’s signed by this key, and we just tell you this was the order of events.

Gigi (00:56:22):
No, we want to move away from this. You need something else. You need something physical. You need something real. You need something that’s independently, verifiable. You just look at it and you know it’s there and this is what happened. That’s why also people, when writing about proof of work some years ago, they used the pyramids as an example. The Egyptians pyramids, the great pyramid of Giza, it’s not proof of stake. You can verify yourself that this is there and it took a lot of work for it to be there.

Gigi (00:56:48):
This is also how Bitcoin works. You just look at it and you know, “All right. Something had to happen in the real world for this to exist. This was not made up.” That’s also why Bitcoin is not fiat money. It just is not. It is a very real money. It is very much like gold, but it’s way, way better than gold. You can teleport it. You can store it in your head and so on. I mean, everyone knows that by now, but it is not fiat money.

Gigi (00:57:14):
Bitcoin was created by Satoshi in the mathematical space, and miners are just digging it out, but we know from the very beginning, from the Chinese’s block, 21 million, never more, and Bitcoin is already defined. We’re discovering it just like gold. Gold doesn’t grow underground. It’s there, and miners are digging it out. The same is true for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is defined in a mathematical space. That’s one of the main misconceptions people have about mining. You do not create Bitcoin by transmuting energy into Bitcoin. That’s not how it works because, otherwise, if we would link money to energy, then if we would get way, way, way better at producing energy, we would automatically create more money.

Gigi (00:57:57):
If you have a fusion reaction, you have a money printer. That’s not a good idea. Satoshi fixed the supply schedule in time. We know exactly how much Bitcoin will exist and it’s already pre-defined. It’s pre-defined in time and minus are digging it out of the mathematical space. That’s why we can say with certainty, approximately in the year 2140, all the Bitcoins will be mined, and that’s it, 21 million, never more. Once people understand this, then it’s also clear, Bitcoin mining does not waste energy or so. You’re not using the energy to mine Bitcoin. The energy is there for something else. The energy is there to solve the coordination problem. The energy is there to build this protective layer around the records of everyone. The energy is there so you produce something that is real and something that you cannot cheat. The energy is there because Bitcoin has to be physical money and not political money. We want to move away from political money where people make decisions. It has to be physical, and proof of work makes it physical.

Preston Pysh (00:58:58):
Absolutely mind-blowing stuff. Last question for you, and this one’s pretty technical. BIP-119, there was a lot of questions from Twitter, people wanting to hear your opinion on this, and I think that there’s two main pieces here. It’s the process for getting the BIP pushed through then also the BIP itself. If you can explain it in layman’s terms for the non-technical folks as to what we’re talking about here, and just describe your thoughts on it.

Gigi (00:59:28):
Yeah. I think I have to disappoint most of the Twitter people because I don’t have a strong opinion on it. Honestly, I didn’t read too much into it yet. I think the controversy is only two weeks old now or something like that. I usually try to ignore the drama of the week as best as I can, and if it goes on for a prolonged time, I will dig deeper into it, but I think, as you said, there are two issues. The first issue is how can we do this on a tactical level, and is the proposal actually technically sound, and there are certain opinions on that.

Gigi (01:00:03):
The second one is about the activation method, the way that the people that worked on this for a very long time are trying to push this into Bitcoin, so to speak, and get it activated and so on. I think, in hindsight, everyone’s always smart in hindsight, of course. In hindsight, we should have had this discussion where it’s taproot, and a lot of people were loud about this like, “Should we really push taproot through in that way and do the speedy trial thing and so on and so forth?”

Gigi (01:00:35):
Now, it comes back and bites us in the ass that there is some precedent for pushing something through quicker than usual, so to speak. Maybe I can add this as a comment. I think what’s interesting in Bitcoin is that no one can tell you what Bitcoin is. Again, as I said in the very beginning, Bitcoin puts the individual at the center. That’s why you have to decide for yourself what Bitcoin is and what it should be. So we will always have these contentions in Bitcoin. A lot of people I think already know this. There will be a discussion around privacy and so on. There will be future upgrades to Bitcoin where most people probably won’t agree.

Gigi (01:01:17):
The reason why it is that way is because, precisely because there is no central authority in Bitcoin. You, yourself with your node, by running the code, by holding your own keys, you decide what Bitcoin is, and you have to grapple with this reality and you have to make a decision what kind of software to run, what are the consensus rules and so on. This will always be true. Of course, Bitcoin will ossify and making upgrades will be harder as time goes on and so on as other internet protocols, for example, ossified in the past or as languages and so on are also an example.

Gigi (01:01:59):
You will always have to make the decision. I also compare Bitcoin to a game in the past. What kind of rules you want to play by? This is a very individual decision because there is no central authority. There is no one who will dictate what Bitcoin is, what are the right rules, and what are not.

Gigi (01:02:21):
Maybe one last point, I think a lot of people are not really aware about the implications of pushing soft forks through because there’s a soft fork and there’s a hard fork and the hard fork is bad and dangerous, and then it won’t be Bitcoin anymore, and we would, I mean, we had contentious hard forks in the past, and then you have two coins and so on, and blah, blah, blah. So soft fork is good and soft fork is always good and not risky at all, and so on and so forth.

Gigi (01:02:50):
That’s not actually true. A soft fork can be very risky as well. Also, just keep in mind that reversing a soft fork is not really possible because reversing a soft fork will always be a hard fork. So we should have the debate and be careful about pushing things into Bitcoin. I think the most important bit about Bitcoin is to not break it. Again, as I said before, I think we have one shot at this. I think there was only one immaculate conception of sound money and fair distribution at all the chess.

Gigi (01:03:23):
So I think we should be very cautious. We should be very, very sure that we are not doing something stupid and breaking something. Again, I don’t have a very informed opinion on it. I did not read into the technicalities of the proposal, and I’m also not up-to-date with the drama. So apologies to all my Twitter friends for not having an update on this one.

Preston Pysh (01:03:52):
Do you find Bitcoin being a little bit like a cell in that as that cell develops, the epigenetics get set and then they can’t really be reversed? So a heart cell is a heart cell and an eye cell is an eye cell and a Bitcoin protocol basically materializes and matures into Bitcoin, and this infighting in the soft forks and everything just you get to a certain point in the life of the DNA of Bitcoin developing that the epigenetics are set.

Gigi (01:04:25):
Yeah. Maybe, maybe. We’ll see. Again, I think you see this with other protocols as well. Bitcoin is often compared to TCP/IP, for example. That’s why people are talking also about LNP/BP, so Lightning Network Protocol slash Bitcoin Protocol. It’s the equivalent of TCP/IP. IP is the very base. The internet protocol just pushes around zeroes at once, basically, and TCP is what creates the more nuanced connections, so to speak. It’s a very nice analogy.

Gigi (01:05:02):
If you look at this tech stack, we knew very early on that the IP space, IP numbers, IP addresses is just too small. We will have way more devices than we have IP addresses. That’s why in your home network you will always have 192.168 or 10001 or what have you. That’s why we have network address translation. Not every device is uniquely identified. We have this additional layer. We have this internet backbone routers and they have their sets of numbers, and every single home has basically the same sets of numbers, and one home gets one public number, and then you have a couple of private numbers that the home network figures itself out and so on.

Gigi (01:05:45):
It’s all not very beautiful and very complicated, and it grew organically. That’s what we have. We try to upgrade from IP version four to IP version six, where it would be better engineering-wise. Every device would have a unique identifier and so on and unique number. We tried to upgrade this for, I don’t know, probably 20 years now. I have no idea, but for a long time.

Gigi (01:06:07):
So that’s also some sort of ossification. It just takes a long time, but it’s not really ossified. Devices support the newer protocol, which will take a very long time. I think in Bitcoin it will be similar. I think in Bitcoin, the base layer, it will ossify in a sense, and it’s also … If you are a pension fund that is holding trillions upon trillions of dollars in Bitcoin, do you want to change Bitcoin? Do you want to upgrade it, so to speak?

Preston Pysh (01:06:35):
No.

Gigi (01:06:36):
Yeah. Exactly. You probably don’t want to do this. So you have multiple interests that will fight against those upgrades. That’s why I think it will ossify, but we have second layer technology very much like we have with other internet technologies. So I think a lot of the things, I mean, take everything I say with a grain of salt because without SegWit we wouldn’t have Lightning. So this was definitely a very important soft fork to get in.

Gigi (01:07:04):
In my opinion, there are some soft forks that would be great to have, but again, I think it’s more important to not break Bitcoin, and just to name one, I think across input signature aggregation, for example, would be good because you can define constructs that you can’t think of future layers that would do settlement on Bitcoin, and you would have privacy as a byproduct, so to speak. I think that would be good. That’s the upgrade from HGP to HGPS and just getting SSL into the internet stack and have secure connections by default.

Gigi (01:07:38):
So I think some of those things, some of the upgrades are bound to happen because everyone basically agrees that this is a good thing, and this will, again, take a long time, but I think, in general, let’s say 30 years from now, I would be surprised if Bitcoin upgrades a lot. I think it will be ossified by that point in time.

Preston Pysh (01:07:56):
Yeah, yeah. Gigi, I can’t thank you enough for making time to come on the show. I’m a huge fan of yours. Your writing is phenomenal. Please, and we’re going to have all this in the show notes, but tell people where they can find you and connect with you if they’re interested.

Gigi (01:08:12):
Yeah. The best place is probably on Twitter. I’m Dergigi on Twitter, and my Twitter handle. Dergigig.com is my site where I publish all my writing, and you’ll find other links to other projects I’m involved with. Yeah. You can read all my articles there. You can also read my first book, 21lessons.com. You can read it for free online. Guy Swann did the audiobook. I’m running the whole project basically at the whole site on a value for value basis. So it’s all published under an open source, free license. You’re free to use it, remix it, translate it. Do what you want, print it out, sell it. I don’t care.

Preston Pysh (01:08:49):
That’s awesome.

Gigi (01:08:51):
Yeah, it’s great because the book was translated in, I don’t know, 12 or 15 languages or something like that. Just the community came together and was like, “Hey, that’s helpful. We’re going to translate it.” I think my articles, it’s now more than 150 translations or something. It’s completely insane. I can highly recommend this model. Just set the content free. Information wants to be free and information is non-scarce. Just give it out there. Again, as I said in the very beginning, I think the world would be a way, way, better place if more people understood Bitcoin. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I try to help people understand Bitcoin.

Gigi (01:09:29):
I’m actually somewhat actively working on a second book. I just have too many things going on. So writing is slow, but I’ll get it done, and I’ll get it out there, and I’ll publish it under a free license as well. The first couple of chapters, one of them is Bitcoin is Time, is online as well. It’s 21waysbook.com. You can read the introduction at the first three or four chapters or something.

Preston Pysh (01:09:53):
It is phenomenal, by the way. Absolutely phenomenal.

Gigi (01:09:56):
Thank you.

Preston Pysh (01:09:57):
Gigi, thank you so much for coming on. Really enjoyed this.

Gigi (01:10:00):
Thanks so much for having me, Preston. It was fun.

Preston Pysh (01:10:03):
If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that, and it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. With that, thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (01:10:35):
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