[00:02:49] Max Hillebrand: Then, you know, on my own, looked into a couple of different schools of thoughts that were available and, you know, Keynesian economics, Chicago school, et cetera, they don’t really make that much sense. So I kept looking until I found the Austrian School of Economics and Praxeology, which is just a, a correct explanation of how the economy functions and, and explain so much as so, so easily, so effortlessly.

[00:03:10] Max Hillebrand: And that really enthralled me. And so I studied the Austrian economics long before I went into Bitcoin and that kind of gave me a head start in, in some of these aspects.

[00:03:19] Preston Pysh: What age are you at this point? What age is this happening? Because for me, I’m telling you, as a kid, there’s no way I was into any of this type of stuff.

[00:03:28] Preston Pysh: Even as a young adult, I wasn’t into any of this stuff. So what age is this for you?

[00:03:34] Max Hillebrand: So I started working when I was around 10. And, and really got into the, the, the theory part of it around maybe 12, 13 ish. And then, yeah, also economics team, I don’t think it was 15, 16.

[00:03:47] Preston Pysh: You know, this is not normal. Max, that’s not normal.

[00:03:50] Preston Pysh: What propelled you to be so intellectually engaged at such a young age? What was driving that?

[00:04:00] Max Hillebrand: Well, really just understanding on, on why should I make money? Why should I do a business and get a job? Basically, that’s something that that’s, it’s counterintuitive to some extent. So especially when you experience it, you just want to learn a bit more.

[00:04:12] Preston Pysh: So did your opinion from what you hold today, dear, has it changed much since 15?

[00:04:19] Max Hillebrand: Well, yeah, for sure. I knew nothing back then. I still know nothing, but like, you know, especially like I thought I knew a thing or two about economics until I got into Bitcoin, which made me realize that no, I knew nothing. And another really humbling experience was going to the Mises Institute for a Mises University one summer in Auburn, Alabama.

[00:04:40] Max Hillebrand: And there was a course on economics with a test afterwards, you know, and I went into it thinking like, oh, yeah, I’m going to ace this. It’s going to be easy. But no, I barely passed it. It was really, really tough. And the nuances of praxeology are really difficult.

[00:04:54] Preston Pysh: Huh. All right. We’ll talk to us specifically about this idea of dualism and the axiom of action.

[00:05:00] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. So, here, the book I would recommend this is Ludwig von Mises Theory and History. It’s a bit later where he really goes deep into the fundamental way of thinking about economics. And which questions we ought to ask and, and which starting points we should have, and he is most known for perfectly articulating the logical starting point, the axiom of human action humans act they, they’re in a current state of uneasiness, they have problems.

[00:05:25] Max Hillebrand: And they can allocate their scarce resources at their time and their capital to alleviate these problems and fix them. And doing this, fixing problem for yourself and for others is ultimately the entrepreneurial task. And that is a starting point that explains any single individual just analyzing isolated.

[00:05:46] Max Hillebrand: Just the way that you work as a human, but then also this can later be deduced for, you know, how humans work together, what exchanges and why we do it because it’s mutual beneficial and what is money and what’s the difference between base money and credit money and what is credit and why do we produce and such, how do we manage this gigantically complex thing that, that is the economy.

[00:06:08] Max Hillebrand: All of these things can, can later be deduced, but this was very clear in stating the logical starting point, which is human action.

[00:06:16] Preston Pysh: Wow.

[00:06:16] Max Hillebrand: And that’s what’s Praxeology means, by the way, Praxeology, the logic of human action Praxos.

[00:06:23] Preston Pysh: There’s another individual that seems to be very influential for you from a privacy standpoint.

[00:06:28] Preston Pysh: And this is a Herman Hope. Talk to us about him and how you came across this work, why it was influential to you just kind of from the beginning. And then maybe some of the higher level points that you’ve taken away from his work.

[00:06:41] Max Hillebrand: I stumbled upon Mises and then later, Mary Rothbard and after that, finally, Hansman, Hoppe, and Hoppe is a logical genius, , and he has in his book, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, he lays out a second axiom that is extremely useful and that is the axiom of argumentation and that humans have the capacity to understand what the truth and they, they can argue with each other to find it out and they can make precise claims on, on logical falsities.

[00:07:12] Max Hillebrand: With this, ultimately, we can deduce an entire science of ethics, a logically deduced and objective morality. What Hoppe here basically has achieved, something that for 2, 000 years was unanswered, can we derive an ought from an is, and this has always been deemed impossible, but builds on top of the action axiom and everything that we could deduce in economics.

[00:07:35] Max Hillebrand: And for me, it’s always state value free, where he was very clearly stating that this is just about causal consequences and not about an ethics. We cannot say that, you know, minimum wage is bad. We can just say that a minimum wage will lead to unemployment. But saying that it is bad, making this value judgment is not the task of an economist.

[00:07:56] Max Hillebrand: But with Hoppe, introducing on top of the action axiom, this argumentation axiom actually enables us to deduce an ethics, and we can clearly and correctly state that a private property society ought to be.

[00:08:10] Preston Pysh: Get into that more, especially the deduction of an arriving at this idea of private property being this emergent property of nature.

[00:08:20] Preston Pysh: And am I describing that correctly, that it’s an emergent property of nature?

[00:08:25] Max Hillebrand: Basically, right? So the, the, the problem is that, that humans have desires. Again, we live in a state of uneasiness and we want to solve them, but getting to that solution requires the use of scarce resources. So what, what are scarce resources fundamentally?

[00:08:39] Max Hillebrand: They’re, they’re those which can only be applied to one specific use case at one specific time. If you have a steak only Preston can eat it or I can eat it. There is just in our universe, no reality where both of us can eat the same piece of steak. That just doesn’t happen. And so this means there’s a fundamental conflict over who has the right to control those resources, like who gets to eat the steak.

[00:09:02] Max Hillebrand: And there are fundamentally three different solutions. Nobody owns it. That’s basically complete chaos, right? We cannot do anything. Everything is a conflict. Then the other solution would be some class of people gets to decide who gets to use these resources and another class of people does not. You And so this is basically a government apparatus where we have some people taxing and price controlling others so that they can manipulate how the resources and choose how these resources can be allocated.

[00:09:34] Max Hillebrand: And finally, the third solution is a private property solution, where the person who has created or homesteaded the resource gets to use it and own it, and he can transfer the legal ownership of this good to someone else via a gift or via a contract for a certain price. And the price of this transfer gets to be mutually disagreed upon by both the original owner, as well as the acquirer of this good.

[00:10:03] Max Hillebrand: And so property rights, contrary to slavery or communism, leads to an actual productive allocation of resources.

[00:10:11] Preston Pysh: The last person I want to discuss with you before we get into the more Bitcoin specific conversation is Rothbard. And you mentioned him earlier. You say that his book man, economy and state with power and markets is the most profound work of, of his, why do you think that?

[00:10:29] Preston Pysh: And what was your major insight that you captured from that particular work that, that makes you feel this way?

[00:10:36] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. Yeah. Rothbard is a, is a great historian. His series on the American foundations with conceived and liberty is outstanding. He’s a fantastic philosopher and, you know, moral speaker with things like ethics for liberty.

[00:10:49] Max Hillebrand: But he’s also a, a probably the greatest economist. And I think that his work with a man economy and state absolutely shows this. It is a few theoretical treaties. It starts from the very beginning on the theory of thought itself, so to say, and on how to think about economics, it lays out the axioms very similar to Mises has done, and then it deduces basically everything in the economic realm from there on out.

[00:11:15] Max Hillebrand: So the theory of the isolated individual and why we save and why we consume and such like this, as well as then the theory of the collaborative individual, right? People working together right. So, trade is analyzed as well as theft and different forms of production stages, credit, money interest rates on all of these.

[00:11:36] Max Hillebrand: It’s extremely, extremely thorough. Rothbard has, has a beautiful logic and, and a very approachable pros. It’s a joy to read. He’s, he’s hilarious. Rothbard is, is so funny and sometimes it clearly shows and the footnotes also incredible like the, the amount of references and. And research and link to up to other monumental treatises of economics, not just in the Austrian school, but also very thoroughly debunking all other claims of economic science in different thoughts.

[00:12:05] Max Hillebrand: It truly is a fascinating book and with the final part, power and markets, it goes really deep into the anarcho capitalist thought and goes quite radical. So radical. In fact, that it got cut for the very first print, the very first edit that that was published simply because it was like, Oh, this, this is a bit rough.

[00:12:24] Max Hillebrand: But when you actually read it, like, yeah, it’s rough, but it’s, it’s true. And because it’s very anti state or what? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It is very anti state, very radically pro liberty and pro human freedom and flourishing and private property and very condemning of any excuse of theft whatsoever. And if you do not have any excuses for theft, a lot of people are going to be angry with you because unfortunately in today’s society, theft is everywhere.

[00:12:52] Max Hillebrand: And there’s a lot of people who benefit greatly at the expense of others. When there clearly is no reason that this should be the case.

[00:12:59] Preston Pysh: Well, this is where I, this is where I want to go past the books and we’ll have links to all of that in the show notes if people do want to dig in a lot deeper on some of these recommendations that I know that you’ve put out there.

[00:13:10] Preston Pysh: So you have worked on Wasabi wallet. You’ve worked on Bitcoin core, BTC pay server, join market, L and D bisq. I mean, it goes on and on like you are a very, very busy engineer, software engineer builder. What of those projects that I’m listing and maybe others that I haven’t even listed, are you most passionate about or that you would say is where you spend or focus a lot of most of your time and energy?

[00:13:41] Max Hillebrand: I’m really passionate about all of them because they’re all amazing projects. And the thing is, so I’m not a software developer. I come much more again from, from the economic side of it. And, and to this day, I still don’t write a single line of code for a long time. I thought, Hey, I should probably, you know, go, go more deep into the technical side of it.

[00:13:59] Max Hillebrand: But then I realized that there’s a huge need for people who just know a lot about economics and system design, et cetera, rather than actually writing the lines of code. And so I started contributing to free and open source projects. Mainly because they need a lot of help. Yeah. But like, seriously, this stuff is barely working.

[00:14:17] Max Hillebrand: We all need to ensure that, that the tools that we use ourselves are working securely and much more than just developing needs to be done. And so I started out with just doing explanation videos and all tutorials and guides and writing documentations, et cetera. And you know, with this, you get to learn a lot more about the projects and find out ways on how they can be improved.

[00:14:38] Max Hillebrand: So I opened a bunch of feature requests and bug reports and things like this and got more and more involved in the project management side of things. But yeah, throughout these years, I think wasabi wallet was clearly the project that caught most of my attention because it aims to fix one of the two fatal problems of Bitcoin and that is privacy.

[00:14:57] Max Hillebrand: The very first comments about Bitcoin, the very first email was, this doesn’t scale because it is not private. Every full node needs to verify every trans you action of every other user ever, like since the beginning of the history. That’s insane. That’s absolutely insane. That’s a privacy nightmare because you don’t want to tell other people about the financial transactions that you make.

[00:15:17] Max Hillebrand: And it’s a scalability nightmare because how are you going to keep up with everyone making transactions for everything? That’s, that’s just impossible. So throughout the years of Bitcoin, both of these fundamental flaws have been addressed or are being addressed and there has been substantial project progress for, for both of them.

[00:15:33] Max Hillebrand: I mean, look at the lightning network, for example, a genius technology, and it works at scale. Right now, human fees are quite high. I make a bunch of lightning payments every day and they work quite cheaply. So that’s excellent. And I think on the privacy side, wasabi wallet really has established a holistic solution.

[00:15:50] Max Hillebrand: And the genius with it is we didn’t need to change anything about Bitcoin, right? We didn’t really need to add any fancy new cryptography and such segwit was kind of needed. But, but since then we can really address the privacy problem. I think quite holistically as wasabi bullets today is a way to use Bitcoin very privately where no third party can, can find out how much money you have and where you’re getting it and where you’re sending it.

[00:16:14] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. And how long you’re storing it. And I think that’s a very important part in the Bitcoin technology stack.

[00:16:21] Preston Pysh: Do you think that in the coming five years, let’s just say in the short term here that, that we’re about to see a pretty substantial battle, especially in developed nation States with respect to privacy wallets and the technology that’s enabling some of the things that you’re talking about is, is, is there a major confrontation on the horizon here that in short order?

[00:16:42] Max Hillebrand: Well, I know.

[00:16:43] Max Hillebrand: I think the confrontation has already started decades ago. The fight for against financial privacy and personal autonomy is, has been relentless throughout the decades of a Fiat regime. And, you know, especially in, in, since the 2000s, it has definitely increased. And whereas in the past banking service providers could legally provide a great degree of financial privacy.

[00:17:05] Max Hillebrand: No, Switzerland was for long the last remaining bastion here. But even there, nowadays, it is near impossible for banking service providers to provide you services with a certain degree of dignity and privacy. And that’s a big shame. But thankfully, we have Bitcoin, right? Where we actually have base money in cyberspace.

[00:17:22] Max Hillebrand: We don’t need banks necessarily to transact. We can do it just by ourselves, peer to peer. And that is extremely, extremely powerful. And the cool thing is that the solutions to Bitcoin’s privacy problem, specifically CoinJoin works fully self custodial. So the end user never hands over control over his keys and his coins.

[00:17:39] Max Hillebrand: You’re always in full control and therefore it is not the banking service. It is just a way to make Bitcoin transactions by yourself. And that means the legal tricks that would have to be played to outlaw such a thing are quite substantial because it obviously violates any resemblance of a free speech and human dignity, which is enshrined in most constitutions.

[00:17:59] Preston Pysh: Yeah, get into that a little bit more. And I think that you also have a situation where just because maybe one jurisdiction is saying that they’re, they are going to ban it through some type of legal gymnastics that goes in the face of other things that have already been set up from a legal standpoint within that jurisdiction.

[00:18:17] Preston Pysh: I think that the competition globally with respect to wallets that can provide these privacy enabling types of techniques. Is just going to wear down the fight with, with enough time. I’m assuming you agree with that, but I’m, I’m kind of curious, maybe a little bit more granularity on your take in that specific area with respect to the privacy.

[00:18:38] Max Hillebrand: I think we can draw a lot from history and go back to the, the early study, the cypher or in cryptography boards. Where PGP was attempted to be outlawed and marked as ammunition and you cannot export it outside of the United States. Of course, ridiculous because it’s just code. And so what they did is print out the code on a book in a text format that is easily readable by any computer.

[00:19:00] Max Hillebrand: And then you can ship it from us to Berlin, which is what happened. And clearly showing that a mandate on not publishing source code that uses cryptography or in fact, anything, it’s just outrageous because humans speak and there’s nothing that you can do about it. I’m sure you could, you could set up a paper law, but in reality, there’s no way to, to tame the human spirit in this way.

[00:19:23] Preston Pysh: So in short, there’s going to be setbacks here and there, but the trajectory that this is all taking is unstoppable. Is that really kind of the take?

[00:19:33] Max Hillebrand: Yeah, I would say so because I mean, look at what we have now, like this call that we’re having every website traffic HTTPS and the S stands for secure encrypted.

[00:19:42] Max Hillebrand: Sure. We, we had, you know, legal and narrative debates back then, but nowadays everyone uses encryption because not using encryption, simply not secure. It’s ludicrous to go on the open internet without relying on strong cryptography or for a confidentiality and for security and, and access rights, et cetera.

[00:20:00] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. That’s why we use private, public key cryptography everywhere. And I think the same extends to financial transactions. It’s ludicrous to make payments out in the open where anyone can see it. It’s in fact, extremely dangerous to yourself and the people that whom you’re paying. And I think we have a responsibility to, to ensure, you know, that other people don’t get wrecked when their sensitive information is leaked to the public.

[00:20:22] Preston Pysh: What does this do for the trend of just governments at large across the world? And how they’re going to raise tech or how they’re going to raise proceeds in order to continue to fund themselves, what happens to their size over time? Are they, is it going to continue to shrink them? Because now we’re actually dealing with sound immutable money, walk us through like the next 10 to 20 years and how you kind of see this evolving from you name it government anywhere in the world and what that trend is going to look like.

[00:20:52] Max Hillebrand: Yeah, Bitcoin’s mission is to make theft impossible and does so on numerous levels. First and foremost, of course, it makes inflation impossible. You cannot print any more Bitcoin than my note defines. Full stop. And you cannot force me to change the software that’s running on my code, on my computer. And that means inflation is impossible.

[00:21:12] Max Hillebrand: But likewise, my full note checks every signature of every transaction that has ever been made, ensuring that the owner based on the protocol, you know, the, the script that was defined in the address of a coin with a certain amount of Bitcoin, I checked that no, that this coin can only be spent if someone provides a valid signature, a valid witness.

[00:21:32] Max Hillebrand: So nobody can steal any individual specific coins. And of course, unless you leak your private keys, which, which is up to you to, to keep secure and private and, you know, not post publicly. Again, you know, Bitcoin fails with all privacy specifically the privacy of your private keys, of course, and then, yeah, also the, the fact that we can make no transactions fully anonymously where no outside party can observe the source, the destination, the, the amounts.

[00:21:57] Max Hillebrand: Of payments that are flowing and that again, makes it very difficult to target individuals and to see that, ah, this guy has a certain amount of money you know, worse to knock on his house and, and drop him, et cetera. This becomes a lot more expensive. So fundamentally it is, these are all crypto anarchist solutions and the crypto anarchist frame of this is that we want to increase the cost of attack while we decrease the cost of defense.

[00:22:22] Max Hillebrand: It should be extremely cheap to use these defensive technologies, and it should be enormously expensive, near impossible, hopefully, like practically, you know, impossible to overcome these defenses and private public key cryptography definitely does this. It’s trivial to generate a private key and from there a public key or a signature, and it’s trivial to verify a signature when you have the public key and the message, but to brute force the private key, if all you have is the public key is impossible, or to fake a signature is simply impossible, and that’s great.

[00:22:54] Max Hillebrand: And we can use technologies like these and Bitcoin is in this class of technology. It’s extremely cheap to use Bitcoin, all things considered, and to opt out of a hyperinflationary fiat standard and opt into a much more sound and reasonable protocol. Extremely cheap. The opportunity cost to say no to the fiat shenanigans has never been lower while simultaneously trying to stop Bitcoin and the technology surrounding it.

[00:23:17] Max Hillebrand: Is extremely, extremely expensive. I mean, sure, it is actively being tried, but it comes at a humongous cost, which deters numerous attackers. And that’s great.

[00:23:29] Preston Pysh: A buzzword that you’ll hear a lot if you’re following this space is this idea of covenants. And I know that this potentially enables improvements to privacy like we were talking about earlier.

[00:23:40] Preston Pysh: Can you just explain what a covenant is and then kind of your thoughts on it potentially being used, getting it into the Bitcoin core? All of these ideas and whether you’re a proponent of this, or if you see it almost as a necessity of something that does eventually need to make its way into core.

[00:23:59] Max Hillebrand: And so covenants are quite interesting proposal and quite a useful one.

[00:24:03] Max Hillebrand: Although it does come with some uncertainty and some potential risks. So the concept is basically to define. So right now, if you have a address and a coin locked up in this address, the rule is that you can only spend it if the witnesses is valid, meaning if there’s a signature that that checks out, but there’s no spending condition on where should that money go, but you cannot say that this coin can only be spent to this other address.

[00:24:27] Max Hillebrand: That’s currently not possible with Bitcoin, but with covenants, it would be so you can put some money in, in, for example, a cold storage and then say that this out of this address, the money can only move into my mobile device or hot wallet, for example, and it cannot go to any other third party address.

[00:24:44] Max Hillebrand: And this is quite interesting, not just for the end user to actually play around with this himself, but more for protocol designers to come up with interesting second layer solutions. And there have been numerous proposals on improving both the lightning network as well as coming up with a couple new protocols.

[00:25:01] Max Hillebrand: Arc as one example. Or state chains, all of these would be a lot better if we have something like, like covenants and the design space goes a lot larger, which is great for developers and engineers because we can play around and build cool stuff, but it’s also very difficult to see the unforeseen consequences.

[00:25:18] Max Hillebrand: And that’s what makes it scary. And further, we need to change the Bitcoin consensus rules for that. And that’s no easy feat that has always been, or not in the beginning, but nowadays it’s especially a mess. And everyone’s kind of scared of doing it just because it’s very difficult. It’s not easy to change to a Bitcoin rule set by design.

[00:25:36] Max Hillebrand: And that’s a good thing. It has its pros and cons.

[00:25:40] Preston Pysh: What are your thoughts on ossification? Because it seems to have made quite a stir lately where you have, I think on the one side, you could say Michael Saylor, who’s basically saying, stop touching it. Just get away. Like all these engineers are just trying to engineer and we don’t need to engineer.

[00:25:55] Preston Pysh: And I’ve got billions of buying power stored inside this network. And I just don’t want anybody to screw with it. And then on the other side of the coin, you have, you know, really talented devs that are, that are saying things like what you just described with covenants, where it’s like, Hey, this could really give us a lot of privacy.

[00:26:11] Preston Pysh: This could open a whole new, just a lot more capability that if everybody could get on board with somewhat minimal risk, we should go down this path. So where, where do you stand on that argument? Are you on the, the sailor side? Like don’t touch it. We need the ossify or do, are you much more

[00:26:28] Preston Pysh: open to changes?

[00:26:30] Max Hillebrand: I think this whole ossification topic is, is not the thing that we can turn on and turn off. It’s more of a naturally emergent phenomena. The fact that people just don’t upgrade their softwares and don’t want to and have good reasons why they don’t. This is something especially tricky with Bitcoin.

[00:26:45] Max Hillebrand: We’re in, we, we have software that defines money. So here, since it’s just a fact of reality and you can find the good or bad, but it is, you know, and nevertheless, the coin dies if, if we don’t keep fixing it, because it’s pretty broken right now, I mean, it barely works and we really need to ensure that it can continue to work and continue to scale.

[00:27:05] Max Hillebrand: That’s very much not a given like there’s insane computer engineering challenges ahead of us. And just ignoring them and not working on them will just lead Bitcoin to break. It’s certainly an option, but I don’t think it will happen because while people are actively working on it, and that’s a good thing.

[00:27:21] Max Hillebrand: And then we should have more of it.

[00:27:23] Preston Pysh: What do you think is most broke right now? Where do you start?

[00:27:26] Max Hillebrand: Long list.

[00:27:29] Preston Pysh: What would be your number one thing?

[00:27:32] Max Hillebrand: So one thing that provides a lot of headaches for me and Wasabi right now is the mempool. Like we have a couple of CoinJoin transactions that were coordinated back when the fee rates were quite low. So these transactions are paying like 7 sats per rebyte, which at the time was a reasonable rate to choose.

[00:27:47] Max Hillebrand: But then since then the mempool has going up only and a few rates have been, you know, quite substantial all the way to thousands of sats per rebite and then now at around 200 ish. But yeah, those old CoinJoins will never be, will take forever to be confirmed. And the thing is we cannot even properly fee bump them with something like child pays for parent because the algorithm only chooses one longest chain of children to be considered in the fee rate.

[00:28:12] Max Hillebrand: And well, a CoinJoin will have numerous chains of children, so people are paying for a fee bump, but none of them are being recognized by the minors for a while. Unfortunately, so this is this is one problem and we cannot rbf it replaced by fiat because in order to do that, the replacing transaction needs to pay absolutely more fee rate than the previous one.

[00:28:32] Max Hillebrand: But the previous one is a gigantic CoinJoin with hundreds of inputs and hundreds of outputs. Mhm. And these are quite large and you need to pay a lot for this amount of block space. And this makes replacing transactions extremely, extremely difficult. Unfortunately, right now we don’t really see an option of bumping the fee rate of an existing CoinJoin or even replacing them as securely, you know, on a consistent basis.

[00:28:53] Max Hillebrand: That sucks.

[00:28:54] Preston Pysh: Wow. That is the first I’ve heard that on the CoinJoin side of how expensive this is, this is becoming. What other thing would you say would be number two that you think is really broke right now?

[00:29:06] Max Hillebrand: Maybe to then go back to one of the books I recommended, which we haven’t yet talked about.

[00:29:10] Max Hillebrand: Crypto Economics by Eric was killed. It’s the best book about Bitcoin so far and you know, the second to none long, long distance. It’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s phenomenal, by the way, because he introduces the axiom of resistance as a third axiom required to understand freedom technology, security technologies that are applied.

[00:29:29] Max Hillebrand: Resistance has to be assumed. If people do not resist duress, then any higher level security protocol cannot help him. So this book talks about one of the most critical flaws in Bitcoin’s design, and that is pooling pressure. The fact that you get a lot of financial benefit as a miner, when you are larger compared to smaller and the larger you are, the more you will gain.

[00:29:53] Max Hillebrand: And that is well, for numerous reasons, for the cost of verifying a block and how long that takes, as well as the cost of relaying a block across the network et cetera. And that is a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin that still has not been fixed and is very difficult, if not impossible to fix. So we will probably always see very large pools dominating the market, which is exactly what we’re currently seeing, because unfortunately, the cryptoeconomic design of Bitcoin leads to such an outcome.

[00:30:21] Max Hillebrand: And Eric Roscoe is a genius for pointing this out so succinctly in his book.

[00:30:26] Preston Pysh: What are your thoughts on Ocean? Because I know they’ve made quite a stir recently and, and they’ve raised a lot of concerns that, that have been presented with respect to some of the pools and how they’re operating and how they’re not above board.

[00:30:38] Preston Pysh: And in many cases as to how the fees are being broken out, I’m just curious what your thoughts are on them.

[00:30:44] Max Hillebrand: And the idea of more people constructing a block template itself, so basically constructing the next block, which, which someone is trying to, to get anchored to the chain, that task should be as distributed as possible right now, only the pool operators do this, right?

[00:30:59] Max Hillebrand: Only a handful of computers basically define what goes into the next Bitcoin block. That’s quite a critical bug, actually. With Stratum V two specifically it is possible to construct pool templates for, as an individual miner. Even if you just have one little USB miner or, or one asic you can connect that to your own node basically and verify all of those transactions that that will be included in the next block.

[00:31:24] Max Hillebrand: That, that is great that we by now have these technologies and, and for example, ocean as, as well as brains and other mining pools are, are working actively on, on deploying this hopefully soon, which is great.

[00:31:34] Preston Pysh: How do you get by the, so when we’re talking and I completely agree with you, the, the block template.

[00:31:39] Preston Pysh: So like, if I’m providing my one rig, my rig finds the block and I’m saying, this is the block template that I want to use as far as which transactions are included, because my, my rig is the one that found the block. How do you guard against, let’s say I’m an idiot. And my block template was a disaster and had half the amount of fees that it could have had if I used a different template.

[00:32:01] Preston Pysh: But I’m sharing the rewards with all these other people that were participating in the pool. So how do you guard against the idiot that mined the block with their template and added just the terrible template that they submitted forward? Is that something that you can basically baseline so that it’s at least this, this amount, like, how do you think through that problem?

[00:32:22] Max Hillebrand: Yeah, exactly. This is one of the many problems that arises with, with a design like, like Straten V2. And the solution is that there’s a handshake between the miner and the pool to agree upon the block template and say that, yes, if you mine this template, we will give you a part of the payout. But it shows another fundamental problem that the pooled has custodianship over the money, basically, it’s a bank, and that comes with all types of nasty legacy regulations and such, which are annoying.

[00:32:51] Max Hillebrand: So this is another interesting thing that ocean and some other miners are doing to have a very short payout time of the delivery of the Bitcoin. And also over lightning, right? So this is very good when, when miners can actually get paid instantly for each candidate block that they perform, then that will be great.

[00:33:10] Max Hillebrand: There are certain other proposals for having a more peer to peer decentralized mining pool. A braid pool, for example, comes to mind, but yeah, these are all still research. And the problem with Bitcoin mining is you need to be damn efficient because if you’re not, you’re, you’re someone else’s eating your lunch.

[00:33:24] Max Hillebrand: And, and that’s expensive. So anything that adds latency and complexity and it’s just undesirable, which makes it very difficult to perform here and compete.

[00:33:33] Preston Pysh: I think you were going to say another thing that you think is broken. And then I interrupted you with the template comment. Do you remember what it was?

[00:33:41] Max Hillebrand: Also, for example, one thing that’s not really broken, but one interesting new proposal that is coming is cross input signature aggregation, which has been around for some time. And it basically means that when you have one transaction that spends numerous inputs and creates a couple outputs right now, every input has to provide its own signature.

[00:33:58] Max Hillebrand: So that means that that does more data that we have to put on the blockchain. And we can, however, use some cryptographic magic and aggregate multiple signatures into one. Okay. So when you have a transaction with a hundred inputs and a hundred outputs, for example, you would not have a hundred signatures, but only one signature.

[00:34:17] Max Hillebrand: And this is of course much smaller. And this gives a nice financial incentive to team up with other people to spend your transactions together, which is a CoinJoin, right? A collaborative Bitcoin transaction where instead of everyone making a transaction with one input, two outputs, We all come together, make one single transaction with hundreds of people with hundreds of inputs, hundreds of outputs.

[00:34:38] Max Hillebrand: Then we can all aggregate and have one signature, which is quite cheap. There has recently been some new progress on and, you know, further discussions on how we could potentially do this. There’s numerous proposals with different, you know, degrees of complexity and efficiency improvements, but at least that conversation is going.

[00:34:57] Max Hillebrand: So, yeah, that’s interesting.

[00:34:59] Preston Pysh: Probability wise as far as getting something like that through, do you think it’s pretty improbable or do you think that this is because it’s, it almost seems like anything really kind of getting pushed through is, is somewhat improbable on any type of near, you know, like the next three years, it almost seems like it’s completely improbable.

[00:35:15] Preston Pysh: Would you agree with that?

[00:35:17] Max Hillebrand: Yeah, definitely is changing becomes quite difficult. I do, I do. I’m pretty confident that we will have numerous changes coming in the future again. Otherwise, Bitcoin dies, so we definitely have to get our act together, but it is always going to be difficult, no matter how you put it.

[00:35:33] Max Hillebrand: And I guess the larger the network grows, the more difficult it will be. And that, you know, has, has benefits and downsides, so it’s definitely going to be tricky. But, you know, like, for example, if we would not have had SegWit, we would not have had CoinJoins or the Lightning Network. If we would not have had Taproot, we would have, could not have a hope for an actually private version of the Lightning Network.

[00:35:53] Max Hillebrand: And without Taproot, you could, for example, not sign CoinJoin transactions on your hardware wallet. This was the change that is only possible because of taproot was finally one of the times where, you know, I was wasabi. Well, it was rather active with changing the Bitcoin consensus rules was in the taproot.

[00:36:09] Max Hillebrand: Also, the treasure developers notified that there was still some issues with taproot. Not fully fixing a critical bug that makes assigning hardware, assigning CoinJoins on a hardware wallet, impossible or susceptible to theft, let’s say, and this was finally fixed in, in taproot. And so this is great.

[00:36:26] Max Hillebrand: This you know, enabled finally to have a secure signing environment for CoinJoin transactions, but it did require changes to the protocol. And if we would not have had that, then, then features like this would simply not be possible. We definitely need to keep working on this protocol.

[00:36:40] Preston Pysh: It seems Max, it seems like back in 2017, when the New York agreement happened and there was this battle between how do we scale Bitcoin?

[00:36:49] Preston Pysh: Is it through larger blocks, smaller blocks, the whole, the whole block size war piece. That, that meeting or that engagement just set off a firestorm within the community that something needed to take place. Something needed to be done and it, and it was this moment of there needs to be action taken right now.

[00:37:10] Preston Pysh: It doesn’t seem like we have such an event or something that’s forcing the community to take action. Do you think that maybe the ETFs or something on the horizon in the coming year or two that is going to just trigger an enormous amount of people in the space is going to have to be some type of event similar to like the New York agreement that is going to trigger the community to then take action on something that that’s what’s going to propel it forward or because it seems to me like there’s just nobody really upset enough.

[00:37:45] Preston Pysh: For anybody to take any type of action. And here we are, it’s just continuing to ossify. And we’re just going down this path where there’s, there’s nothing really happening from a core standpoint. If you agree with that, I don’t know if you do, what would that event be in your opinion that would maybe propel action that start taking place?

[00:38:06] Max Hillebrand: That’s a really good question. And of course, it’s always difficult to say beforehand. And it’s probably going to be a connection of numerous events, right? It usually doesn’t come out of the blue, but potentially it is ordinals and inscriptions, etc. This might already be the catalyst, because as we see right now, blocks are full with with data with non monetary transactions.

[00:38:25] Max Hillebrand: And this is quite a change to, you know, how Bitcoin was, you know, originally designed for and use. It has always been possible to put arbitrary data on the chain, but the extent of it happening right now has not been the case before. And we see, for example, with Ocean, right, they are, to some extent, ringing the alarm bells.

[00:38:42] Max Hillebrand: And saying that we should do something about this, but, but also realizing that it’s really difficult to do anything about this, like, sure, you can construct block templates without any data on, on chain. And that’s certainly doable. It means you’re going to leave a lot of fees on the table that your competition might take, who might not have the same, no idea of, of excluding these.

[00:39:00] Max Hillebrand: Yeah, really tough there. And you know, also then do a whole segment New York agreements, block size war drama was, it’s not so much about the block size. It was more about how do we change the protocol itself? With one group claiming that it’s easy. We can just do a hard fork and break the rules and do whatever we want.

[00:39:17] Max Hillebrand: And another group saying, guys, it’s not that easy. Like we wish it were that easy, but the reality is it’s not. If we have a hard fork that leads to disastrous consequences and, and most likely a vast majority of users remaining on the default status quo, because that’s all network effects and inertia.

[00:39:34] Max Hillebrand: And yeah, the same will make it really difficult. I don’t know if we could, for example, remove inscriptions and such with all the hard fork. Potentially we can we can do a lot of things with soft forks. Peter Todd wrote a great article in 2016 about the evil soft forks, like we can inflate the money supply with a soft fork, et cetera.

[00:39:51] Max Hillebrand: There, there’s a lot of things that we can do. And the question is, will, will any of these things actually gather enough momentum and such? And that’s very difficult to predict.

[00:40:00] Preston Pysh: On the hard fork side, I remember when we went through this in 2017, leading up to it, I was concerned. I was like, Oh my God, this is going to be really bad.

[00:40:09] Preston Pysh: But at the same time I was looking at it, it was like, well, I’m going to have both coins. And if I’m really concerned, and let’s just say I didn’t have an opinion either way, I can just continue to squat on both coins. And then the market’s going to pretty much demonstrate which one, which one was right, which one was wrong from a, from a value standpoint, because nobody wants to see their, their savings go to nothing.

[00:40:31] Preston Pysh: And I think if a person is very confused or not really knowing what the outcome of the hard fork is going to be, they can just kind of sit there and they’re going to be the beneficiary of either outcome. It’s the person who has this stubborn opinion that says, Nope, this is right. I’m going to sell the other coin.

[00:40:47] Preston Pysh: I’m going to plow it straight back into the one that I think is right. And maybe there, they were dead wrong. That has this situation where the hard fork could be personally detrimental to them because they were stubbornly opinionated as to what the outcome was going to be.

[00:41:00] Max Hillebrand: The question still remains on what are you going to settle your future trades in, right?

[00:41:04] Max Hillebrand: So after the fork, are you going to give an address for fork number one or fork number two? And this is here where we’re in the future. Your economic node will make decisions. Another thing Eric Voskow talks about, it’s all about the economic node. An economic node is a full node that is used to verify, verify a receiving transaction In an exchange and that verification of the full note is the depending trigger for releasing the goods and services to the other party.

[00:41:29] Max Hillebrand: Yeah, that is what is actually ensuring the integrity of Bitcoin and this goes on after the fork as well. And you either run a node on one or the other.

[00:41:39] Preston Pysh: Yeah. And I mean, we saw that in 2017 where all the nodes were being pointed to the chain that we know is Bitcoin today. I guess the point of why I’m bringing this up is.

[00:41:51] Preston Pysh: I guess having gone through it, I, before it, I was very scared and like you hear hard fork and it scares the bejesus out of you. But having gone through it, I guess I don’t see it as, as nearly as threatening or concerning. And it almost seems like you have a different opinion of that.

[00:42:08] Max Hillebrand: I mean, no, any change to Bitcoin is, is quite critical and very difficult to pull off.

[00:42:14] Max Hillebrand: We still don’t really know, for example, which activation mechanism we should use in the future. And the last two softworks have been quite painful in terms of activation.

[00:42:22] Preston Pysh: Explain that the activation for people, how they were done historically and why this is kind of a very confusing topic.

[00:42:29] Max Hillebrand: Basically, whenever we change the Bitcoin rule set, the consensus rules, we need to somewhat agree on when do we change to that new set of rules.

[00:42:38] Max Hillebrand: Because if you know, Preston starts verifying it differently at block 100, but I only start my verification at block 150, then there is some discrepancy and maybe Preston is going to be happy with a block that follows a new rule, but according to me, that would be violating and so we would fork off and split and further on, it’s important that the miners are also up to date because if miners do not produce blocks valid according to your software rules then your blockchain is simply stale, right?

[00:43:07] Max Hillebrand: It doesn’t move forward. And therefore we need miners to be active and collaborating with this as well. So in, in the early days of Bitcoin, this was all just, you know, done by Satoshi in a silent software updates, not really much rigor there, but, but since then the industry is quite mature and the deployment of softwares is much more conservative.

[00:43:27] Max Hillebrand: For example, in the last especially with SegWit, for example, Bitcoin Core did not have any activation logic for this new soft fork. It simply had the code to verify these new transactions, but no way to enforce the activation of it. And then instead, an alternative client and an alternative full node implementation popped up that had the activation mechanism built in, which then finally triggered miners to upgrade and produce blocks that are valid.

[00:43:57] Max Hillebrand: So this is always very tricky and we can have activation periods that are very short, like three months or activation periods that are really long, like three or five years. All of this has been proposed in between. And yeah, there is simply no consensus on how to change the consensus of Bitcoin. And maybe that’s a good thing.

[00:44:16] Preston Pysh: I want to talk to you about just, there’s this argument that because self custody is really difficult for people, maybe in developed nations that have very small amounts of buying power at that individual level, that it’s a, it’s going to fail at the payments standpoint. From a payment standpoint, what are your thoughts on how this evolves and what the most freedom tech solution possible from a payment standpoint so that every single person can still custody their coins moving forward?

[00:44:48] Preston Pysh: Like, what does that technical solution look like from your vantage point?

[00:44:52] Max Hillebrand: Basically, since forever, there has been a cost of using money. Economists would say this is a demo rush, right? So this means, for example, if you have a gold coin and you want to protect it, you need to buy a safe, a metal box, etc.

[00:45:06] Max Hillebrand: I need to hire a guy with a gun stand in front of the safe and such keep it secure. And if you want to move it, you need to move the gold and the box and the guy with the gun from place A to place B. So that’s quite expensive. That’s the cost of moving base money. And similar is the case with Bitcoin.

[00:45:22] Max Hillebrand: When you need a computer to register your private keys with, maybe you want to have a hardware wallet, et cetera, need electricity and such to power the whole thing, internet and so on. But then, of course, also you need to pay your blockchain block space costs. So the fee rate to minors has to be considered as well.

[00:45:36] Max Hillebrand: And as we can see, this can go quite high, and this is a cost of moving base money, which the higher this cost is, the worst it is to make payments to settle payments in this money. And for example, where costs of using gold was very high, alternative monies cropped up to settle this, like, for example, silver much, much easier to move small amounts of silver rather than small amounts of gold.

[00:45:58] Max Hillebrand: Or we have the banks popping up, basically money warehouses who take custody over the base money and hand out paper receipts, basically money substitutes, money warehouse receipts. And those can be transacted cheaper, much easier to move a paper that says this is worth a hundred kilos of gold, much easier to move that than to do it physically.

[00:46:17] Max Hillebrand: And especially that paper could be digital. These are all solutions to decrease the demurrage cost of money. And we will need to use all of them with Bitcoin. And that’s mainly because it’s very difficult to fundamentally improve the protocol. So that naturally decreases its demurrage cost. Like sure, we could increase the block size, but not by that much.

[00:46:36] Max Hillebrand: Because at a certain size, it definitely breaks. Sure. We can have to lightning network, et cetera, but there’s still opening and closing transactions to be happening on chain, et cetera. So these We can certainly engineer our way out of the problem to some extent, but not infinitely. So I’m rather bullish on money warehouses in Bitcoin custodians, not because I necessarily like them to be around, but more, it’s a very useful service when there’s a high demurrage cost of the money and a lot of people will use it.

[00:47:04] Max Hillebrand: So we better build solutions that work well and that provide efficiency and scalability and privacy and security and autonomy to the user. And I think we can do that right. So I’m, I’m quite happy with the recent development of e cash as money warehouse receipts with Cashu and Fedi, by Cashu, extremely simple and beautiful and way more fast than lightning.

[00:47:26] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. But Fedimint breaks people’s minds with establishing a federated money warehouse of base money with a federated. Digital money warehouse receipt. Absolutely mind bonkers, like the idea that multi signature even exists in Bitcoin seems like a glitch in the matrix. And combining that with a federated e cash system is just incredible.

[00:47:45] Max Hillebrand: These are all things that are here right now and will continue to be worked on.

[00:47:49] Preston Pysh: I just find it fascinating that some of these ideas, some of these mathematical constructs that are being used for things like fetaments were discovered decades ago, I think is correct. And it’s like, we figured out that these things are possible, but Are now just figuring out how to actually put them into to utilize it and to make it real and to make it actionable.

[00:48:12] Preston Pysh: And it’s just mind blowing mind blowing math. But there’s this meme where the mathematicians are like way over on the far right. And then like the rest of the world the doctors, the whatever’s are way over onto the left hand side. And the mathematicians looking over like way over there, like, Hey, how are you guys doing over there?

[00:48:29] Preston Pysh: And I think that that’s a perfect example of that meme. Max, the last thing I got for you, what are you just so hopeful for, or that you’re just really excited about that’s happening right now in this particular space?

[00:48:43] Max Hillebrand: I’m just really bullish for Bitcoin privacy. Like I really think we have fundamentally solved that problem and that’s super encouraging.

[00:48:50] Max Hillebrand: There’s still a lot of work to do, but on all three major categories, we’re doing quite well. So we have great network level privacy, basically hiding your IP address with Tor. Tor is working quite well, sometimes under denial of service attack, but there’s lots of improvements, a complete new re implementation of the Tor code in Rust.

[00:49:07] Max Hillebrand: And which makes it much more modern and modular and faster. So this will be, this will be huge. This will finally bring a usable Tor client to mobile phones. One of the last bottlenecks to get Wasabi on mobile right now is Tor. Wasabi is probably the most sophisticated user of the Tor network and it simply doesn’t run on a phone.

[00:49:24] Max Hillebrand: It will probably blow up and burn. So our team will probably make it possible. So that’s, so that’s quite encouraging. With block filters, we have a great way to find out how much money you have on the blockchain without actually running a full note, because, you know, the larger the blocks, et cetera, the more difficult it is to run a full note.

[00:49:41] Max Hillebrand: And we want people who don’t have that much compute power to still use Bitcoin without sacrificing their privacy. And so block filters, you know, has been introduced with Wasabi in 2018. And since then, you know, we’ve had numerous improvements on making it much faster, much more performant. And we’re still working on making it better all these years later.

[00:49:59] Max Hillebrand: So it’s a very elegant solution that works really well. And finally, CoinJoin, you know, the crowning feature with Wasabi 1. 0, we had our first attempt of having a CoinJoin coordination system that’s anonymous, where even the coordinator cannot spy on you. And we use Traumian blind signatures, right? The ancient e cash tech from 1983 that everyone forgot about.

[00:50:18] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. You know, this was referenced in 2013 by Gregory Maxwell and like one little side sentence on, on, on the post about CoinJoin. Oh, by the way, we could use blind signatures to, you know, improve the privacy of all of this. And, you know, everyone forgot about it again until we started picking it up and actually implementing this.

[00:50:36] Max Hillebrand: And then since then with wasabi 2. 0, having a basically introduced a new e cash system, a new blind signature scheme, or more specifically a keyed verification, anonymous credential scheme. And the cool innovation here is that even the value of the token is now encrypted. Whereas in the past with things like cashier or Feddy, the value of the token is known to the mint.

[00:50:56] Max Hillebrand: And if you have a token worth one Bitcoin, you don’t get any privacy from the other users who have worth 10 Bitcoin or something right. But with Wasabi e cash, the value of the token is fully encrypted. So if you have 5, 000 Satoshi’s or 40, 000 Bitcoin, the coordinator cannot tell the difference.

[00:51:13] Max Hillebrand: And this means that we can finally have an extremely maximally if a flexible way to write a CoinJoin client. And there can be different modes for this, right? There can be some that focus on radical privacy, you know, like probably would consume a bit more block space than usual, but you don’t get great levels of privacy where other people might just, you know, want to have a small level of decent privacy and not spend too much on the entire affair.

[00:51:36] Max Hillebrand: They can use it probably even cheaper than, than doing it by themselves with with all the CoinJoin. All of this is now possible. And for example, payments in coin as well. So if you’re a merchant or like a, you know, someone who, let’s say, pays his staff 50 transactions of every month, you can do a batch transaction paying, you know, a bunch of these salaries at the same time in the same CoinJoin.

[00:51:58] Max Hillebrand: And nobody knows that you just paid these 10 different people and one of your employees cannot spy on the other employee with previous ways of making batch payments in Bitcoin alone, not inside a CoinJoin was very clear to fingerprint that one guy is paying these 10 people and they all know about it with a CoinJoin.

[00:52:16] Max Hillebrand: That’s that’s no longer possible. And we can even, you know, we have ways that person I can send you money. But you pressed in the receiver, you never have to tell me your address. I can send you money without ever knowing what your address is. And with, with this Wasabi, Cointreau and protocol, it’s absolutely insane.

[00:52:33] Max Hillebrand: Like it’s so anonymous that even the person who pays you doesn’t know where you end up getting the money instantly. It’s like Wasabi is such a scalable and flexible and secure protocol that I’m very bullish on that.

[00:52:46] Preston Pysh: I just love hearing stuff like that because at the core, you just know that nature’s plan for humanity is that they have access to this type of sovereignty and this type of freedom.

[00:53:00] Preston Pysh: It’s embedded in nature itself. It almost seems. When you see what, what some of these just insanely astute individuals and engineers are doing with all of this today. So, wow, I just really enjoyed this conversation. Max give people a handoff. If there’s anything that you do want to point them to, I know you, you’re obviously active on Twitter and Nostr and just anything else that you want to point people towards so we can put it in the show notes.

[00:53:26] Max Hillebrand: Yeah. So I really like what you ended with here. Like it’s incredible about the work that the people are doing in the space. It’s absolutely unbelievable. And maybe to round it off, let’s mention the fourth book that I recommended at the panel in Bedford, which is the ethics of money production by your kid, your host mom.

[00:53:41] Max Hillebrand: And I think this might explain why, why because are so weirdly positive and productive because he argues that there is a clear ethic embodied in the technology that is money. And we can have a money that imbues a positive ethic that that is sound for property rights are respected. That is, you know, sovereign base money, neutral base money, gold and Bitcoin would fall under these categories.

[00:54:05] Max Hillebrand: Or we have a monetary technology that that can be controlled by others where the money supply can be inflated. And where there are just numerous consequences that regard if there’s not just a direct transfer of wealth and capital. Of to those people who print the money in the way from the people who received the newly created money later at the classical canter on effect.

[00:54:24] Max Hillebrand: It also means that we mess up our production stages and we produce way more than we would need. We malinvest in sectors that should not be invested in and simultaneously we over consume by a bunch of crap that we don’t really need. And both of the, both of these things together just lead to a strategic destruction of, of the production stages and, and the growth of, of civilization.

[00:54:44] Max Hillebrand: It’s, it’s extremely, extremely harmful. And it’s harmful because fundamentally it is based on theft. And so having a system like Bitcoin that every 10 minutes has enshrined in it that you shall not steal, is extremely powerful. And, and it changes the people who have, who are, who are interacting with such a system.

[00:55:01] Max Hillebrand: And I think that’s probably what makes me the most bullish about Bitcoin is how the imbued ethics changes the people that engage with it. And you know, number go up means more and more people will be attracted to this glowing gemstone and it will morph them and make sure that they grow and flourish, which I think is going to be very fascinating to see how an economy based on an ethical sounds money would look like it’s going to be wild.

[00:55:29] Max Hillebrand: It’s going to be a, an age of abundance. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, it’s so simple. Just don’t steal from each other and we’re going to be filthy rich. It’s it’s a very, very simple game plan and Bitcoin is a great way of actually manifesting that. So yeah, thanks Preston. I really enjoyed this conversation.

[00:55:44] Max Hillebrand: You can find me online, Max Hillebrand and wasabibullet.io. Get it from the right source and verify your PGP keys.

[00:55:53] Preston Pysh: Thank you so much, Max.

[00:55:54] Max Hillebrand: Thanks Preston. See you.

[00:55:56] Preston Pysh: 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. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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