Joshua Unseth (00:31:02): The market can be very wrong about what it’s doing and we see it all the time in Bitcoin, where the market is completely wrong about how this technology ought to be used and yet, people use it that way for a while until it falls out of use because people realize that it’s kind of bullshit or in the case of the ICOs, a lot of these companies end up failing. And it’s interesting, because now, we have a bull market, and there’s no more ICOs. They’re pretty much done, at least, conceptually. Maybe it will return in the next bump.
John Carvalho (00:31:34): Yeah. I think it’s just a weird phenomenon where when you’re new here, you have this weird mix of ignorance and greed that allows you to basically ignore things and gloss over things. The cues are there. You could learn them if you dug in and actually paid attention a little bit and actually know what’s going on. But you would more prefer to ignore them, so you can believe this, that you have this opportunity to make money and it will just kind of stay in that state for as long, until they stop making money.
Joshua Unseth (00:32:05): Right, and then they move on to the next thing. And I’m wondering what’s going to happen if like Christie’s or Sotheby’s if they’re jumping into these things, what are they going to think? Because I’ve talked to a couple of people and they’re always saying that they’re researching this very exciting new art stuff. And I’m trying to figure out what they’re going to discover. Because when you take, it’s sort of an emperor has no clothes situation. And are we just going to pretend for the next 10 years that NFTs are things in the way that we’re saying are things, or we can ever discover that they’re not? Does that happen sometimes?
John Carvalho (00:32:41): I think it will depend on how well it actually sticks as a narrative for raising money through the bear market. If I can keep raising money for my shitcoin company by saying I’m building an NFT platform or revolutionizing NFTs, then it will be around for the next bull market. But if I can’t do that, then it won’t because it’s just going to be like a retired narrative
Joshua Unseth (00:33:01): Meanwhile, I see companies like Masterworks, which allow you to buy fractional shares of our pieces and they do it in a full-fledged database. No shitcoin, nothing.
John Carvalho (00:33:12): Yeah, totally, incidentally, I actually had a call. I don’t know why they asked me or why they wanted my opinion, but I had somebody like a gallery like Christie’s. I had recently had a meeting call with them, because they wanted to get my thoughts on NFTs and how I thought they should do it and such. And I’ll tell you what the result is, I’m pretty sure what they’re doing is building an NFT platform for Ethereum. And so, I even had the chance, so I literally had the chance to tell a gallery, you can just use any key pair and sign a message to somebody else’s key and keep it that. The example you just gave, I literally gave it to them. I said, “Look, if you wanted to do the total Chad kind of aristocratic kind of move.
John Carvalho (00:33:58): And actually do it like how I think Christie’s should do it, it would be like I have this formal white glove thing where you’re having high security for the keys and how you generated the keys. And you would prove that, “Now, this is now Christie’s key.” And you would sign a message to the buyer and you would give him a printed copy of what was encoded in the message and you would frame it. Everybody would see it, make news and there’ll be nothing to do with Blockchain.
Joshua Unseth (00:34:24): They could absolutely build any of these platforms and actually make some money. There’s a giant hole in the market. And it’s funny to me that that solution has been around for, I don’t know, 50 years. So far about 50, but probably 30, 40 years, essentially since PGP. I don’t know when PGP was developed, but you could have done something this that long ago. And yet they’re pretending like, well, they’re not pretending. They truly believe that this is a new innovation that has recently been come up with and it’s not. It’s just something that is the word Blockchain is involved, so they think it couldn’t have been developed the other way.
John Carvalho (00:35:04): The same thing happens when people get into shitcoins, and they hear about all the narratives. They don’t actually realize that a lot of those narratives are narratives from the past two decades from people trying to build the internet. And it was just like things that people have always wanted people to do in the internet, but they don’t for some reason or they’ve never been designed well or finished. And now, shitcoins are going to claim to finish them and that’s it.
Joshua Unseth (00:35:26): Well, this is the thing I’ve always said about the blockchain stuff is if you listen to pitches of a Blockchain, what you end up with is a realization that oftentimes the word Blockchain is substituted for this idea of human coordination. So if you have Blockchain, then you don’t need human coordination, right? And Blockchain doesn’t really solve that problem. Blockchain doesn’t solve the problem of human coordination. You still need people to do things, so the key pair signing that you’re discussing, the reason it hasn’t been developed is because someone would have to develop it.
Joshua Unseth (00:35:59): And now that we have Blockchain, the fact that you could develop it doesn’t go away. But now they think it has essentially been developed because blockchain exists. And, blockchain doesn’t even really facilitate it or make it easier. It’s just that someone else has done this and made it easy for them to do. And I feel like given that, given that fact, there actually would have been possibly a way that Christie’s could have developed this in the ’90s and made a ton of money in the meantime selling digital artwork. And I wonder if that’s true. I wonder what would have happened if they had done that back then.
John Carvalho (00:36:37): I bet we could find this in the wild if we actually looked that it already [crosstalk 00:36:40].
Joshua Unseth (00:36:40): I bet you it does exist. Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? But again, the provenance thing in that sort of environment is a little bit difficult, right? What if I want to do a private sale of a piece of art? Now, in a world where you do the key pair stuff, you could transfer it by going in signing and giving it to this person. But if you forget to do that, does that person now not own the art? Do they not own the ability to sell that in auction?
John Carvalho (00:37:14): Well, if the person loses the proof, do they not own the art?
Joshua Unseth (00:37:17): Yeah, and this has been my question with Ethereum like if you don’t transfer the rights, let’s say have a physical piece, people say you could tie one of these receipts to a physical piece. If you have a physical piece, and you don’t sign off that you sold it, does that person not own it? Do you own it still? Because it just seems to me that the mess of provenance isn’t the fact that paintings move, art moves all the time, and it’s going to move-
John Carvalho (00:37:40): Well, because they’re really talking about trust and whether or not and basically substitute witnesses, that’s all.
Joshua Unseth (00:37:45): And it’s going to move, regardless of the token.
John Carvalho (00:37:48): All right, let’s move on. I think we should talk about maybe Bitcoin Uncensored and more specifically, Bitcoin maximalism a little bit?
Joshua Unseth (00:37:58): Sure.
John Carvalho (00:37:59): And let’s see if we can try to put it through the lens of business. I don’t really know what that means or what that would look like, but so much as like, I don’t know, maybe. Do you think Bitcoin maximalism is good for business?
Joshua Unseth (00:38:11): Bitcoin Max, yeah, I do. And I would say I would say it’s good for business because it moves you towards a consistency of direction, but also, it means that as a business operator, you don’t have to kind of be up on the latest trends, if you will. You can focus on building your business. I think that it’s actually really dangerous for businesses to become obsessed with cryptocurrency. And I think we’ve seen this a lot where businesses come into the space and the first thing they do is spend a lot of time trying to research exactly what they should do, and what they ultimately end up on is Ethereum or Dash or something else. And they’ll try that for a while. And then eventually they make their way to something else, and then something else and something else, then Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:39:09): And I think that that’s a giant waste for businesses to spend all of the time and money to develop all of these different types of platforms or on all of it. Because what businesses really are in the business of making money. So if you know not a Bitcoin business, necessarily, let’s say you’re building a business selling food, if you’re trying to focus on any crypto at all, you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to just market your business and build your business. That said, I would say that a lot of this stuff, I mean, no one spends their coins right now anyways. I tend to believe, I tend to be a believer in the idea that if you’re a business, you probably shouldn’t focus on this space at all if you’re not directly in Bitcoin for that exchange.
Joshua Unseth (00:39:52): Businesses should be in the business of making money and then if the owners when they get their dividends want to invest in Bitcoin, more power to them. And I think that’s the best way for businesses to focus on this space is to have a founder maybe that really likes Bitcoin and to watch it closely, and then to just not really participate in the business aspects of Bitcoin. Bitcoin as money eventually will make it into your business if it works as money.
John Carvalho (00:40:19): Yeah, I would agree with most of that. I would say that, there is a little bit of a flipside where probably and I only would really appreciate this because I worked at [inaudible 00:40:27]. But probably a business should just be currency agnostic for the most part and just accept whatever form of payment they can actually parse through their own business system, which may include adding payment processors.
Joshua Unseth (00:40:41): Well, if a payment processor takes Bitcoin cash or Ethereum, or Cardano, or any of these others, if you’re a business and you getting the cash in your bank account is fiat, you’re going to be ambivalent as to what people is paying.
John Carvalho (00:40:54): Yeah, because you can always buy Bitcoin with whatever they paid you in any way.
Joshua Unseth (00:40:56): Yeah, absolutely.
John Carvalho (00:40:57): Which one.
Joshua Unseth (00:40:59): And that’s what I’m saying is what you want as a business really is just, you want to not have to think about the payment process at all. You want to receive fiat, you want that to go into your bank account, and then you want to be able to extract that as dividends or as payroll or whatever. So, it’s really dumb for businesses, unless they’re Bitcoin businesses to really focus on that. And Gen-X or whatever the company that does a credit card processing, if they add a way to pay with Bitcoin, that’s great. And you as a business, all you have to do is turn it on.
Joshua Unseth (00:41:29): But there’s been a lot of studies, particularly with eCommerce, I don’t remember which company it was, but many years ago like probably seven or eight, there was a company that added Bitcoin processing to their checkout, and it lowered their checkout percentage, because people had another option to pay. And that’s not good. You really want, you want businesses, too. Businesses want as many customers as they can possibly get going through that checkout process and finishing it, and putting in their credit card number or their ACH or whatever it is that they want and they just want the money. So, to add Bitcoin because out of principle or something that, especially if it hurts your business, that’s in my opinion, a violation of your fiduciary duty as a business owner.
John Carvalho (00:42:17): But what about the concept of we have hyperbitcoinization, which I kind of, the way I interpret that is basically like circular economy. In which my definition of that or I think the actual definition of that is something of basically about removing as much conversion as possible, reducing the amount of friction, having the least amount of points between nodes, et cetera. Circular economy is about efficiency and removing conversion. And so, if you are somebody that subscribes to hyperbitcoinization or the concept of a circular economy for Bitcoin, you probably want to be part of some kind of movement towards Bitcoin businesses that only use Bitcoin and don’t accept all the things, because all the things are an inefficiency.
Joshua Unseth (00:43:10): Yeah, except that businesses, again, are trying to receive fiat, so.
John Carvalho (00:43:16): Well, that’s an assumption. I definitely think they’re starting to be people that businesses that do want to accumulate Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (00:43:22): Yeah. Well, I think it’s different when you put it maybe in your Treasury, like some of the MSTR or Tesla talking about it now. Other company is probably going to do it at some point.
John Carvalho (00:43:35): Yeah, I don’t think people are using Bitcoin for their overhead. Yeah.
Joshua Unseth (00:43:39): Yeah. I think that most businesses really want fiat for the most part. And if you want to make an ideological statement with your business, I mean, that’s the business owner’s prerogative, but I do think that businesses really have an obligation just to accept fiat or to get money into fiat and then the business owners themselves or the business employees or whoever, they can do whatever they want with their money. If they want to invest in crypto, they can. If they want to invest in gold, because they’re gold bugs, they can. If they want to invest in silver, they can. If they want to put it into equities, they can.
Joshua Unseth (00:44:16): And I think that it’s just, it’s incumbent on businesses to operate in a normal environment with something very stable. I think it kind of adds a layer of risk to business that isn’t necessarily what they should be taking on as businesses. As an individual, I think it’s a very different question, but as a business, it’s just not. I mean, to me, the risk of a highly volatile asset being added to your businesses.
John Carvalho (00:44:40): I want to nitpick and say I don’t know if it adds risk so much as changes the risk profile in a way they may not know how to handle.
Joshua Unseth (00:44:47): Yeah. It definitely adds risk, though, because volatility is risk in the markets. I think there are people that disagree with me on that, but that tends to be the sort of accepted definition of volatility is risk.
John Carvalho (00:44:57): Well, I think this goes into the sample rate thing like I think everything has the risk and it’s just like how big and how often it will happen, particularly with money. What will happen with your fiat is suddenly in 2020, they’ll print half the money supply, like that’s a risk.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:14): Yeah, but businesses are generally not, they’re not there to, like I don’t think that businesses should be accepting big currency risk as a part of their portfolio. And maybe your thesis is that it’s not risky, because it’s less risky than holding US dollars. I tend not to subscribe to that.
John Carvalho (00:45:35): No, no, no. My thesis is not that, it’s not that. My argument is that it’s not more risky, it’s just different risky.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:44): It’s absolutely more risky than fiat, though, it just it is. It’s just much more volatile. And if volatility is risk like you are adding a dimension of risk to your business.
John Carvalho (00:45:53): But Fiat has volatility as well, it’s just on a different sample, really.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:57): It’s just very minor. It’s very minor… John Carvalho (00:45:58): It’s not minor, really.
Joshua Unseth (00:45:59): … volatility.
John Carvalho (00:46:00): But the past year, it’s been huge.
Joshua Unseth (00:46:04): It’s been within like 6%.
John Carvalho (00:46:07): Okay, I mean, I don’t want to get in a conversation about how we measure inflation, but I would prefer to measure by the money supply, that’s how I would measure.
Joshua Unseth (00:46:14): Yeah, I don’t measure inflation that way. I measure it.
John Carvalho (00:46:16): Yeah. I understand that there’s a delay to the effect but in the end, that’s the truth of it. And even that, we don’t know it’s true. It’s probably worse than that.
Joshua Unseth (00:46:25): I’m guessing that the US over the next, I mean, we’ll see. And but per my very sober view on things, I tend to think that we’re probably going to have a lot of deflation this year and in spite of the money printing and in spite of the Fed lowering the reserve ratio. So if I’m right, even if I’m wrong, let’s say that there is a lot of volatility this year in the value of your currency, we’re still talking within a few percentage points whereas Bitcoin fluctuates. The other day, it dropped at 40%, something like that, 35%, it’s huge. The volatility in Bitcoin is very big and that just adds a completely new risk dimension to business.
Joshua Unseth (00:47:11): And if you’re a Bitcoin business, that’s one thing. If you’re taking on Bitcoin, you need a certain inventory of Bitcoin, whatever the case is, if you’re a Bitcoin ATM, that’s you’re literally the business that you’re operating, it’s the business of volatility. But if you’re just selling, I don’t know, doughnuts, that’s not a risk that you should be taking on.
John Carvalho (00:47:31): Maybe I’m packaging it wrong. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to say that you can design, you can choose any configuration and achieve the same risk exposure if you design it properly. You can hold your Bitcoin and then do a future shorts or something to make it stable to whatever degree of stability you want to offset whatever amount of volatility you want. And it could be totally stable or a little bit within 1%. You can have whatever you want if you configure it.
John Carvalho (00:48:00): And so the point is the reason why I’m framing it this way is because if you think this way, then it makes you choose, which makes you actually think about what your actual risk choices are and what you really think about the risk of having your money in fiat, because there are different risks. That’s typically going to be held in a bank and what risks of you being able to access that money someday when you might not have total access, the money printing, et cetera. There are real risks and you could design yourself into a situation where you have less exposure to them. Well, with less exposure to some instead of others.
Joshua Unseth (00:48:36): That’s true.
John Carvalho (00:48:37): Basically, you can rearrange things however you want.
Joshua Unseth (00:48:40): Yeah, you can absolutely rearrange your risks. But for me, the business question is whether businesses themselves should be putting their money into Bitcoin or accepting Bitcoin. I mean, I just tend to think that fiat is the more responsible alternative right now in this era, and that you as a business owner can take on different risks personally, then I think your business should.
John Carvalho (00:49:06): Yeah. Well, I’ll agree in this way. I’ll say if your specialty is not something to do with Bitcoin or risk or financing…
Joshua Unseth (00:49:13): Or trading.
John Carvalho (00:49:14): … then don’t do those things. Outsource them to people you trust or just don’t get involved with them.
Joshua Unseth (00:49:20): Yeah. I just, I mean, what you’re talking about is a fairly sophisticated set of trades. And if you’re a business owner, that’s probably not what you’re focused on.
John Carvalho (00:49:28): Yeah. You’d end up outsourcing that to someone else, too and trusting that anyway.
Joshua Unseth (00:49:32): Yeah. You have to trust them. Yeah, it really is a different set of risks. Like I said, if you’re selling donuts, you want to sell donuts for cash, and you want the cash. And then again, if you want you can take your salary or your dividends and you can buy Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (00:49:49): So, what do you think Bitcoin Uncensored would be like if it happened this year?
Joshua Unseth (00:49:55): Man, we’d probably be making a lot of fun of the NFTs. We’d probably be making a lot of fun of these DeFi projects. We’d be focusing a lot on like I hear a lot of these DeFi projects are pretty scammy, very obviously Ponzi scheme.
John Carvalho (00:50:15): We have Elon now.
Joshua Unseth (00:50:16): Elon’s here. I’d probably be laughing at Elon.
John Carvalho (00:50:21): Imagine Elon in Bitcoin Uncensored that would have been so much better than S&L.
Joshua Unseth (00:50:25): Yeah. I mean, Elon would never have come on.
John Carvalho (00:50:29): Well, maybe.
Joshua Unseth (00:50:30): But you know. Yeah. Well, the Elon thing would have been interesting, because I think he would have probably done two shows. The first one would have been that Tesla is accepting Bitcoin. We probably would have diagnosed it correctly. We would have said no one’s going to buy a car with Bitcoin. And very soon, he’ll probably get back out of Bitcoin and we would have been right two weeks later. Very funny. Elon coming into Bitcoin, Bitcoiners, I was surprised by the reaction to it, because they were so happy. And I think that people don’t remember the history of all of these guys.
Joshua Unseth (00:51:09): Every single person that comes into Bitcoin and begin selling things for Bitcoin, very quickly has a realization that nobody uses Bitcoin and at least not for purchases of that sort or of that magnitude. This was my realization at the Bitcoin Ball if you remember that. We went to the Bitcoin Ball.
John Carvalho (00:51:28): I wanted to bring this up, because I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve had a series over the years of people that have sponsored things with Bitcoin, like Superbowl ads or whatever. And you bringing up the Bitcoin bull, which I believe was Bitpay. And recently, we had Strike, who you also mentioned, they did, they sponsored an Indie race car again. And I was like, “Oh, man, this is feeling very dangerous.”
Joshua Unseth (00:51:54): Yeah, yeah, it’s a misuse of money, I think, especially [crosstalk 00:52:00].
John Carvalho (00:51:59): There were so many top signs in hindsight.
Joshua Unseth (00:52:06): But the Bitcoin Ball was interesting, because they had arranged for this one taxi driver to begin accepting Bitcoin and you had this large concentration of Bitcoiners. Bitpay tweeted about them. Everybody was talking. There were articles written about this taxi driver. We took the taxi at, we called that taxi driver and we had him come pick us up at around 1:00 AM, basically, the last trip, this taxi driver took. And we asked him, we said, “So, did anybody pay in Bitcoin today?” The whole day, tons of Bitcoiners. He said, “Zero, zero people paid with Bitcoin that entire day, not one.”
John Carvalho (00:52:47): Awesome.
Joshua Unseth (00:52:48): And I remember, we went back to the hotel and we were looking at each other like, “What the fuck is happening?” How is it that you have the most Bitcoiners here and nobody, not one person was willing to spend. And this was when where everybody was so excited. I mean, I’ve seen this, the shitcoins do it too now. They get really excited when some little piddly vendor somewhere starts accepting their shitcoin. And what I know is that nobody spends that shitcoin at that vendor ever. And that’s always going to be the case for a long time until people feel comfortable like they have maybe some of it, like a lot of the growth, maybe a squeeze out of this. But I could have told you that.
Joshua Unseth (00:53:35): Elon opened it up for Bitcoiners. I bet you, I bet he sold one and a half cars to Bitcoiners to a Bitcoiner. I bet almost nobody used Bitcoin to pay for them and, two weeks later, they pulled the plug. And he pulled it with a fair amount of resentment, which I thought was interesting, the amount of resentment he acquired in those two weeks.
John Carvalho (00:53:57): Yeah, well, I think what the resentment was paired with that like he was on his little kind of Dogecoin adventure, and he didn’t like that. Basically, Bitcoiners were making fun of them the whole time. And so, he wanted his Dogecoin adventure to be pure and true and novel, and Bitcoiners just kept wanting to shit on him for it, which I think he deserved, but-
Joshua Unseth (00:54:19): I agree.
John Carvalho (00:54:22): So, yeah, Bitcoin Uncensored. I don’t know if it’s still got the same mystique that it had a couple years ago. People always talked about it say, “Oh, you got to go watch that.” I kind of wonder what the new crop of Bitcoiners is, how they’re getting exposed.
Joshua Unseth (00:54:37): And they’re making a note of it. No, they hadn’t heard about it.
John Carvalho (00:54:38): Well, hopefully this will help. I’m not very famous, but some people will hear this and hopefully go back and listen. You guys should if you’re listening, Bitcoin Uncensored. I think the whole anthology is still on YouTube. It was a-
Joshua Unseth (00:54:51): I think Chris took them down, but I think there is stuff-
John Carvalho (00:54:52): Did he?
Joshua Unseth (00:54:54): Yeah, you can find it. I think there’s a couple of people talking about hosting it. So, I think that soon, you’ll be able to find it in places.
John Carvalho (00:55:04): We can make a version of The Biz web, so we put it all up there and people have to pay for it.
Joshua Unseth (00:55:07): That’s true as well. But yeah, I think that a lot of the new guys haven’t heard of Bitcoin Uncensored. They don’t know what it is. And it’s funny because a lot of the stuff, like I’ll be in these rooms and I’ll hear arguments that I created being told to me about these things. I think it’s very funny. Just because it was, it really was sort of the cultural pivot for Bitcoin when we did define culture.
John Carvalho (00:55:32): It was like Bitcoin Twitter before Bitcoin Twitter kind of.
Joshua Unseth (00:55:34): It was, yeah. It really was. It really did define Bitcoin culture for many years. And a lot of the stuff, I just heard about “Bitcoin, I’m here to fix it” me and stuff like that. A lot of the stuff that was-
John Carvalho (00:55:48): It’s getting used a lot lately.
Joshua Unseth (00:55:50): Yeah, especially on Elon. A lot of that stuff, it was developed in real time on Bitcoin Uncensored and exported to the world. And now, I hear people repeating these things. And I think it’s cool. It’s had a long lasting effect on Bitcoin culture. And I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it, at least in terms of its effect. So, hopefully, that remains, I think that we did set sort of a toxic culture that Bitcoin has, which I think has really kept Bitcoin pure and very free of a lot of the scams that Bitcoins have had to endure and seem to be okay with enduring, which I think is, again, interesting.
John Carvalho (00:56:35): I think I’m just thinking this out loud right now, but what Bitcoin Uncensored was for me, and I think maybe a good cultural theme for Bitcoiners in general was like it was just sincere, it was genuine. It was like no matter how stupid or wrong or right or whatever, everybody was just trying to experience Bitcoin in the open with the clothes off.
Joshua Unseth (00:56:54): Correct.
John Carvalho (00:56:54): That’s what it felt like. And certainly, it was honest.
Joshua Unseth (00:56:55): But like, yeah. Well, yeah. And I think that’s important, because, again, I think encountering a lot of the FUD that we see in Bitcoin, right now we’re dealing with this energy FUD again, which we’ve seen for many, many years, and watching Bitcoiners freak out about it. I think Bitcoiners have a tendency to be very dishonest about the protocol and what’s going on with it. The claim, for example, that Bitcoin uses renewable resources, it’s complete bullshit, for the most part. It really is not running on renewables. That’s objectively false and it always will be until, you know?
John Carvalho (00:57:40): I’ll tell you this, I don’t know if it’s subjectively true or false, so I think all of it is bullshit, so I don’t even go looking into it. And that’s how I handle it.
Joshua Unseth (00:57:46): Well, yeah, but like I’ll make the simple argument. Bitcoin goes to where the energy is cheapest and the energy is cheapest in places with subsidies, real simple. So, you have Bitcoin going into places like Niagara Falls where they sell their Niagara Energy to New York cities, right? And the energy that comes off of the falls is very cheap, but the cities have limited amounts of that, so what will happen is Bitcoiners miners would go into these cities, eat up the entire subsidy, and then the town from then on runs on like 11 to 13 cent per kilowatt hour electricity after the Bitcoiners eaten a lot. And so, net-net, there’s a lot more energy used, but the Bitcoiners technically were running on renewable energy. And I think it’s funny to watch Bitcoiners be on their back heels trying to defend it rather than kind of just making the argument like, “Okay, so what’s your point? Bitcoin uses a lot of energy.” It has to. There’s no alternative.
John Carvalho (00:58:54): Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you follow me on Twitter, but I did try to kind of bring these sides of things to the debate. But I don’t get to-
Joshua Unseth (00:59:01): I don’t follow anyone at Twitter these days. I got kicked out from it.
John Carvalho (00:59:04): Yeah, I looked for you. I looked for you today. I was like, “Where’s his account?”
Joshua Unseth (00:59:07): I got kicked off.
John Carvalho (00:59:08): Yeah. I don’t know. Well, the energy debate, I mostly agree with you. I think that like a lot, at the very least, a lot of the people that are kind of cheerleading these narratives for either side are definitely not verifying or researching these narratives on how true they may or may not be or how technically true they may not or may not be, which can be pretty important when you’re talking about energy.
Joshua Unseth (00:59:30): I just don’t think that Bitcoin needs to lie to win.
John Carvalho (00:59:33): Yeah, exactly.
Joshua Unseth (00:59:34): That’s what really bothers me. That’s always bothered me. It was funny to me when people said that Bitcoin was not used for drugs. That was Bitcoin Uncensored would go out and be like, “Yeah, okay. Well, here’s a drug user, how do you get your drugs?” “Oh, we use Bitcoin.” “Oh, I guess it is used for drugs.” “Okay, this is a hooker, what do you do?” “Oh, I use Bitcoin to list my stuff on back pages.” “Oh, interesting. Okay.” Bitcoin was Dark World money, and it still is and probably less so now. But it’s hard to deny that that’s what it was.
John Carvalho (01:00:10): Well, it is because it is the black market. It’s like…
Joshua Unseth (01:00:13): Correct.
John Carvalho (01:00:14): There is no rules other than the rules in the Bitcoin protocol, so it’s like literally the only place you can’t make rules, so it is the black market. I actually think the energy debate is totally a false premise anyway on many levels. Just the idea of that we should decide which energy is okay, and which energy is not okay, and how we buy it because it’s like once you decide, “I’m going to sell coal energy, I’m going to sell solar energy,” it’s just a question of price, right? And so, if you start making a question of who or for what, this is like regulation at a kind of granular level, what you can’t actually enforce? You can’t enforce how individuals use energy, which means you can’t enforce any type of regulation in any special way, but you know?
Joshua Unseth (01:01:05): Yeah. Well, I mean, I see that all the time. I saw it on YCombinator the other day. Someone said we should ban proof of work chains, which I thought was a very funny idea.
John Carvalho (01:01:15): Well, the other absurd thing is that like I don’t know if I even believe that there’s such a thing as more energy being used. And what I mean by that is like thermodynamically, there’s all the same amount of everything all the time, right? So it’s like if the miners are using energy to mine in a trend, that means they’re not doing something else they would have done.
John Carvalho (01:01:38): And so, what would they have done with their energy or how would they have used energy if they weren’t mining Bitcoin? They probably would have started storage farms or who knows what they would have done, but they would have done something, right? And they would have done something to try to make as much money as they could close to that situation. So, I don’t think you can actually, it’s like the whole Bitcoin doesn’t create evil. It’s just, just because people do stuff with it, it doesn’t mean that those things are newly happening because of Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (01:02:07): Yeah, but they would have burned far less energy. I just find that uninteresting [crosstalk 01:02:10].
John Carvalho (01:02:11): Maybe they would have learned more. Maybe they would have become coal miners or literally.
Joshua Unseth (01:02:14): True. But so what?
John Carvalho (01:02:16): [crosstalk 01:02:16] idea. Right, so what is the bigger point, but just in general, yeah, I don’t know. It just seems like a stupid argument. And you’re right, I think Bitcoin should just be more honest and say, “Okay, yeah, Bitcoin is used for crime, Bitcoin is used for drugs, and it probably will be used for pedophilia and all these bad things.” Because it wouldn’t actually be freedom technology, if that weren’t true.
Joshua Unseth (01:02:38): Right. And again, you get to these libertarians and they go, “Bitcoin is going to make everything hunky dory. It’s going to make war stop. It’s going to make criminal stop. It’s just amazing tech.” And you kind of, you sit there, you’re like, “No, it won’t.” It will continue to be used for all of these things like criminals. It will continue to be used for all sorts of nefarious activity and it will be used for a lot of good stuff, too.
John Carvalho (01:03:07): So, I guess we should take a moment and tell everyone that you also have a podcast, right? Junseth’s World.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:12): I do. Yeah, very infrequently. We release an issue sometimes more frequently than others. We try to do every week and that turns into once every couple of months sometimes, but we’re over there, Junseth’s World at soundcloud.com/junsethsworld. And we got some good interviews. Interesting stuff on there.
John Carvalho (01:03:30): I don’t listen to that many podcasts, but I do I listen to yours about as frequently as any other.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:35): Good.
John Carvalho (01:03:35): I listen maybe once a month to a podcast episode these days.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:39): Nice, so you’ve probably caught up.
John Carvalho (01:03:41): I don’t remember. I’d have to look at the latest episode and try to remember it. But your topics are always so variety, so I’d have to.
Joshua Unseth (01:03:51): Yeah, we tend to swing from topic to topic and I just talk about stuff that interests us. And we’re Bitcoiners, so everything in the world kind of relates back to Bitcoin.
John Carvalho (01:03:59): Yeah, that’s the fun part of being Bitcoiners, you can just make everything about Bitcoin.
Joshua Unseth (01:04:04): Yeah. And again, it’s not as frequent as Bitcoin Uncensored which is once to twice a week. In what we could do, but it’s just our thoughts. It’s me and a group of guys that are in varying stages of Bitcoining. Some of us have been around for a long time. Others have been around for less long. It’s funny I think Bitcoin TINA put it up today talking about how basically every single person that comes to Bitcoin has to follow the same journey no matter what.
Joshua Unseth (01:04:32): You can’t really jump over the journey. You have to shitcoin for a while. You have to you have to experience all the exact same mistakes that every other person who got here made and you will not listen to anybody as you’re making those mistakes. You have to do them yourself. It’s a very interesting phenomenon. And I’ve witnessed it now, I don’t know. It seems to happen most often during bull runs when people come into the space. You get new people and they just start making the same mistakes. And it’s very, very funny.
John Carvalho (01:05:03): Yeah, I think Bitcoin kind of in a way attract a type as well or multiple types. There are certain kinds of people that are just more likely to put themselves in that position.
Joshua Unseth (01:05:15): Right. Yeah. And I do wonder when we have had enough people in this space for a while and have had enough people lose money in the space that they sort of consolidate. I wonder if that will happen or when. I do fear, one of my big fears here is that we end up with a lot of people, putting a lot of money into these projects that end up being scams. And maybe they won’t be figured out today, but they might figure it out in five years, six years, 10 years.
John Carvalho (01:05:45): Well, that’s the deep fear that kind of drives most of Bitcoin Twitter tweets, right?
Joshua Unseth (01:05:49): Yes.
John Carvalho (01:05:50): They just want, it’s Catcher in the Rye syndrome. You just want to stop everybody from falling off the cliff.
Joshua Unseth (01:05:56): Yeah. And that’s why Bitcoin maximalism exists because so many people here have been, we’ve been through the fire. We’ve been burned. We’ve lost our money in Ponzi schemes. We’ve given our money to projects we thought were good. We realized we didn’t understand mining or proof of stake or whatever the case it is. And we did things that were stupid.
John Carvalho (01:06:19): And now, we need you to buy a Bitcoin, so we can get out of it.
Joshua Unseth (01:06:22): Correct. Yeah, we’re trying to pump our bags.
John Carvalho (01:06:26): That’s a joke, by the way.
Joshua Unseth (01:06:27): Yeah. That’s been mentioned a number of times [crosstalk 01:06:30].
John Carvalho (01:06:30): But not really, but yeah.
Joshua Unseth (01:06:31): What’s interesting about Bitcoin is that all these other shitcoins people buy and they buy for a profit, but in Bitcoin people hold and they just only want to hold. They want to get as much Bitcoin as they can hold it. And that’s a phenomenally different use case than like an Ethereum or Monero or any of these others. Which are essentially just transaction mediums or in the case of Ethereum, it’s pump projects, whether it’s the DOW or whether it is NFTs or what, the ICOs.
John Carvalho (01:07:07): Yeah, people get so excited about what’s possible with networks and with the internet and with computers and with programming. And then they actually they confuse discovering all of that stuff with discovering cryptocurrencies.
Joshua Unseth (01:07:19): Yeah, and it’s interesting. Ethereum is like this masturbatory project, failed projects that are basically projects to fund other projects. And I find that very interesting as well, the fact that there really is nothing useful anywhere except Bitcoin. And I’m curious as to how long it will take people to realize that. I hope sooner than later.
John Carvalho (01:07:41): So, I want to come back around and talk about business-y stuff for a little bit.
Joshua Unseth (01:07:44): Sure.
John Carvalho (01:07:47): I want to do like a kind of think like a case example like you mentioned Bitcoin wallets earlier and you mentioned, we talked about Bitcoin businesses. Let’s talk about like bootstrapping and marketing, and that kind of thing. Let’s use the wallet as an example. What do you think, using your own expertise and recommendations, how would a Bitcoin business with an app or a product go about marketing itself effectively in the current internet environment?
Joshua Unseth (01:08:20): I guess it depends on what the-
John Carvalho (01:08:22): Let’s use the wallet app, I guess. Because I know you have experience with eCommerce, and I’m trying to tap into that a little bit.
Joshua Unseth (01:08:33): I think that the wallet space is very crowded. And what I probably would do if I were developing a wallet would be I would probably do it as an ancillary to another part of my business. If I ran Bitcoin ATMs, I’d have a lot of people with the opportunity to then download a wallet, because they’re going to get that receipt from the ATM and they’re going to look at it and be like, “Well, what do I do with this?” And the answer is, “Put it in our wallet.” “Well, what’s a wallet?” “Here’s the wallet, you put it on.”
Joshua Unseth (01:09:03): So, that’s a pretty good use case, I think, for wallet development and it’s very interesting. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. Again, you’re not really monetizing the wallet. In that sense, you’re monetizing sales of your Bitcoin. But the wallet, the wallet has some cool opportunities there too. I mean, I’ve always been amazed by wallet developers. I would think they would take a de minimis output or something like that from transactions. Maybe, they can’t. I don’t know enough about wallet development, but I would think that that would be something they would do that you submit it to the chain, and-
John Carvalho (01:09:40): It’s actually something, it’s not something they typically do, but it is something that actually Lightning makes actually possible. I don’t think you could do it before, not trustlessly. But Lightning will make this possible by basically if your channel is with the wallet company, the wallet company gets to set the first fee that you pay and allow-
Joshua Unseth (01:09:57): That’s true. And I think they should set a small fee. I mean, I do think that wallets should be able to be a service that can generate income. And I think in Bitcoin, it’s difficult because the easiest way to generate income in a wallet would be to show people advertisements, but I think that that would be extremely unsafe and insecure and privacy violating. So, they’ve been reluctant to do that.
Joshua Unseth (01:10:25): So, what a lot of them have done is they’ve tried to build these little marketplaces in their apps, I don’t think that really works very well. So, I think the wallet business is a really hard business and that’s why I would say it should be probably be ancillary to an actual use case, if you’re running a business.
John Carvalho (01:10:44): Yeah, I definitely agree. I think that having context for your products is super important. And I think that a lot of Bitcoin businesses and businesses in this space in general, there are a lot of times engineer led and they don’t have a lot of specific experience with marketing or product and these kinds of things, so they tend to have certain bents to how they do things.
Joshua Unseth (01:11:06): But there’s a lot of opportunity here. I mean, I think [inaudible 01:11:09] was a great example of opportunity that exists. You’d think that someone would have come up with that entire business plan years ago, but they really didn’t. And I think it’s because it’s so hard to understand how Bitcoin works. It’s really difficult to get your mind around how seed phrases and seeds work. And it’s just difficult to build a business like that. It really is.
John Carvalho (01:11:35): So, apart from how the actual product and decisions about which product and the challenges of it. What about what’s going on in the internet and eCommerce world with just as far as like channels and advertising and approaches, guerilla marketing. I used to be savvy in this kind of world. I don’t follow it at all anymore. As far as if I had a Bitcoin wallet and I wanted to advertise it and promote it and get people to bootstrap it, what kind of trick kind of traditional means that you think are out there that actually would be appropriate?
Joshua Unseth (01:12:08): I’d probably build a website that answers Bitcoin questions and then [crosstalk 01:12:14]-
John Carvalho (01:12:13): So, SEO route, I guess is what you’re saying.
Joshua Unseth (01:12:16): Yeah, I mean, that’s my expertise. I mean, you could certainly do Google AdWords, but I probably have people literally just purchasing or just coming to my site and making the site as useful as possible and then trafficking that into the wallet. In a wallet. I mean, I’m kind of amazed that more wallets don’t do things like integrating with Coinbase or with these other exchanges. I think more and more have been doing that, but-
John Carvalho (01:12:42): It’s becoming a trend, yeah. You’re starting to see, well, at least you’re starting to see exchanges have pet wallets basically.
Joshua Unseth (01:12:49): Yeah, I would have done that very early on. I probably would have used, I use affiliate marketing links and stuff like that to get people into Coinbase. And then encourage them to dump those coins into their wallet. That sort of thing would have been the thing that I think could have monetized wallets a little bit earlier, but a lot of them didn’t really do that. And that’s always kind of baffled me.
John Carvalho (01:13:11): Do you include any type of support strategies for your SEO like social media behavior or other aspects to it?
Joshua Unseth (01:13:20): It depends on the business. I tend to believe that in eCommerce, you should let your business speak to you as to what the next step is. So, there’s a lot of businesses that do very well on Instagram. I know a guy down here, he started a fishing lures company. He built his entire reputation on Instagram and then he launched his eCommerce site. The result is that he was able to translate those Instagram subscribers into actual buyers of his fishing lures and he’s doing phenomenally well as a result. So, that business is an Instagram component. I don’t think he has Twitter. He could probably do very well on YouTube.
Joshua Unseth (01:13:55): And that’s certainly my strategy for business has always been if you’re going to start another channel, the channel needs to be unique, number one. And number two, it needs to have a definite use case in ROI. So, I don’t generally start social media channels for my company unless I have a very specific sort of methodology about going into that channel and actually turning that channel into a revenue generating engine.
John Carvalho (01:14:21): It’s interesting because-
Joshua Unseth (01:14:23): Or a cost lowering engine.
John Carvalho (01:14:26): Yeah, well, the default is Twitter is everything to Bitcoiners. They think that all of Bitcoin happens on Twitter and they don’t, you know? This is something that you can see a lot better once you actually work for a Bitcoin business that has actual customers, you’ll see that most of Bitcoin Twitter has nothing to do with it.
Joshua Unseth (01:14:42): Yeah, it’s interesting, though like I think the podcast space is huge in Bitcoin. Yeah, and I think that’s why podcasters in Bitcoin, they command absurd amounts of money for fairly small audiences. I think it’s because Bitcoiners it’s a very targeted group.
John Carvalho (01:15:03): Yeah, well, it’s also very hard to target them from working at [crosstalk 01:15:08] trying to do advertising and sponsoring and events and all the different ways that you could market the company and the products. It’s actually not that many that you’re even allowed to if you just mention cryptocurrency and even the ones you are allowed to, it’s inconsistent and they’ll treat you weird and yeah.
Joshua Unseth (01:15:25): Yeah, so I think that the podcasts provide a really good opportunity for getting the word out.
John Carvalho (01:15:30): There’s too much now.
Joshua Unseth (01:15:31): Well, it’s it depends on what your product is. You have to, Bitcoin is hard because in order to advertise, you have to have this product that’s very valuable or it’s going to attract basically every Bitcoin in the known universe, so that you can sell a lot of it, right? And that, there aren’t a lot of those products.
