The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 210 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dixon: Paul Krugman makes basic mistakes and hasn't read the whitepaper
“You read, like, Paul Krugman or something, and they just, he makes very basic mistakes about Bitcoin, and clearly has not read the paper, and so it's hard to take those seriously”
Regulatory barriers delay hard tech compared to consumer software
“There are applications in genomics and, you know, drones and Bitcoin and three printing and things like that that do run into regulatory challenges. And so you know, some of the reason that people see these things that are perceived as fluff that, that, you kn…”
Bitcoin wallet adoption will enable a new software platform
“I think one of those things is probably going to be Bitcoin, like getting lots of people Bitcoin wallets, because you can deploy all kinds of software on top of that once they have Bitcoin wallets, so.”
Balaji: Apple's Bitcoin ban will drive users off iOS within three years
“Like, you know, locking down Bitcoin on the iOS platform is going to be, I think, seen in like three years as one of the more short-sighted things that, that could be done. Because it's going to be so, such a big deal. And so it's the kind of thing that could …”
Balaji: Bitcoin will reach one billion users and 1,000x growth
“Ultimately, you know, you're gonna get to ten million, then a hundred million, then maybe a billion Bitcoin users, and so you've got, like, room for a thousand X growth left.”
Dixon: Bitcoin was likely created by a group, not an individual
“Which actually makes me think it had to be a group, almost, because, like, the game theory it out against all the different attacks.”
Darknet Bitcoin transactions dropped from 30% in 2012 to under 1%
“In 2012, 30% of Bitcoin transaction value was associated with dark net markets like Alphabay or Silk Road, but by 2018, that number is down to less than one percent.”
Paul Krugman says uninformed retail investors are getting ripped off in crypto
“My barber actually did ask me if he should put all of his money in Bitcoin. So this is not, this stuff is not hypothetical, it's for real, and there's a lot of, Uninformed people getting ripped off.”
Katie Haun concedes Bitcoin's main use is not peer-to-peer payments
“Satoshi's white paper says it's an electronic peer-to-peer cashless system for payments. Right. For payments, and I would grant you that it's right now, it's main use is, it's certainly not that.”
Krugman: Best bull case for Bitcoin is acting like cash hoards
“The best argument I could possibly be persuaded for on, on the question of Bitcoin Is that Bitcoin will become like gold or high denomination notes. It'll be something that people hold in their stashes in, in in Buenos Aires, or actually high denomination euro…”
Dixon: Crypto networks are fundamentally a new type of computer
“You know, being kind of, being technology focused, we kind of, we like to look at it or one way we like to look at it is as a, as you can think of a crypto network like Ethereum or Bitcoin or one of the many other new innovative, you know, networks out there a…”
Rampell: Gold as money is more absurd than Bitcoin
“And again, if you think that Bitcoin is silly, I would turn your attention to gold being a little bit more silly.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Bitcoin achieves universal global consensus across hostile political divides
“So essentially, the point is that Bitcoin is decentralized cryptographic truth. Like essentially the whole thing about Bitcoin that's so hard is how do you get global consensus on who owns what BTC? And we have something now where whether you're a Democrat or …”
Dixon: Crypto is a new network architecture, not just meme coins
“Crypto is a new, this is what my book's about, is it's a new way to architect internet services, a new way to build networks that has a bunch of different properties, which I argue are beneficial for a bunch of reasons and can do a set of things you couldn't d…”
Capital Group's Mark Casey holds Bitcoin exposure in equity portfolio
“As an equity portfolio manager, there's not too many ways to be involved in Bitcoin in your portfolios, but I have one, and, ah, I'm looking for others.”
Dixon: 18% of Argentinians own stablecoins and 50 million Americans own crypto
“Like Argentina, something like last number I saw was 18% of Argentinians have owned a stable coin. In America, fifty million people have crypto and mostly Bitcoin.”
Dixon: Crypto developer energy has largely moved from Bitcoin to Ethereum
“I think a lot of the energy though, in my opinion, the developer energy has moved to Ethereum and other ecosystems that have been friendlier to this type of innovation.”
Dixon: Bitcoin is a political movement while Web3 is a technological movement
“My sense is Bitcoin is more of a political movement than Web three. Web three is more of a tech movement. So to me, it's more like, I think of the Web three kind of crypto blockchain as more like open source.”
Boneh predicts Bitcoin and Ethereum data will survive until year 3000
“So I think that the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains are going to be with humanity now forever, you know, in the year 3000, you know, the era of Futurama, we're still going to be looking at the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. Maybe they won't be called that,…”
Carlson-Wee: Bitcoin enables internet digital scarcity and sovereign-free finance
“It means that for the first time you can have digital scarcity on the internet, And of course you could move to a global unified financial and monetary system that's outside the scope of any sort of sovereign state political control and is really opt in by all…”
Dixon: Sub-second transaction finality is impossible in proof-of-work systems
“You just simply can't have, ah, like sub-second transaction finality in a proof of work system. Like, so Bitcoin, like you really need to wait, you know, each block is 10 minutes, and it has to do with the coordination among the network, and the network propag…”
Fish: Bitcoin's proof-of-work energy is largely wasted computational work
“The thing about Bitcoin is that all that work is just sort of computational energy that is, ah, that is, say, somewhat wasted, although it maintains the system in balance.”
Berniske: Crypto networks lacking formal governance devolve into defection
“I think also if you don't have formal governance mechanisms and clarity around it, you devolve into governance by defection. And we saw that with Bitcoin.”
Milenius: Bitcoin behaves as digital gold and improves on physical gold
“Bitcoin, as we've seen, how it's behaved in the wild, it behaves a lot like digital gold, and it's definitely an improvement on physical gold”
Dixon: Native internet money will emerge between 2023 and 2028
“And I think at some point, I think over the next five to 10 years, we'll have this sort of internet money, and it'll either be Ethereum or Bitcoin or something, or some stable coin or something else, but”
Weisman: CFTC ruled Bitcoin is a commodity under its jurisdiction
“And it's been, one of their rulings said that Bitcoin is a commodity, so it falls under their jurisdiction.”
Carlson-Wee: Token ownership creates fanaticism by combining utility and financial gains
“People in Bitcoin are fanatics, and it's because they not only gain value in a more traditional sense of network effects when the user base grows, they also actually gain wealth from that user base growing.”
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum enables features simply not possible on Bitcoin
“So you can build all sorts of more advanced features in Ethereum that are simply not possible with Bitcoin.”
Buterin: Building fair lotteries on Bitcoin requires O(N³) collateral versus O(N) on Ethereum
“Like, one of them was they published this at the Financial Cryptography, in the workshop, that they were trying to create a provably fair lottery on top of Bitcoin, and it turns out that if you have N players in the lottery, Then you basically have to have O o…”
Paulus: One-third of all Bitcoin ever mined is lost
“Something like one third of every Bitcoin ever mind is, is now lost.”
Boneh: Functional quantum computers would break modern internet cryptography and Bitcoin
“All the world of crypto that we use on the internet today, and for Bitcoin as well, ah, would be well, would be broken if someone was able to build a quantum computer.”
Back: Bitcoin hard forks require full ecosystem compromise to succeed
“Because of the nature of hard forks where everybody has to upgrade at once, it's essentially, you know, it's essential that all of the participants, including the users, the miners, the ecosystem players providing different kinds of services to users, that the…”
Morkos: Back's proposal provides crucial temporary scaling relief
“I think that's why you know, a proposal like Adams, which sort of gives you that temporary breathing room, and in the long term, more time to implement the right solution, may make a lot of sense.”
Morkos: Bitcoin governance rejects top-down decision-making by industry bigwigs
“No, I don't think the point is to, you know, gather all the bigwigs in the room and make decisions. That's not how a system like Bitcoin works. I mean, everyone makes their own decision, and the idea is to have all the information come together so people can S…”
Armstrong: Bitcoin GitHub repositories outpace traditional payment systems like PayPal
“There's about 6000 total to date, which is outpacing the number of GitHub repositories for other common payment systems like PayPal.”
Dixon: Bitcoin's greatest value is enabling new payment types
“I personally am much more excited about the latter kind for Bitcoin. In other words, I'm more excited about new ways that you can use Bitcoin and pay for things that you couldn't before. So for example, micro payments, machine to machine payments, versus save …”
Hearn: Bitcoin will hit its 1MB block size limit next year
“And we're now at more like half of that block size, and it, you know, as traffic is growing, it looks like we might start hitting that limit sometime next year.”
Hearn: Western Bitcoin adoption suffers from poor messaging, not lack of utility
“If you're in the West and you have access to, you know, credit card payments and so on, it's not always clear why you would want to use Bitcoin, but that's not because there aren't good reasons, it's because we're not doing a good job of, like, telling people …”
Popper: Bitcoin is not ready to serve as a mainstream currency
“It's pretty clear that at this point, Bitcoin is not ready for prime time in that way. There are sort of basic problems with the protocol, with the number of transactions that can go through the system, and significant improvements that need to be made before …”
Popper: Bitcoin's advantages in Argentina will diminish if inflation and currency controls end
“If the government does away with that, if the government begins to deal with inflation, then the advantages of Bitcoin are going to become a lot less significant.”
Popper: Mainstream Bitcoin adoption will take 5 to 10 years
“And I think the people who are kind of really in the trenches working on this recognize that this sort of thing takes five, 10 years, and, you know, Wences often would say that to me when I was talking to him in the course of reporting on this book that, you k…”
Popper: Argentina is not the future or model for broader Bitcoin adoption
“I wouldn't argue that Argentina is the future of Bitcoin, or Argentina is paving the way for Bitcoin, you know, broader adoption by ordinary people. I just think it's a great experiment to watch, because it's the place where people are trying that right now”
Popper: Bitcoin code would have died quietly without early adopters
“The code in itself would have died a quiet death if it were not for all of the people in this book”
Mountain View is poorly suited for heavily regulated frontier tech startups
“Like if you wanted to build a company that operates drones and trades in Bitcoin while doing that and maybe layer something, I don't know, stem cells into that mixer or something, it's very unlikely that you should create that company in Mountain View.”
Vigna: Bitcoin diffuses centralized financial power across broader society
“What I think Bitcoin can do is take that power of the currency and diffuse it. A decentralized system where people really can be their own bank if you want to, or you can use a certain, you know, it takes that concentrated power and it diffuses it among the br…”
Casey: Interest in developing world Bitcoin adoption is top-down, not bottom-up
“As to whether that's actually sort of coming from there, the interest, it's kind of, it's a top-down level of interest rather than bottom-up.”
Casey: Framing Bitcoin as a 'trustless' system is a problematic mistake
“One of the reasons why I think they struggle with that is because they've come up with this meme that I think is actually problematic, and that is that there's no, we're a trustless activity. We don't need trust anymore. It's like, no, no, you absolutely do ne…”
Dixon: Fixed asset supply does not guarantee perpetual price growth
“People say, because there's only so many of them, the price will always go up, but we have so many counters, like gold, for example, I don't think anyone thinks gold will always go up. There's plenty of examples of things with fixed quantities where the price …”