Welcome to Pragmatic.
[Music]
Pragmatic is a show about technology and contemplating the finer details in their practical application.
By exploring the real-world trade-offs, we dive into how great ideas can be transformed
into products and services that impact our lives.
Pragmatic is entirely supported by you, our listeners.
If you'd like to support us and keep the show ad-free, you can by becoming a Premium
Supporter.
Premium Support is available via Patreon and through the Apple Podcasts channel subscription.
Premium Supporters have access to early release high-quality versions of episodes as well
as bonus material from all of our shows not available anywhere else.
Pragmatic is also a podcasting 2.0 enhanced show,
and with the right podcast player,
you can also stream Satoshi's and boost with a message
as you listen.
Just visit engineer.network/pragmatic
to learn how you can help this show to continue to be made.
Thank you.
I'm your host, John Chidjie,
and today I'm joined once again by Dave Jones.
How's it going, Dave?
- Oh, it's going great.
It's beautiful here.
The weather is fantastic.
I mean, like usually in Alabama,
it's a million degrees in a million, you know,
And now it's like, oh, outside it's in the high sixties.
Um, just mostly, mostly dry.
It's, oh, it's just beautiful time of year.
We, we, in Alabama, we get, we get like, uh, three weeks of gorgeous weather.
And then it swing, like, you know, you get this window of, of nice weather in
the spring and another window in the fall and then it's just, it's just
beautiful, beautiful weather.
nice weather in the spring and another window in the fall
and the rest of the year is miserable.
So we're in the window.
Yeah.
- Well, the interesting thing is it's also in the seventies
here, it's 71 at the moment.
So, or 22 degrees Celsius, if you prefer Celsius,
but yeah, and it's a beautiful day too.
I love this time of year.
It's a little bit cooler at night,
but it's not too hot in the day.
So we haven't quite hit summer yet,
but yeah, spring is in full flight.
So, but I do love this time of year where I live.
It's a sub-temperate kind of a climate.
It's not quite tropical,
'cause I grew up in the tropics.
So about a seven hour drive north of here,
I'm right on the tropic of Capricorn
when I was growing up in Rockhampton.
And yeah, I feel that humidity complaint.
It was always like 90% or more relative humidity
and it was stinking hot.
And it was just generally unpleasant,
but here, different story.
So it sounds like right now today though,
different sides of the world,
we got some almost identical weather, which is great.
Not complaining.
- Humidity, I talk to my kids about this.
Humidity is like 90% of comfort.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause you can take a room and not change
the actual, the real temperature of that room at all
and just lower the humidity and make a drastic difference.
Like 75 degrees at 80% humidity
and 75 degrees at 40% humidity
are two completely different experiences.
- Oh, totally.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I actually did some work out at a mine, a coal mine,
way, way back in my youth, 1996, '97.
And I was out in a township called Marra.
And Marra is a good three hours inland from the coastline.
And it was regularly in the 100, 110
sort of a temperature range,
but the humidity was effectively non-existent.
So you didn't feel it.
You were just, I mean, you felt like,
I'm walking through a blast furnace,
but it's not really a bother, it's not really bothering me.
- It's a comfortable blast furnace.
- Yes, it's exactly.
- It's more like a warm blanket.
- Yes, it's like a scorching warm blanket.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But yeah, it's funny how that works, but yes.
Anyway, all right, humidity, yes, is not our friend.
But okay, so onto what we wanted to talk about today
is the reason I got you back on,
and thank you for coming back on.
I--
- Yeah, anytime, bro.
- Yeah, I just wanted to continue the conversation
in two dimensions.
One is a little bit about sort of like the Bitcoin thing
that I've been grappling with
and I'm trying to get my head around
some of the little nuances.
But the other thing is mainly about some more stuff
on podcasting 2.0, particularly around soundbites.
But I thought we should probably start with Bitcoin
and I'm, 'cause I run my Bitcoin lightning node
on a Raspberry Pi using Raspberry Blitz,
Raspberry Blitz, sorry.
And it's been, to be honest, pretty solid.
Haven't had too many issues with it.
And I've got a whole bunch of other little bits
and pieces running on there, like I run Helipad on there
and a Boostergram messenger that I did the extract TLV,
Python script running over and over.
And a few other bits and pieces,
but it's been really good.
And I've learned a lot about channel management
and on the Lightning Network.
And I've come a long way since we last spoke.
So it's been quite the interesting educational journey.
And one of the things that I was thinking about
Bitcoin and have been thinking about for a year or more now is I do look at all the different
other cryptocurrencies out there and what worries me is the fact that they seem to be
be plagued by a lot of there's a lot of like pump and dump sort of stuff going on there's
lots of you know like is it was some of them have boards and board members and consortiums
and and different interests and some are driven by corporations and the one thing that Bitcoin
doesn't have is, well, any of that.
Yeah, that's right.
I sort of look at that and I think to myself, well, is there actually any other
cryptocurrency out there that is actually truly independent like Bitcoin?
Because I think it's the only one that there is.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.
I would say that Hive is probably the only other one that comes that
that is similar.
And that, I think, is almost purely by accident, because
I mean, now I'm not the Hive blockchain historian by any means, but I do know enough to know that it was a split of some sort from Steam, I think was the original blockchain, the name of the original blockchain that Hive came from.
And I think a lot of the protocol is the same between the two.
I think they've diverged now, but if I don't, if I know this correctly, if I know this history correctly,
I think there was this some sort of like dissatisfaction between different factions within S.T.E.A.M.
and then there was like this takeover anyway, a bunch of nastiness.
And then what got split out or forked out of S.T.E.A.M. became H.I.V.E.
And I think the result of that like a lot of these what you're talking about
is there's a lot of pre mining that goes on a lot of the people don't realize
that a lot of crypto currencies a lot of blockchains are owned by their own by
companies. So something like Cardano or so you know these different
cryptocurrencies that you hear about, XRP, they're owned, they're actually owned by a company and they're
they do what's called a pre-mine and so the company or the stakeholders or whatever get a certain share of
the coins up front
before the blockchain goes public and I believe that was the case with Steam
if I'm not mistaken, but because of this
split thing that happened, I think what you ended up with is sort of an independent blockchain
that it's proof of stake, but I don't think there is, it's not owned by any corporation,
it's actually open source and decentralized, and it doesn't have the pre-mine factor in
it.
I think there were some whales and some beneficiaries that happened during that whole transition,
But I believe it's a more pure entity than almost any other coin that I can think of.
Oh, well, there's Monero. That's another one.
So Monero is unique in a lot of ways too.
It is proof of work, like Bitcoin, but it's schtick, so to speak.
is like, it's not just an AES hash that goes as fast as you can go. It's more of a, I forget
the exact technology, but it's like sCrypt or something like that, where it's meant to
be a sort of a GPU, CPU neutral sort of thing. You can mine Monero just as well on a CPU as you
you can on a GPU. So you can actually still be profitable as a miner with normal hardware.
Okay.
And Monero is a very interesting coin. So I think, and there's very privacy focused
and it uses this relay system and it also does like a variable block size. So with most
blockchains the block size is fixed and so that could be like you know one
megabyte five megabytes whatever and that means that the blocks can only hold
a certain number of transactions because you can only fit that much data in there
so for Bitcoin for example you can fit you know between 2500 2500 3500
transactions I think on average it's around 27 2800 transactions per block
Monero uses a different setup where it's got this idea of variable block sizes.
The blocks can get bigger and smaller in reaction to things that are going on
pressure like mining pressure on the network. I don't fully understand it but
the problem if there is a big weakness with Monero it is that
it's very privacy focused and it's very difficult to ever find out identity. It's
anonymity first. That really makes people suspicious of it and you know
especially governments and that kind of thing. Definitely. Yeah the weak the
weakness of Hive if there is you know a weakness there it's that it's just not
It's not huge. I mean, there's a limited number of API servers.
So you don't have the breadth that you do with Bitcoin.
Something, you know, thousands and thousands of nodes.
You just don't have that there.
So I would say that probably those three are the only ones I would ever trust to do anything with personally,
with my own funds or really my own coding time, honestly.
I can't think of any other one that I would really ever waste my time with.
Well, the reason I wanted to sort of explore that a little bit was that,
I mean, obviously Bitcoin is in terms of cryptocurrencies has been around the longest.
But one of the other things that Bitcoin is, I think, I don't know if this is unique,
and this is, again, where I'm hoping to lean on your experience a bit and knowledge is,
it has essentially got artificial scarcity.
And that is to say that, you know, you will only ever have 21 million, I believe.
That's right. Is the figure? Yeah, Bitcoin.
So they can only ever be 21 million.
And once they're mined, they're mined.
So I don't know how many other cryptocurrencies have got a hard limit like that
or whether or not that is Bitcoin unique.
I don't know of any other that have that.
I've never I've not heard of one.
If they do, it's a very small chain that I've that I've not heard of.
Yeah. I mean, like definitely like Monero is a inflationary coin.
I would have to ask Brian about Hive, I'm not sure, but Bitcoin is definitely a fixed limit.
It is inherently a deflationary currency.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that's an interesting thing.
And this is one of the things that I mean, I think it's both good and it's bad.
And I will focus on the good part is that, you know, you can't infinitely inflate the you can you can't
infinitely inflate it technically.
You can't just print more.
Sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm thinking of fiat money.
You can't just make more and therefore press deflate the value of that that's already in circulation.
So, like that I would count as being a good thing because you know you can manipulate the price of
or the value of something by doing that and that's obviously not what you want.
Well, I say obviously not what you want. I think most people that hold it don't want that.
Anyhow, all right. So, but then I struggle with this whole idea of like you know I want to access
the Bitcoin that I have on the blockchain, then I have keywords.
And those keywords effectively are my permission to access those funds-
and to execute a transaction. So, you know, so-called wallet.
I think, in a manner of speaking.
And I think it's kind of an interesting idea that it's a wallet.
But it is, but it isn't. But anyway.
So, the point is that, yeah, but if you lose that access-
and you don't have those words to recover it-
then that Bitcoin is always going to be there.
It's just that you can't actually, you don't have permission to do anything with it.
It's like stuck there forever.
So like it's stranded Bitcoin, I suppose you could say.
And that's also a deflationary thing because people are going to be losing Bitcoin.
Some people are going to be losing some amount of Bitcoin all the time.
So there's always going to be even a further downward pressure on inflation there.
Yeah. So I guess what I'm struggling with a little bit is,
I mean, forget the way in which governments print more money because they can,
for their own reasons.
I mean, that also was intended.
The idea of printing more money is you take some money out of circulation
and then you reprint more money to replace it, because money is a physical thing
and physical money will deteriorate over time.
Money will get lost and go out of circulation and so on.
So there's a means for that.
But in Bitcoin, if you're fixed at 21 million, you can't actually do that.
anymore, like you can't create more. If it's stuck on the blockchain and no one can get to it,
then it's kind of gone. It's out of circulation.
So that... Am I missing something or is that a genuine issue?
No, that's a real thing. Yeah, absolutely. You're not wrong.
And I mean, this is the same... This is where the analogy with gold
and silver, precious metal currencies come in. I mean, there's always the...
or any physical currency, there's always loss that happens.
Gold is probably the most apt above any sort of paper currency because
you really, it takes a lot to mine it. We know, I mean, there will be a fixed amount. We don't
know what the fixed amount of gold is, but there is one. Once it's all mined out of the earth,
then there's not gonna be any more. And so, you know, going, when, if it's, if you lose it,
I mean, on a long, you know, on a long time horizon, I think a lot of this stuff fixes itself because you're going to, you know, this, this is, I'm not going to say this is early days of Bitcoin because it's not, it really, you know, it really isn't.
I don't think that's the appropriate language to use.
I'm not going to say this is early days of Bitcoin because it's not. It really isn't. I don't think that's the appropriate language to use. But if you go back, let's just say you go back 10 years ago, Bitcoin was like, it was purely just a wallet scenario where you had to remember a password that was going to encrypt your wallet.
encrypt your wallet in some way. Now that you have all of these custodial wallet
providers there and where you don't have to you don't have to deal with any of
that if you don't want to. And you know there's a whole spectrum from cold card
hardware wallets where I have to remember my 24 seed words all the way up
to Coinbase where I can just, you know, get a reset my password and I'm good to go.
And so there's like this, this whole spectrum of, of options for people all
along, whatever their comfort level is.
So I don't think it's, you know, some, some of the, the worry that was in the
past, like, you know, I'm going to lose my, you know, this is too complicated
for people because they're going to have to remember their, their keys
or they're going to lose their stuff.
I'm not so worried about that anymore because I think most people, you know,
most people are now are buying Bitcoin and that kind of thing through in selling
it through cash app and other in Coinbase and these other things.
So it's only the hardcore nerds like, you know,
like us that are really having to remember seed words and that kind of thing.
I mean, I want to, that's what I want,
but most people aren't going to have to go that route.
So I think that's a long way of saying that the, the loss of coin,
I think the loss of units of Bitcoin is, is, is going down early days.
I would bet you, if you looked at a graph, I would bet you 80, 80% plus of Bitcoin
that has been lost so-called has been the quote unquote lost.
I bet that was five years ago.
Plus, you know, back in time, because it's just not, it's just not as much of an issue
as it used to be with all the different options we have now, but it you're right.
No, it definitely is a thing.
It's never coming back because you can't, I mean, it would take you, you know,
a trillion years to find a collision on, you know,
on a key. So it's not coming back.
Yeah. Well, that's it. Cause I was thinking, well, you know, we've got the,
with gold, for example, the perfect example is tailings.
So we go through and we do a bunch of chemical washes and so on and so forth to
extract gold. But those processes 20, 30 years ago, we're not very,
not as good as they are today. So we can actually go through those mind tailings and extract even more gold that was missed the first time.
But yes, so the idea is that what's the digital equivalent of that? And it's like I was thinking, well, you know, it may take you however many, you know, hundreds of years of calculations to try and recover lost Bitcoin.
But then if you're trying to like calculate or go through all of the possibilities of trying to figure out what those words are, I mean, would there be like Bitcoin reclamation services or something like that?
or something like that, like I lost my words, but then I'm thinking, well,
but if you could do that for anyone's wallet, you could do that for anyone's wallet,
couldn't you? So it's like, no one would do that.
So you would just hope that like, hopefully with quantum computing advancements and
so on and so forth, we don't reach a point where it becomes so easy to figure that
out. And we have to go to five times as many words or something like that to keep it
safe. But that's a separate conversation.
So I was thinking, well, what happens when we get to 2042 or whenever the last
Bitcoin is mined. And, you know, the human population will continue to grow.
They, you know, calculations vary.
World Wars notwithstanding, natural disasters notwithstanding.
You know, we will assume the population will continue to grow.
And if it becomes a transactional currency for day to day use, let's say, then the
question is, well, how do we balance the value that's available to transact against the
head of population that may want to use it?
And I sort of think that at some point, inevitably, it's going to drive that down to transactions in sats and then millisats at some point, because there will just be so many people wanting to use it.
Well, that's assuming mass adoption continues.
It may or may not.
I don't know. I hope it does, to be honest.
I think that it's a balancing effect against fiat currencies, but that's another discussion probably.
But I mean, let's assume that it does continue to grow.
And at some point, it's like if you don't increase the quantity,
the effect is that the value you've got left that each individual can trade is going to go less and less.
So the amount of that you did, am I making sense or am I just overthinking this?
No, no, I understand what you're saying.
I believe I do. You know, so my my relationship to Bitcoin, I think, is
is practical more than anything. I try not to... I don't think I would call myself a Bitcoin
quote-unquote maxi or maximalist. And it's not because I don't believe in some of those things.
I think I do. And I'm an Austrian at heart. And as far as economy goes, economists go. But,
you know, I really try to have a more, a more sober mindset of it. And I think that, you know,
one of the issues that we run into when we talk about things like you're describing,
like what you're describing is a repricing. Yeah. There's a, there's a sort of, if you imagine,
okay, we're here in 2022 and then in 2042, there's going to be the last Bitcoin mined. Okay. Well,
Assume from for the you know for the moment this thought experiment that in 2042
Assume that we are an all Bitcoin economy
well, that means at some point between now and then
There has to be a massive repricing that happens within all of global
commerce to where we're no longer
pricing in maybe
even local currencies or the petrodollar, we're now pricing in units of Bitcoin in satoshis.
The hard part about that is, and this is where my sort of attempt to be a realist comes in, and is that
we've never seen anything like that happen ever in the history of humanity.
So we really don't know, I don't think anybody knows what that process would look like.
I mean, I think there's there would be I can see how it would happen
This is one of those issues where I can see how the the sort of end of the process would happen
But the first steps and how everything looks in between I really have no clue
And it seems like it could possibly be very very painful
To get to get there because so, you know, how do you?
The idea that there's not going to be local currencies seems awkward and odd
Look, maybe it's better to say it this way
if if you asked
me how I think Bitcoin would be is going to be utilized and I think it absolutely will become critical to
global economy by 2042 my first reaction would be that it would not be
something that is transacted
the way that we transact local fiat currencies today to me it seems more like a
backing thing that central banks or
governments or banks in general
Transacted transact in and then we continue and that becomes the backing for local currencies
That would probably be my first guest. I'll be I may be like I'm admitting
getting complete fogginess on what the future looks like.
But then, so I think that would probably,
but then you have this other idea of,
okay, what we've seen now,
we're all global, we're all fiat currencies around the world.
Every country has a fiat currency
that's completely untied to anything.
There's no gold backing.
There's nothing.
There's no hard currencies anymore.
We've never seen that either.
I mean, this has only evolved
since the Bretton Woods Agreement after World War II,
and especially in 1971 here in the US
when Nixon closed the gold window.
There's no more gold redemption.
So from 1971 until now, I mean,
you're only talking about 50,
there's only been 50 years of human experience
where there's been no backing of currencies
buy any hard assets.
This is unknown to human history.
We have no idea what this is gonna be like.
This could be awful.
And so I think there will be absolutely
an inevitable return to some sort of hard asset
backed currency, when I say asset, I mean hard in quotes,
just something like a gold or a Bitcoin
that can't be changed or even property or whatever.
But that thing, like how we get there, man, that's a mystery.
I don't know.
I realize, Dave, that these are long term sort of questions.
And I mean, I also thought about this from the perspective of, well, maybe I'm thinking about Bitcoin wrong.
Like as in so far as it's so different from a fiat currency.
So if you look at a fiat currency, like a $5 note today or a $10 note today and
compare it to what it was in terms of value perception 50 years ago,
they may as well be completely different currencies. You know what I mean?
It's like, yeah,
what you can get for it has been so inflated away that it's sort of,
it's almost an unfair comparison.
You may as well be comparing two different currencies from two different
countries. And yet it's called the same thing within the same country.
So it doesn't, yeah.
So maybe if I put aside the longer term concerns
of what happens with Bitcoin in terms of what its value
is worth, how do we deal with stranded money,
accounting for population growth and transactional value
and downward pressure on it?
I just think about, well, maybe that doesn't matter
quite so much for the minute.
That's a future, you know, civilization problem.
But it's a fascinating discussion, I think,
'cause I think about it and I'm like,
the only way this can really work in the longer term
is if we get to 21 million and then it's like there's an agreement, it's like,
okay, well, this has become really popular. We want to use it for transactions.
Let's just agree at that point that we're going to double the quantity and we're
going to migrate from one to the other.
So one blockchain will migrate to the next because ultimately you're doing a fork
at that point, I guess, because you're redefining the rules.
I don't think that can work, John.
I don't think that that would ever happen
Because Bitcoin requires, at its core,
it's what's called a consensus protocol.
And so you have to have consensus
of such a high number of nodes,
a high percentage of nodes on the network
to agree to make a change like that.
I don't see that.
I don't see that as ever being a possibility.
Because most of your network is never going to agree
devalue their currency, essentially do a split.
So you have, you know, the thing is, currencies will reprice themselves in the same way that
they do in the fiat world that we're used to.
You're going to, as currencies inflate and deflate, the assets should reprice themselves
accordingly.
I think satoshis is plenty enough.
I don't think we'll ever have to go to mill satoshis.
I don't think that would be necessary.
Or if, you know, the way that these things work in a digital world, when it's purely
digital currency, that's a mystery a little bit too, because like lightning
internally is mill satoshis, but it can't actually write to the blockchain unless
it's a full satoshi.
So your bank account could be denominated in mills Satoshis, but if you get ready to do a transfer, you know
It has to be it could be a certain amount. That's what I'm saying. Like I think I
It feels to me like Bitcoin
operates at a lower level
then
than a normal currency and so like I can see how
transfers of I mean just like you can't get on to PayPal and
you know, transfer, you know, 10 cents to your account.
I mean, you're going to, everything is a dollar at least.
And there's like this minimum that you have to meet to do some sort of like
transaction or you go to like around here.
If you go to like a gas station and buy a soft drink, you know,
they're not going to let, they're like, oh, you know,
you got to spend at least three bucks before we can do that.
Cause it's got to cover the credit card fee.
So I think there's when it comes to transferring funds around,
these minimums are probably going to just adjust themselves to account for
for whatever the reality is, you know, in the economy at the moment.
There's a really good book
that I've had for a long time.
I got I got it probably 10 years ago.
It's called The Value of a Dollar.
And it's actually a set of books by this professor, Scott Dirks.
And it's a text, it's a university textbook.
And there's a few different ones.
It's very expensive.
I mean, if you find it on Amazon, it's like, you know, $200.
But I got it many years ago, like secondhand for not very much, but it's a
chronicle of, so this guy and his team at the university, I forgot which university
it is, they went through and they looked at old newspapers, magazine articles,
periodicals, all kinds of stuff like that.
And they found in all these archives.
And they just wrote down every time they saw
like an advertisement for something.
So they would be like, you know, a pair of slacks,
men's slacks in an advertisement in a newspaper
in 1936 in Chicago, or, you know,
a can of kidney beans in a grocery store
in Armont, New York in 1977.
So they wrote all this stuff down
and they chronicle what things cost
based not on like models or mathematical models
or anything like based on what things cost
in the real world as they were advertised in media.
And it's just fascinating to go through that book and look at how destructive inflation
has been to humanity, honestly.
You go back in time and it's like when I was a kid, I was born in 1976, you go back
and time you flip through there and it's like, oh, you know, milk, you know, was,
was 75 cents a gallon, you know, now it's, it's five, six, $7.
Uh, it's, it's, it's truly amazing.
And the, and the inflation, inflation is, we, we have these pet names for it, like,
do you know the hidden tax and these kinds of things, but it's really
much more destructive than that.
And I know this is not an economics podcast and we got other stuff to talk
about but I like it but really I mean that's okay inflation causes people to
take risks it forces them to take risks that they otherwise wouldn't take
because they know you know we know that if we put our money in the bank it's not
gonna it's just it's it's going we're gonna be harmed every month every week
every year it's just going to be it's gonna slowly erode so we have to do
something to make sure that the money that we're saving maintains its value over time
for things in the future like retirement or whatever.
We have to do something.
The only thing that we can do is take risky bets on things like the stock market or business
deals we may not have been comfortable getting involved in before or buying too big of a
a house that we probably can't afford.
We take all of these risks because we're desperate
for real assets that will maintain their value
and index to inflation,
and in holding equities and other financial instruments
that promise us a return.
And so for somebody like the average pensioner,
the average pensioner, they shouldn't have to be doing that.
They don't know much about the stock market.
They're not an expert in economics.
They really have no business.
If you just step back for a moment and look at it sort of on a bigger scale, they really
have no business putting their money into things like equities and stocks that they
do not understand.
that they're forced to and they're forced to and they get in because there's really
no other way because otherwise inflation will literally eat them alive.
We see it really, we see it a lot now, I mean with this 8, 9, 10 percent plus inflation
that we've had, but really that's been true even when inflation is at the magical
two percent number that every central bank wants to, you know, thinks is appropriate.
is so much more destructive than we think it is.
And I saw this graphic today,
and it was like this chart,
it was like this bar,
and like a spectrum laid out in front of you.
And then it had zero,
it was demarcated as zero in the middle of this bar.
And then all the way to like,
was something like negative 100 on the left,
and all the way to like positive 100 on the right.
And it was a white bar,
And in the middle from zero to two was this red line and it said, you know
Every everything on the left is bad everything on the right is bad, but everything between zero and two
That's where you want to live, you know, it was like this is the sense
This is central bank thinking is what this is, you know
Anything other than you know somewhere between zero and two percent inflation a positive two percent anything other than that is bad
You know, and that's just I mean what?
The whole thing is kind of is kind of ridiculous
I think and
We might just have to wrap this up on this particular topic in a second because as you say
Neither of us are economists. Although you've studied this a lot more than I have I think
The reality I struggle with is that you know when you break it all down. Nothing is really worth anything
It's it's just a value that we ascribe to it and I yeah, and I I find it
An exercise in frustration trying to understand economic thinking and I mean understand economic thinking that is to say
Understanding economics is not difficult
understanding the
The accepted wisdom that this is what economics should be in how it should work. That's the bit that I struggle with because
economics should not be as complicated as it has been made and
It becomes a thing that is becomes impossible for most people to comprehend
I've spent most of my life just ignoring it because it was to me so ridiculous.
Like the whole thing was just so ridiculous to me.
I find that Bitcoin for me has been a breath of fresh air.
It's a fresh take on things.
It's not perfect, but you know what?
It seems to be quite a lot better than many of the other alternatives.
And I know I'm sort of I'm not touching on the more controversial points, but, you know,
like things like energy consumption and so on.
And there's ways and means for that to be handled.
I don't mean to dismiss, though, people with those concerns and that's fine.
The truth is, though, that it does have a lot going for it.
And I think that I'm glad that it exists.
I don't know if that makes me a maximalist or not.
And I don't like the terminology.
It's sort of like puts people into a bucket.
It's like, oh, you're a Bitcoin maximalist.
I don't like them or what. Is that an insult or a compliment?
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
I feel like I'm glad it exists and I think that good things will come from it ultimately.
But like I said, I just can't help the back of my brain just thinking about the longer
term like where is this going?
And yeah, I mean inflation is ridiculous and I have nothing else to add to that unfortunately
other than I hate it.
You know, 2008, Adam had made this point once before,
is he's like, if you look at all of the Bitcoin people,
I'm excluding crypto, I'm just thinking of,
let's just, just Bitcoin.
If you look at all the Bitcoin people,
many of them got, many of them are young.
If you look at their ages, they sort of had their
coming of age, so to speak, or young adulthood,
around the time of the 2008 financial crisis and beyond.
And they really, they don't trust the system in any way.
And we probably all really shouldn't
because we saw this past week,
Ben Bernanke won the Nobel Prize in economics.
I mean, the guy that one year
before the 2008 financial collapse said,
said, "Oh, I don't, the housing market's fine. We don't see anything wrong with it."
And that, you know, less than a year later, that the housing market in the
United States almost brought down the entire global economy. And he, you
know, he's the guy that wins the Nobel Prize in economics. I think that's
probably what your frustration with in economics is, is that, and it's
like you see Bitcoin, okay, well, yeah, it's not perfect and I don't
want to be called a maxi either because I think it's got a lot of tech bro
grossness attached to it after all this time, but if you think about it as an
engineer as you are, it's sort of the engineer's money. It's like, I can see how
this works. I mean, it's math. This is math. I don't have to get
into the squishiness of, you know, terms like, is the bond market going to
"break," which is what we've seen, like I've seen these headlines this past week.
is the bond market about to break? Well what the hell does break mean? I mean
this is not a real word. I mean like what are we talking about?
How does like... something either works or it doesn't. I mean like there's no
broke here. I mean so I don't know. I think it makes sense that you
would get quote-unquote Bitcoin because I mean that's
the math. That's the engineer money.
- 100% programmable money.
Oh yeah.
All right.
So maybe we should put a pin in that economics discussion.
I realized that whilst, yeah,
I feel like we've kind of gone as far as we can go
that conversation without us studying economics
at university for years and still being confused
at the end of it.
So yeah, we should probably just keep moving
because the next thing I want to talk about
relates to the podcasting 2.0 namespace.
And I have implemented a lot of these tags.
And one of the advantages of owning all the layers
in the stack is that I can do this relatively easily
on a whim if I want to.
So, I mean, currently I'm using like locked funding,
value, good, social, trailer, license, medium,
chapters, soundbite, images, location.
- Almost all of this.
- Which, you know, which is almost all of them.
Yeah, because like, oh, new tag.
I can use that.
Currently not using live,
but that's mainly because I don't do live shows.
So anyway,
have been there, have been there, done that.
Anyway, as we talked about when I was a guest
in episode 100.
- Yeah, not a great experience for you.
- No, it did not work out well for me.
So in any case, doesn't mean I won't do it
on a different show in the future again, maybe,
but for the moment, the answer is no.
But otherwise, almost every other tag.
So one of the ones that,
one of the things I was grappling with
is I was listening to, I think it was Mitch Downey
and maybe it was John Spellock, I can't actually know.
It wasn't, it was Mary, Mary Oscar, Oscar Mary, I forget.
but they were guests on Podcasting 2.0 several months ago
and they were talking about what could we do with soundbites?
Could we, and I hate to say gamify
because it makes it sound dirty,
but in a sense, provide some kind of a remuneration,
remuneration kind of benefits to people contributing.
And what got me thinking about it initially was,
well, what right now, let's say someone wants
do cloud chapters or shared chapters.
So you would get someone like, I believe Dreb Scott
is helping out on podcasting 2.0,
doing chapter artwork and chapter definitions and so on.
And he is then coded in to the main RSS feed split.
So he is always in there and it's sort of like, well,
you know, like that's how he is.
He's compensated with a percentage of the split,
which is, you know, fine.
But it got me thinking about like soundbites
and could we do something with soundbites
that is sort of similar, but a little bit more targeted.
And so I thought to myself, well, I guess my, my fundamental issue with sound
bytes is that up until now, and I say up until now in air quotes, because I mean,
this is still the case, I guess.
It's still the case whereby sound bytes are in fact defined by the,
the end end listeners.
So you go into an app and create a sound sound byte or whatever else and,
and share it. So like Overcast was doing this for years.
you could share them. And I did this a few times, you know,
like it'll actually take the audio.
It'll turn it into a, like an Instagram shareable thing.
If Instagram's your thing, you know, it's not for me really. I didn't,
I did it a couple of times and stopped doing it, but it's like,
it's all about encapsulating the audio into a discrete file and then posting a
link to that on social media or if somewhere, and I was like,
this is how I'm sharing a soundbite of the show.
So when we started doing work, I say,
we as in the podcast 2.0 industrial complex.
I started doing, you know,
Hank I'm just saying representing, nevermind, okay.
I'm sorry, I find the whole industrial complex
a little bit hilarious.
I know it's supposed to be a running gag, it is funny.
- Yeah, yeah, it's all for the,
yeah, the podcast industrial complex,
it's just like every industrial complex.
Somebody is getting rich and making all the money,
it's just not you.
- Yeah, pretty much, yes.
So the podcasting 2.0 industrial complex
is the complex that isn't.
- Yes.
- So, you know, we're providing value for everybody.
Anyway, all right, so staying on topic,
the point of soundbites is that you can now create them
and put them in your feed on an episode item level
and the podcaster defines them.
And so then we've now got this applications,
things like Podverse, for example,
that will scrape the feed, look at the episode,
XML from your RSS feed and say,
oh, I've got one, two, three soundbites here or there,
start and end times and so on.
and it provides the interface for someone to listen to them.
So far so good.
And I think that that's a better way of doing it
because you're using the source audio
and the podcaster has control over it.
But the problem with that is that you've basically got,
well, now as a podcaster, I have to create those
in the same fashion that in the past,
I also had to create the chapters.
So having cloud chapters has been
in some respects beneficial,
but we don't really have cloud soundbites.
We don't have shared soundbites
that we can actually accept submissions for.
And this is the problem that was discussed a few episodes,
well, several episodes back on Podcasting 2.0.
And it got me thinking about how could we do that?
And so what I put in a proposal on the namespace
whereby we attach, so the idea is that an application,
a client application, could be a website.
And I build a website to demonstrate how it could be done.
Not necessarily how it should be done,
but how it could be done.
'Cause I'm a bit of a hacker and a slasher
when it comes to web development.
So I know enough to be dangerous
and let's just leave it there.
Write too much stuff in node and JavaScript and nevermind.
The point is that if you were to create a tool
that can then save that as something in a JSON format
with a start time, a duration, title,
and enter your name and a lightning node
for a value reference and submit that to a podcaster,
then that podcaster could opt to incorporate that
into their feed.
So the idea would be that if then that podcaster
had the tool to do that, which I also created an example of,
if they then ingest that JSON file,
they can have a list of those,
but soundbites have been submitted by listeners,
select the ones that they want to put in their feed
and then essentially push that to their feed
as another JSON file.
So everything is handled in JSON.
It's all very basic, very simple, easy, human readable.
And you just need a couple of tools to do it.
And you could share it via an API if you want it to be fancy
or you could just do it the cheating simple way
and send it as an email,
send it as an attachment in an email,
which is the way I've currently done it.
The only problems I've got with some of that is,
well, okay, I'll get to that in a minute,
But conceptually, what this then does is it gives you the ability.
So let's say you're on our Podverse.
So Podverse now reads through those soundbites that are in the
JSON file attached to the feed.
And you've got three of these soundbites and they've got value tags now associated
with them. So you could then for each play,
if you've obviously got, you know, sats loaded in your wallet,
you could then remunerate the person that created the soundbite basically by
playing that soundbite.
And hence there becomes an incentive
for people to contribute soundbites.
And the more popular the soundbite,
the more it gets played, the more they get remuneration.
So it's not a fixed split.
It's essentially a pay per play kind of a concept,
no differently to streaming sets.
And the only difference with soundbites is that
in order to stop the system from being gamed,
doing a rate per minute would probably not make sense
because you don't want your soundbites
to be more than two minutes long.
So, 'cause I mean, otherwise the incentive
would be, oh, well, you know, you're going to stream this to this other person who
submitted the soundbite. The soundbite goes for five hours. It's like, well, no,
not, no, not really, not really what we want.
So the only thing I struggle with is more about the, well,
there's a few things I struggle with. I struggle with, well,
what if you have three people, um,
that were each 33% split, um,
creating that episode and you do a soundbite,
that soundbite would then have to be split by a fee,
an amount going to those three people that create the episode and a split going to the
person that created the soundbite.
So you'd have to work through the math behind that.
And then what is fair, if it has to be fixed, then that needs to be set by the podcaster.
And I thought, well, you know, maybe to make it simple as a default, you'd say, well, what's
the suggested streaming sats rate?
Take that number and multiply it by like a factor of five or 10 or something and say,
well, each one by default is this.
then the podcaster could override it because maybe they just don't want to set that maybe
set up set suggested streaming or whatever, right? I don't know. Like I said, anyway,
so there you go. Thoughts, comments?
I got a lot of thoughts on that. A lot of thoughts on this. Well, because this sort
of fits in to something that I was actually talking to Dan Benjamin about today. We were
We were discussing just like some sharing stuff within podcasting and what I told him
was this sort of like, there needs to be a better way to do sharing within podcasting
just in general.
So if we set aside soundbites for the moment and just say, "Okay, how do you share things
within the podcast ecosystem.
Everything seems very tied right now to the application layer and the share button,
the share sheet, and like you said, like emails and these kinds of things, or is
somehow embedded into the application itself.
The application has to go scrape up a bunch of content or get people to produce.
And so the problem is that there's no like standardized way for these things to get pushed
around from entity to entity within podcasting.
There's only the distribution mechanism of RSS and that's where SoundBytes started was
the podcaster can say, "Okay, here's two sound bites that I consider to be, and each of them
are a minute and a half long or whatever, and I consider these to be like the two really
great segments of this episode that are almost like a trailer where it's like, if you just
want to, these are going to be attention getters.
These are the good hits."
And then like you said, okay, well what if you want to go outside of that and put it
in the creator's hand, put it in the listener's hands, and now the listener is going to spend
their time to create a sound byte.
How do they get that back into the ecosystem?
There's really not a way to do that.
It falls back to you as the owner of the pragmatic stack to somehow build this into your system
where the build a web app which you did, the soundbiter app that will help people do this.
So then you now have to distribute that back out.
So all that's fine except I guess there's a bigger thing there.
And I think John Spurlock's podcast events proposal, his tag proposal, I think is the
first steps to trying to figure this part out.
Because there's data, what his events tag does is it defines a URL on the hosting platform
that says or whatever platform is producing the RSS.
So let's just call it the publishing platform.
So it defines a URL endpoint on the publishing platform of the podcast, puts that URL into
the feed as a tag, and then describes the events that it's going to accept.
And so this in a standardized way, you could give back events to the publishing platform
to tell it, okay, these things have happened or these types of data are available or whatever.
So you can think of a million different scenarios.
You can think of one where you can report back to the publisher, "Somebody started listening
to this feed to this enclosure," or "Somebody subscribed to this feed," or one we used on
in the last episode, the artwork of this episode is not working.
Like it's 404ing, like error reporting.
Well, in this instance, you could report back and say, okay,
somebody just created a soundbite.
Well, now the publisher knows the soundbite details and they can turn around
and either put it into like what you said, where, which is the, you know,
like either the JSON file or the sound bytes grouped tag in the feed.
Now they can populate that because they now know that that event happened.
And we don't, we don't have to like figure out some way to shuffle
files around on the backend.
You know, it's just like this single, um, it technically is an API, but it's sort
of an open standardized API way of doing things.
Yeah, so I think like just from a transport sense, I think that's the way, I think something
like that is the way forward because then what you're describing is the format and then
we need a transport mechanism for the format.
So I think these things fit in together is what I'm trying to say.
I absolutely agree. And when, when John Spurlock put that
concept out there for the proposal forward, sorry, for events,
that was one of the first things that came to my mind is that, yeah,
we could use this for, you know, like chapter proposals.
We could use it for soundbite proposals.
We could use it for all sorts of different things. Which, you know,
it's sorely lacking because the way in which we do it now is here's an email,
you know, attaching my JSON file to it. I mean, I know it's archaic, it works,
But so for me, I was so yeah, the two proposals absolutely, you know, can work together
There's no question in my mind.
And in fact, that is a far better method than sending it by email.
But I, you know, I refer you to the title of this show.
I try to be pragmatic about it and realize that, look, I don't want to let perfect be the, you know, be the enemy of good here.
Let's just get something out there that works and let's start the conversation.
So, I mean, irrespective of the mechanism, and I think that having a mechanism that doesn't
require email is definitely the way to go.
But I'm not a, how should I say, a web API kind of guy.
I mean, I've written APIs before in different languages, but as more from a library perspective,
it's not my area of expertise, capable of doing it in a pinch, but not going to profess
expertise.
But I guess my point is that I wanted to make sure that people like start thinking about
this idea that like soundbites need to be vetted by the podcast creator if you're going
to provide compensation for doing it.
You know so I guess that to me is the fundamental problem I've got with sharing soundbites for
example it's like it's a discovery thing and it's yeah anyone can create soundbites and
it's like yeah but if anyone can create soundbites why don't they?
And the answer is that most people, the true super fans of your show will happily create
a soundbite, no remuneration, no interest in any kind of feedback loop.
That's fine.
That's great.
And I love those fans of my shows.
They're awesome and I love them and that's awesome.
But the truth is the vast majority of listeners to shows aren't like that.
But if you then say, well, you know what, if you were to submit these soundbites, there
is a possibility that every time the soundbite is played that you will get a few sats for
your trouble.
I think that changes some of that equation. It's not going to make everyone want to
submit soundbites, but it's going to encourage more people to do it than you have
currently. And I guess that's more my point, right?
Irrespective of the transport mechanism. So, you know,
what I've tried to do in the submission is I've tried to say, well, look,
I'll try to think this through as best I can. You know,
as from the creative perspective, as well as the developer perspective,
if you're someone like Fireside, you know,
so you're saying you're talking to Dan Benjamin, right?
So on the Fireside platform, or if you're Libsyn,
on the Libsyn platform, you know,
if that were to be sent via that API
that you're talking about, the events proposal,
you know, in whatever format you choose,
or as an email and a JSON file that you just simply import
into your web interface that Libsyn or Fireside gives you,
you know, how they handle that in the backend,
I really don't care.
It's just a matter of, you know,
they need to have the ability, sorry,
the podcast creator, publishing person, nominated person
needs to be able to select the ones they want,
tweak if necessary, and then publish to their feed.
How that's done in their web interface
is entirely up to them.
All I've done is what I've done for my system.
So my system works for me.
Everything I'm doing is a static site generator
using GoHugo.
So I manage all my stuff using JSON files
'cause it's convenient for me.
And I just run up a node server running sound bit
and then it goes through and imports
and gives you that list.
it scans through the RSS feed and looks for whether or not the episode is even
wants soundbites. So one of the other parts of my proposal is, well,
maybe a podcaster says, well,
I don't want you to submit soundbites for episode 47 because I've got 20 good
ones already. So there's, there's an option for a Boolean in there. It says, yes,
soundbites are open or they're not.
So you can submit a soundbite on any episode that's open. For example.
Another thing that I was thinking about as well is that,
And I'm not saying that everyone should be concerned about download counts because I realize there's pros and cons and people get obsessed with numbers and I believe me I've been through that roller coaster
You know, and advertisers, it seems to be more what they care about that plus conversions, which is another thing. But anyway,
So if you are not careful about what you link to, then every time someone plays a soundbite against your episode, you're tracking downloads on, for example, it will potentially qualify as a listen.
So every soundbite listen is an episode listen,
which is from an advertiser's perspective, disingenuous.
So, you know, I feel like, you know,
being able to specify and say-
- Unless you pay for them and put them in a game.
- Well, that's...
(laughing)
Oh, that was terrible when I heard about that.
Oh my goodness.
But I mean-
- Somehow that's okay.
- That is not okay.
Oh my God.
Anyhow, but yeah, no, that was next level,
next level ass-hattery, but nevermind.
I suppose, I guess my point is that you can also then specify in the soundbites
proposal, you can say, well, use this particular file. It's not, you know,
you don't have to, it'll default to using the one that's listed in the item in
the feed, but alternatively you can use this particular one here.
This file is not tracked for download.
So you're not going to mess with your download counts. So things like that.
I've tried to think about as many things as I could, but ultimately, you know,
it comes back to, you know, would this actually encourage people to do this?
So on episode 47 of Causality, I put that in the intro read and said,
Hey, this is now available to you. You can submit it and so on and so forth.
And I have had no submissions.
So I'm not entirely sure if it's one of those things that needs to be,
I don't know, hammered home a bit more, like I need to do it for more and more episodes
and reinforce and reinforce. And then hopefully someone might find interest in it.
Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.
Maybe this is simply something that shows of different, you know, scales and/or
types will have different levels of participation.
I don't know. But if you don't know, unless you try.
Well, I think, you know, I think there's a couple of things that come to mind when I
say that the proposal, the proposal as it's written is, makes a lot of sense.
And I mean, just from a structural standpoint, you know, standpoint, it makes sense.
The only awkward part was the split designation.
That one, I don't know, it feels, that one's hard.
That one's just difficult.
I think it's a hard way to address something
that's inherently multifaceted in a single value like that.
But I think the issue really, soundbites are hard.
They're hard to make.
No matter how good the tool is, they're always fiddly.
And you gotta like, you gotta really get real granular
and narrow in on where the thing's gonna start.
If you're obsessive, you know, if you're OCD,
which people, a lot of people who make clips,
- Oh yeah.
- They are, they're pretty OCD.
If you're OCD, you, I mean, that start position
in that end position, those things are like critical.
And so you end up fiddling with it and fiddling with it.
And especially if you're in a mobile app,
oh, it's so hard.
It's just really difficult to get those positions just right.
And so what you end up with,
you end up spending, you know,
sometimes, you know, five, 10 minutes
trying to get just the right clip
so that you can send it to somebody, you know,
or post it somewhere like Twitter or whatever.
And that's a, so it's kind of a bigger ask
than people realize, 'cause I think a lot of the,
a lot of the apps that focus on clips,
like Podverse and Fountain or two,
they're where they have sort of the clip making mechanism
is front and center.
That,
they,
they don't get a large percentage
their audience to do that. It takes some commitment to make those clips. So the pay, the sort
of the reward for that makes sense and rewarding people for that. But I think you hit on something
that's part of it because I'm not sure that the money really matters. And I say that as
As somebody who I used to years and years ago, I used to make clips of Adam's show,
No Agenda.
I used to do these short little sound bites and post them on YouTube.
I did a couple dozen of them.
It would take me an hour to get it together, to get each one of them put together.
I did it just because I enjoyed it and it was fun.
So there's people that do that and I think the rewarding with Satoshis is more about
the...
Like when you see it come in, when you see that, those Satoshis come in as people are
listening to the clip or however that reward happens, it feels almost more to me like that's
a replacement for like a like button or a heart in a social media app.
Yes, you're getting what is technically a unit of Bitcoin when that happens, but it's
more like it's the feeling that you get of, "Okay, people are listening.
People are using this thing that I created."
That feels really good because when you just put it out into the void on Instagram or YouTube
or one of these big social media networks, they don't generate a lot of engagement.
They don't give you very much back.
don't get a lot of satisfaction. And so I think the money really almost is a
secondary thing as money. It's more like sats as a, or satoshis as a
sort of substitute for the likes and the hearts and the interaction.
It's like when you see, when you look at helipads and see
all these, you know, see sats coming in, it's like, it's just, it feels good.
It feels good in a way that in the way that looking at a download stats chart doesn't I wonder I wonder if that I wonder
If that's it because that the yeah, I think you're I think you're right
I think the rewarding people I guess this is what this is what I'm trying to say
the rewarding
People makes sense. I think it would encourage people to do to put in the effort to make the clips
But I I think the interesting part of that is the reward is probably not the money money
is probably like just the experience and participation.
- Well, I mean, that's true.
- Maybe I'm wrong.
- No, no, no.
I think that that's a valid point.
And I think that, like I say, that's the,
I feel like you're talking about the subset of fans
that are like the super fans,
that they just love the show, they love what you do,
and they wanna create clips and share it
just because they love your work.
And I mean, and like I said, I love those listeners.
That's awesome.
Super fans are awesome.
Unless they cross the line and become stalkers,
in which case it's sort of, you know.
- Not awesome.
Decidedly not awesome.
It's like there's a limit, but yeah, so they're going to do what they're going to do.
And that's awesome. But I guess what I was thinking is I don't know if incentivization will
improve uptake.
Maybe it won't.
Or if it does, you need to be at a certain scale for that I'm not at or it needs to be a different
kind of content, which I'm not producing.
I don't know. But I mean, I'm trying to think also beyond the scope of just my own
wheelhouse here. You know, I do what I'm trying to do is sort of like kickstart
this conversation about two things. First of all, I think that having soundbite as discrete
entries in the main feed at an item level is probably not the right approach at this
point. I think we should be considering putting in a JSON file just like we have for chapters
for all the same reasons as chapters. Which, you know, having spoken to Mitch Downey about
this, I mean, it's not hard to do. It's just a matter of let's agree that, you know, it's
either or, or maybe we transition or I don't know.
The second piece is we just need to accept the fact
that there's a difference between podcaster approved
or podcaster submitted, shared, sorry, soundbites
versus clips that anyone makes.
Because one of them you can potentially provide
a feedback mechanism for from the podcaster,
the other one you can't, not really.
So I guess what I'm trying to point out is,
Well, whatever the transport mechanism is that we use,
whether it is the soundbite events,
I'm sorry, soundbite, you know what I mean,
podcast events thing,
or whether it's just a silly JSON file
attached to an email, whatever.
And then the tooling notwithstanding,
it gives a mechanism,
a standardized format mechanism and structure
so that anyone could submit a soundbite to the podcaster
and they can just include in their feed
with a couple of clicks.
I feel like that's where we need to get to
and that will improve the number of people contributing
And that just makes it better for everybody. Whether or not value is something that's a part of that or not.
I saw that as an opportunity potentially to, and again, I use the word gamify.
I mean, incentivize whatever, whatever you want to call it.
But, you know, I feel like that's an opportunity.
And I feel like, you know, if we can just agree a basic set of rules, then potentially that could be, I don't know,
something that we could consider.
I don't know.
I'm yeah, I think what you're talking about, this is one of those concepts that requires, uh, layers
and you have to build in layers.
And I, I think that's the only way that things like this, this gets done because it is multi,
it's multifaceted.
So you have, you do have the transport issue.
You've got the approval issue.
You've got the, uh, the format issue of this, of the spec and the protocol and the way that's
got to look.
Uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of parts there.
And so when it comes to one of when it comes to things like this, my my preference is just
in this is like the the oversimplification is get a base level spec and you've done a lot of this
work here, I would almost remove the value block stuff to begin with.
And so that you have this thing, it's like, okay, what are we trying to accomplish here?
It's like, we're trying to accomplish the sharing of crowd created sound bytes.
Okay.
What is the minimum thing that we need to have in order to get that done?
And then that thing is the thing.
So, and you mentioned Mitch.
So Mitch is, is, uh, committed a hundred percent to sound bites.
That's what he's always been about in clips.
So to me, something like you say, okay, we start with this layer.
It's like, we've got, you've, you've got a proposed protocol for
sharing sound bites in a JSON file.
Uh, that thing can go into production with somebody like Mitch and say, okay,
let's prove this thing works.
And then, uh, and then once we see that that works now, it's like, okay, well,
step two, what makes sense to add, to add the value stuff in here?
Uh, should it be, uh, should it be attributes in the tag?
Should it be some sort of something external to that in some other way?
Should it be references back into a split?
Then that step two, because that's complex.
To me, I get muddied and confused when we try to take a thing that's complicated
like this and solve it all at once.
I'm almost apt to want to have the soundbites tag just live initially without the value stuff.
How does that make you feel like?
Oh, I mean, I'm happy to take an incremental approach.
That's fine. There's no reason why we have to put value in there straight away.
But I guess my, the only counter to that is that are the concerns around value, is that
something that we can resolve quite straight in a straightforward manner?
I mean, I can't help the way my brain thinks
and wanting to try and solve, you know,
and thinking forward about, you know, all the permutations.
It's just the way my brain works.
But I suppose, you know, with the value block, for example,
it comes back to, to me, it's a simple thing of,
well, you've already, the app that's doing
the value streaming, it already has the details
from the main feed.
It's just a matter of deciding, well, you know what,
Let's just agree a 50/50 split.
50% of that goes to the
creators of the episode. 50% goes to the person that submitted the actual sound byte
and then just let the math work itself out and say you can't have
less than, I don't know, 10 sets or whatever, however many, and code
that in on a client level and then essentially let the rest shake out in the math,
because that math already exists for the split at an item
level for streaming sats on an episode.
So all this is really doing is it's simply passing that as a single fixed
amount using the same math. But I mean,
the whole idea of having a 10 X multiplier, for example as a guide,
maybe we just ditch that as an, as a concept, it was just a question.
We could simply say, you know,
the idea here is you have, if I understand, if I'm following you, right,
you share,
you pass the JSON file with all the soundbite details in it. Yes.
you pass that to the feed publisher and then the feed publisher modifies the XML in the
feed in the sound bytes tag to publish that back out as part of the feed, correct?
Correct.
Okay, so the JSON file is easy to represent the value stuff because we already have the
JSON for that, that's what we pass around on the back end of the index.
That's just, you know, that's really straightforward.
Once you translate that into XML, it gets funky because the XML for the value tag has
children for the value recipients.
So you almost need, at that point, the soundbite tag to have children, to have value recipient
children to make it make the most sense.
Otherwise you're, um, because I'm thinking of, here's what I'm trying to avoid.
Uh, in a lot of, and this, this is going to come up because you can attach
value for value to any part.
You can attach it to lots of parts.
You can attach it directly to chapters.
You can attach it to soundbites.
Um, you could attach it to events.
even, you know, you could, you could attach value tags to a bunch of stuff.
Um, what I'm trying to avoid is that it is that you would end up with two
different ways to extract two different layouts for the value information,
depending on where you are.
Um, like that the value block looks one way, but then when you go to parse out
who gets a payment in the, in the soundbite is it, it may look a different
way.
And then when you get to chapters, it's going to look a third way.
So the consistency where it's like, okay, value is always going.
And I'm thinking of parsers here.
When, when we go to ingest value is always going to look like this.
It's never going to change.
And that's, um, that I think is not hard to do in the sound bite tag because,
uh, you could gracefully fall back and say, well, if the sound bite tag has
text in its node value, well, then it's a traditional, like, uh, what you
might call a V1 sound bite, but if it has value recipient children in the,
or, you know, if it's got a value block in it, well, then that's a V2 or so to speak.
I mean that will at least let you take this, I've got this single unit of data which is
the value block and I'm going to drop this thing in everywhere.
Anywhere there's a potential for somebody to receive sats, it's always going to be this
thing is the thing I'm looking for and expecting to parse.
To me that has great value because otherwise things just get really complicated from an
ingestion standpoint.
Yeah, I think I understand what you're saying.
I guess because there was talk, I was talking to the different developers over the last
few months and there is an interest in standardizing, like having a standard value block representation
that you just put in where you need it.
And I didn't really want to weigh in on that necessarily.
For me, the only thing that's--
the only point of concern for me with the value in soundbite
is simply how the client interprets it.
Like, you can put it in the block.
You can have it in the feed.
You can have the JSON file, which is linked to the feed.
And all of that is all easy enough to do.
What are the rules for the client?
What does the client do with it when
someone plays the soundbite to make sure that the credit goes
where it goes to?
And I guess what I was thinking is--
And this is now completely not thinking about the,
this is thinking about the podcast creator or creators
and the podcast soundbite creator
and thinking about it from that perspective,
not the technical, how do you ingest it?
How do you pause it?
And so on, which is its own separate problem.
But if someone is taking two minutes of a show
that you and I record,
then you and I would have a split between us when we record
that if someone would listen to the whole episode,
they would, you know, that that split would go to each of us.
And then if someone has a soundbite of a two minutes of that,
then it would make sense that, that, that, that,
that some of that money for that period of time gets split between the
creators, which would be you and me. And then of course, um,
a fraction of that goes back to the soundbite creator.
So I kind of feel like, cause I thought about, well, yeah,
it'd be simpler if you just sent it all back to whoever created the soundbite,
but the person creating the soundbite didn't create the content. And,
And that's where I kind of mentally got stuck.
And I'm like, but the problem with that is that
if that's the thought process you take,
it leads you down that road of, well,
then I've got a split of a split and, you know,
now the what links to what, because the only wrinkle,
to be honest, from the ingestion point of view
that I've struggled with is it's easy
if you've got an item level value split
for streaming sats to go with this, because, you know,
the JSON file for the soundbites is linked
to a single item, therefore they line up perfectly.
That's easy.
Where it gets more annoying is, well,
what if you've got a value split at the top of your feed
at a feed level, channel level,
not at an individual episode level,
at which point then you have to,
so then sound bites would then get split
against the top level split.
And if you've got different guests
and you haven't broken it down, then how does that work?
You know what I mean?
Like that's the only thing that I kind of got stuck with
because then it's like, well,
then you're sending value to people
that you aren't taking sound bites of.
And I'm also, you know what I mean?
That's where I actually mentally got stuck.
- Yeah, well, you know, we've almost run
into that same issue with our show,
with Podcast Tip One O Show is that we have,
we've ended up, what Adam's ended up doing
is he puts the same, he just puts a full value block
in every episode.
- Yeah.
- And so it's like, okay, here's the thing.
We recreate the whole block.
We don't have the block at the channel
and then extra people in the episode.
It's like, it's just, okay, every, every,
if the episode has a block,
it's a complete override of what's in the channel.
You do, you ignore, you know, you ignore the channel totally.
And I think you're, I think you're sort of hitting on,
on that idea that it's like, well, you know, if you start,
if you have to start layering these things,
that's way too complicated.
- And obviously I want to avoid complexity,
but at the same time, you got to discuss it
and have an agreement and say, well, you know what?
this use case, we don't do a split
because you can't really split that
if you've only got a channel level definition.
- Well, you need the other part of the value tag as well
because there's not,
being not a maxi here,
there's other cryptocurrencies out there.
The value block was specifically made
be able to handle anything that you could throw at it.
So if there's, like you'll need that top level definition also because somebody might want
to share clips and get reward, if it's the Monero podcast or the Hive podcast or whatever
it is, they may not want Bitcoin, they may not want Lightning, they may want their own
thing.
They may want lots of hive power.
So, you know, you can, so then that's where the,
to me, that's where the attributes,
having the value destinations and the value information
purely defined as attributes on the soundbite tag,
that's where you run into a problem
because you're, now it's not,
there's not enough fidelity there to know what is,
it assumes lightning.
- That's true, because I guess if you've got someone
who's contributing a soundbite.
And, but see that comes back to your wallet problem.
So if you're, let's say right now,
I'm not aware of any podcast client apps
that support anything other than Lightning.
So I guess if you were to think forward
to a point in the future where there is
like an LN pay equivalent for Hive,
so a Hive pay, let's say, wallet,
you spin up a Hive pay wallet,
you spin up a LN pay wallet,
and it's part of Podverse, let's say, then you'll have two different balances.
At which point then, if it supports it, that is to say the Soundbyte contributor supports Hive
and they've got a Hive address for their wallet,
then it would simply split that out to that wallet.
But how we handle multi-currency splits,
I don't. It's like it's either all one or the other, that's easy.
But if it's part Hive, part Lightning, how does that even work?
because the value of a hive, because yeah, this is coming.
It's like everything needs to be for an individual episode
of one currency, otherwise it's extremely complicated to do
'cause you'd have to have a fixed rate or fixed amount
in either lightning or hive, depending on which you support.
- Stepping into the theoretical here for a second.
- Yeah, sure.
- This is something, this may sound,
you know, when people hear us discussing
the intricacies of things like this,
This may sound just like, this is silly,
why would anybody, this is too complicated,
why would anybody want to fool with this, this is goofy.
But, if you, I think it's naive to think at this point
that cryptocurrency in some shape, form or fashion,
no matter what it is, Bitcoin, whatever,
cryptocurrencies are not going anywhere.
I mean, if anything, we're going to become more crypto
with a central bank digital coins that are inevitable.
Things like these concepts, these tools of cryptocurrency
are only going to become more entrenched in what we do.
It's not, we're not going back.
Let's put it that way.
It's not going, we're not going back
to the way things used to be.
This is a thing that exists now
and we're just going to have to,
We're going to have to integrate with it at some point.
So it makes sense to work these things out now.
And that's one reason why we didn't try to do 50 different cryptos or all these
kinds of things. We focus like, okay, we know Bitcoin, we understand how it works.
We understand lightning. We're going to,
we're going to settle on this because Bitcoin has seems the most like money.
It operates the most like a money. And we're just going, we're going to do,
we're going to settle and do this one thing.
Now, you know, in the future, we can figure out like what you, what mean you
were talking about a while ago, these multi-currency splits and all this kind
of stuff, that's, that's a big mess, you know, but we'll figure that out when we
get there, but you got to have the foundation first, uh, because it is a
thing and it's going to, I guess I just kinda, that's something I think about
often is, you know, when a people, when I hear people talking about cryptocurrencies
and as if it's sort of like optional, that you don't have to think about this thing,
that it's just like it's a big, it's a fad or a, it's, it's no, no, that's not how the,
that's not how this works. It is a thing that is going to be with us for a very long time and
going to get, that's going to become even more and more true, I think, over time.
I absolutely agree. I guess my, I mean, yeah, okay. So, I mean, I know I went way off into
to the future there and thinking about multi-currency splits
and so on.
And of the three that we've spoken about today,
like Monero and Hive and Lightning,
I mean, if we want to be pragmatic about it,
we just have to pick one and stick with it
and simply say, well, for the moment,
the standard only supports sharing
of a single currency type.
So like the podcaster says, well,
I will remunerate soundbites in Lightning only
because the rest of the podcast only accepts Lightning.
And make it that simple.
Like if you want to, as a podcaster in future,
support All Hive, then you say that.
If you want to support All Monero, you say that.
And you can handle the multi-currency split
by essentially saying, I don't handle multi-currency splits.
Because I mean, you could look at this
from any street vendor's point of view and say,
well, I'm selling ice creams, what do you accept?
And it's like, well, I only accept Solana.
And then you're like, what?
- Too bad I don't have any of that.
- It's like, no, just no.
But anyhow, sorry, there's a lot of fans out there,
if there's any left.
Yes, but all right, cool.
Well, look, this has been good
because it's a chance for me to sort of like,
'cause I can't have these sorts of conversations
with just anybody, Dave.
So I-
- You shouldn't.
You should not have these conversations with anybody.
You would have less friends, John.
- You know, you're probably right.
So yeah, let's not push the other friendships out there.
But in any case, yeah.
So look, I appreciate your time talking through all of this.
- Yeah, sure.
- And I know that when we were on episode 100,
I was sort of hoping that we would have a chat about it,
but Adam was really keen to talk about music.
And I didn't wanna like, you know,
'cause you know, as Dan is so famously says,
it's your show kind of thing.
It's not my show.
So, you know, it's your show.
So, you know, I was not gonna push it.
So I thought, you know what?
I'll just get Dave on Pragmatic and talk about it.
'Cause you know, why not, right?
- Hey, sounds good.
I will talk this stuff any time of any day.
- Awesome, fantastic.
If you would like to talk more about this,
you can reach me on the Fedverse at chigi@engineered.space,
on Twitter at John Chigi, or on Word,
or the network at engineered_net.
If you're enjoying Pragmatic and you'd like to support us
and keep the show ad-free,
you can by becoming a premium supporter.
Premium support is available via Patreon
and through the Apple Podcasts channel subscription.
Just visit engineered.network/pragmatic
to learn how you can help this show to continue to be made.
A big thank you to all of our supporters. A special thank you to our Silver Producers,
Mitch Bilger, Kevin Koch, Shane O'Neill, Lesley Law Chan, Kellen Fradelius Fujimoto,
Jared, Bob, Joel Marr, Katerina Will and Dave Jones. And an extra special thank you to our
Gold Producer, Stephen Bridle and our Gold Producer known only as R.
Pragmatic is a podcasting 2.0 enhanced show, which is what we've been talking about today.
How about that?
And with the right podcast player,
you'll have episode locations,
enhanced chapters and real-time subtitles
on selected episodes.
And you can also stream Satoshis
and boost with a message if you like.
That's a Boostergram.
And there's details on how you can do that
along with our Boostergram leaderboard on our website.
Now, if you'd like to get in touch with Dave,
what's the best way for him to get in touch with you, mate?
- Probably on the Fediverse,
dave@podcastindex.social,
or email dave@podcastindex.org.
Awesome. Fantastic. Well, once again, a special thank you to all of our supporters and a big
thank you to everyone for listening. And once again, thank you, Dave, for coming back on
the show. It's always a pleasure.
Yeah. Love talking to you, John. That was always great.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Music]
(upbeat music)
♪ ♪
(music)
Okay, I will add that to my to-do list. Thankfully there's only 39 other things on it, but that's okay.
- Right, yeah.
- Oh my God.
All right, cool.
Excellent.
'Cause I mean, the thing is about my Tesla,
I love my Tesla, it's a beautiful car,
but it's got problems and I can absolutely understand
why people don't wanna drive them.
And it's, yeah, like just like,
they did a software update about a month ago
and it gives you these alert warnings
when you drift too close to the center line on the road.
And honestly, I'm nowhere near crossing that line.
Like seriously, if I were to get a, like a ruler out and measure how far I'd have probably at least, I don't know, five, four or five inches before I'm going to cross that line.
And then it does, you know, emergency steering correction applied for safety.
And it goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
And I'm like, whoa, what?
It's like they might.
Oh, that would drive me nuts.
I know. And the worst part is you go into the screen and you say disable it.
And you're like, yep. It says if you disable this, it won't try to correct the steering.
I'm like, yeah, I know. Leave me alone.
Let me drive it.
And so you disable it and it's like two thumbs up, everything is good
So you reach your destination, you go and have your coffee or whatever
You get back in the car again and it automatically re-enables every time you hit drive
And I'm like, "Ugh!"
So it's like, it's stuff like that that makes me want to punch the screen
But I just, I haven't yet
So the screen is still intact, but there may come a time if they don't fix it
So it's just stuff like that
Like I never had this problem driving my Honda Jazz, you know what I mean?
You take the car and you twist the key away you go
And then
- Yeah
I just really don't want my car making decisions for me.
- I get that.
- This, when, you know, I jump in the truck,
I jump in the truck, I throw it in neutral,
I start rolling, you know, I take my foot off the brake,
start rolling, crank it up on the way,
then throw it in the second and go,
and it baffles my children.
They're like, "How did you crank the car
"with it rolling down the road?"
I'm like, guys, this vehicle doesn't know, it's dumb.
It doesn't understand anything.
All it knows is when you press the gas, go,
when you hit the brake, stop, and that's all it cares about.
And this is exactly what I want out of a car of mine.
I don't want it to make any decisions for me.
- Well, I'll tell you one thing that blew my kids' minds,
similar to that, is I had a flat battery,
as you have with a manual.
So, every now and then, you know, any car, sorry.
But as you have the manual, you can just roll start it, right?
So, here I am.
I'm towards the bottom of a hill, but there's still enough of an incline.
So, you get that car, you push it down the hill.
And then the car started.
And they're like, how the hell did you do that, dad?
And I'm like, oh, my God.
This is what this is.
What's that kind of magic, isn't it?
It's like, no, it's just I tried to explain it to them.
And I just like a blank expression.
I thought you needed jumper cables, dad.
And like, no, you don't need jumper cables.
Have you ever driven a, I don't know, I don't know what the stick shift history is in Australia,
but have you ever driven a car with, or a truck with a stick shift on the column?
Once...
Manual on the column.
Once, many years ago, back in, like when I was really young, like I was 17 years old,
my grandfather had an old Holden Tirranna that had a manual shift on the gear steering column.
I drove it for a total of about maybe 30 yards.
That was it.
OK, yeah, it's like it's just like it's just like a three speed.
But you you you pull it, you pull the lever back and up.
That's reverse.
Yeah. Back and down is first gear
back forward and up is second gear and forward and down is third gear.
Yeah. And so like this, I took my
I took my truck to get it to get the tires replaced a couple of years ago.
And the, uh, so it's sitting out in the parking lot and the guy, this old dude behind the counter,
um, he was like, uh, he said, he said, is that your truck? He said, yeah. And he said, okay.
And so he got all this stuff together and he said, uh, Hey, so-and-so some teenage kid. He's like,
go, go pull the truck into the, into the bay. And so he, the kid, he's like 17. He goes out there
and that old dude was like, uh, he's like, yeah, let's see, let's see if he can make,
if he can figure this out and he got in there and he just stared at it for like five minutes
and finally he came back in he's like hey man I don't know what to do.
I love that they I've seen cars with stickers on the back and you probably got the stickers over in
the states as well it's got a picture of a like a stick shift gate you know the six position
you know manual shifter gate and it says that's on the sticker and it says millennial anti-theft
device fitted. I just love that so much. It's so good and it's so true and it's
funny because my daughter had a traumatic experience in other words she
kept stalling it on a slight hill when I was trying to teach her to drive my
car because I'm trying to say kids get your license in a manual and then you
can drive a manual or an automatic whereas if you get stuck with an
automatic you can only drive an auto because we have you know the rules in
Australia are if you get an auto license you're not legally allowed to drive a
manual. Oh I didn't know that okay. Yeah yeah so I mean and I actually think
that's a good call because frankly I've watched some people that don't know how
to drive a manual try to drive a manual and it's comical and dangerous so anyway
but yeah yeah but my um my oldest son you know he insisted he's like nah I'm
down for this I am learning how to drive a manual and so he gets in now he's got
his license he's on his provisional license now so he can drive without me
sitting with him anyway so he's out and about driving he gets home he says oh dad I love
driving a manual just like windows down blaring my stereo and I'm like yeah it's
pretty awesome hey and he gets into my daughter's car which is an automatic and
he's like I hate this car it's too boring it's just there's nothing to do I
don't like it and I'm like yes he understands I guess. He's an old soul. He is an old soul.
So I think I'm grateful that so far at least one of my kids gets it and I
drove manual cars for the vast majority of my life you know I even drove I drove
of my Honda Jazz, which is a five-speed manual
in and out of the city in Brisbane,
which is a good hour commute each way,
like five days a week for five years,
you know, in rush hour traffic.
So, I mean, I was a hardcore manual driver.
So, for me, my Tesla has been the first automatic
that I've bought for myself.
Actually, come to think of it, ever,
'cause I was given a Ford Laser hatchback when I was younger.
my mom gave that to me as a hand-me-down and then she made me give it back when I
went overseas. It's like, you, you, but...
Ford Laser. I wonder what that compares to.
I'm sure there'd be some kind of an equivalent in the States,
but it was a 1988 model. Um, it was a, it was a piece of,
well, it was a Ford Laser. I don't know what else to say, but it's like a...
Also called the Ford Meteor.
Oh yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. It was a hatchback and,
but it was automatic, but technically I didn't buy it. It was given to me.
So therefore, every other car I bought since,
every car I've bought except the Tesla has been manual.
But anyway, nevermind.