Bitcoiners - Live From Bitcoin Beach

Can Bitcoin Be Hacked? The Secret History of Bitcoin Security & Satoshi’s Core Developers | Juan Galt

• Mike Peterson • Episode 177

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If Satoshi Nakamoto handed the keys to a single successor, is the network truly decentralized? We go deep into uncomfortable questions about who controls the Bitcoin blockchain and how the power to merge code has shifted since the Genesis block. Juan Galt (@JuanSGalt)  joins us in El Zonte to break down the history of the maintainer role. He proves that the security of our money depends on janitorial consensus rather than a single lead developer.

We explore the cypherpunk origins of the protocol, looking at the private correspondence between Satoshi and Hal Finney. This lineage shows how an early culture of cryptography evolved into the modern GitHub repository. Understanding this is essential to knowing how Bitcoin survived the exit of its creator without a corporate takeover.

The episode dives into the high stakes world of the private key and the nightmare of the early wallet.dat era. Juan shares stories of recovering seven figures of lost coins, highlighting the shift from 2010 hurdles to modern recovery standards. This was a fundamental upgrade for anyone holding digital gold as a lifelong savings account, moving us toward a robust sovereign standard.

Building a circular economy requires a payments interface that works for a local pupuseria as well as a Wall Street fund. We discuss early adoption friction in Mexico and El Salvador, moving from the guy with the Bitcoin phone to modern tools that make daily commerce possible. It is a raw look at moving Bitcoin from a speculative asset to a local currency.

Finally, we look at the internal decentralization of the Core team and how maintainers are elected without a CEO. From the Trusted Keys PGP system to the threats of quantum computing, we analyze the protocol’s ability to stay hardened. This is a masterclass in the Proof of Work required to maintain the most secure financial network in history. It is about verifying code rather than trusting a person.

—Bitcoin Beach Team

Connect and Learn more about Juan Galt:
X: https://x.com/JuanSGalt
Bitcoin Magazine: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/juan-galt
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@BitcoinMagazine
Lifeboat: https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.juan.galt
Company: https://www.satlantis.io/


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STAY AT BITCOIN BEACH
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Browse through this quick guide to learn more about the episode:
00:00 Intro
06:01 Why is the "Juan Galt" namesake a high-signal filter for Bitcoiners?
10:39 What was the Toronto Decentral hub like before the Ethereum fork?
14:19 What can we learn from the "Galt’s Gulch" Mexico experiment?
21:10 How can you recover seven-figure Bitcoin from a legacy wallet?
23:38 Why was the BIP-39 seed phrase a leap for Bitcoin self-custody?
36:18 How did Satoshi manage the maintainer transition to Gavin Andresen?
45:45 Why did Bitcoin move to GitHub and the "Trusted Keys" PGP system?
53:11 How does Bitcoin achieve consensus without a CEO or leader?
59:02 Is the Bitcoin protocol truly hardened against 2026 quantum threats?

Live From Bitcoin Beach

Juan Galt:

Satoshi reaches out in private before publishing the Genesis blog. Reaches out to a few cypherpunks. One of them is Hal Finney, and says, Hey, Hal Finney, what do you think of this? And how Finney in private email says, Oh, that's cool. Maybe have a look into this aspect of the cryptography or whatever. And then Satoshi is like, cool. Eventually, Satoshi gives Hal Finney an account like give an account on source for in this article, I show that there's in way in the Wayback Machine, a record of how Finney joining the organization as a contributor. Right? What that meant at the time, arguably, is that how Finney could upload a version of of Bitcoin Core, which means how Finney was arguably somebody that could merge changes into core and upload it to the main repo. But that's like the first instance of somebody having, like, the power to change code in, like, the official distribution of Bitcoin, right when Satoshi publishes the Genesis blog on January 3, 2009 that's the beginning of Bitcoin as we kind of know it, and how Finney never contributed after that, at least on a code basis. He was in the forum for a while and contributed intellectually, but not from a code perspective.

Mike Peterson:

Here we go. We got Juan Galt with us, reporter with Bitcoin Magazine, and he's actually here in El Zonte to cover the Circular BITCOIN ECONOMY summit that we have here, and then, I think also for the the plan B Conference. So we caught up a little bit, and Medellin just, was that last week?

Juan Galt:

Yeah, was that that's a few days ago?

Mike Peterson:

Yeah. So it's, I'm glad to have you back here. I know this is definitely not your first time in El Salvador. How many times have you been here?

Juan Galt:

Yeah, well, thank you for having me beautiful studio. It's great to be here. This is actually the first time I spend, let's say, quality time in El Zonte, okay, but I've been to El Salvador like three times. I was here for adopting Bitcoin, I think three years ago.

Mike Peterson:

Think you interviewed me, then.

Juan Galt:

I did.

Mike Peterson:

So now I get to turn the tables.

Juan Galt:

I love it. I love it. This is fun. And I've been looking forward to being on this podcast, actually, if I, if I had the chance, because, because I know you have a very select audience, and you know, the people that that are paying attention to what you're doing are actually, you know, I think Bitcoiners that are, that are more, they're very, very in touch with an aspect of the Bitcoin industry in the world that that, I think other other people are like on different scenes, right? So it's great to be here.

Mike Peterson:

But hey guys, you know, we don't do commercials here at the Bitcoin beach podcast, because we want to keep it focused on what's happening here in El Salvador, but we have something special that we're promoting right now, because we have the stay at Bitcoin beach project that's just been launched. We've always wanted to make sure that when Bitcoiners come to El Salvador, they have a truly Bitcoin through and through experience in their accommodations, and being able to stay at a place that mostly has other Bitcoiners. And so we came up with this idea, and I actually found my buddy Peter here to take the bull by the horns and then make it happen. So Peter, tell us what you got cooking for us.

Peter:

Thanks, Mike, stay@bitcoinbeach.com this is the website and the brand that we started that it will host a growing number of Premier properties that we have, both in the Punta mango area and here in El Zonte. The first is Punta mango villas, which was the original place that Mike you and I bought 16 years ago, and it's been newly remodeled six villas that sit upon the best break, my opinion in the country, but stunning. The pool has been redesigned. We've got a bar on the cantina, the full restaurant, Casa Agua Fria is a small, little cabin in the same area, and it sits right on the Agua Fria Beach, a little bit more intimate. It's great for families and they want to go out and kind of get away. And then here in El Zonte, there's three properties. First is the city el mar which Mike you put your heart and soul into. We're sitting here now in the podcast studio that has two main houses overlooking the the break of El Zonte. Beautiful infinity pool. Gym just got a first class place to stay, and then a new condo that just got released in the Barefoot project that's on the other side of the river, fifth story, overlooking the ocean. Again, beautiful. Two bedroom and then seven suites that we're opening up called Bitcoin beach suites. That is really close to where a lot of the Bitcoin beach story started. So when you come you can use Bitcoin to book your stay right on the website. You also can use it for transportation, for food, for all the services that we continue to add to to the business. So we'd love to have you please go to stay at Bitcoin beach com. You'll see pictures, you'll see all the different descriptions and information of the properties, and you can hit us up, either on our web page or on Instagram, and we'll get back to you. And we'd love to have you out. Please come to stay at Bitcoin beach.

Juan Galt:

I was, yeah, I was at Plan B last year. I'm gonna be a Plan B this year, giving a speech in Spanish about the bitcoin core role across history and what it means, what it does, and how it's changed, and such. But yeah, it's, it's my fourth time here, I think, yeah,

Mike Peterson:

So, so probably in the Bitcoin space, most people will pick up on the name Juan Galt and the play on the author Iran. But I'm curious, in general, like the general public, do most people pick up on that, or

Juan Galt:

It's funny, like you get three reactions. You get the one. What got? Okay, right? You get that one, yeah. And then you get, okay, cool, you know, you get like, a little spark. And it's like, we're boys, you know, we're friends, we're on the same vibe. Or you get the, oh, I've gotten that one a few times, really, yeah, and it's like, and I actually had one guy at a bookstore once in Canada being like, capitalism, right? It started, like, went into a full com me rampage, right? Okay, buddy, right. So it's fun. It gives me signal, yeah, ironically, right. It's probably kept me from getting hired at certain places, right? So, yeah, you know, but it probably opened other doors.

Mike Peterson:

So it's kind of, I'm trying to remember, was that? Was that Fountainhead or Alice Shrugged? Which? Which one is?

Juan Galt:

That one's Alice Shrugged.

Mike Peterson:

Alice Shrugged, okay, yeah, yeah. She was actually one of my, my favorite authors from from a young age, actually from junior high. I read anthem, and I was like, hooked, yeah. Love that book, seventh grade, yeah. So shout out to my seventh grade lit teacher for for introducing us to that right on.

Juan Galt:

Yeah. Anthem, I think, is, it's a beautiful book. It's a lot shorter than the other one, yeah, and yeah, yeah.

Mike Peterson:

So, at what point in life did you decide to pick that up as you know as your namesake?

Juan Galt:

Yeah, well, when I was finishing high school, I started to get into libertarianism accidentally, through, like, a politics class, they they asked me to, like, do research on Somalia. Somalia and government was collapsing at a time, and the news, the media was calling it anarchy. And there were the teacher asked me to, like, report on that, right? So, so I looked it up, and I found a bunch of libertarians saying, No, this is not real anarchy. Real anarchy is, you know, Austrian economics and blah, blah. And so through that rabbit hole, I started, like, learning about libertarianism, and that led me to wine Rand eventually, and I read her book, I have, like, quibbles on her philosophy, yeah, over the years, but, like, from a narrative perspective. And I think if you look at the world today, Alice Shrugged, kind of predicted a lot of what we're seeing. You know, I think she, she was, of course, born in Soviet Russia, and she grew in the during the kind of, like the communist sort of Soviet era. And she fled when she was young, to the United States. So she saw the rise of the Soviet Communist state, and then saw, like the golden era of the United States. And I think that perspective is what's so compelling about about Alice Shrugged.

Mike Peterson:

Yeah, I definitely have, you know, there's some things with the whole philosophy of objectivism that I, you know, have my quibbles with too. But just as an author, and like an overall, the themes of her book, I don't know if I found anybody is quite as riveted as her.

Juan Galt:

Yeah, she was super interesting. She was famously opposed to anarchical capitalism. She had like, debates with, I think, Friedman, Milton Friedman in disagreements with him, and had, like, an interesting critique of anarchical capitalism God's culture had a constitution, you know. And had like, borders, right? Had like, very, very strict immigration policy, right? Immigration policy of Galt sculpture. For those that haven't read the book, God's culture was, like, kind of an intentional community hidden in the mountains, I think of

Mike Peterson:

Montana or Wyoming,

Juan Galt:

yeah, something like that in the United States and and. Yeah, you could only enter if you were basically not a thief, right? Like, if you, you know, made a vow not to steal, right? So, you know, there's lots to talk about there, but yeah,

Mike Peterson:

so curious as to how you entered into the Bitcoin space. And then I know we were talking in the car before this, that you spent some time in Mexico with the Anarchapulco. I always say that wrong com the events that they had there. So I'm just kind of curious as to, did Bitcoin lead you into that, or how did that all come together?

Juan Galt:

Yeah, so, so after kind of doing a lot of libertarian, let's say educate, like learning a lot about libertarian, thought eventually was that in Canada, that was in Canada? Yeah, I was in Canada time. So eventually I ended up moving to Toronto. And I wanted originally to study psychology, but I started looking at the education system, and I was just kind of appalled at the cost the time, and it seemed very like I saw kind of like a corruption deep in there, right? Like this sort of peer review study was, like a very tight knit, kind of like group, I don't know. I just, I didn't like it. And so I was like, You know what, I'm not gonna go to university. And University. And there's like a movement to, like do out of the dark self study. So I started figuring out what I was gonna do. I already knew about Bitcoin. I'd heard about it earlier. Had some friends that were sort of in, had some bitcoin. So I started going to a Bitcoin meetup there. And there was a Bitcoin community there that had the brand Bitcoin decentral This turned out to be one of the, actually, actually the founding sort of hubs of Ethereum later on. So, but there's a guy called Anthony diori That was hosting this intentional sort of meetup space. It was, you know, one of those early meetups that had a lot of influence. And I just went every day, and I studied a lot from them. I volunteered, I started, I worked with their conference, and I got to start. I started, started meeting people that were very deep in the space. So I learned a lot of what I know about, like Bitcoin and how the blockchain works, proof of work, all that stuff with them, just having conversations with them and and then they had a hackathon at the conference, 2014 Bitcoin Toronto, and Amir taki showed up. Amir Taki is one of the first bitcoin core developers, or contributors. I don't know if he was officially a developer, but or yeah, he was like, I don't know if he was like a protocol developer, but he was like a contributor. He's the guy that came up with the Bitcoin improvement proposal system in Bitcoin, and he basically showed up to that, to the hackathon, and invented an on chain, sort of eBay, right? It was like what became later on open Bazaar, which is like basically using Bitcoin script so you could trade random items for Bitcoin in a non in a decentralized way. And as a libertarian, I saw that, and it just blew my mind, right? I was like, this is the mecca, right? It's like an article capitalism, crypto fight, right? And so I wrote an article about it, start a blog, posted it. Somebody was like, oh, you should open a Twitter account. Open a Twitter account, posted it, and it got it, got me to 300 followers within like, a couple of days. I got a few 100 views. And one of the my friends there was like, This is really good. You should keep writing. So I kept writing. Eventually started. Somebody started, kind of paying me for articles. Then I got into, I think my first paycheck was Bitcoin magazine, actually, but some somebody else distribution. We're talking like late 2014, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, yeah. So I got into so the Bitcoin magazine for a couple of months. Then there was like a shuffle, and David Bailey bought the company, and company kind of stopped functioning for a month or two. And I decided to move to Mexico with my friend and go to this sort of intentional community in Acapulco, Mexico, which is kind of like an anarchist hub at the time. And so that's how I got there, the long answer to the question, but that's, that's how I got to that community, which was kind of like an anarcho capitalist intentional community that had, like a whole saga as well.

Mike Peterson:

So were they the people there? Were they all, like, living like, in the same like, communities, or was they kind of just spread out across Acapulco? Yeah, what was, and were they there seasonally? Are they there full time, or what was, and what was the goal of the community like, yeah, was the...

Juan Galt:

I mean, all of the above. It starts with Jeff Berwick. I mean, there's a long story to Berwick, but he was sort of anarchical capitalist, influencer and content creator and and market analyst and investor, all these sort of things, right? And he actually had a lot to do with some of the first Bitcoin ATMs that came out. He was already in Bitcoin early on and and he was. Trying to create kind of like a Gulch, Gulch. You know, a lot of people in the libertarian space were influenced by Iran, and Alice Shrugged, he was trying to find a Gulch. And they had, like, a failed project in Chile that, like they tried to do like a chile Gulch and collapse into,

Mike Peterson:

was it in Chile, or was it in Argentina?

Juan Galt:

I think it was Chile.

Mike Peterson:

Okay,

Juan Galt:

But I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was Chile.

Mike Peterson:

Yeah, I think you might be right,

Juan Galt:

one country type of thing. Yeah,

Mike Peterson:

yeah. There's something that they had all this land and then it couldn't be developed. There was, like, a permit, like,

Juan Galt:

beautiful, somebody needs to do a sequel of the documentary that have come out over the past year, just over that. But anyway, a lot of radical capitalists actually met in person, probably for the first time at that Chile event. And then that didn't work out on the real estate front, but the connections were left. So Berwick went back to Acapulco and said, hey, you know what Acapulco is? Actually a very anarchist city. Acapulco is a coastal port in Mexico on the Pacific Ocean that had a, you know, big history of, sort of Hollywood. And it was kind of like Hollywood's backyard, all the, all the, all the big stars would show up there and take selfies, right? And and so it was beautiful city, but it's Mexico, so it is kind of an Arctic it's kind of pay to play. It's kind of like you don't, you don't push people too far, because they'll hit you back type of thing. So it does have, Mexico does kind of have that culture. And so people were like, okay, cool. They started showing up. He decided to host a conference. More people showed up. Some people stayed. Some people came seasonally. And then he kept doing the conferences over the years. Eventually, community started kind of like being very involved in the in the conference. Another old friend of mine called that. Nathan Freeman took over that conference and grew it a lot. It eventually got like 4000 attendees. I think at this peak, it was the biggest crypto com, the biggest anarchist conference in the world. But it was also like as the 2017 boom was taking place, 2018 boom. So everybody was in crypto, everybody was doing something in Bitcoin or crypto. There's shit coins everywhere. I don't know if I can curse in this podcast, but there's plenty of them. And it was just anarchist chaos, yeah, and it was beautiful, and it was a lot of fun, and I met a lot of my best friends there. But it was also, like, very dramatic, and like, just, let's say, chaotic good.

Mike Peterson:

Does does that conference still exist? Or did it?

Juan Galt:

It does. It sort of faded after that. There was a lot of drama. You know, somebody got murdered. There's a whole HBO documentary. I made a documentary about the community in the early days, and then that documentary brought in a professional documentary crew from the United States, and they did a second one, and that second one ended up on HBO. Oh, really, yeah, yeah, so, so you can find mine on YouTube. It's called the The anarca pulco settlers. And that's like the prequel to to the HBO documentaries called the anarchists and, and, yeah, and so, so that kind of documents the whole story after the 2018 events, you know, the murder, the biggest conference, it kind of starts to sort of, let's say, fade or sort of fall in attendance. It kind of transforms into more of like a retreat type thing. And I think the last I heard is they moved it to Puerto Vallarta, because Acapulco obviously got hit by a hurricane a couple years ago or so, really hard. And I don't know, maybe for some reason they decided to move.

Mike Peterson:

And you were so how long did you live in Mexico for?

Juan Galt:

I lived in Mexico for five years. Yeah. So I was in for three years. I was in Acapulco, part of that community. I saw it sort of rise and fall, you know, and and then eventually I was in Guadalajara for a while, and in Baja, California, yeah,

Mike Peterson:

where in Baja were yet

Juan Galt:

In sonata? Yeah,

Mike Peterson:

We used to always go down there. I grew up in San Diego, so we would, we would go down for surf trips right there.

Juan Galt:

Yeah, yeah, they're doing the Baja for like, Baja, 600 vehicles.

Mike Peterson:

No, I wouldn't do that, but there was some sand dunes in a place called Cantamar that we would go take. I had a, actually had a Toyota Tercel station wagon, four wheel drive we would take there, and everybody would just look at us like driving this little station wagon over the sand dunes. And then it got stolen down there.

Juan Galt:

So it must have been cool there.

Mike Peterson:

So So you enjoy your time in Mexico,

Juan Galt:

yeah, Mexico's Great, yeah, yeah.

Mike Peterson:

No, I love Mexico. So during that time, were you working as a journalist in in the Bitcoin space, or what were you doing for work? And how did that what's kind of been your path that back the Bitcoin magazine?

Juan Galt:

Yeah. So I worked after Bitcoin magazine. I worked for coin telegraph as a sort of contract writer for, I think, a year and a half. And I was living in Mexico at that point, so I was just writing, sort of doing the remote thing, and live in Acapulco, writing articles about Bitcoin, right? And I. And I was doing crypto too. Like I was shit cleaning a little bit, you know, and then I started trading and such. Eventually, I kind of got tired of writing. I started doing YouTube. So I had a YouTube channel for a while that was getting some views and stuff, and interviewed people and short, like, sort of opinion pieces,

Mike Peterson:

was that in Spanish or that

Juan Galt:

was in English, that was all in English. And I was just trading the markets. I started learning how to trade. And, like, you know, that whole journey, piece of the journey that I think a lot of people go through, eventually, I started doing consulting. I started a consulting project, and I started teaching individuals about the industry, you know, started going more, sort of Bitcoin only, and, and teaching people self custody, teaching people about the market, just kind of, I just kind of answering people's questions, doing one on one, consulting education. Did that for like two years. I did a lot of, like, self custody, cyber security, kind of education. I've done recovery. So, like, I've helped. I've felt multiple people recover lost coins, right? I think I'm over like seven figures of recovered coins at this point. So it's nice. It's not always possible, yeah, but when it is, it's a life changer, right?

Mike Peterson:

So, So explain to me a little bit how, how that process works, like what I'm assuming, they've they've lost their keys, so how, how do you go about helping them recover? What's...

Juan Galt:

Yeah, I mean, there's a full range, right? So like, I'm, I'm a hard a cipher punk. So like, I don't, or at least I try to be. So like, I don't care what coins you're using. I prefer. I think Bitcoin is the best. But if you show up to me, like, I had a guy come up to me recently with, like, oh, I have BTCB. I'm like, what's BTCB? Right? It's like, I don't know, but it's stuck in a wallet. I can't move. It is okay. How much is like, Okay, that's enough. Like, there's a certain minimum that I work for. Yeah, I charge 10% so, like, there's a sort of minimum that I'm like, Okay, I'll work for it. So I started looking it up, and it's like, this binance chain has BTC contract and a thing, and they have, like, this wallet with defy, it's a mess, and the guy couldn't move it. So it's like, okay, we make an agreement, and then I help you recover it. And this because I managed to help the guy. So, so it's stuff like that. I mean, you know, I know, like, I had, sometimes people just show up with like, an old, like ancient bitcoin wallet. It's like, oh, I had lab Bitcoin in a laptop, and I it's, I don't know where it is anymore. Okay, well, let's look at your laptop, and it's like an ancient laptop they've had in a closet for 10 years, right? It's okay, let's, let's scan it. Let's figure it out. And it's, it's usually that kind of thing. Or sometimes it's like, I have this wallet, I forgot that it's encrypted. Usually, a lot of people lost a lot of money on the wallet dot, dot files. So people that are new to Bitcoin or more recent, they they, thank God, never experienced all of that files. You know, if you know they're terrible,

Mike Peterson:

I was too technologically for you ignorant to figure out how to get in the back. A couple times I tried to get into bitcoin early, and I was just like, oh man.

Juan Galt:

Well, it was rough. It was really tough. I mean, I lost coins in Bitcoin. Now, while it that files in the early days as well.

Mike Peterson:

And it's not just from there's a simple, simple explanation you can give.

Juan Galt:

Yeah, yeah. So before, before the the 12 word seed era, right? Well, 12 412, word seeds, 24 word seeds, that comes from a couple of bips Bitcoin improvement proposals that are, I think, probably 2014 era, that defined how you can have a wallet be recoverable from 12 words. That was a major innovation from like, a user. Okay, so that wasn't there from the start. That was not there from the start.

Mike Peterson:

Wow, I did not know that.

Juan Galt:

Yeah, that's like 2014 plus ARRA more or less Satoshis. Original approach to wallet was just a file. The file was called, is called, still the wallet Dot. Dot file. Bitcoin Core still supports the standard to some degree. I think they're making some recent changes to the wallet module, a child core contributor, sort of doing a lot of work on that front, but it's basically just like a file that has a bunch of private keys and public keys, and it's just like a list of private keys and public keys. And there's a bunch of problems with that. The first problem is the first time you create an account or a Bitcoin wallet, download Bitcoin Core, boot it up, it creates a wallet. That file has 100 addresses, right? At least, that's the way it used to work, I don't know. And then if you run through the 100 addresses, you basically have to, like, update your backup. So like, if you make a snapshot and a backup of it, you have to update your backup after 100 addresses, because it'll create new ones that won't be on your backup. So that's the first way people have lost some coins. The second problem is you have to know that you have a wallet of that file. And then the Bitcoin Core interface, if I recall, kind of prompted people to put a password. So they would put the password, the wallet would encrypt. The core client would encrypt the wallet that that file contents with that password. People forget that password all the time. And so a good amount of the work that I've done in that front is. Like, okay, let's, like, hypnotize you see if we can figure out your password is brute force it. I've had to brute force that password and

Mike Peterson:

and was that involved just sending like, 1000s of different passwords?

Juan Galt:

Okay, yeah. So one of the things we did was, literally, we had to write a custom script to, I think there's actually some libraries online that you can just sort of run, that will run, use your GPU to randomly, sort of create passwords to try to break something, right? So I think we, in one of the cases, we like, there's somebody else that I work with on this, he's like an engineer. We created a custom script because we knew more or less what the password was. So we just tried a bunch of variables that were, like, where we didn't know and we found it and that that was like, that was kind of a big success for us on that front.

Mike Peterson:

What was the biggest amount of that? You guys, yeah,

Juan Galt:

I can't, I shouldn't say, like, specific numbers, but like, let's say, Yeah, six figures, okay, yeah, yeah, in a single recovery,

Mike Peterson:

yeah, yeah, that's, that's no, I'm sure for a lot of people, that that's fun. That was a huge, huge blessing to be able to, because, I mean that you know, and I know people that have that, you know, that they've lost funds like that, and it just kind of eats it. Oh, man, it's rough, especially as the price is Bitcoin keeps going up. Yeah, the terms, the

Juan Galt:

Yeah, well, so, so my, my story, short story on that is like, I when I was, when I first heard about Bitcoin, I was a broke, like, 19 year old, 20 year old. I My body was kind of getting into it. I gave him some money. He went and bought like seven coins for like 100 bucks, and then I withdrew him to a Bitcoin Core wallet. And I was like, okay, cool, Bitcoin, whatever, right, forgot about it. Price went to like, $30 and crash for like, two years, right? It was just like, some dude was like, oh, Silver's way better than Bitcoin, because Silver has intrinsic value. You know? It's like, yeah, he was early. 10 years, 15 years early. Now, Silver's doing something. Hasn't done anything for decades, right? But, but I eventually, like, my laptop died, I reinstall Windows on it, and it wiped out the private key and but I didn't realize that. So eventually, when Bitcoin pumped to 1000 I was like, Okay, well, where's my bitcoin? Right? And I started looking, and quickly I realized that I had made a big mistake. So through with a friend, an engineer friend of mine, we started, like digging, and we I learned a lot about how to scrape data from a drive that's been sort of reset and do like a hex analysis, like hex scraping of the drive, and like I had to go through my own process of recovery to find peace with the fact that actually, you know, the coins were gone. They had the reinstall had wiped out the private keys on the wall, that that sort of file in the drive, and but that at least brought me knowledge like peace with the fact that I know you did everything. Yeah, I found, I found the bottom of the barrel. It's not there. And I think a lot of people don't, they don't get a final answer to that, and that's what eats you, because it doesn't like I'm at peace with it, yeah? But it would be nice to have the money, so, yeah,

Mike Peterson:

awesome. I can't remember.

Juan Galt:

Well, you were asking me about, like, my career paths, yeah. So after that, I mean, I did that for a while. I still do that sometimes, when I find somebody that I can maybe help and such, I sort of do that. But I think over the past few years, well, I started making content again. So I work with Bitcoin news com for a while. We did a bunch of podcasts on x.com, and such, and then

Mike Peterson:

I think that's when I first met you.

Juan Galt:

That's when I interviewed originally, yeah, yeah. That was a plan B last a couple of years, maybe last year, last year.

Mike Peterson:

Think was adopting Bitcoin. Wasn't it?

Juan Galt:

Might have been adopting Bitcoin, yeah,

Mike Peterson:

yeah. I think

Juan Galt:

yeah, it was adopting Bitcoin, yeah. So that was, like a couple years ago, three years ago, yeah, yeah. So that was, I did that with them, and then, and then I was offered an opportunity to become magazine and and I've been with them since March, business reporter for Bitcoin magazine. So I've written, like, gosh, maybe you can queue it up now, probably 100 or so articles with them.

Mike Peterson:

100 or so probably more, okay,

Juan Galt:

at this point. Yeah, you can go a little faster. So, you know, I've been focusing this year a lot of self cost that if you stop there for a second, go up a little bit. You see the top self custody Bitcoin wallets of 2016 2026 that one's been getting a lot of play. It's sort of like my opinion on what the best wallets right now are. It's sort of based on open source of custody, sort of design, like privacy focus, you know. And I cover, kind of like the full range of wallet types. And if you zoom out a little bit, there's, there's, yeah, I mean, there's. Lot of stuff. I do some like collaboration and price analysis with with another author. That's why these ones are showing up there for me. But I did, for example, if you go down a little bit of async page joint on the left, that's a that's an open source Bitcoin privacy sort of organization, very, very good stuff. So yeah. I mean, I write two to three articles a week. I've done a lot of coverage on samurai wallet. And I look for like, companies or projects that are, let's say, are they touch the Cypherpunk idea. But you know, they're like, using cryptography. They're using they're not just like a custodial exchange with, like, custodial front end and all this stuff for, like, you know, trust me, bro model, I try to, like, find, like, you know, the the Cypherpunk that actually has either a best, a functioning business or it's maybe, like, nonprofit open source type of thing, right? So this is actually one of the reasons I accepted, or like, I decided to come to the circular BITCOIN ECONOMY Summit, because it's something that I tried to do in the early days to get retail adoption and such, and it's like I ran into a bunch of these sort of friction points. But being here now is okay. The technology has evolved a lot, and the approach has matured a lot.

Mike Peterson:

So what do you mean by that?

Juan Galt:

Well, I mean, I think we can get into into some of the issues around that, but, like, I've found that that getting people to start using Bitcoin, there's a bunch of frictions that you have to overcome. You know, one of them is that nobody has any bitcoin, like, the amount of people that have Bitcoin, yeah, okay, it's growing a lot, but it's still like maybe 1% of the world at best, right? And and of those, the ones that actually have it in self custody or in a wallet that I can actually spend from maybe, like, half of them, let's say so half a percentage point has Bitcoin that they can spend with, right? And so you're not gonna have, in my experience, a lot of luck getting retail adoption to stick if retail adoption is not getting a lot of hits. Yeah, right.

Mike Peterson:

There's no incentive for them to, like, learn how to custody and to have whatever device they're to accept if nobody's actually spending Bitcoin with them. Yeah.

Juan Galt:

And then on top of that, the platform integration that retail needs to keep the Bitcoin input flowing. You need, they need, they have, there's, there's a full stack of tools they need. They need accounting. They need it integrated with the with the app. It needs to be like just the Bitcoin button that type into the kind of stuff that Blink has done that very well, but in cash, app has done very well now. That didn't exist back then, right? And it doesn't exist in every country and that, you know. So, so, so retail needs accounting, integrated accounting tools. Otherwise it ends up on, like, the Bitcoin phone. Here's the Bitcoin phone. And who has the Bitcoin phone? Oh, the guy with the Bitcoin phone is not here today. Sorry, right? And that, and that just kills.

Mike Peterson:

Would you definitely run into that?

Juan Galt:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Peterson:

Like, oh, the owner is gone, and right, took his phone with him.

Juan Galt:

So yeah. And for the owner, it's like, well, I can't just let my employee receive the Bitcoin because how do I know they got a new Bitcoin, right? So it's, it's a, it's a payments interface problem that's only now starting to really get solved. And then on top of that, people don't have any bitcoin. So if you tell people, well, you know, you you can, you can get a 5% off if you spend Bitcoin here, it's like, well, but they still don't have it. So now they got to go pay 2% to buy it, so they can save 3% maybe, right? And so, so I think we're in this kind of distribution stage of Bitcoin that that's tricky to overcome. Now you guys have obviously achieved it right and here in El Zonte and and there's a lot of ways that you guys solve that problem. So you guys have found an approach that works. And I was talking to Valentin from the sort of Peru circular economies, which he's incredible, yeah, and the depth at which he has analyzed the problem, I think, is probably the right approach in certain environments,

Mike Peterson:

yeah, yeah. I love what Valentine's doing in all across Peru. That's what's like. So amazing is, like, I know how hard it is to do it in one little location. They have like, 15 different spots that they're working in. It's impressive. Yeah, yeah. So have you had much chance to, like, visit any of the businesses in El Zonte yet?

Juan Galt:

And, yeah, I've been to El Zonte, I think three or four times. I think every time that I come, I come to El Zonte so I've seen a little bit of like, the growth of El Zonte. I remember the first time it was it's grown a lot, right? But yeah, I mean, I bought my coffee today. I've drank too cold. Office pay for bit with Bitcoin. Today, I got my breakfast. I had lunch last night, and it was paid for with Bitcoin.

Mike Peterson:

Yeah, yeah. It's gotten so much it used to be, you know, kind of clunky, and then be like, now they're like, they don't blink an eye. They're like, yeah, Bitcoin, okay, right, yeah, yes. It's fun.

Juan Galt:

Is that all like, blink, or what stock are you guys use?

Mike Peterson:

I think, I mean, we primarily use blink. A lot of the smaller businesses use blink. But there's some of the bigger businesses will use, like Ibex. I think what else are they using? Paco, artianki, yeah. So there's, there's a number of different solutions now that that work pretty well. So, so, which is great, we want to have multiple, multiple solutions right, and options for the for the vendors. So I'm curious you had mentioned earlier about the this latest article that you're writing about the history of core contributors and and to be honest, that's that's not something I have a great understanding of. So I just be curious if you could kind of give us, you know what you talk about in your article, and kind of lay that out for the listeners.

Juan Galt:

Yeah, thank you. So the next issue of Bitcoin magazine. So we have, obviously, the digital which you can find on websites. We also have, like the print magazine, right? We've been doing it for a decade, right? The next edition is called the core issues, coming up at the end of the month, and it's going to be focusing on Bitcoin Core as a kind of institution, of sorts. And we have a long range of articles contributed by different core contributors and engineers and commute like Bitcoiners, right? And I contributed an article which was a deep dive, kind of the most academic style work I think I've done, which was, it was like 4500 words going through the history of Bitcoin Core maintainers all the way to Satoshi. So I started with Satoshi all the way to today. And I argued that as an example, you could make somewhat of a case that Hal Finney was the first core country core maintainer, right? So one of the issues is that one of the things that that people might hear is that there's these guys called, these people call the core maintainers that are programmers and they have some sort of power. Is the kind of things you hear online...

Mike Peterson:

Is that, would that be different than a core developer?

Juan Galt:

Yes, okay, so there's three terminologies, right? You, you'll hear core contributor, core developer and core maintainer. Okay, core developer and core contributor are kind of the same thing. There are people that submit a change to the Bitcoin GitHub repository, and then sometimes through long term discussion, those changes get merged, which means added to the Bitcoin master repository.

Mike Peterson:

So you'd be considered a contributor if something that you proposed was adopted.

Juan Galt:

Correct, and you would end up on the list of contributors on GitHub. And that's like a solid badge of honor from a career perspective. It's like nice, right. Now, who has the, let's say, the power or the technical ability or right, to merge a con, a piece of a new piece of code to Bitcoin, right? How do you do that? Because you could, in theory, come up with a system where anybody can make any change to Bitcoin. And it certainly if you download a copy of Bitcoin, you can modify it locally and run your own local, local copy, which you know people do. There's multiple implementations of Bitcoin, and you can certainly do that. I mean, Bitcoin, I mean, this is a conversation we've been having for the past couple of years, right? But if you there's certain things you can't change without risking falling out of consensus with Bitcoin, right? So in order to make sure that people that the consensus doesn't have technical failures, and we all end up in like, this sort of crisis chaos of like, you know,

Mike Peterson:

would be like, the chain would split,

Juan Galt:

yeah, like, chain forks, chain splits. In order to avoid chain splits, you kind of have to be careful what you put in there, right? And there's also, like, cryptography involved in people's money at stake, you know, trillion and a half dollars, right? So you have to be careful what you put in there. And one like the open source answer to that question is, you have core maintainers, right? Or you have maintainers. This is not a Bitcoin specific answer. This is a open source answer, right? Core maintainers are kind of like janitors. It's considered a janitorial role, and it's basically like, you look at it and like the maintainer that makes a sort of judgment call, is this spam? Or is this or is this, like legitimate does is this something that's ready to emerge, or does this need further work? And usually the core maintainer role is not to be kind. Of like a judge, but rather to be again, janitorial, in the sense of like, they watch a thread and let people debate color contributors debate something. Polish it. Polish it. They offer suggestions like, Okay, make sure that it passes these, these quality tests, right? Because there's a bunch of automated tests that bitcoin core contributors do that, that that verify that the thing works at scale, that it works on a bunch of different machines, that it passes basic computer science tests. So they they do a bunch of testing on everything, and then eventually it's okay. Does anybody have any objections? No objections? Okay. And then the core maintainer comes and says, clicks, merge, right?

Mike Peterson:

So back up just a little bit. How does one become a core maintainer? Who right is it? Can anybody be a core maintainer, or is this something that's voted on? Yes, I'm very naive when it comes and

Juan Galt:

there's a great history to this. And this is sort of the topic that my piece sort of focus around, and I'm going to give you the speech in Spanish at Plan B. So for people that is, you know, have Spanish friends or whatever. So the history starts with Satoshi. Satoshi reaches out in private before publishing the Genesis blog. Reaches out to a few cipher punks. One of them is Hal Finney. And says, Hey, Hal Finney, what do you think of this? And how Fini, in private email, says, Oh, that's cool. Maybe have a look into this aspect of the cryptography or whatever. And then Satoshi is, like, cool. Eventually, Satoshi gives Hal Finney an account, like give an account on SourceForge source forge was a website, still is a website where you could host code and upload and that and get code from similar to GitHub. And so you in this article, I show that there's in way in the Wayback Machine, a record of how Feeney joining the organization as a contributor, right? What that meant at the time, arguably, is that how Fini could upload a version of of Bitcoin Core, which means how Finney was arguably somebody that could merge changes into core and upload it to the main repo. There was no version control, as engineers would identify. There was no version control of Bitcoin at the time because they hadn't even been published. But that's like the first instance of somebody having, like, the power to change code in, like, the official distribution of Bitcoin, right when Jen, when Bitcoin, when Satoshi, publishes the Genesis block on January 3, 2009 that's like the that's the beginning of Bitcoin as we kind of know it, and how Finney never contributed after that, at least on a code basis. He was in the forum for a while and contributed intellectually, but not from a code perspective. And then we have a few other contributors. We have two other guys show up. We have the Bitcoin pizza guy, Laszlo, and then we have another contributor whose name I forget. He only made, like, one or two changes contributions, and they had accounts that where they could upload changes, like upload versions with their changes to Sourceforge, but then Satoshi would grab their contributions locally and then merge them locally on his machine and then upload them again, right? So the merge process was centralized on Satoshi, right? And that process, that sort of way of doing things, continued until like late 2020, 2010 I believe when Gavin Andreessen starts becoming a contributor, he's the third contributor. And then we have all of Satoshi sort of saga. At the end, I write about the most notable moments, including, like the inflation bug, and then how he leaves, and then, and then, when Satoshi leaves, there's this kind of question of who, who tells us what Bitcoin is now, right? So Satoshi had been kind of described as the lead programmer, or, like, he's the founder by nature, right? And, and there's this funny problem that you can see it in, like, the history of Europe, right? It's like the king's dead. Long live the king, right? Like, who's the king? Now, yeah, you have this problem of lineage of power, right? Open Source kind of suffers from the same issue, right? So, so who is the lead maintainer? How do we know which direction to go and avoid chain splits? And so Satoshi sends an email to Mike Hearn, who was another core contributor at the time, and says, I've moved on to other things, but bitcoin is in good hands with you guys and with Gavin Andreessen and you and the other and I don't know if he mentioned anybody else, but he mentioned specifically my Gavin Andreessen, who was basically the core contributor, the most prolific contributor at that moment, right? So Gavin then publishes a blog, a post on on the Bitcoin talk for us, which was the major sort of Bitcoin kind of social network at the time. So. And says, Hey guys, well, you know, with Satoshi behind us, or having kind of moved on, I'm basically going to be operating now as lead maintainer, and the first thing I'm going to do is move us to GitHub, because Sourceforge kind of sucks, right? So he moves Bitcoin to GitHub, and then over the next, like, year or two or three, he starts adding contributors, maintainers. So he starts decentralizing his role as maintainer and he adds a variety of people I will have to like, check real quick on this, on who he was. But we get the set of that first wave of Og core contributors and maintainers. We get people like Gregory Maxwell, we get people like Peter Willa.

Mike Peterson:

These were just people that he would manually add.

Juan Galt:

Yeah. So he starts giving them maintainer rights in GitHub, the platform GitHub, which means that they can merge code into the master repository of Bitcoin. We get a few people like that, and then eventually you get Vander LAN right, becomes one of the core maintainers, right, and Vander LAN towards, there's a point where Gavin Andreessen, he gets kind of roped in with Craig Wright, right? And Craig Wright starts, kind of like trying whispering in this year, no, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto, right? And you get this whole saga where, where Gavin Andreessen goes.

Mike Peterson:

How early on did that start happening with Craig Wright?

Juan Galt:

So the Craig Wright era is like, I think 2014 2015 and he, Craig Wright, starts sort of trying to prove that he's Satoshi Nakamoto, but he doesn't have the cryptographic keys to prove it, because we have PGP keys for Satoshi. Satoshi could prove that, that he's Satoshi, right? And, and so Craig Wright starts sort of making the case that he's Satoshi, and then he says, we're gonna, I'm gonna prove cryptographically that I'm Satoshi by signing with this PGP keys and summons Gavin Andreessen to, like, witness it. And, I mean, I think in bread, and there's, like, BBC reporters and such, and they do this ritual where Craig Wright has like an app and like signs and Gavin, and Jason's like, Okay, interesting. And like Gavin, it's like, yeah, that looks legit. Looks like that's those are the PGP keys. Well, turns out Craig Wright had a modified version of the program and had backdated the PGP keys or something like that. So basically, he's, he like, created a fake signature. Okay? Bitcoin community figured that out in like two hours, and they were like, actually, no, this is a fake, this is a false signature. But that kills Gavin's reputation at the time. So the core maintainers that Gavin had added to Bitcoin GitHub repository. They very quickly, basically remove his access from a security perspective.

Mike Peterson:

And then, and how has that happened on a practical level? Is it like if, if the majority of maintainers,

Juan Galt:

I think, I think any of them could have done it? Oh, really, yeah, okay, any one of them could have done it. I'm not exactly sure the technical details of how that worked out, but basically it's like, you, it's like, imagine a telegram group or a WhatsApp group where you have a bunch of admins. Any one of those admins could kick out in a yoga it was, it was like that. It was basically that, right? And so, so they kick out Gavin, and then Gavin kind of like, apologizes and says, and he had already kind of ceded the lead maintainer role to Vanderlin. At this point, he had written a blog post saying, basically, hi everybody. I've been contributing to Bitcoin for years. I've now decided to, sort of, over the years, I've started stopped contributing as much, and I've decided to move towards a chief scientists role. And I think vanderland is the best lead maintainer of Bitcoin Core. And so that's the way that we're going to operate for now, right? And so Vanderlin gets this sort of default title of lead maintainer. When this whole thing happens, Gavin exits the picture, and Van der LAN is less left with a default, sort of leadership role over Bitcoin Core. So van der LAN, I kind of separate the article into eras and again, like I know I'm kind of doing sort of thick brush strokes over this, the article goes again. It's 4000 words annotated with sources of everything. So wait for that one. The print edition is going to be excellent. So get that article, get that print magazine. But van der LAN writes a blog post and says, Well, you know, and I think. Need to decentralize this role a little further right. So Vanderlin starts adding some new contributors, some of the old com some new maintainer some of the old maintainers, kind of leave on their own. There's this whole, the whole sort of bitcoin cash drama at the time, and some of them got attacked, and they got

Mike Peterson:

that was happening at the same time that

Juan Galt:

was happening at the same time as the Craig rights, okay, right? So some of them leave, and so Vanderlin adds a bunch of a few new people over the next year or two. And then throughout this whole Gavin era, the way that the code was being merged so somebody could wrote an updated version of Bitcoin, right? They couldn't. They, they submitted it as as an update to Bitcoin and GitHub, and then the maintainers were like, you know, after enough review, yes or no, and the yes meant that GitHub was the one like GitHub, the cloud of GitHub, github.com, Cloud Services was the one that merged the code into bitcoin master, which introduces a nation state level sort of attack. It's like, we don't want GitHub merging the code. We want to make sure we're merging the code. So, so van der LAN institutes this new process for for merging the code called the trusted keys, sort of scheme. And the trusted keys is basically there's like a file on Bitcoin Core, the master bitcoin core repository, that has a list of public PGP keys of the core maintainers, and the new versions of Bitcoin have to be signed by somebody in that list, and that signature has to be valid. And you can download that and verify that the signatures are valid. And, like,

Mike Peterson:

allows just one person on the list,

Juan Galt:

any, any of the people in the list, right? So, so, so right now, there's like, five or six people that have that that that kept that technical capacity, okay, right? And, and for the record, a lot of this stuff, the changes that have happened in Bitcoin, have been signed by PGP keys anyway, right? So when you make a commit to Bitcoin before it gets merged, you sometimes it's sort of PGP sign, and then the merges get PGP signed. So there's a lot of cryptographic authentication and validation, but, but the merging of of new code is a point of particular sort of interest, right? And so, so the trusted keys, sort of part of the system. You can go and look up Bitcoin Core GitHub, trusted keys. There's a file with PGP keys, and it shows the history of core maintainers up to 2014 that was that system was basically initiated by blue Matt, who is a Bitcoin Core, like, very popular Bitcoin Core contributor and maintainer for, actually, no, he wasn't maintainer. He was a contributor, I believe, but he, I don't think he was ever a maintainer, but he was the, sort of the first person to kind of create that, that system. And, yeah and so now we have, like, a verifiable and trackable sort of history of maintainers. Before that we had, like announcements and a child has a post on Bitcoin talk forum that also did a lot of review, like historical sort of work, trying to provide sources for who had been a maintainer throughout history. That one is now outdated by like two maintainers, but I sort of tried to expand on that work that HL did. So, so yeah, and then avanderland eventually gets tired and decides, you know what, I'm going to move on to other things as well. But before vendor land leaves, a new process for electing core maintainer shows up, and this is basically by contributor consensus. So bitcoin core contributors will meet in IRC. IRC is, you know, very nerdy forum protocol from which most other forums comes, actually, like a very old protocol. It's kind of like Slack. Slack is an implementation of IRC that's little more high tech, but basically there's this sort of like internet IRC groups where that are public and open. You can go and read the log. There's long history of all of the conversations that have happened in Bitcoin IRC channels, all the way back to, like Satoshi era, I believe. And you can download these archives and go through them. All of this stuff is very true. Transparent. All of the conversations around Bitcoin Core are very transparent. There's there's the forums that have gone they have their own history, the mailing list that have their own history. And then there's a long tradition that goes back to the cyber punks, of having open conversations in the mailing list about open source code. So, so these conversations happen in IRC. They're scheduled, they're known, you know, when they're going to happen, and people just show up and say, Well, what's on the on the docket today? Somebody is like, the person that's kind of like leading the conversation. And then eventually it's like, hey, you know, I like to submit X person to be a maintainer. They've been with being core contributors for three or four years, they have 3000 commits right that have been merged, and does anybody oppose it? And then people discuss it. And then if I assume that sometimes there's been a no, sometimes there's like a maybe, but a lot of it is like, if it's getting submitted as a, as a, as a possibility, it's usually because people are already, like accepted that. It makes sense and and so that's the core maintainer. Let's call it election by contributor consensus, right? And that is the era that we're in now, right? So we are Vanderlin overseas, one person, I think it's hebasto, but I have to, I will have to check on the article the first sort of election like that, and after vanderland leaves, we are left without a lead maintainer. So currently there is no lead maintainer of Bitcoin Core. That era has passed us, right? Somebody, a week ago, got elected as a maintainer by contributor consensus. The other thing that happened on the vanderland Was that you started getting maintainers that are specialized in in modules of Bitcoin, right? So you have, I call them modules, I don't know if engineers call them modules, but basically you have the wallet code, you have the mempool policy code. You have network, like the networking sort of part of the Bitcoin. You have consensus code. You have all these different sort of folders inside of Bitcoin. And usually, like today, maintainers will tend to specialize in a particular piece of code. And so you have, like the wallet maintainer, and that's H how you have the mempool policy maintainer, and that was Gloria Shao, right? And when you have you have specializations, right? So that's that's where we're at, and I think that my thesis is basically a we've seen, historically, a slow and steady process of decentralizing the core maintainer role as much as possible. But it's also that this is all open source, and open source gains security from attention and careful attention from its users and from it sophisticated like people that are like, interested in the topic, right? And and I think there's a responsibility and a call to us, the Bitcoiners, to actually go and look and not just like, go and look and like, criticize. No, go and look and understand and review. You know, one of the first things that that core contributors or aspiring core contributors are told is like, well, go review a bunch of pull requests or commits or code that's being contributed to Bitcoin. Go like, read it and try to understand, and if your engineer offer feedback, or at least review it, and if you see something critical and bad, we'll call it out. Right? So we have, we have a duty to to to attend to Bitcoin if we want it to be decentralized. And we are an era where, like, I think the history shows that it's increasingly decentralized. So, I mean, that's the deep dive, but yeah, the article you can, you're gonna find a big.

Mike Peterson:

I love that, because that's that's definitely an area that I feel a little lacking in knowledge of that history, of that so and and having kind of gone back and really studied that has that impacted where you come out on the current debate?

Juan Galt:

Right, right. Well, it's funny, before the debate, I was starting to get like, let's say, frustrated with core. I think we would all like certain changes to go through. I think, I think CTV covenants are appear to be ready to be merged. But they're a consensus changing thing. They would change consensus. It would be a soft fork, and nobody seems to be leading it or doing it, because consensus changes are very risky from a career perspective, I suppose, or from a, you know, personal like nobody wants to be harassed on the internet for doing anything like that. So So I would like that change, for example, personally, I think it would make a lot of make self custody a lot better, a lot more secure, a lot easier to program. But so I was frustrated with that, and frustrated with things and. I started looking into it, and I started a project with a friend to, like, try to, like, understand what's going on. And that's what eventually led to this article, is sort of me trying to understand how big, how the sausage is made, which in turn, has actually answered a lot of my questions about it, and has left me more or less on the core side of the latest debate. I think, I think, like, I understand the perspective of people that think that we should be filtering more, but I think I don't know. I don't really, it doesn't make sense to me technically, like, it doesn't make sense to me to filter things at this point, like, you can't filter it. Bitcoin is a censorship resistant system. You can't filter. The filter is the consensus rules. That's the fundamental filter. The block size limit is the fundamental filter. You can try to create frictions in Bitcoin to keep people from making transactions that you think are bad, and some of them are arguably very bad, but I don't think you can fundamentally do it, and so I've just kind of loved it, lost interest in the topic. I don't think it's a systemic risk. I don't think it's going to kill Bitcoin. So that's kind of where I'm at with that. I think there's more important work and topics inside of the Bitcoin development world that we need to talk about. Obviously quantum the quantum risks are like the new the new drama, right? We got to talk about quantum now, and so that's really interesting. I also don't think that's a systemic sort of critical The sky is falling issue, but it is something that we're going to have to probably make a consensus change to fake to make Bitcoin quantum resistant. And while it's big, quantum resistant, and and you have to deal with Satoshi coins, which is a whole other picture, right? So I think there's more interesting and important topics. I think, yeah.

Mike Peterson:

Awesome. Well, we've, we've covered a lot. Is there anything else I want you to be able to get the see the sunset. Yeah, here tonight. So was anything else we didn't cover?

Juan Galt:

All I'm gonna say is I'm really looking forward to meeting all the people at the at the circular economy Summit. I think again, like this is a very, very different crowd within the Bitcoin world that I'm actually used to at this point. So I'm really looking forward to talking to more of them.

Mike Peterson:

No, I'm excited.

Juan Galt:

Thank you for hosting me and everything

Mike Peterson:

and covering it with Bitcoin magazine. How can people follow you personally? Any any other videos or past work you want to direct them to? Yeah, please. Yeah, sure, let them know.

Juan Galt:

I mean, I have a website, juamgalt.com it's kind of outdated. You can follow me on Twitter at if you look at Juan Galt or @JuanSGalt, you'll find me on Twitter. And, yeah, just keep an eye on Bitcoin magazine. I mean, you know, we're trying to do good work. I think we're trying to move the Bitcoin mission forward. We're trying to hyper bitcoin is the world. There's, I think, many different ways and approaches to reach different crowds and markets and niches, right? And and Bitcoin magazine is firing on all cylinders on multiple fronts to try to advance Bitcoin to the world. So keep an eye on what we're doing. I think we're trying to do good.

Mike Peterson:

Awesome. Yeah, all right. Thank you, Juan. Appreciate it.

Juan Galt:

Thank you.

Mike Peterson:

Hey, Bitcoin family, we want to kind of end the podcast this month with a special tribute to our dear friend, Andy. As a lot of you guys know, Andy recently passed away after battling cancer, and Andy was was really the heart and soul behind this podcast getting off the ground. He was the one that kind of helped convince me to do it, that designed, the studio, that came up with the format, and, you know, did the great intro that we had and and has really been the the energy behind it. He brought Paco in, and kind of trained Paco to take over the daily production. But you know, Andy still always had his kind of fingerprint on what was going on here. And so we just asked you guys to really be keeping his family in prayer, his wife, Suez and his daughter Maven, as they kind of struggled through this time. And we just want to give a shout out to and out to Andy and just what an amazing friend he was. He was the guy that everybody loved. You didn't find anybody who didn't love Andy. And so rest in peace, brother.