I cannot express how much I enjoyed this interview. I’ve heard a few other interviews with Bob, and saw him speak at a Mining session in Nashville last year, and I’ve never heard anyone be able to explain mining quite like him. Although I’ve never met him, he comes across as a kind and gentle soul, which always makes me lean into what he’s saying. He is near the top of my list of Bitcoiners that I hope to grab a coffee with someday.
Bob and I are the same age, so I really enjoyed his comments on (and vividly remember) the early days of the PC industry when he was at Gateway (I received many of those black and white cow boxes, lol). And I completely agree with his comments that PCs were the first wave of decentralization that “enabled” the internet.
There is SO much amazing content in this episode, it is hard to distill down to my favorite topics and takeaways but here are a number of things that really resonated with me. First, he reminds us that Mining incentives should be structured such that it incentivizes good actors more than bad actors. I loved the observation that there is a massive social shift as you move across the bell curve of technology adoption from innovators through late adopters. For example, innovators actually like the fact that early technology is “hard” and there is excitement when it works, while later in the curve people simply want ease of use and dependability. I personally have always found the term “mining” a bit misleading/confusing when trying to explain it, so I appreciated Bob’s breakdown of it as simply a combination of transaction validation combined with a mechanism to release new Bitcoin into circulation fairly.
I really appreciated his take that he decided against taking Barefoot public because it promotes a high time preference due to reporting to Wall Street every 90 days, and also that going public is basically a move towards centralization. Loved his breakdown of what he refers to as “captured” vs “wild” mining and why they focus much of their efforts on wild mining. Another topic that really resonated with me was how he has mixed feelings about the term HODL since it often reflects that people should “sit back and do nothing” after acquiring Bitcoin. Rather, he believes that Bitcoiners should consider that they have a bit of a “citizen responsibility” to be active in the Bitcoin ecosystem and run a node and/or mine to keep the network secure and decentralized, etc. Perhaps one of the most important points he made (as always) was his emphasis on template creation in mining (rather than just hashing in pools) which is critical to decentralize those that are selecting the transactions to be included in blocks and minimize the risk of censorship in the future. Finally, his comment that he thinks it is more important for nations to secure hash rate before buying Bitcoin for an SBR was absolutely fascinating. What an incredible episode! Cannot recommend it enough!
Larry, thank you so much for this beautiful review. I passed it to Bob too. He's indeed such a humble, thoughtful, insightful guy, I resonate deeply with everything you wrote!
I cannot express how much I enjoyed this interview. I’ve heard a few other interviews with Bob, and saw him speak at a Mining session in Nashville last year, and I’ve never heard anyone be able to explain mining quite like him. Although I’ve never met him, he comes across as a kind and gentle soul, which always makes me lean into what he’s saying. He is near the top of my list of Bitcoiners that I hope to grab a coffee with someday.
Bob and I are the same age, so I really enjoyed his comments on (and vividly remember) the early days of the PC industry when he was at Gateway (I received many of those black and white cow boxes, lol). And I completely agree with his comments that PCs were the first wave of decentralization that “enabled” the internet.
There is SO much amazing content in this episode, it is hard to distill down to my favorite topics and takeaways but here are a number of things that really resonated with me. First, he reminds us that Mining incentives should be structured such that it incentivizes good actors more than bad actors. I loved the observation that there is a massive social shift as you move across the bell curve of technology adoption from innovators through late adopters. For example, innovators actually like the fact that early technology is “hard” and there is excitement when it works, while later in the curve people simply want ease of use and dependability. I personally have always found the term “mining” a bit misleading/confusing when trying to explain it, so I appreciated Bob’s breakdown of it as simply a combination of transaction validation combined with a mechanism to release new Bitcoin into circulation fairly.
I really appreciated his take that he decided against taking Barefoot public because it promotes a high time preference due to reporting to Wall Street every 90 days, and also that going public is basically a move towards centralization. Loved his breakdown of what he refers to as “captured” vs “wild” mining and why they focus much of their efforts on wild mining. Another topic that really resonated with me was how he has mixed feelings about the term HODL since it often reflects that people should “sit back and do nothing” after acquiring Bitcoin. Rather, he believes that Bitcoiners should consider that they have a bit of a “citizen responsibility” to be active in the Bitcoin ecosystem and run a node and/or mine to keep the network secure and decentralized, etc. Perhaps one of the most important points he made (as always) was his emphasis on template creation in mining (rather than just hashing in pools) which is critical to decentralize those that are selecting the transactions to be included in blocks and minimize the risk of censorship in the future. Finally, his comment that he thinks it is more important for nations to secure hash rate before buying Bitcoin for an SBR was absolutely fascinating. What an incredible episode! Cannot recommend it enough!
Larry, thank you so much for this beautiful review. I passed it to Bob too. He's indeed such a humble, thoughtful, insightful guy, I resonate deeply with everything you wrote!
thanks!