WBD684 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin, Nostr & Freedom Tech with Matt Odell

Release date: Monday 17th July

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Matt Odell. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Matt Odell is host of Citadel Dispatch, co-host of Rabbit Hole Recap, managing partner at Ten31 and co-founder of OpenSats and Bitcoin Park. In this interview, we discuss Bitcoin conferences and podcasts, the importance of decentralized tech, the implications of identity verification on social media, Nostr’s potential as a censorship-resistant social network, and the involvement of BlackRock in Bitcoin.

“Freedom dies by people just taking a little bit more and a little bit more… we just end up in a situation people are like ‘How the fuck did we end up here?’ And at some point down the line you have to practice civil disobedience and say: ‘No, I will not fucking comply.’”

— Matt Odell

Interview Transcription

Matt Odell: I never use headphones when we do our party rips at the Park because it's just more shit that I have to deal with.  People are always blown away.  I'm like, "We're in the same room, you can just hear me, you don't need headphones to hear me. 

Peter McCormack: It's different though. 

Matt Odell: Well, you need the headphones so you know if you're too far away from the mic without telling the -- 

Peter McCormack: I also speak slower when I have headphones on.  You hear how the audience hears it, like a professional. 

Matt Odell: The audience is listening at 2X!

Peter McCormack: Not with me.  I never listen to 2X.  Do you listen to 2X?

Danny Knowles: On some podcasts, not on everything.

Peter McCormack: I can't do it. 

Danny Knowles: It depends who it is.

Matt Odell: I do a humble 1.25. 

Peter McCormack: Humble!  Do you listen to roasbeef on 2X?

Matt Odell: No, you have to decrease the speed!

Peter McCormack: Have you listened to anyone else on half speed?  Everyone sounds drunk. 

Matt Odell: No, just roasbeef.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he sounds normal.  Everyone sounds drunk.  Hello Matt Odell.  How are you, man?

Matt Odell: Are we on? 

Peter McCormack: We're on, we're always on, man.  Once you put the headphones on, we're on.  I asked you how you are; you can answer.

Matt Odell: You told me not to touch my mic so I just --

Peter McCormack: Don't touch your fucking mic.

Matt Odell: I couldn't, I couldn't think, I just wanted to touch it.  I've been good.  It's good to have you back in Nashville. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we love it here. 

Matt Odell: Both of you, particularly Danny. 

Peter McCormack: Fuck Danny!  We love it here, we like Nashville.

Danny Knowles: It's my favourite place in America.  I think if I was going to move to one place in America, it'd be Nashville. 

Peter McCormack: I think we had consensus on that, didn't we? 

Matt Odell: We're ready for you. 

Danny Knowles: We'll make it happen. 

Peter McCormack: I like Nashville.

Matt Odell: Same.

Peter McCormack: It reminds me of when I first went to Austin.

Matt Odell: I'm incredibly long on Nashville and Bitcoin and freedom tech.

Peter McCormack: And the park is going very well.  Did I hear when I was in the bathroom then that it means you don't have to travel any more, everyone comes to you?

Matt Odell: Well, that's the -- yeah, at the Park we're trying to build, I think we have 40-plus free events this year.  So I'm going to be doing a lot less Bitcoin travel and more focus on building out our events here and building out a good member experience here.  And I mean, the massive Bitcoin Conference will be here next July, moving from Miami.  So, I don't have to go to Miami this year, which is great.

Peter McCormack: That's going to be a big couple of weeks for you then.

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, it's insane.  These summit weeks, we had the Lightning Summit this week, is fucking ridiculous, it's exhausting. 

Peter McCormack: Next April, we'd like you to travel. 

Matt Odell: Well, we can play that by ear.  What's next April? 

Peter McCormack: We'd like you to come to Bedford. 

Matt Odell: Is there a match?

Peter McCormack: That will be the final game of the season, hopefully with us being crowned champions for the second year, and we will be hosting a little Bitcoin Conference.  We'd like you to come.

Matt Odell: That's pretty cool.  Well, thank you for the invite, I'll consider it. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Just say yes. 

Matt Odell: This is the first time, I was telling Danny this, I guess, when you were in the bathroom, this is the first time in three years that I don't have any Bitcoin travel on the calendar. 

Peter McCormack: Well, that's helpful.  I mean, look, it's a good thing --

Matt Odell: It's liberating.  I mean, I think you could remember maybe three years ago, yeah, even just three years ago, there was maybe three not shitcoin conferences, like three Bitcoin Conferences that were really worth going to, and you would go to it, and you felt like you met everyone you needed to meet, you had all the conversations you needed to have, and then in the last three years, there's just been this explosion of Bitcoin events.

Peter McCormack: It was Honeybadger, BitBlockBoom.  Were you putting Miami into it as well; is that the three?

Matt Odell: I would say 2019 was their first one in San Francisco, right.  Yeah, I would throw that in there.  Do you hear something? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I do feel that coming through my headphones.  I wonder if, do you remember when this happened before? 

Peter McCormack: It happened in New York.

Danny Knowles: It picked up, like, radio?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it was in New York.

Matt Odell: It sounds like a news report or something, right?

Peter McCormack: We're going to go without headphones, hey, Odell?  I can't listen to that shit in the background. 

Matt Odell: So, what were you saying?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so the three were, for me, were Miami, BitBlockBoom, and --

Matt Odell: Right, at the time it was San Francisco. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Matt Odell: And then -- 

Peter McCormack: Honeybadger. 

Matt Odell: And since then, for better I think, is now there's Bitcoin Conferences almost every month, every continent, and that's what we want to see.  Bitcoin adoption is growing, these events are distributed, a lot of them have different niches that they focus on.  Like a perfect event is TABConf in Atlanta, and it's a developer-focused event, and they don't really have any competition on that front.  And I think people have to kind of get it out of their mind, or I mean, people can do whatever the fuck they want, but I think it's completely ridiculous to expect to go to all of them.  And you pick and choose, and that's the beauty; that's the beauty of Bitcoin growing up, right?  You pick and choose what you want to go to. 

I've gotten some flack about some of our events conflicting with different dates of other people's events.  We're throwing 40-plus events a year, there's going to be conflicts, please don't take it personally.  And at the end of the day, what we're doing at the Park is very intimate, 200-person events.  If you're throwing a 2,000-person event, I don't really consider that competition.  It's an apples-and-oranges experience, it's a completely different vibe that we're going for. 

Peter McCormack: Prague was very good. 

Matt Odell: Prague, I've never been, Prague, the city, is awesome.  BTC Prague was the first year.

Peter McCormack: They did a really good job, really, really good job. 

Matt Odell: I was bummed to miss that one.  I had pretty solid personal reasons not to make that.

Peter McCormack: I always have to miss BitBlockBoom because it always clashes with when I take my kids on holiday in the summer, which is a shame because I know Gary does a great job.  I've been to one day once and I hate missing that.

Matt Odell: Yeah, I think I went to four years in a row of BitBlockBoom, and unfortunately this will be the first year in five years that I'm not going to be there.

Peter McCormack: I'll go to Lugano, that's good.

Matt Odell: I've had the pleasure of being invited, but unfortunately I wasn't able to make it last year and I probably will not be going this year.  The other thing, I like the ability to reserve my right to just FOMO in last minute, rather than having it on my calendar like six months ahead of time.  And also, I remember when I was -- it was really weird.  My trajectory in Bitcoin was a really zero to one.  I was like an anon pleb with many different name handles, and whatnot, and then the podcast just really took off; Rabbit Hole Recap really took off.  And then I just started speaking at all these events. 

There's a novelty that would be nice to just FOMO into an event, buy my ticket, not tell the organiser I'm going to be there, and just be at the fucking event, not be on stage.  I think there's something to be said about that.  I haven't done that in four years.

Peter McCormack: They also get a bit samey if you go to all of them. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, you go to the same people, same conversations. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and when you've got a podcast, you get to have those conversations all the time.  So, when there's a talk on, most of the time you think, "Well, I've already spoken to that person, had that conversation with them", and so it becomes more about the hanging out afterwards. 

Matt Odell: But it's good you brought up the podcast because, I mean, we've seen the same thing happen with the podcast, right?  When you started your show, when we started Rabbit Hole Recap, there weren't that many Bitcoin shows.  Now, there's thousands of Bitcoin shows and a bunch of them are in different niches and you kind of need to change it up.  We all remember the early Bitcoin podcasts where every podcast just started off with, "Oh, hi, I'm Pete.  What is your Bitcoin journey?"  And they would just say their story about how they got into Bitcoin, or whatever.  You need to change it up and you need to keep it interesting.  And then the expectation isn't that people are going to listen to every Bitcoin podcast, that doesn't make any sense any more.

Peter McCormack: I don't actually listen to any.  Well, very, very occasionally.  We had Balaji booked, then Marty dropped one.  I was like, well, we should listen to that.

Matt Odell: I listened to the Balaji one.  I thought it was pretty funny.  Like three hours in, he was like, really the only takeaway your audience should have here is that they should stay humble, stack sats!  I was like, "Why didn't you just tell me that when I started listening!"  I was like, "I've got that part on dial already!"  

Peter McCormack: You own that, you own that, man. 

Matt Odell: When I first started podcasting, I listened to every one of my own shows. 

Peter McCormack: Your own shows? 

Matt Odell: That's the number one recommendation I would give to someone who's starting, is listen to your own shows, because you learn.  That's how you learn what your crutches are, what you're doing wrong, improve yourself.  And if you're expecting other people to listen to it, the least you can do is listen to it yourself. 

Peter McCormack: I've never, I can't listen to my shows, I never have. 

Matt Odell: You see, there you go.  It's important.

Peter McCormack: My biggest advice is don't listen to the -- come on, man, you want to go there, we can go there!  I would say don't listen to your competitors in the same sector.

Matt Odell: Why?

Peter McCormack: Because I think you'll naturally listen to what they're doing, and you're being drawn to them.  Listen to good interviewers.

Matt Odell: I think if you're starting, listen to everything, including yourself. 

Peter McCormack: Listen to Larry King and listen to Rogan. 

Matt Odell: I think it changes if you've been doing it for a while, that makes sense, but in the beginning, I think it worked for me.  Listen to everybody, including yourself.  I would actually disagree with myself.

Danny Knowles: You would listen to yourself as a guest, or you'd listen to yourself hosting?

Matt Odell: Both.  I would listen to every Rabbit Hole Recap.  And the funny thing is, Rabbit Hole Recap is not edited, it's a live show, we just fucking publish.  So, it wasn't like I was listening to produce it or edit it or anything.  I was just listening to see, you know, how it went.

Peter McCormack: I would also say, practice doing interviews without any questions in front of you, if you're going to do one.

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, I just never did it with.

Peter McCormack: You've never, ever had questions prepped?

Matt Odell: No.  I just wing it.  I wing it on live shows, same with Citadel Dispatch.  And also, it drives people crazy, conference panels, when I'm the moderator.  They're like, "Oh, Matt, can we get on a call ahead of time and talk about what we're going to talk about?"  I'm like, "It's going to be fine, it's going to be good.  We're having a conversation".

Peter McCormack: No, I mean, I say no to that anyway.  Were you there in New York?

Matt Odell: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we had one in New York and --

Danny Knowles: What conference was it?  It begins with an S.

Peter McCormack: It was Scaramucci's. 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it was.  

Peter McCormack: It's not Scaramucci, is it?  What's his name? 

Matt Odell: Oh, I know it.  It's SALT, right?

Danny Knowles: SALT, that's it, yeah.

Danny Knowles: Who's Scaramucci?

Peter McCormack: Isn't Scaramucci a character in a film?

Matt Odell: No, Scaramucci, Anthony Scaramucci, and he's got SALT, the SALT Conference, just a shitcoin event. 

Peter McCormack: So anyway, we turned up and they were like --

Matt Odell: It's the Mooch, the guy who worked for Trump for 14 days before getting fired. 

Peter McCormack: They wanted us to -- they asked, "What questions are you going to put?" and I told them and they would say to me, "Well, can we have some more crypto questions?"  I was like, "No, it's going to just be Bitcoin only".  They're like, "Yeah, but we need some crypto questions".  I was like, "No, it's going to be Bitcoin only".  They fucking pulled me!

Matt Odell: You see, that's why you don't give them a heads up.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they pulled me!

Matt Odell: So, that's one thing I've learned putting on the Open Source stage for Bitcoin Magazine three years in a row, and now what we're doing here in Nashville at Bitcoin Park, is that people do want to get their email intro with their panellists so that they can plan ahead of time, and whatnot, and that was just never my style.

Peter McCormack: No, don't do that.  But yeah, Bitcoin Park, amazing, I love it.  And the fact that it comes to you is a good thing.  The fact that you don't have to travel so much, because the travel's a slog, let's be honest.  I find it a slog.

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, it takes time, right?  The only thing more scarce than Bitcoin is our time, and travel takes a lot of time, whether it's the plane, whether it's getting to the airport, dealing with all the planning ahead of time, all that shit.

Peter McCormack: Leaving your laptop on a plane.

Matt Odell: Changing time zones always fucks with me.  And personal travel, I always like doing the longer trips, and in the beginning of the conference circuit, or whatever, it was always like I would try and create a longer trip out of it.  And then it got to the point where it was just, fly in, fly out, fly in, fly out, and it's just draining.

Danny Knowles: I figured out on a plane on the last trip, because everything's from Australia, so minimum it's like 14 hours, I reckon it's like 20 days a year I spend either in an airport or a plane.

Matt Odell: That's insane.

Danny Knowles: It's crazy.

Matt Odell: Yeah, so just move to Nashville.

Danny Knowles: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: It was that year I did 92 flights, and I sat down and worked out how much time I actually spent in the air, and it was something like three weeks!

Matt Odell: The other thing I like about Nashville is that we're very centrally located and I prefer driving if I can pull off a drive.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's not always easy here in the US.

Matt Odell: Yeah, well I mean we have pretty good freeway systems if you're willing to be in a car. 

Peter McCormack: Not being in California. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, not California, but Chicago is what, like four-and-a-half hour drive?

Peter McCormack: I mean, I like it here.

Matt Odell: If I could do a four-and-a-half hour drive to Chicago versus, maybe it's a little bit longer, maybe it's six hours.  If I could do like a six-hour drive versus a 50-minute flight, I would take the six-hour drive. 

Peter McCormack: How big is the community here in Nashville?

Matt Odell: We're growing, we're growing pretty strong.  Our monthly meetup, we have two monthly meetups that are free to the public, that we've been running, well, one is the social, which we've been running for, it's going to be two years in September, so a little bit less than two years.  That is a topical meetup, we have different topics every month.  Every year is supposed to be the same topic that month.  So, like July will always be Lightning, January will always be mining, and we get on average 200 people for those.

Peter McCormack: Nice.

Matt Odell: In the bull market, it was like 250.  And the bottom of the bear, when we were at like $15,000, it was like 160 or something.  But the average in there, pretty strong in a bear market in recession.  And then we added another meetup, which is the day before that, which is our BitDevs, which is modelled after New York BitDevs, which is a technical meetup, mostly focused on developers, like the latest in developer news for the month.  That one, we average like 70 people. 

Peter McCormack: Have you got people flying in and coming to do both? 

Matt Odell: We have people flying in and driving in.  But a very strong local community and a lot of people are moving here.  I mean, we have very good taxes, no income tax on the state level.  And property is not as expensive as other places in the country, cost of living is much cheaper. 

Peter McCormack: If we had a studio in the US, it would be here, without a doubt.

Matt Odell: There you go.

Peter McCormack: I mean, it's gone from a place, I think I first came to, what, I didn't come for the first three years of doing the pod.  I think in like the fourth year maybe we came, and now it's, what, three times in the last year?  It's growing, and interestingly, it's flipped Austin in terms of access to guests.  Because we think of locations as access to guests.  If we go to a location, how many people in that location are we going to get; and how many can we fly in close; and then how many fly in far, right?  Nashville's now flipped Austin.  We're doing Nashville and Austin on this trip, and Austin's a bit harder.

Danny Knowles: There's no one booked for Austin yet!

Peter McCormack: I thought there was.

Danny Knowles: I don't think so.  We've not got anyone confirmed.

Matt Odell: Well, you just have Danny handle that for you, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah.  That's what happens when you get a blue check, you get a team!

Matt Odell: I will say we have very strong ties to the Austin community, the Austin Bitcoin community is very strong.  And one of the advantages of Nashville is that we have a really easy flight between the two cities. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, early in the morning. 

Matt Odell: Southwest runs them all day.  I think Southwest has like five or six flights. 

Peter McCormack: I fucking hate Southwest. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, but they're cheap, they get the job done, it's like an hour and 20 minutes, super-easy flight.

Peter McCormack: We're flying American.

Matt Odell: There you go. 

Peter McCormack: It's like 6.50 in the morning flight. 

Matt Odell: Well, should have considered Southwest. 

Peter McCormack: I fucking hate Southwest!  Austin, we like Austin because it's got that whole blue check scene going on.

Matt Odell: Yeah, Austin is a little bit blue check captured over there.

Peter McCormack: A bit more credible.

Matt Odell: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Their blue checks.  Where's my blue check hat, man?  Fuck's sake.

Matt Odell: So, Peter's upset because I brought Danny a no bugs, no pod, no blue check hat because --

Danny Knowles: I should be wearing it. 

Peter McCormack: You should be wearing it. 

Matt Odell: Danny doesn't have a blue check, but you have a blue check and blue checks aren't allowed to wear the hat, because that would be hypocritical. 

Peter McCormack: I want the blue check hat, the actual "blue check and proud" hat. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, should we talk about my issues with the blue check? 

Peter McCormack: Let's talk about your issues with the blue check.  Did you have an issue with the blue check pre pay for blue check?

Matt Odell: I think most people had an issue with the blue check before anyone could get the blue check.

Peter McCormack: Okay. 

Matt Odell: No one liked those blue checks, no matter what. 

Peter McCormack: I did.  Let me tell you the privilege that came with that blue check that was useful.  No, because there was something useful about it.

Matt Odell: You're pre-Elon blue check.

Peter McCormack: I'm like OG blue check.  I got a blue check for my status!  No, listen, there were two things that were really helpful with the blue check.  First one, the scammers.  As soon as I got my blue check, I didn't get any more fake profiles.

Matt Odell: They still have those accounts, even if you have a blue check.

Peter McCormack: I know they exist, not because I'm searching for them, because people get in touch and say, "Is this you?"  I had it today on Instagram, people getting in touch, "Is this you?"  That just stopped when you had a blue check, I just didn't have it.

Matt Odell: I don't think that is true, but I understand --

Peter McCormack: They stopped contacting me.

Matt Odell: -- from your experience.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, people stopped contacting me and saying, "Is this you?"  They knew which one it was.  But actually, where it was really useful is when people followed you, and you had a blue check follow you, you're like, "Oh, who is that?"  And you go and check them out, and they'd be like, "Oh, that's so-and-so", and then you would message them and say, "Hey, let's talk", and you'd open up a discussion.

Matt Odell: It was a class status thing. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean it was just like --

Matt Odell: You were like, "Oh, I care because this person has a blue check". 

Peter McCormack: It's not because I care because they have a blue check.  It's like, "Oh, who are they?  I'd never heard of you". 

Matt Odell: And it must be someone important, they have a blue check.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they've done something.  It's a journalist or something and you can get in touch. 

Matt Odell: A lot of journalists have blue checks. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that was kind of useful. 

Matt Odell: The journalists love their blue checks. 

Peter McCormack: But when it went, I didn't even keep it.  I didn't care.  I didn't pay for it until the point where I was starting to see these long tweets where people are doing ones that --

Matt Odell: And you wanted the long tweets. 

Peter McCormack: I did.  There were things I wanted to put out there.  I was like, "Okay, I'll pay for this".  And then there's the edit and all the other things.  I was like, "This is worth paying for".  But at the time, I didn't actually know that it gave you a privileged position in the order of the replies, and I didn't know it gave you an elevated promotion. 

Matt Odell: It literally says that, it's like the top level bullet point. 

Peter McCormack: But you assume I read that stuff.

Matt Odell: OK, so let's just unpack this for a second.  Yes, I always had a problem with the blue checks because they would talk down to people that had no checks and they thought they were better than you.  And you're just like some dumb journo who has a fucking check. 

Peter McCormack: But that's a bit generalist.

Matt Odell: One sec, that's not where my issue lies.  I will say that I was offered a blue check during that period, and I denied the blue check.  I did not want the blue check then.  I've been very consistent with it.  But my issue with the current blue check system is that it's not the payment, it's the identity verification.  It's the idea of verifying the identity of every Twitter user in order to use the platform.  Twitter is a very powerful platform, it's a platform that I've used for years, and I made certain -- you know, my actions speak louder than my words.  I haven't used any social media for ten years except for Twitter.  I made the exception for Twitter because it felt like a platform that everyone had a voice, that you had really open discussion.  And yes, was the previous regime horrible of censorship?  Were they horrible of shadow bans?  100%.  And I took major issue with that. 

But now, under the new leadership, the plan is to move everyone into identity verification.  And right now, the identity verification is a credit card payment and a phone number verification.  And he actively blocks any of those digital burner numbers.  You can still go and get like a prepaid cash burner, you can still buy a prepaid Visa card and use that.  But most people are using credit cards attached to their name they're using the same phone number that they've used their whole life.  And I have a feeling he's going to increase the identity verification requirements over time.  And the plan is essentially, let's make it so every Twitter user is identity verified.  And the soft way of doing that, rather than saying, "All of you need to get identity verified", is "We'll give you longer tweets, we'll give you longer videos". 

Then the really dark part, which is what you highlighted, is essentially, "We will shadow ban anyone who does not verify their identity".  And he doesn't say that.  What he says is if you have a blue check, you're at the top of the comments, you're at the top of the algo.  My whole feed now is just blue checks.  Like all I see is blue checks there just pushed in front of my face.  And essentially what that does in practice is it shadow bans anyone who doesn't verify their identity. 

Now, it's incredibly clever how he's done it.  The fact that he added the payment element to it becomes a shield because we have that saying that everyone always likes repeating, it's like, "If you don't pay for a product, you are the product".  So everyone proudly goes and pays for their blue check and they're like, "I'm no longer the product any more".  But they're even a greater, more valuable product than the people that don't verify their identity because he knows exactly who you are, he knows you're not a bot, and he has you, and he still serves you ads.  There's a reason you don't have ad-free experience when you pay.  It's because he knows you're an even better product to advertisers because he has more data on you than someone who doesn't verify their identity. 

So I see this trend happening, and it's mostly not speculation.  People are like, "Oh, you're speculating this".  Elon has just straight up said it in interviews.  Before he bought Twitter, he said, "My plan is to authenticate all humans".  This is the trend we're going in.  It is a very dark, dystopian timeline and I'm very disappointed with, there are so many people I respect that have just lined up and just fucking did it, and they just signed up for the blue check, they verified their identity, and it's an interesting case study, because bitcoiners like to talk about CBDCs all the time, we like to talk about freedom, we like to talk about resisting tyranny, individual empowerment, and you kind of see what happens when you try and roll out a digital panopticon, when you try and roll out a global digital identity, where you add soft incentives and then you get people to buy in so that they defend it with excuses and cope.

Peter McCormack: So what's Marty's argument in defence of him doing it?

Matt Odell: Well, his original argument was that he thought he was signing up to the TFTC account and he wasn't doing it under his personal account, it was an accident.  Within a week or two that narrative changed and now he says he's on the inside and he's trying to help us out and he's reporting back.  But I mean I saw, so what did Elon do relatively recently?  He closed off the API, he made it so you couldn't view tweets without signing in, he's rolled back that little aspect. 

Peter McCormack: That's annoying, yeah.

Matt Odell: He's probably going to reenact that, his servers were just getting too overloaded, but he blocked it so you couldn't view Twitter unless you logged in.  And he made it so that if you didn't have a blue check, if you didn't verify your identity, you could only view 600 tweets and then it was 800 tweets and now I think it's 1,000 tweets.  And all the blue checks, they were retweeting this video of another blue check who was like, "Elon's doing this to protect us from the deep state and DARPA and stuff".  The amount of cope that happens once you buy into a system is fucking crazy and we're going to see all these exact same excuses happen with the CBDC.  Most of these blue checks will pay for their blue check with the CBDC probably, and they'll have a bunch of different excuses for why they made that decision. 

But it's just a really dark -- and I don't think like I'm necessarily surprised by it, but it's really dark to see it in practice.  And it's dark to see so many people who you thought might stand up and push back a little bit, just comply with the system for sake of better engagement.  

Peter McCormack: All right, convince me against having it then, as someone who fully accepts that I have to give my identity everywhere, constantly, bank accounts.  So, you're lost already.  No, but I need it for my bank accounts, I have to have it, I have to give full identity.

Matt Odell: And now you need it for Twitter. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm used to my identity being everywhere.  I'm just talking you through my side.  I'm used to my identity being everywhere.  The stuff I have to do with the bank account in the UK is absolutely crazy.  I have to have ID to buy Bitcoin on an exchange, ID for my driving licence.  I live in a world where I have to give my ID everywhere for pretty much anything I sign up by or use pretty much, so Twitter to me is just another one of those, right?

Matt Odell: Right.  So, you're going to use the CBDC, you're fully captured.

Peter McCormack: Well, bear with me.  We can have the rational, honest conversation or I can tell you what I think I should say so people don't shout at me.  Okay, let's come back to that.  So, in a world where IDs are everywhere, I have to use them, Twitter is just another service I signed up with my ID and I paid for, like I have for hundreds of services online, like hundreds of services I pay for and have subscriptions to.  To me, it's just another kind of software as a service, like a retail software as a service.  So, convince me why I shouldn't be using that.

Danny Knowles: You get a hat for a start!  That's good. 

Peter McCormack: Matt wouldn't give me the hat anyway.

Matt Odell: Yeah, any blue checks that resist the check and remove the check afterwards will get a hat.  They just have to shake my hand and I have to verify that they don't have a blue check. 

Peter McCormack: What is the mission? 

Matt Odell: I have to make a judgment call that they're not going to get the blue check post hat. 

Peter McCormack: What is it you're worried about in this instance; what is the resistance?  Because, do you see it as a sinister act by Elon --

Matt Odell: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Well, bear with me, or do you see it as somebody who spent $44 billion accidentally on a platform he didn't really want to buy and then got trapped into buying, and now has to try and monetise it, and he's now found a way to monetise it in a way that you would maybe see as sinister and has potential sinister repercussions down the line?

Matt Odell: To be clear here, when we say he's found a way to monetise it, it's not the $8 a month, it's getting everyone to verify their identity so he has more expensive data to sell on them. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I'm saying is --

Matt Odell: Because that's the genius of it.  Everyone is talking about how he's got this revolutionary new business model of the $8 per month.  That's not the business model.  The business model is, verify everyone's fucking identity so his ad sales are significantly more lucrative.  And all of his data, all the data he has becomes significantly more lucrative as we start to enter this world of AI and more bots and whatnot.

Peter McCormack: But that is, in some ways, just business; that is the business of online platforms. 

Matt Odell: It's surveillance capitalism. 

Peter McCormack: Yes, surveillance capitalism, of which some people are happy to sign up to surveillance capitalism, share their data and get a platform for free. 

Matt Odell: Here's the thing.  If you're fine using TikTok and you're fine with using Facebook that have historically been very surveillance capitalism focused, and Twitter wasn't immune to it.  Obviously, Twitter had its own elements of surveillance capitalism, but we saw with Facebook, they moved to real names very quickly, very early on, right?  They were trying to make more "safe", safe local spaces that people felt more comfortable, less nims.  They had really not as many nim folks, they would block people's accounts, so they had nims, and whatnot.  TikTok, everyone knows TikTok is a Chinese surveillance app.  Everyone knows WeChat is a Chinese surveillance app, right?  And Elon has decided that he wants Twitter to be WeChat of America.  He literally has said that he wants to integrate payments, he wants your whole life to revolve around Twitter and have your verified identity there and have complete control over that system. 

So, if you're fine with those others, then I mean it logically follows that you'd be fine with Twitter moving to identity-verified model.  Now, I would say that we've never been in this situation in humanity; we've never had so much of our lives digital; we've never had so few people control those platforms that our lives revolve around; and I think this idea of connecting your identity to everything you do on the internet is extremely dangerous, and I just don't think we've seen the repercussions yet; I think people see the repercussions down the line later on.  And it's fun to shit on blue checks, don't get me wrong, but I'm not trying to be necessarily a negative person.  I think there is hope at the end of the tunnel, I think the hope is freedom tech. 

I think Nostr, for example, is a very compelling protocol.  It's this open communication protocol that's interoperable, that's permissionless, that anyone can build clients for, that you control your network graph.  So, if you're using one app and that app decides to censor you, you can just take your private key and move to another app and continue using Nostr.  It can be used for all different kinds of communication, even larger than social media itself, but it can also be used as essentially a Twitter competitor or an Instagram competitor or a Reddit competitor.  And I think that is hope, because you don't have an individual or a company or a government controlling it.  Because at the end of the day, what Snowden showed us is it doesn't really matter if it's a company controlling it, they're going to be complicit with government actions in the future as well.

Peter McCormack: So that's the fear is down the road, I don't know, let's use Turkey as an example because Elon bent the knee to the Turkish Government.  There are activists, anti-government activists, and the Turkish Government, Erdoğan says, "Can you please give me the identities of these people?"

Matt Odell: Right, I mean that's the extreme example, and we just saw Elon say on Twitter that he's going to protect anons, and he was responding to a nim blue check account who has verified his identity.  So, Elon knows the identity of that blue check. 

Peter McCormack: Unless they did it with anonymous. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I think that is mostly a copout because I think most people are not doing that.  99% of people aren't doing that and I think that it will become much more difficult for people to do that in the future because he's going to increase.  What's going to happen is, he's going to use the excuse that, "Bots are getting blue checks and I need to increase the verification to protect you all".  And most of the blue checks will be like, "Oh, yeah, of course", and they'll just go along with it.  It's the frog boiling in the pot, so to speak, right?  It's a slippery slope.  So when he says he's going to protect anons, what he means is, "I'm going to verify every single person's identity", and then you have to trust him to protect that identifiable information. 

What we've known about every single amount of data, any data on the internet will eventually get leaked, sold or shared, that's what always happens.  And you mentioned Turkey with Elon.  Well, let's say you have Turkish activists, and so what did Elon do?  Elon censored a particular opposition candidate on Twitter during the election in Turkey so that Twitter was still accessible in Turkey.  Well, that same dude will undoubtedly hand over any opposition people that are verified on Twitter and attach anything that they said on that platform.  They will attach that to your identity and they'll hand it right over to those goons.  He'll do it in a fucking heartbeat.  That is fucking dark shit. 

Even this whole idea of like everyone knows corporate media is shit.  But why is corporate media shit?  Corporate media is shit because it's controlled by big corporations; that's why we call it corporate media.  They have big pharma contracts in terms of their ad revenue, they have all these different contracts.  They can only say certain things and if they speak out of line, what do they lose?  They lose reach and they lose revenue. The independent media person was supposed to be the answer to that.  Anyone could be an independent media personality or an influencer.  That was supposed to be the way to democratise access to news and content and media, and whatnot.  Most of those people rely on these centralised social platforms, including Twitter.  They are building revenue streams into them and they have centralised control over whether or not you have reach or not. 

So, if you speak out of line five years, six years, seven years on Twitter, blue check removed, you lose your revenue stream, you lose your reach, you're in the same exact situation as corporate media.  You just added Elon into the mix, where Elon gets cut of the revenue as well.  But in practice, you end up in the same result as the host on CNN or an anchor on Fox, you're in the same exact situation.  And he's trying to get the content creators and the independent media personalities even more bought into it.  He has this idea where you content creator, podcast host --

Peter McCormack: Post your video.

Matt Odell: You release your video directly on Twitter, you verified your identity, people verified their identity underneath you, they reply to your posts and you're doing all these replies, then he inserts ads in there, and then you get a cut of the ad revenue.  He's already said this publicly, this is his plan.  You get a cut of the ad revenue of the ads that people see underneath your comments until you act out a line, then you get none of that.  And a lot of the blue check influencers will, in a heartbeat, do whatever he says to make sure that they get back in there.

Peter McCormack: Why do you think there's so much cope and so little pushback on Elon?  Because I think there's plenty of evidence that he's somebody who can't be trusted.  I think there's plenty of evidence that he's shown he's willing to censor people, he's very happy to bend the knee to Chinese Government or any government where he maybe has a rocket deal.  I heard him referred to as a free speech opportunist, where he's constantly talking about free speech.  My own experience, anytime I post a tweet that's critical, all my replies, well not all of them, a lot of replies are simping for Elon, yelling at me, saying, "What have you done?" 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I get that a lot.

Peter McCormack: So, why do you think people have failed to operate from principles with Elon?

Matt Odell: If you care about your audience on Twitter, it is fucking scary to talk shit about Elon and current Twitter leadership on Twitter, or anything that might be counter to the current Twitter regime.  It was the same way pre-Elon in a lot of ways, different things you couldn't say or different things you'd be worried about saying, but people self-censor themselves to protect that reach, to protect that platform.  And the only reason I am comfortable -- I mean, one of the main things that empowers me is that I've come to terms with the fact that my 200,000 followers, or whatever, on Twitter, I could just lose access to them tomorrow.  If he reads a tweet the wrong way, who the fuck knows?

Peter McCormack: Has he done that to anyone?  Do we know directly?

Matt Odell: What, banned people? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, for criticising him.

Danny Knowles: I don't know if it's for criticising him. 

Matt Odell: Well, we know one thing, that in 2018, there was a Tesla critic that was an anon, I think he was called Minnesota Sceptic or something like that, on Twitter and someone doxed him and obviously Elon didn't own Twitter yet at that point, and "Elon Karen" called his employer and complained that that one of their employees was talking shit about Tesla.  Was that what that tweet was about, that anon?  No that was about something else that was just --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but did you see what it said? 

Matt Odell: Yeah, it was, "I'm an anon because you're just going to --"

Peter McCormack: "Get me fired".

Matt Odell: "-- Karen called my boss" and, "Get me fired", yeah. 

Danny Knowles: Did you see what Jordan Peterson said to that?

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean Jordan is just incredibly wrong on this.  And it's really it's really sad to see.  But there's a lot of influencers that are also just completely wrong, in my opinion. 

Peter McCormack: So what should we do?  Just cancel -- should I do it now?

Matt Odell: I mean, you're not going to cancel your blue check.

Peter McCormack: I'm not going to cancel it.

Matt Odell: I think civil disobedience is important and I think at the very least people should not comply with it.  I think if Elon saw that...  The thing is, the big lie is that there are however many millions of Twitter users, right?  But there is a core 5,000 that he really cares about, that are the ones that actually use Twitter as their main medium, they are posting all this content.  And then most of the people are consumers; they're consuming that content that gets created.  And I don't know the exact numbers, but like of those 5,000, like 95%, 98% just like identity verified, boom, done, there was no pushback.  Among a lot of people that are so-called freedom-oriented, "I'll never do the CBDC, I'll never do all this stuff", they just straight up, as soon as they got offered it, they just complied, they verified their phone number, they paid with credit card. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I did, I didn't think it through at all, I was like totally fine with it.  Interestingly, so I just did go to look to cancel.

Matt Odell: I think the real productive thing is to use Nostr more.  Nostr is still very early. 

Peter McCormack: Well, we'll come to that.

Matt Odell: I think I'm very hopeful and optimistic for it.

Peter McCormack: So listen to this.  It says, "Looks like you bought the subscription on the Twitter website.  You'll need to manage or cancel your subscription on that platform".  It's strange that it's not cross-platform like that.

Danny Knowles: It might be like a weird Apple rule.

Matt Odell: Yeah, it's because if you do it through Apple, you have to pay 30% or whatever, so you have to do it on desktop.

Peter McCormack: I left my laptop on the plane!

Matt Odell: Yeah, it's because Apple takes a 30% cut otherwise.  And I think what he does is if you buy through Apple, he charges you 30% more so he still gets the same amount.  So, you have an incentive to sign up outside of Apple.

Peter McCormack: But do you think about this all day every day; this is who you are, Matt?. 

Matt Odell: I mean, not really.

Peter McCormack: No, bear with me.  I'm not saying it's your brand.

Matt Odell: Are there blue checks in the room with me right now?  You are!

Peter McCormack: No, I don't mean you think about blue checks all day, every day.  And when I say your brand, I don't mean that as like, this is who you're trying to be, some brand.  But I mean, you think about freedom tech, you think about privacy, you think about this a lot, right?  So when it comes up, you take a step back and think it through.  Whereas I don't, I'm not naturally like that.  I see, "Oh, cool, there's a 4,000-character tweet.  I'm hitting my limit, I want to send that, I want to be able to edit my tweets, yeah I'll sign up", I didn't think it through to that level.  So, if I'm not thinking about it to that level, most people aren't. 

Matt Odell: Well, that's what I'm talking about.  One thing you did that I do appreciate is you got very defensive about my blue check tweets.  So, you would usually respond to them, which is really nice.  You gave me your blue check engagement boost. 

Peter McCormack: Well, you're my boy. 

Matt Odell: So I do appreciate that.  Most blue checks will just ignore it.  And so, the tweet just dies in a corner.  And then people always say like, "Oh, if you hate Twitter so much, why do you use it?"  Well, it's like, I've got this fucking audience on Twitter, everyone's on Twitter.  That's why I'm disappointed, is because Twitter is moving to a more closed platform.  So, of course I'm going to talk about it on Twitter.  That's where everyone that's affected by this is already, because it's fucking Twitter closing the doors.  But look, you have a decent amount of reach.  I think you talking about the dangers of identity verification across the digital landscape would bring a lot of value to people.  It's one of the reasons I come on your show all the time, because you have to meet people where they're at.

Peter McCormack: So, should I keep my blue check so I get more people to listen?"

Matt Odell: You have to make a personal decision.  But I think, you know, freedom dies by just people just taking a little bit more and a little bit more, and then we just end up in a situation where people are like, "How the fuck did we end up here?"  And at some point in the line, you have to practice civil disobedience.  You have to say, "No, I will not fucking comply", and I think COVID taught that for a lot of people.  But then at the same time, a lot of those people then went and just verified their identity right away.  And it's a different technique, right? 

I think Elon is a very good operator in that regard.  He knows exactly what to say, he knows exactly how to virtue signal.  And the point here is, it's way bigger than me or you.  It's the Joe Rogans of the world that complied with the blue check and continued to leverage the platform.  It's the Tim Pools, it's the Glenn Greenwalds.  Snowden has a blue check, right?  These people have millions of followers.  They completely dwarf our shows and listeners, and they have just gone ahead and they've complied with it.  And what you've noticed is, they will also make up excuses for why they did it.  They will make up excuses for why Elon does something, "Oh, we're misinterpreting it, we're doing it this or that", and it's a coping mechanism for their decision.  But we had Tucker Carlson, right, Tucker Carlson did it.  He left Fox. 

Peter McCormack: Well, he was fired by Fox. 

Matt Odell: Okay. 

Peter McCormack: And then, see this this is another cope that I don't understand.  Tucker Carlson quits and suddenly has this revelation about the media. 

Matt Odell: I know, I agree.

Peter McCormack: You were fucking fired and the next day you're on Twitter giving a speech about how we've been lied to.  As long as you were happy to be paid, it's fucking bullshit.

Matt Odell: We all know the influencer game is mostly a larp and a show, and you tell people what they want to hear.  That is how influencers' incentives are set up.  There's a reason why the independent media concept didn't stop misinformation.  If anything, it increased misinformation because misinformation can be very provocative, you'll get very good engagement.  Most people can't beat you to the punch on it because you just fucking made it up, so how can they report on it before you?  And as a result, if you follow those incentives, we've ended up in a situation where a lot of influencers just act completely unethically, and then they get rewarded for that, they do better in that situation.  Someone taking a more nuanced, accurate point of view is going to get way less reach across any platform. 

Now, I don't think Nostr necessarily fixes that, but it's something that people should be aware of.  But my point is, for better or for worse, Tucker's brand is a freedom-oriented brand, people look to him for freedom-oriented content, they believe of him as a freedom-oriented figure.  And he's done more than just comply with the new blue check program, he has made it a core part of his brand.  You know, he got fired from Fox "I left Fox and now I'm Twitter only, posting my long-form videos here with my nice, identity verified blue check.  And the thing is, I don't expect to convince most people, but it will become more obvious over time.  As the trend continues, it will become more obvious. 

When we saw him make the rush decision of close the API and close off the access and rate limit or whatever, there was a lot of people that reached out, they're like, "Fuck man, you were right".  Well, that's going to happen over and over again.  And if you seed the thought, it will happen quicker for people, in my opinion, if you seed the thought, if you bring it to people's attention ahead of time, as it starts to unfold and get worse, people will connect the two dots quicker.  And that's kind of my hope.  But I just think more people should talk about it.  It is scary, it is fucking dark, it is a really bad trend.  And another thing -- I'm just going on and on.

Peter McCormack: Do it, keep going.

Matt Odell: Someone responded to me like, "Odell, this is super easy for you to say, you have 200,000 followers.  I'm just trying to make my account now and I'm trying to get a little bit of reach for my content, and so I'm going to verify my identity".  It's like, "Yeah, that's the fucked up part", because I didn't have to, I didn't have to verify my identity.  Twitter had its own faults, but it allowed people to just come in and interact with an audience and build an audience and make friends and do all this stuff without providing identity verification information.  And the thing is, verifying for the blue check doesn't even give you increased reach.  It just effectively shadow bans everyone who's not doing it.  But if the majority of people are doing it, you're just verifying your identity to be on equal level as all the other people.  And so, that's the fucked up part.  When I see a comment like that, that is exactly why it's so fucked up, because essentially, a new content creator comes in, new independent media person comes in, just average Joe comes in, and they want a decent Twitter experience, they have to verify their identity.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to get rid of my blue check, Matt. 

Matt Odell: Well, I would respect that if you did.

Danny Knowles: The hard thing is as well, you're preaching to a pretty receptive choir.  This is Bitcoin and people are willing to hear these kind of arguments.  In the real world, I don't think anyone even understands this an issue.

Matt Odell: I think a lot of people realise Tick Tock is a problem. 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think so, but that's only because it's China. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, mostly because it's China.  A smaller subset realise Facebook is a problem.

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Matt Odell: Some people realise PayPal's a problem, mostly because they've either gotten censored themselves or they know someone who had their wallet frozen.  But yeah, I think that's why I'm even more disappointed, because it hasn't been that receptive in this audience. 

Danny Knowles: You can't even get the bitcoiners. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, fucking my brother, Marty, did it.  That is what concerns me the most because it happened so fucking quickly, and so many more people complied than I expected to.  But I think the average person will start to realise the dangers.  It's my same doomer optimism I have for Bitcoin, broader freedom tech movement, is that people are just going to get burned to the point where they'll realise the need, and then we just need to have the tools and the education ready for them when they actually want to improve their situation. 

Peter McCormack: I think a lot of people probably did it without thinking about it to the extent that you have.  I don't think it's a case of they thought, "Oh, well, it's bad, but I need my additional reach".  I think some people just didn't think it through.  I swear, when I did it, I was literally like, "Oh, I want to do that long tweet.  Here's my card details".  I didn't go through the list of things and I didn't think it through.  And I think a lot of people probably did that.

Matt Odell: We'll see.  We'll see if there's a lingering revolt to the identity verification program, but I don't think there will be, and in fact, I've seen the opposite, I've seen people dig their heels in to defend their decision. 

Peter McCormack: And I don't think it's going to change. 

Matt Odell: It's particularly among the influencer class.  The influencer class is completely captured by the centralised platforms that they rely on.  I'm sure you guys have thought about it, like what happens if I wake up tomorrow and we're off of Twitter, we're banned from Twitter?  Or, I've consulted for many companies in the space, but Bitcoin Magazine gets cut from YouTube, right?  That's a serious hit to your business.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Matt Odell:  And so as a result, people end up making decisions based on protecting their access to those centralised platforms. 

Peter McCormack: Can we honestly say, and we should be honest, say we've ever made any decision where we thought, "We'd better not do that in case we get banned?"

Danny Knowles: No.  We've got one warning on YouTube, I can't remember what it was. 

Peter McCormack: That was for an ad. 

Danny Knowles: Oh, was it? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's for a gambling ad.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, you're right.  No, I really don't think we have, genuinely I don't think we have. 

Peter McCormack: But we're not that risqué. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, Marty doesn't post certain things to YouTube. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're not that risqué. 

Matt Odell: We've come close, I say we, but he has the TFTC YouTube account, he owns TFTC, we're 50% partners in Rabbit Hole Recap, Rabbit Hole Recap uses the TFTC YouTube account.  But the TFTC YouTube account has gotten to like the two of three strikes, where it's been very close, and he's intentionally not posted certain things to YouTube.  He's self-censored himself. 

Peter McCormack: That's frustrating, man.

Matt Odell: Now I will say, podcasting as a medium is fortunately still very resilient.  Spotify could ban you, and that's why it's been very dangerous watching Spotify try and capture the whole stack, like they do with Rogan, where they have them completely in-house, you can only listen to Spotify.  But this idea of the open RSS feed, like maybe whoever hosts your RSS feed can censor you, but then you can move to a different RSS feed; listeners can listen from thousands of different podcast apps.  But if you look at people that are text-based, we've seen massive censorship on Medium, on Substack.  Substack was born out of the Medium censorship, but then we've even seen censorship on Substack. 

Then all of a sudden, Ghost comes into the picture and Ghost lets you self-host so you don't have to deal with that as much.  I mean, we saw Twitter start blocking Substack links on Twitter, or whatever.  So, this is something that the influencer class, most of the influencer class is thinking about on a daily basis.  They're thinking, "How do I maintain access to these centralised platforms that are essentially paying my rent and paying for all my travel and paying for all this other shit?"  And as a result, they're self-censoring across the board. 

Then sometimes, it takes an even step further where they're not self-censoring, but they just get fucking removed from the platform, and that's that.  All of a sudden, you lose all your YouTube revenue, you lose all your YouTube subscribers, or whatever.  You have a channel that has a million YouTube subscribers and you lose that tomorrow.  All of a sudden you want to do revenue projections for the next year, you just fucking got rekt.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and that two or three strikes is a strange position to be in, because it's not like, "Oh, if you're a good boy for the year, they reset you".  Any moment now, one mistake in the eyes of YouTube.

Matt Odell: I think they do some kind of reset system. 

Peter McCormack: Do they?

Matt Odell: I don't know.  The problem is most of these policies are very vague, but the real core of the problem is that these platforms are controlled by centralised entities.  And those centralised entities are almost always complicit with whatever governments are providing them safe harbour, whether that's America or China, and they are complicit to their shareholders if they're a publicly traded company, or they're complicit to their private ownership even if they're a private company.  And if you see the ownership structure, BlackRock is probably the biggest shareholder of Google.  I haven't looked it up, but they're the biggest shareholder of pretty much everything.  And then the second biggest shareholder is Vanguard, and BlackRock's the biggest shareholder of Vanguard. 

So, it's the same people who are controlling everything, and then you just have this this really small group of very powerful people and then you have this influencer class below it that gives this appearance of distribution like, "Oh, we have all this distribution media", but they're all subservient to to their rulers that are are are gifting them access to these platforms and can take it away from you at will; super-fucking dark.

Peter McCormack: Danny mentioned it, it's one of the things that I wrote down before we started, is that in the world we live in, we have an audience that's slightly receptive to this, these ideas, these risks, but it's a very small group of people in the grand scheme of things.  I always use the example if I was down in the pub with my mates.  It's a great example because I host a Bitcoin podcast, it's one of the larger ones, and so if anyone should know about Bitcoin or be receptive to it, it should be my friends.  But when I sit down, they don't give a fuck.  I mean, they know I do it as my job, they know it's been good for me, they know I've now got a football team, they know I've now got a bar.  I still want to try and talk to them about Bitcoin or money matters or having my bank accounts closed down, they're like, "Yeah, whatever.  I've still got my bank account".  They don't care.  If I start talking about social media platforms and the risk of censorship and ID verification, again, they're just not going to care. 

So, what I've been trying to do then with preparing for this, Matt, is I was talking to you about this kind of collective fight back is a very hard battle to win, because creating that density of people who are going to care about what you care about to fight back is going to be very hard.  But as an individual, you can at least put in place the insurance products or the insurance to protect yourself if you are removed. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, I think that's why a large part of my focus is Bitcoin.  But my focus is this idea of freedom tech that empowers individuals.  Because, if you give someone something that is effectively a defensive tool, that amplifies their defensive capability, the result is it significantly reduces the control of a select few.  And so, I mean this is kind of how I see Nostr developing.  And I think there's actually a strong incentive -- and this is why I said, I don't think Nostr fixes broken influencer incentives with misinformation and engagement at all costs, which is just dark, it's just really fucked up.  I don't know what solves that. 

But Nostr actually provides a very strong -- the reason I'm optimistic on Nostr is because it's not going to succeed based on altruism, it's going to succeed because influencer after influencer is going to realise, "If I wake up tomorrow, everything I built on Twitter could be gone, everything I built on YouTube could be gone, everything I built on TikTok could be gone.  But everything I built on Nostr can't be stopped", and they have a direct incentive to start trying to fucking figure it out.  And that's beside the point of the ability to just immediately receive Bitcoin payments directly from your audience, which I think is an extremely novel content funding mechanism that people will get very excited about, because Bitcoin is the best fucking money.  And if I can get paid without a middleman directly from my audience for content I produce, that should be a very valuable revenue stream that can't be censored very easily. 

But I think there's a direct incentive for just individual people that have large platforms to start trying to figure out how Nostr works.  And Nostr is still very early, the clients, the apps are still a little rough around the edges.  It's going to get easier because there's another direct incentive that if you build good Nostr apps, you can make your own revenue stream out of that.  And so, the success of Bitcoin and the success of Nostr are not based on altruism, they're based on greed and selfish behavior.  That's what makes me optimistic about them because if you assume benevolence, that's how you end up in all these corrupt institutions that we've built our whole society on, because you can't assume benevolence.  If there is a centralised power, it will be corrupted eventually.

Peter McCormack: I just checked, Jack has a blue check.

Matt Odell: Well, see, Jack is a little bit different, because I think Elon removed his blue check because he refused to do the new blue check program.  And then, Elon added it back because it was really bad to have the ex-founder of Twitter not have a blue check. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because Jack has been one of the best, is a prominent person with millions of followers, very well respected, pushing freedom tech.

Matt Odell: I mean, look, this is the thing about centralised platforms, is if I make any kind of real waves, the easiest way to neuter my commentary, if Elon pays attention, is to just bless me a blue check.  I can't stop him from putting one there.  And no one would believe me, I would just be like, "Oh, no, this is ridiculous, I woke up this morning and there's a blue check".  They'd be like, "Fuck you, Matt, you're just another fucking influencer!". 

Peter McCormack: I'd believe you.

Matt Odell: Thank you, Pete, I appreciate that.  But a dozen people would believe me.  And you could just fucking nip it in the bud like that if you wanted to.  But that's the fucked up part, is one person, one company, governments they collude with should not have that kind of power.  That is fucking crazy, and we have not seen the repercussions of that yet.  We've seen soft repercussions of it, we've seen little tidbits of it, but it gets really, really fucking dark down the road.

Peter McCormack: Do you think Elon cares about freedom?

Matt Odell: No.

Peter McCormack: So why do so many people simp for him?

Matt Odell: He cares about money and power and he plays an audience really well.  Most people care about money and power.  That's fine, that's how we should build these things; we should build it with the assumption that most people care about money and power.

Peter McCormack: So after the initial excitement with Nostr, it's died down a lot.  A lot of the people that were there early on, using a lot, aren't so much, which is disappointing.

Matt Odell: Yeah, I mean, there's a great website called nostr.band that tracks a lot of these metrics.  Nostr is really cool because it's an open protocol, so all that information is out there.  People can analyse it however they want to analyse it, and it's not like you're trusting Twitter with daily active user numbers or whatever.  It's like, "This is the data, this is how many posts have gone out from different pubkeys, these are the relays they're connected to".  And you can extrapolate data from that.  I think nostr.band said, after 30 days there's about a 20% retention rate.  So, someone comes in to Nostr and 30 days later they're still using it, which I think is actually pretty decent. 

Peter McCormack: But the more prominent, well-known people are using it. 

Matt Odell: I think a lot of blue checks have one foot in, one foot out.  And it's a weird chicken-and-egg kind of situation.  So, Nostr is an interoperable communication protocol.  What makes that interesting is you can use Nostr for things that are not social media.  So, if apps need to communicate with each other, if AI wants to communicate with each other, who knows, I think there's going to be like a crazy AI landscape where AI is paying other AI with Bitcoin and the communications with Nostr.  There's all these like crazy fucking things that we can't even comprehend.  But the easy thing to comprehend is the Twitter clones, and Nostr is being used as essentially a Twitter competitor, a Reddit competitor, Instagram competitor, Substack competitor. 

I think when it comes to that social media competition, we have seen in general, even among centralised social media, that there's very few people that successfully build audiences across multiple platforms.  They usually pick and choose one, they kind of cross post to others, they almost never get the kind of engagement that they see from their primary, if they're just cross posting and they're not really natively part of that platform, or whatever; I think you've noticed that.  And I think Nostr has kind of seen those issues as an early social protocol and where people, maybe they'll post to Twitter and then they'll cross post the same exact thing to Nostr an hour later.  And it's like, if the user has already seen that on Twitter, they're like, "Well, why are you reposting it here?" and it's just not really genuine. 

So anyway, where I was going with that is I just think there's a little bit of a chicken and egg, where we were talking earlier about how Twitter has a subset of users that are creating the majority of content.  And so new social protocol, like a new social network, this is bigger than a network, it's a protocol, but a new social network, you need the content creators that are dedicated to it.  But then the content creators expect to have the audience that is consuming it, and it's like which comes first?  And it's probably this organic combination of, they kind of come together over time and they become additive on top of each other. 

I think what we'll see happen is, the two main issues that Nostr has had so far is ingrained network effects of Twitter, and whatnot, and that is what it is, that will take time to kind of combat; but the second thing is, the apps have just been very rough over the edges.  And let's be honest, the main way people are going to use Nostr as a social media protocol is going to be through their mobile apps, whether that's on iPhone or Android.  And those apps are way better spot than they were six months ago.  In six months, they're going to be in an even better spot.  I think it could be sooner than six months. 

Peter McCormack: I think Damus is great. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, Damus is great, iPhone only.  And so, what I think it is, I think these apps will get better, the clients will get better, everything around the ecosystem is growing really fast, and it's growing in this very viral, organic way, it's not like a centralised company is building this out.  And the thing is, when you have a centralised company doing it, you can really turbocharge the beginning and you can fake it with a bunch of daily active users and do all these different incentives to kind of juice those numbers, like we saw with Instagram and their Twitter competitor threads. 

But when you have an open protocol that is mostly built on top of a bunch of different open-source projects, it's a little bit of a slow, gradual, then kind of suddenly kind of growth trajectory.  But it's really hard to stop once that momentum starts building, and we're watching that momentum build.  So, I think people will flock to Nostr as they recognise the need, and I think the best marketing channels is all these centralised platforms, continuing to censor, continuing to require more and more personal identifiable information, continuing to move to walled gardens.  It's not just Twitter; Reddit just recently closed up their API, they broke a bunch of third-party clients. 

Peter McCormack: Why did Reddit do that? 

Matt Odell: Because they see a value of closing their data behind a paywall and requiring you to essentially pay them in order to hit their servers.  And some people say it's partially because of AI and people training AI.  Yeah, sure, but I think that this has always been the case.  What is that phrase that people hear all the time, "Data is the new oil".  But a lot of times it was kind of hidden, because everyone was just supercharged on this VC money and we were just in a super-easy money environment, rates were super-low, tons of VC money was pouring in, "Oh, we'll figure out how to make profitability later, right?"  And then you get to this point, money is extremely tight, it's hard to raise money, it's hard to borrow money, rates are high, meanwhile your server costs keep going up and you start to try and make drastic measures to pay the bills.  And the immediate reaction of a centralised system is, "Let's close up the walls, let's make it less open, not more open". 

The difference with Nostr is Nostr is a protocol, it's not controlled by any company.  So, that information will always be free, people can build on the sides of it, on the edges of it, but the core protocol is a free and open-source protocol that no one has control over, that data will always be open.  So, it's not even if you're an influencer and you're afraid of being rugged, what if you're a builder?  What if you're one of these guys that's been working for eight years on a Reddit app, a Reddit third-party app, and then one day the Reddit CEO essentially calls you up and says, "If you don't pay us $10,000 a month, you can't do it"?  And then he crunches the numbers, he's like, "I can't be in business".  If you're running a business, you don't want to get rugged by a centralised provider. 

So, the unfortunate reality is, it's just going to be people getting burned over and over again and then people learning and then seeking out better alternatives.  And that's the same thing with Bitcoin, it's the same thing with the greater freedom tech movement in general, is how I look at it.  And if people with platforms with audiences can talk to their audience and explain these risks ahead of time, I don't think we avoid this dark timeline, but we can greatly lessen the impact, we can greatly lessen the pain that people feel.  And we can start building towards a brighter future today, rather than waiting three decades or two decades, or whatever. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I still think it's hard. 

Matt Odell: Yeah it is hard, man.  Freedom's difficult. 

Peter McCormack: Freedom is difficult, but this is not me not backing you or not agreeing with you, I'm just saying it is a hard sell for people to care enough to put the effort in to learn about these technologies, to learn about Bitcoin, to learn about Nostr, to go to platforms where their favourite rapper or football player isn't. 

Matt Odell: But that's my point.  My point is, I respect that, which is why Bitcoin should be very easy to use, you just download an app.  And so should Nostr.  The average person is not going to understand the intricacies of how relay incentives work, or that they're signing a message with a public key/private key pair, or any of this shit.  All they're going to know is, I can install this app and I can access social media that can't be censored, and if I get censored on this app, I can take my little backup phrase and I can just put in a different app and I'm good to go.  Twitter can't do that, YouTube can't do that, TikTok can't do that, Facebook can't do that, and they'll just figure that part out.  They don't have to know all the intricacies.

I mean, it'd be great if more and more people understand the intricacies, like we need people building and focused on this ship.  But for the overwhelming majority of people, it's just an app they install.  And if we if we don't get to that point, then we've completely failed.  Like, anyone who's focused on this movement has completely failed if we can't get to that point.

Peter McCormack: So, you're saying that people don't really need to know what an xPub is?!

Matt Odell: Yes, but people that have a massive Bitcoin podcast should know what an xPub is!

Peter McCormack: But what is somebody who has a massive Bitcoin podcast is trying to make the point?

Matt Odell: Yeah, well, you should still know what an xPub is.  You can still act dumb if you need to for your audience.

Peter McCormack: I've known what an xPub is for a very long time.

Matt Odell: I'm aware, I'm glad.

Peter McCormack: But the point, I always try --

Matt Odell: My point is, if you had a Nostr-focused podcast, you should understand all the incentives and everything that makes Nostr censorship resistant.  But if you're the average person, you should just know it's something that does the things that Twitter has done for me for years, but there's not like five people in the boardroom that can decide if I can speak or not. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I obviously completely disagree with the point you made there. 

Matt Odell: Why? 

Peter McCormack: Because I think it's very important to be able to talk to people like yourself and everyone else and say, "Look, everything you're expecting people to do, they're not going to do, they're not going to care, and this is why", and I've stood by that, whether it's nodes, xPubs, or whatever technical bullshit that sits in the background that people think you should know and say, "They don't care", and I've been 100% right. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I've been saying that too. 

Peter McCormack: No, but I've been 100% right the whole time.

Matt Odell: Hey are you trying to derail me? 

Peter McCormack: No.  You agree with me, it's fine!

Matt Odell: The important part is that it's easy to dismiss these tools as code, as tech projects, but ultimately these are freedom movements.  These are tools that facilitate freedom movements; movements require individuals.  It's a movement of individuals, people need to stand up, people need to take action, people need to take their life into their own hands and push forward, otherwise we're going to go down a very, very fucking dark timeline that everyone's going to fucking regret andw going to have to build from the fucking rubble of that, which I prefer not to do.

Peter McCormack: And I'm with you, but I keep come back to it, how do we get them there; how do we get people to care about this?  Because, you're trying to convince them to use something that looks less sexy, feels less sexy, has less kind of social benefit or commercial benefit for them, for a risk which is downstream.  It's a hard sell.  And again, just for the idiots listening, you're going to yell at me for saying it --

Matt Odell: Are you talking about Bitcoin or Nostr?

Peter McCormack: It's the same, it's almost the same point.  It doesn't matter what it is.  If I go to my notes here, everything the government can capture they will capture and we've got money/property, comms/comms channels narrative. 

Matt Odell: Speech. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, speech, money, speech, anything they can, they will.  To me, I see there's very little difference between Nostr and Bitcoin these days.  One is money, one is speech, but they're doing exactly the same job.  They're making it censorship resistant; censorship-resistant money, censorship-resistant speech. 

Matt Odell: Right, protected by code and incentives, not laws.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Matt Odell: Laws get corrupted.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's a hard sell for people. 

Matt Odell: I think the Nostr side is going to be, maybe I'm wrong, I think the Nostr side is going to be a much easier sell than the Bitcoin side. 

Peter McCormack: I agree. 

Matt Odell: Particularly for Americans, because Americans, you know, the dollar is the best shitcoin.  People trust the dollar still, even though they shouldn't.  They trust the US financial system.  People were very surprised when the bank runs were happening, and they've already kind of forgotten about it relatively quickly.  With Bitcoin, you don't see that, by the way, in like Argentina or Nigeria or somewhere where they have failed money and very horrible, very frictionful, inefficient financial networks.  Those people tend to come to Bitcoin easier than in America. 

But I think for better or for worse, social media has completely consumed and corrupted our societies.  People spend hours and hours on these networks.  And when their favourite influencer or their favourite TikTok video creator or whatever gets fucking deplatformed, that hits them, it hits them very hard, and it's something they can relate to very easily.  And I think there's a broader discussion about social media addiction that we could have, and I don't pretend to be an expert in that field, except people should use it less and I try and practise what I preach and use it less, but I think the Nostr sell is an easier sell that people will come to grips with very quickly as the censorship increases.  And we'll see on this next election cycle; it's usually around the hot-button stuff. 

We saw massive censorship during COVID; Turkey was Elon's first test, and what was it?  It was Turkish elections.  So, the politics tends to --

Peter McCormack: He would have had to have broken the law.

Matt Odell: Or he could have just not had Twitter there.  By the way, Nostr was completely unaffected during that whole thing, right?  So, I think as people get censored, they will start to realise and they'll come over.  And the interesting thing is, because Nostr has Bitcoin payments built in, I actually think Bitcoin becomes -- I think Nostr could onboard billions of people into Bitcoin.  I mean, right now, do we wish there was more daily active users of Nostr?  That site I was saying, nostr.band, puts out like 12,000, 14,000 daily active users on Nostr right now.  It spiked when the Twitter rate-limiting happened and they closed everything behind login walls.  Should there be more?  Yeah, I wish there was more, but it's still very early in the adoption cycle. 

But where I'm going with this, I'm going with this is, if you reply to one of my posts on Nostr and you haven't set up a Bitcoin Lightning address, you're leaving sats on the table.  The other person who comments who has a Bitcoin Lightning address set up, he's going to get paid some sats from me, but you don't.  And so then all of a sudden you're like, "Fuck, what is this Bitcoin thing?  Let me figure it out".  It's not onboarding onto a KYC exchange, it's not taking your hard-earned money and putting it on, it's just internet money that can't be easily blocked that if you post on the social media site, you might get some.  And I think it's a very low-lift touchpoint, like first touchpoint for people to experience Bitcoin. 

So, I actually think Nostr will be an adoption accelerator for Bitcoin and might actually be adopted at scale.  Obviously, it's way less adopted than Bitcoin right now.  It might surpass Bitcoin in adoption and then start pushing people into Bitcoin.  It might be the opposite, just because people are so ingrained with social media.  They live on social media now.

Peter McCormack: But it also makes sense in that there is still that initial conversation I get all the time.  People are like, "I want to buy Bitcoin, am I too late?  When's the best time to buy?" 

Matt Odell: But you don't have that conversation if you're just getting it on a post.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, exactly, that's the point I'm making.  It's like Bitcoin.  The first time you get into Bitcoin, there's always that choice.  It's like, "Am I going to lose some money here?" or, "I'm too late", that kind of thing.  But Nostr is just like, "Oh, it's another social network, I'll try". 

Matt Odell: It's like, "This guy, Odell, just gave me 2000 sats.  What the fuck are these things?" 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but even pre that what I'm saying is, the reason Nostr might accelerate ahead of Bitcoin is the choice of using it is a choice of just sign up to a platform; whereas Bitcoin, you've got to make a financial choice, "Do you want to part with some money?" and potentially lose that. 

Matt Odell: Exactly. 

Peter McCormack: So, I just think I'm with you on that.  Unless you've got anything else you want to say on that, let's --

Matt Odell: Well, Danny seemed like he was going to say something.

Danny Knowles: No, I mean I've been thinking a few things.  But I think the thing that's going to be hard is when people realise that they aren't the products on something like Nostr, getting people to start spending money, like buying things at the true value of that content.

Matt Odell: That's a whole different question.

Danny Knowles: It is, but those content creators that get banned from Twitter or YouTube, or wherever it is, and end up on something like Nostr, they have to make money.  And so to do that, they have to find revenue somewhere.  And so, those people who are no longer the product on something like Twitter, then have to start spending their money.

Matt Odell: Well, so look, I think this is separate from the value-for-value discussion, and we've had this discussion in the past. 

Danny Knowles: But it's all part of the same thing. 

Matt Odell: No, but my point is, so right now on Twitter or Instagram, everything except YouTube, content creators don't get a cut of the ad deals, even though ads are the majority of their revenue.  What do they do?  They put their ads in their podcast, they put the ads on the bottom of their newsletter, they put the ads in the video content, right?  Nostr doesn't remove any of that.  If you're a content creator or independent journalist or whatever you want to call yourself, you can still release a video on Nostr that has sponsorships, right?  You just have this other avenue where your audience can send you Bitcoin directly and you can send your audience Bitcoin directly.  They share something, you can send the Bitcoin.  And that's very interesting because it's not an all or nothing.  And I think value for value is quite compelling and gives creators a lot of independence. 

But all three of us have agreed in the past, both privately and publicly, that the revenue levels are way, way less than ad-based revenue, and that's why people choose ad-based revenue.  But it's separate from just content creators.  So there was this woman, and no one can verify any of this, I forget where she said she lived, maybe Venezuela, and she's on Nostr and she posted it.  And she's like, "My mother's sick.  We basically live paycheque-to-paycheque on fucking nothing".  And she wrote like this whole story about her life, or whatever.  And then people just started sending Bitcoin to her.  And she didn't have to separately ask for Bitcoin.  I mean, some people, especially more negative people, could just assume that it was a post that was asking for Bitcoin.  But she didn't have to enable anything special.  The protocol natively allowed her to accept Bitcoin. 

Another key is the protocol, the way it's set up is if you send Bitcoin, your little badge, your little profile picture and your name says how much you sent.  So, people love the social signal, right?  It's like, "Oh, Peter sent her 100,000 sats, but did you see Odell sent her 250,000 sats?" and it's just all built in right there.  So you have this censorship-resistant protocol that can replace pretty much any social network, and then you integrate a censorship-resistant money directly into it with the social-signalling of your network graph, or the people that you're connected to and who's doing what, and all of a sudden you have a very powerful platform-killer that is very much in its infancy.  It's like less than two years old now or something like that. 

I think people are really underestimating how quickly something like that can grow.  I mean, I really hope it's successful.  I'm optimistic, but a lot of it is just based in hope, a lot of the conviction is based in hope, because the alternative is just incredibly dark. 

Peter McCormack: Are you using Nostr much? 

Matt Odell: Yeah, so to practise what I preach, because a lot of people have said, "If you're so upset with Twitter, why are you still using it?" for the last eight days, I was using Nostr only and no Twitter.  Today I made a statement on Twitter, because of that anon's Elon comment, and everyone was just dragging me on Twitter and sending me private messages.  I was getting signal messages like, "Odell, you were wrong", all this shit, so I just had to be like --

Peter McCormack: Well, that comment says fuck all.  He says, "You'll be protected", he doesn't say anything. 

Matt Odell: He's like, "We're going to protect the anons", or whatever. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, how?

Matt Odell: So, I just made one statement today.  But I'm trying to use Nostr.  My focus has, for years I've had a very strong focus on Bitcoin and that focus will continue, but more and more of my time and energy is going to be focused on growing Nostr and helping it become more robust.  OpenSats, the non-profit that I co-founded with Ben Price, now has a Nostr fund.  We just funded 16 Nostr open-source projects.  Ten31, where I'm a managing partner, venture fund is going to be funding Nostr-focused startups.  And Bitcoin Park, all the podcasts will focus on Nostr more, tangentially and also directly.  Rabbit Hole Recap, we cover Nostr news alongside Bitcoin News now.  Citadel Dispatch, I'm going to have more and more Nostr-focused shows, including this Wednesday with the founder of Primal, which is one of the most promising Nostr clients. 

Then, Bitcoin Park is going to focus on Nostr more.  We run our own relay for our members, and they're able to get an @bitcoinpark.com handle.  So, if you're Harry, you have harry@bitcoinpark.com and then when people want to search on Nostr, they can search for you @bitcoinpark.com.  So, more and more of my focus is going to be on growing Nostr and making it more robust, because I think it is an incredibly complementary freedom-tech tool with Bitcoin and I just don't think people really are appreciating what the centralised control and capture of these communication platforms is really doing for our society.  It's just so negative, and just people are not appreciating the scope of it.

Peter McCormack: We've got Will from Damus coming on the show.

Matt Odell: Fuck, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Matt Odell: He's not flying into Nashville, right?

Peter McCormack: I don't know where he is.  Just Vanessa messaged me and was like, "Yeah, fuck, we'll do it".

Matt Odell: Oh, awesome.

Peter McCormack: I don't know where he is.  Let's not dox him.

Matt Odell: But my point is, he's not flying in this week?

Peter McCormack: No, it's not this week.

Danny Knowles: This is the first I've heard of it, too!

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Matt Odell: Will is a fucking legend, he's awesome --

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  How do we help more?

Matt Odell: -- we just gave him some funding through OpenSats as well.

Peter McCormack: How do we help more?

Matt Odell: You mentioned infamous blue check Jack Dorsey.  He donated $5 million to OpenSats for Nostr projects. 

Peter McCormack: Nice. 

Matt Odell: So, we maintain complete independence from him, he doesn't have any choice on how we allocate it, but we're definitely very grateful that he gave us.  We're a 501(c)(3) tax deductible organisation, we're just very grateful that he gave us a no-strings-attached donation to allocate to Nostr projects. 

Peter McCormack: So how do we help more; what can we do? 

Matt Odell: Look, I think a very productive thing is to focus on Nostr more on your show.  I think you should resist the check, and I think you should resist identity verification across all platforms as much as possible.  And then if you don't resist the check, you should at least be talking about the dangers of identity verification across the internet.  And I will just reiterate one more time, it's not the payment, it's the identity verification, that is the issue. 

Peter McCormack: So, if he changed it --

Matt Odell: He won't.

Peter McCormack: But if, just if he changed it and allowed you to pay with Bitcoin?

Matt Odell: Pay with Bitcoin, no phone number verification, and it was just literally pay to join, pay to use Twitter and only paid users can use it, and maybe non-paid users could use it in view only, completely respectable decision. 

Peter McCormack: Have you seen the gold check? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, that's the company one. 

Matt Odell: That's the company one, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen how much it is?

Danny Knowles: No. 

Peter McCormack: It's like $1,100 a month or something.

Danny Knowles: Oh, shit!

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Matt Odell: But all your employees get blue checks out of it. 

Peter McCormack: But if you've got like three employees!

Matt Odell: Do they scale the price depending on how many blue checks you get -- 

Peter McCormack: No, I think it's a fixed price. 

Matt Odell: -- how many baby blue checks you get underneath it? 

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin Magazine I think has got it, haven't they? 

Matt Odell: Yeah, Riot just got one because my good friend, Ghazaleh, who's head of mining at Riot, made sure to message me that she didn't get the blue check out of her own volition. 

Peter McCormack: Go on, Ghazaleh!

Matt Odell: Riot blessed her with the blue check.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, $1,000 a month, plus $50 per month.  Why the fuck would you do that?

Peter McCormack: It's a lot of money.

Danny Knowles: Like, Mempool are doing it.  Why would they spend that money on it?

Matt Odell: Dude, I mean, the talk we had about influencers really valuing Twitter as a platform and not wanting to get knocked off of it or lose reach on it, it is very true for companies.  Some of these companies, it's their main marketing funnel, it's their main top-line funnel for customers, and it's the way they interact with everybody, and Elon knows that.  He's got most people by the balls.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and like I said, what I've been really disappointed with is the lack of pushback against Elon.

Matt Odell: There's no pushback, to the point where, at least in the Bitcoin community, it's mostly just a meme.  It's like, "Odell just talking shit about blue checks".  It shouldn't be. 

Peter McCormack: Well, I think he's gaslighting people into thinking he cares about freedom, he cares about free speech. 

Matt Odell: Well, he was fucking clever, people don't realise it.  I have respect for his lack of ethics and execution in this regard.  When the blue check concerns were first coming up, what was his response every time?  Pay the $8.  The payment is not the fucked-up part, but he made sure that was the conversation.  There would been way more pushback if he said to people, "Verify your identity and we won't shadow ban you", no one would have fucking done it.  A lot of the bitcoiners wouldn't have done it, at least, a lot of the freedom-oriented types wouldn't have fucking done it.  But when he said, "You're paying for it", for whatever reason, it just removes the identity verification from the conversation.  It's like, "I'm paying for the reach". 

Danny Knowles: Do you think that's malice, or do you think that's just an unintended consequence? 

Matt Odell: I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

Peter McCormack: But there is this, I don't even know how you refer to them, let's call it the Intellectual Dark Web 2.0.  There's this group of people, there's Rogan, there's Tim Pool, there's Jordan Peterson.

Matt Odell: Blue check, blue check, blue check.

Peter McCormack: There's Zuby, they're a group of people who are highly respected, seen as people who will challenge the status quo --

Matt Odell: Yeah, all complied. 

Peter McCormack: -- challenge authority.  But no, he's in their friend circle, he's done all their podcasts.

Matt Odell: Yeah, because if they don't, they might lose their audience.

Peter McCormack: Or, they might lose them as a guest on their shows.

Matt Odell: Both.  They have to play ball.

Peter McCormack: But do they have to?

Matt Odell: Why are they?

Peter McCormack: I don't know, maybe they haven't thought it through like you've thought it through.  That's the point I'm making, like I made earlier.  Like maybe Glenn Greenwald hasn't thought it through like that.  I know Jordan has.

Matt Odell: All your heroes are captured, most of them are larps.  Do not blindly trust me or anyone else, but you have to view it from that lens; that is that is how you have to view it.  They're all fucking captured. 

Peter McCormack: Tim Pool was captured a long time ago. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, well they're all fucking captured.  And it's actually really convenient because Twitter has this new feature where, if they have a blue check next to their name, you know for sure they're compromised! 

Peter McCormack: Like I said, I think some of them unknowingly are. 

Danny Knowles: The fact that Snowden's got a blue check. 

Matt Odell: That's so bad.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that is a surprise.  And he even spoke out against --

Matt Odell: He's been using Nostr more often. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and he spoke out, was it the rate limits? 

Matt Odell: Yes.  Because he uses Nitter and other clients to view Twitter without being logged in, which is much better for your privacy, and that all got blocked.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you can't see the tweets of people who block you now.  So, you get the notification and then you go, you know, you copy the URL, you go into incognito mode, you just can't see the tweet.  That's actually annoying.

Matt Odell: He rolled that back, so now you can. 

Peter McCormack: Oh, you can? 

Matt Odell: And the big thing that it really also broke was the previews.  If you posted it in Signal or Telegram or Slack, it wouldn't show the Twitter preview because the fucking bot's not logged in that's showing the preview.  So, he did roll that back, but I think I think it gets rolled, rolled back, or whatever, it's going to happen again, that's the plan.  Because he wants to close the API, he wants to charge people for the API, and otherwise it's just going to keep getting scraped on that side.  So, he's going to close up the whole thing, and I think that's mostly he's just making sure his servers are ready to go and he can handle all the login requests.

Peter McCormack: He is running the risk of making so many drastic changes that he just gets to the point where people are just like, they just don't even make a rational judgment to leave, they just use it less.  I use Twitter a lot less these days, I just do.

Matt Odell: Well, we're also in the summer doldrums.  I think people use Twitter less right now.  But that's also why all the different SyOPs are important.  He essentially has this little SyOPs factory in Twitter.  Remember when there was a Russian coup?  What happened with that?  That was like 12, 14 hours of really high Twitter usage that he accelerated through his profile and his personal reach on Twitter, which somehow he has the highest reach on Twitter. 

Peter McCormack: How did he do that?

Matt Odell: Who would expect that?  And then like what, like two days later, it was like a nothing burger, it didn't fucking matter.

Danny Knowles: That one was really weird.  That got promoted so much through Twitter and that Mario guy, he ran like a 14-hour Space.

Matt Odell: And Elon inflated him, he pushed him up, right? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah

Matt Odell: Because it's good for business, right?  It's good.  All these SyOPs and all this different engagement tactics, bullshit, all good for business. 

Peter McCormack: It's the story of the day.

Matt Odell: Right.

Peter McCormack: Like Jonah Hill this week, I saw.

Matt Odell: And getting you addicted and keeping you on the teat.  And up until Nostr, there was really no alternative.  There might be some people listening here that are really in the weeds, that are like, "Oh what about like ActivityPub or Mastodon?" they all had broken incentives, the whole thing was fucking broken.  Nostr is beautifully simple and robust.  And the simplicity is where the beauty lies, and that's what people, a lot of the shitcoiners and stuff, don't realise about Bitcoin.  The beauty of Bitcoin is the fucking simplicity of it.  It's not like, "Oh, let's add a million different fucking features", it's just simply robust, and I see the same thing in Nostr, and we finally have an alternative. 

So, instead of hopping between centralised platform after centralised platform that all have different shades of the same issue, there's actually a free alternative, free as in freedom, that is being built up and is growing at a very quick pace.  The actual infrastructure is being built out way quicker than the actual active user numbers or anything like that would say.

Peter McCormack: Well, hopefully it becomes cooler as well that people want to use it.  I think there's a brand issue sometimes with these things of, you know, people just want the easy, sexy, cool stuff as it becomes easy, sexy, cool.

Matt Odell: But I think we can make it easy, sexy, cool.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  I mean it would be helpful with someone like, I don't know, Glenn Greenwald did drop his blue check and said, "Look, I'm going exclusively to Nostr", or Snowden did that.  If one of you people, or if someone like Rogan spoke out against it.

Matt Odell: I mean, Dorsey did that for a little bit. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I've noticed he's gone back to posting mainly on Twitter again.

Matt Odell: He posts both places.

Peter McCormack: But the thing is that he has an impact on Twitter by raising specific issues.  If he replies to Elon, people notice.

Matt Odell: That's the battle, right.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So sometimes you have to be on the inside to fight, like Marty says.

Matt Odell: Don't give Marty the app, Marty's fucking full of shit.  I love Marty as a brother, but it's some blue check cope that's going on over there!

Peter McCormack: Matt, anything you want to speak about that we've not spoken about today?  Shill the Park, man.

Matt Odell: Come to Nashville, come visit us in Nashville, bitcoinpark.com.  Good vibes over here, very strong momentum.  We're building something cool here, come shake our hand.  If you don't have a blue check, you come here, shake my hand, I'll give you a no bugs, no pod, no blue check hat like I gave to Danny, if you don't have a blue check.  But yeah, come visit us.  I think all our links are at bitcoinpark.com.  All my links are at odell.xyz, so check that out.  It's always a pleasure.  I mean, I guess this will release and then the What Bitcoin Did Live will release as well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, we don't know if we'll release the What Bitcoin Did Live one.

Matt Odell: You're not going to release it?

Peter McCormack: Well, it depends.  It depends if it's different enough. 

Matt Odell: It's going to be completely different, it's going to be me and Preston. 

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, but it's going to be you two separate and then you two together. 

Matt Odell: Oh, really? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll do half an hour with you, half an hour with Preston, and then get you both together. 

Matt Odell: If you're not going to release it, I'm out. 

Peter McCormack: Should we?  I mean, we could release it.  The only reason we wouldn't is if we have the same conversation we have now. 

Matt Odell: We're not going to have the same conversation.  I'm not going to have a blue check conversation. 

Danny Knowles: We could do it about what this conversation was meant to be about! 

Matt Odell: Yeah, like BlackRock ETF, like all that stuff right.  I'm teasing the future conversation. 

Peter McCormack: All right, just give me a quick take on BlackRock. 

Matt Odell: The BlackRock ETF will happen because BlackRock owns this corrupt world, and you never bet against corruption. 

Peter McCormack: But Harry Sudock, our mutual friend, would say everything's good for Bitcoin. 

Matt Odell: Yeah, I think BlackRock can go fuck themselves.  I think the beauty of Bitcoin is we cannot stop BlackRock from using Bitcoin, and BlackRock can't stop us from using Bitcoin.  But if what you're worried about is short-term price implications, or whatnot, I think this is a very big signalling mechanism to rich people and institutional capital that Bitcoin is here to stay.  BlackRock has been super anti-Bitcoin in the past.  They're a $10 trillion, $11 trillion fund manager, they have tons of assets under management, largest in the world.  They've called Bitcoin a money-laundering network in the past, they've called it a Ponzi scheme, and now they're launching an ETF product. 

So, even if they didn't get approved, they've basically signalled to that whole class of rich people and institutional capital that Bitcoin is here to stay and it's a real asset worth paying attention to.  And I think the price will react accordingly to that.  I think ultimately, I believe that Bitcoin will increase in purchasing power with adoption, whether that purchasing power is measured in dollars or cows or ammo or bread, you can measure it in whatever the fuck you want to, it's a scarce asset.  As more people adopt it, the purchasing power should increase.  And if the largest asset manager in the world is signalling that they want to be a part of that accumulation strategy, it should increase the purchasing power. 

I think it's a paradigm shift.  I think people aren't really truly appreciating how big it is, how big of a deal it is, even though BlackRock, like I said, can go fuck themselves.

Peter McCormack: Well, so the interesting thing about that, and we'll end with this because we should discuss it more tomorrow night, somebody posted something that was interesting.  I think what they've noticed, they're wrong about.  Somebody posted up a bunch of articles that appeared in Forbes and they said, "Oh, look at all these positive articles since BlackRock -- positive Bitcoin articles since BlackRock have signalled about Bitcoin".  I think they're wrong, because I think Forbes were already pretty positive at times.  They're a mixed bag. 

Matt Odell: They have this contributor model, or whatever, that mostly rewards people for being positive.

Peter McCormack: But I actually think it's a future prediction.  I think the BlackRock thing will lead to more positive stories or more accurate stories about Bitcoin.

Matt Odell: Because BlackRock owns everything.

Peter McCormack: Exactly, so you might get New York Times now actually doing proper journalistic work with regards to Bitcoin, and so that's a good thing.  If we stop with all the FUD mainstream bullshit, if that comes off that, that is a very important positive, so I'm here for it.

Matt Odell: It goes back to the same thing we were talking about earlier, where the incentives are set up in a way that Bitcoin expects participants to act greedy and selfish.  They don't expect -- Bitcoin becomes more robust the more selfish actors come into Bitcoin, rather than less robust and expecting benevolence.  And this is what we're seeing essentially play out in real time, like BlackRock has more to gain participating in the Bitcoin ecosystem and launching Bitcoin products than they do ignoring it or going against it, and they're going to play this game and a bunch of other people are going to play the game. 

I think the main risks that people talk about, the two main risks are: paper Bitcoin, they might play a paper Bitcoin game.  I think if you play a paper Bitcoin game, you will eventually get blown out.  We saw that happen to Celsius, we saw that happen to FTX, we saw that happen to BlockFi, we saw that happen to Barry Silbert.  You play paper Bitcoin games, people will just continuously take Bitcoin off the market, hold it in self-custody, exchange it in a circular economy, purchasing power will go up, you will get blown out eventually.  So to me, that's more of a short-term price volatility risk.  If they want to play paper Bitcoin games, it'll suck for people that are invested in the ETF that is not actually backed by as much Bitcoin as they say it is, but the Bitcoin Network will be completely unaffected. 

The second thing is this fork risk, BlackRock having a significant amount of Bitcoin under their management and getting to decide if there's a Bitcoin fork, which fork they take, because the way Bitcoin works is if you hold Bitcoin keys and there is a fork, essentially a code change, all the history at the point of the fork is the same; but going forward, you essentially have equivalent amounts on both chains and it's two different chains.  So, if you hold 10 Bitcoin at the time of fork, you have 10 Bitcoin and then 10 forked Bitcoin, and BlackRock can choose if that forked Bitcoin is the Bitcoin that they honor for their investors that hold money with them.

Peter McCormack: I think we know how that would work out though.

Matt Odell: Exactly, it'll be incredibly painful for anyone who's an investor in BlackRock, in the BlackRock ETF, or whatever their fund products are, but I think it's not a true risk to Bitcoin because the whole point of Bitcoin is that it's incredibly hard to change by default.  And if you try and enact your will on the Bitcoin, you probably will learn a very expensive lesson.  So, I'm not really concerned about those two risk vectors.  I think people shouldn't buy the BlackRock ETF, I think they should learn how to hold self-custody and buy Bitcoin themselves.  A lot of people will not listen to that and just buy the BlackRock ETF, but overwhelmingly I think it's a massive paradigm shift.  People just do not realise the significance yet.

Peter McCormack: Yes, right, we will talk about that more tomorrow night, looking forward to getting down to Bitcoin Park.

Matt Odell: Which we're going to release on the podcast feed.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, no, absolutely.  Like I say, the only reason I wouldn't have is that we've had it before where we've done a live show and it's pretty much the same show.

Matt Odell: We're going to make sure, one of the things we take a lot of pride with at the Park is that the in-person event recording in our event space is a very high quality recording too.  So, you won't have to worry about the audio quality being poor for the release. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll get it out.  Listen, we're big fans of Bitcoin Park.

Matt Odell: Cheers for that.

Peter McCormack: Love what you're doing, love what Rod's doing.  Love you, Matt, thank you.  We will see you down there tomorrow night.