EB63 – Tim Swanson: The Bitcoin Hype Buster

Transcript

hello welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Sebastian Couture and my name is Brandon Robin crane we're here today with Tim Swanson Tim Swanson is well known in the Bitcoin Community as the man who sees the class half empty he's written a lot of articles about Bitcoin and I remember um reading some of them a long time ago often having a very critical opinion of Bitcoin but he was I think for a long time he was sort of the one voice that seemed to argue well that maybe things aren't so Rosy and it seems like in the recent month we have more and more come

up with conversations that we sort of questioned some of the assumptions that we've been having about Bitcoin so it's really exciting that we have Tim on today to dive into a lot of the things he's been he's been writing about so thanks for joining us today Tim hey my pleasure thanks for the invitation um so we wanted to start off by asking you and just how you got into Bitcoin and and what has what your journey has been in this space you know I'm a paid stooge of of the banking class so they you know they they just give me money and I just jumped jumped into it so uh no so uh I was I was out in China and I built a couple different mining machines just to test it out in fact uh my wife before she was my wife she was she was my girlfriend

and uh she she's a chip designer and when she first saw me building these these rigs she's like what are you doing with with these chips I designed because she apparently was on one of the Radeon teams that was designing some of these gpus uh so yeah I was pretty enthusiastic uh much more bullish a couple years ago and then um silver time um there was a number of different things I came across it uh uh swayed me to to look at it a little bit differently um starting really uh a year ago about there was an article by I think it was Ken Griffiths he wrote uh Bitcoin Jack of all trade and master of none and it was I think he was actually pushing part of the products that he was making but he made out a couple interesting points including like transaction costs and

stuff like that um so and then at this stage you became more interested in Bitcoin you started writing uh yourself or yeah so uh you know I moved back from China a year ago with my wife um and we were both looking at different things to uh to get back involved with uh I mean she's a chip designer so she was already doing that but I was looking to see what what kind of news new space uh had some potential and uh I did a lot of uh research and compiled it into a book uh called great uh great chain of members it was just about smart contracts and stuff um and then after that I was actually somewhat disappointed after I'd written

that because I adhered all this promise and potential of these this technology but there was really no use case like and everyone's like oh the use case will come well maybe it will uh maybe it's just you know 20 years down the road uh but uh I'm joking I don't think it's there's 20-year wait time but the uh over over the summer um I started doing a lot of uh correspondence with a couple people uh Jonathan Levine he's out there in the UK um Dave Hudson actually a lot of British people Robert Sams um who who are actually looking at statistics it uh suggested uh the the things weren't quite filling the way the narrative was on Reddit and uh I ended up putting together another book in

August it's called Uh the anatomy of a money-like informational commodity that's not really my own title it was actually a paper earlier in the year saying hey how can we classify what Bitcoin is and uh the way they classified it and I'm not saying it is the correct way but they called it a Malik a money-like informational commodity and uh along the way I ended up uh becoming a business development over at melodic which is a asset Exchange in China and then um I'm also an advisor disclosure to to hyper ledger so uh still involved in the space I'm not anti-bitcoin like some people like to say I am very familiar with how it works I work daily with people who really love Bitcoin uh including the people who you know would take the

narrative on bitcoin on already Bitcoin so but yeah I think it's a it it's good to have those voices and and it's interesting also personally that I feel that I've grown more skeptical over the last year of the chance that Bitcoin will actually succeed and succeed on the level that a lot of people think it will and it's it's an interesting it's an interesting experience right if you're like the more you learn about it the more skeptical the more you see the weaknesses it's I don't know to what extent that is um I'd say a common experience and or to what extent it's not

sure you have over hype in a lot of spaces like um we had that with cleantech there was a clean tech bubble uh started 10 years ago you had a passionate group of effectively with our environmentalists that uh built this organic Groundswell of enthusiasm they got VCS to buy into it and you had a peak and then you had a drop off I'm not saying that Bitcoin will face the same issue but um we've seen this historically you know in many different segments so it's not you can't necessarily single out Bitcoin and and it's not to even lament uh you know over overzealous investors like look to be fair VCS only can dedicate five ten percent of their portfolio or their time towards any one particular segment

because they're supposed to be Diversified that's what LPS want so uh aside from a few uh these accelerators that are Bitcoin only you do have you know VCS that have to focus their attention on other things and uh you know maybe they just haven't had a chance to fully digest um the rest of of the ecosystem that's being developed or maybe they haven't looked at some of these the actual costs like I know I know you you've talked about mining with with vitalik talked about it with Robert Sam's even with Preston in the last month uh but look Bitcoin transactions were not to be designed to be cheap uh is this the opposite it was intentionally designed to be in a inefficient inefficient effectively to make it expensive to disrupt and censor and modify the selling point you know six years ago

wasn't Bitcoin transactions are super cheap it was if you could get around trusted trans third parties uh you get rid of you know around their mediation costs therefore it's uh it's a competitive to compete with uh quote-unquote centralized institutions in practice that hasn't varied out like like we we know it's in order to do decentralization in civil protection attack uh you know prevention you have to uh you have to pay some money and that money is is a seniority reward and we know that the true cost of mining is basically the marginal cost to Hash a block because the block is what contains the transactions and without being able to process and protect those blocks from uh any kind of attack from a malicious

attacker uh the uh the the network goes to zero the the value goes to zero but we know based on that calculation this is the cost of the transaction is actually about 10 bucks 15. maybe maybe that will change maybe true volume will go up at some point but uh that doesn't seem to be the case today yeah I mean to be honest that's one thing where I did sort of take issue with uh that comparison you know because I I don't think you I think the mining reward you can't really count into the cost of transactions um I mean at least it's not the marginal cost for transaction right which is kind of maybe more interesting part although in the long run of course um it will be interesting to what extent

um transaction fees can make up for but just briefly Sebastian I'm curious about you what has your experience been like how has your view of the potential of Bitcoin involved over the past year uh well that's a really good question Brian my view has evolved in uh I'm kidding because I just heard a Freakonomics episode where all about responding to questions by saying that's a really good question to defer the actual answer um no my my view has sort of shifted from uh uh perhaps a uh a naive uh position that this was going to take over the

world to somewhat more realistic views that it's much more nuanced than that that uh there are many other things at play uh that uh it's not you know so I mean we can probably get into this first topic that we have here in the rundown but you know the to the moon like we're not going to accept anything but like total world domination of Bitcoin versus like Bitcoin could be a niche or it could be complimentary to a lot of other you know monetary systems uh I think at some conference I heard someone talk about uh monetary diversity uh is probably more of what we're gonna uh go towards

probably more realistic anyway yeah yeah so I I um Tim I saw you mentioned when we were discussing topics for the show uh the idea that Bitcoin could detain this Niche status can you expand a little bit yeah we have these people talking about this binary existence bitcoin's gonna go to zero or a million or something like that like there's almost no discussion in the middle um and that could be just because they're invested in underwater and they hope that you know it pulls out or something like that like I think that for for what what is by the way I don't own any coins of any kind whatsoever so I'm not here pumping anything but and I think it'd be good if these people especially the media disclose you know

with their own any Bitcoin no not at all that's interesting I remember also talking with Preston like uh at the Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam he was like I've never owned any Bitcoins I did though I mean I did mine like I'm not anti I just it's just not something I want to be exposed to right now and it's not because I'm I think it's horrible again I I think in the long run this is going to be a tradable asset I don't think it's going to be I don't think hyper bitcoinization in these these fan fictions will ever take place I mean that doesn't even there's no logical it's a non-sequitur to get to that point like like will maple syrup go to the Moon where it falls to zero are towels this look in your apartment you know I'm just you know I can just sight

off all these different things you know none of these be like my cereal didn't become a you know a multi-trillion dollar uh industry if we're gonna have massive burnout if all you're doing is going around on the streets and trying to get people in to saying hey you're going to be the new one percent you're gonna be the new wealthy Elite with your citadels and your yachts and your Islands it's setting it's it's over promising and effectively under delivering if it doesn't get to that and I mean we have uh you know in front of us um you know Android phones and this came from Linux and you know 15 years ago um you had a whole group of people saying oh desktop Linux is gonna destroy windows and destroy everything and they

know they were very sincere very genuine they weren't trying to scam anyone but at the end of the day most consumers wanted an OS and not a hobby and the same thing with with Bitcoin is most people want a currency and not a hobby and you know if you have to spend you know an hour a day tracking can you hear me yeah we can hear you I can hear you oh I'm sorry okay yeah uh yeah most people don't want to have to spend an hour a day you know worrying about fluctuations and when to buy and sell you know for to buy their gasoline or to buy you know user Bitcoins to buy laundry detergent or something like that I saw one thing you wrote Somewhere it's like and therefore this is a very uh a very nice quote is that yeah people want you know

people want money they want to pay for something they don't want a new hobby so people do this in the different areas like there's something called Maslow's hierarchy of needs and wants and you know at the very bottom when you go to these developing countries uh like I lived in a really poor part of China uh it was called anpay Province and the average salary there was like 500 bucks a month and you know the based on um what's it called Ingles law like in the as the country develops you spend less money on food and more money on on discretionary items and in China I believe that the the the Ingalls law in terms of like how much you spend on foods like 28 where in the US it's like 10 so not only do we have more money to spend uh on on healthier

food or sorry we have more money to to spend on other things but we also could buy food for less and so on so like these people in developing countries that spend like half their their uh their wages on on their needs they don't number one have them the money to to necessarily buy Bitcoins and then get wiped out they don't have that kind of cushion and number two they don't have like it's like that not like they're gonna wake up the next day like oh you know I hate my local currency I'm gonna buy Bitcoin on-ramping educational profits like it's like I gave this example I was at a conference uh in Singapore and somebody's like you know we should tell more people about the white paper I was like are you kidding me you don't go around like you don't need to have to

read this set Boeing 747 schematics to realize is that the Boeing airplanes provide utility I get on airplanes like the A320 or whatever I don't have to read what it's how it's built in order to realize it provides utility and value for me and if if that's our main sales page this is brochure that some guy wrote six years ago uh you know I I don't think that that's the best way to Market it especially to developing countries I like the analogy that you made to uh to open source software and you know perhaps we can expect something similar to what happened to Linux in effect is I mean Linux didn't develop the proliferation of Linux or Unix based systems didn't develop through Linux desktop operating system it developed through Android uh open you know open

source project iOS to a certain extent Mac OS and so companies private companies effectively have taken web services web servers as well yeah uh but that maybe you could argue has always been the case but effectively private companies have taken those open source projects and made commercial products with them but perhaps we can expect to see something similar to that happen uh with Bitcoin or with cryptocurrencies in general absolutely like you have it's ironic you have thousands of man-hours going into producing this code whether it's just free open source stuff 15 years ago or Bitcoin today um by these people who really um are anti-establishment figures but what ends up happening in practice is because it's all public good stuff there's you know

funding issues in order like going to the which model red hat and Mozilla you know which model you're supposed to build maybe the end of things the people who benefit the most are as you say these private institutions or governments I mean look 15 20 years ago when Phil Zimmerman was doing the pgps you know fight I don't think any of those guys expected that the Chinese government would create what's effectively called you know the great firewall uh but we the biggest filter in the world using some of this technology that these this open source Community made that's just you know the the double-edged sword there and obviously uh they probably would have created this uh software somehow in China regardless of how the free opens were sifted but it just uh we see this with government agencies in the US or elsewhere that uh if you if you make it

about politics you probably you know it doesn't seem like it's the the smartest way to gain traction at least uh in the long run I'm not saying it won't work out for these uh these very partisan people in the Bitcoin space but uh I I think that they're going to find out the hard way that financial institutions if there's any margins to improve uh financial institutions will just incorporate the technology and throw away the stuff that they don't need including the political ideology so if you talk about a niche case is there something specific you have in mind uh or sure so like you had Robert Sam's on like I guess two weeks ago and he's got a new company called zero clear I I guess he hasn't spoken too much because it's not quite public it's still kind of

semi-styled but it's a general idea with some of this and I know um there's maybe two or three other you know stealth projects that have contacted me or some people I know basically are are trying to take some of this consensus Ledger technology um and then Cobble it together uh building a stack uh for Enterprises for uh private financial institutions and again you don't need necessarily proof of work to do that I'm not to bash proof of work I think Dave Hudson um makes an interesting case for for some of the business use cases for it maybe he's someone you could have on your show listeners might be interested in it's hashingit.com that's his website uh but uh Robert Sands is doing the zero clear thing doing uh derivatives clearing uh

using uh bits and pieces of this overall Tech um it's actually um in some in some ways similar to what ethereum is doing but it's uh again I can't spill the beans too much because then it defeats the purpose of being a stealth business right but uh yeah I do think that there are our actual applications you could take this and that don't require it to be Bitcoin based blockchains so tell us I'd like to hear more about this consensus as a service uh idea uh how how do you uh then you know ensure that this Ledger is trustless if you don't have blockchain and proof of work okay well I'll be honest and I'm guilty of this too there's also saying this really is trustless it's really trust minimizing like Bitcoin itself isn't trustless we

have to our third party is minors and the idea six years ago is hey there would be so many minors there's so many validators effectively there there's no way the collusion or abuse could take place but as we've seen that has kind of narrowed down and it narrowed down in terms of consolidation and centralization uh primarily because it's rational to do if you want to if you want to smooth out your your risk curve or uh your volatility curves you need to aggregate Capital uh effectively with these data warehouses and so forth um so I I don't think that uh most businesses care about Cypher pump Solutions like in terms of they're not Cypher punks like at the end of the day Bitcoin was all designed to solve problems for cypherpunks problems for

people who are doing uh you know uh Poker Stars you know I'm not saying that that Satoshi was a pokerstar guy but you know he originally wanted to build like a marketplace with a token within it in fact version point one had that built in anyways my point is if you could get rid of some of this stuff that uh that Bitcoin uh makes it costly with in terms of proof of work if you have a network or a Consortium or a group of Institutions that uh that trust each other and know each other you could use proof of stake and or uh even a simple database I'm not saying that that is the solution obviously each business has different needs but uh yeah you don't necessarily need civil protection attack uh for for some of these applications

you just need uh block ordering that is cryptographically verifiable so I know um zucky Manion from skew chain his phrase that he uses cryptographic Primitives uh when he's talking about how you can integrate blockchains with Supply chains and again I'm not saying any of these ideas will be successful but we're looking at it and that's why I see the spaces consensus is a service uh going forward and not Bitcoin is a service um because we I I find it I find it interesting and I did sort of ask um president burn about this as well because my idea has always been and my understanding that you know the sort of fundamental breakthrough of Bitcoin is

uh proof of work and and using proof of work to achieve this like you know distributed consensus and have this blockchain and when you do some and and it seems like that the the powerful thing there is a decentralization so when you get rid of that I I I'm just curious and sort of skeptical rather than this whole blockchain design and let your design still make sense or rather than not you know the most efficient thing is just database right sure yeah so you have the Spectrum right fully decentralized which would be I guess Bitcoin six years ago not Bitcoin today and then uh just like a database you know or Oracle

database or IBM data somebody centralized what can you do something in between the is effective for certain business use cases so again if you know who your nodes are if you know who you're validating with that is a semi-trusted network there's still ways to use like for example proof of stake you can do something called delegated proof of state and by the way guys I understand there's lots of arguments about whether proof stick is stable or not I am not saying proof of stake is is the solution it is a proposed solution that many people are looking at um and obviously people who hate it have the vested interest to hate it because they own a lot of Bitcoin so if if something else comes out about it then you know they uh they'll they'll lose a value that goes

going back to you know they won't be to the Moon as I say hope but anyways the the basic idea with delegated proof of stake or having these these validated nodes in in different areas is you you could just take maybe 100 ngos you put a validating node inside one of these things and you'd have to convince like the Red Cross and Blue Shield and all these different or I guess blue sheets like HMO it's not ngu but if you take these different uh ngos like United Way uh you say hey can you run this delegated validator uh in to to to make that collusion take place you would you roughly have to convince 50 50 of these nodes to to collude or something like that which would be much more distributed than Bitcoin today Bitcoin today is only you know like that's all I

said it's basically a five of ten multi-sig that issues a coinbase so uh you know it's 10 pools versus 100 I think 100 is a little bit more distributed we already know who the pools are we know who works there at least 85 of the hash rate um so I mean I I don't think that in practice the proof of worked uh uh became the decentralized network that he had um and I don't think you can read decentralize it uh in the in the way that they're trying because look if it what happens with the security of the network is proportional directly proportional to the the actual token value of market so if you have a 200 token miners are going to destroy 200 towards the capital to secure it um every you know 10 minutes or whatever

times 25 or whatever the block reward would be anyways if if that is the case then uh what's happened when people are like oh you know the the good fault the the Fallen price is going to redecentralize bitcoin right now actually it's not all it's going to do is squeeze out marginal players and allow the most competitive to to stay around so survival will fit us effectively and the fittest are those who are the most uh effective with uh efficiently uh managing electricity or administrative costs so like bit Fury their cost of production effectively is like 180 so they're still kind of marginally profitable at this point it's like a 20 20 profit window right now uh whereas everyone else has to get off get offline um there's obviously some other players

like in China who have some sweet land deals because they had they know some you know Governors and stuff like that the point is is in practice Bitcoin did not say decentralized because it's more effective as Dave Hudson has shown due to the poisson process to to to pull your Capital together and scale it uh in in a way that it gives you guaranteed results and dpos uh again I'm not saying it is the solution but it's at least more decentralized than Bitcoin would be well the problem the problem with you know the example that you just gave were ngos would effectively be the nodes I mean the problem with that is that you have to give them the trust and that is subjective you know you could consider

that uh ngos or not to be trusted I don't think that's the case but uh you're you're adding a degree of subjectivity there that perhaps isn't desirable sure well let's look at it this way it's harder to throw an NFL game an American football game because in order to throw it you have to collude with a ton of different people whereas boxing is much easier to collude you just have to get one guy or or the ref or the uh one of the players to to be the Fall Guy you just have to convince one of the people or one of the judges it's much easier to to spoof or throw a game or a match that way um and same thing with with Bitcoin um you know when you have 10 effective miners uh it's much easier to get them to collude or you have to trust them uh

in the in the long run not to you know do censorship of transaction squares if you have a hundred nodes or a thousand nodes at these different ngos or financial institutions then you know again what what if if we're looking at it from uh from the like we've seen the last six years yeah maybe you don't want to deal with red cross but again I'm not saying the Red Cross is going to be involved with this I'm just saying if you have a hundred different entities um or 100 different institutions um to that is this topologically more decentralized than 10 dudes uh in in Finland or Ukraine we're g hash and some of these other facilities are like the theory

yeah absolutely I mean I I think in the end right the decentralization is the most important part when it comes to Security in that way right so like obviously with Bitcoin in the mining pools there is an issue there and now maybe there's a way you know when we like for example with human you know they're looking at if it's really just CPU uh minable maybe then that will work that it's actually stays decentralized or maybe with proof of stake it's possible to to achieve that but it is I think it's it's obviously true that right now there is a problem in that it's very expensive the whole Bitcoin mining and it's not very decentralized right and it's right if

you're falling away you have all the costs of decentralization Without Really any of its benefits anymore right um and you you've created centralization without any of its benefits which would be time efficiency and stuff like that so yeah it's kind of like the worst of Both Worlds and I'm not saying that to be mean but look again Bitcoin was was designed and proof will work with the being thrown into it was designed for specific purposes if you already know the nodes if everyone's already some nominally trusted you don't need necessarily proof of work anymore you need some other block ordering scheme or some other way to to move uh transactions in a cryptographically verifiable manner uh again I'm not saying that uh proof of sake is a solution I'm not saying hyper electricity solution I'm not saying any of those things that have been proposed

or Solutions but uh there's more more than one way to skin a cat and Bitcoin isn't it well that's all very interesting and well perhaps we can talk about hyperledger in just a second um I'd like to know more about how that works uh but first let's talk about shapeshift uh our sponsor of shape shift of course and uh shapeshift is the fast and easy way to uh trade altcoins so um we've been talking about chip for quite a while and uh and the what we're going to do today is a little different because we want to show you the shape shift lens uh Google Chrome extension uh We've mentioned it a couple times before and

um and we want to show you how that works so as you as you know so if you've ever wanted to buy and sell altcoins uh you know you have to go through and exchange shape shifts a lot shape shift allows you to do that without having to go through an exchange you go to the website they've got some sort of conversion tool there looks a little bit like Google Translate for cryptocurrencies uh one side you have the currency you want to convert and the other side you have the currency you want to convert to you just put your um your address and in a few minutes you can uh you can trade effectively convert an altcoin into another and it takes a couple seconds but what if you want to send um uh some uh some Bitcoins to someone and you know you might have some

Dogecoin well they have a great Google Chrome extension that allows you to do that right from the website so go ahead and show my screen here so I can show you how that works there we go so I've uh went to our uh support page on our website on our uh uh tips page and I've got the shape shifts lens um Chrome extension installed I can see it here in my browser that it's detected that there's a Bitcoin address on this page so if I scroll down here and I go to bitcoin so I see that there's a Bitcoin address and I see the

little uh Fox icon show up next to my Bitcoin address so if I go ahead and click that I'll get this shapeshift lens uh pop-up and it says pay with and right here I can say I want to pay with Dogecoin and there we go um so it's already filled in destination Bitcoin address I'll say I want a tip so I want to say maybe like 0.01 to 1 millibit okay well it appears that there's an error maybe if I if I uh if I refresh it might just move my browser

let's try that again okay so there's an error um well that's unfortunate I'll have to let them know about that uh but uh yeah so when this does work you can expect it to work something like shapeshift um where you just uh have a QR code and you would send the money to that QR code and it would and it would uh send the uh the Bitcoin uh in exchange for your Dogecoin yeah I'm sure they'll have it fixed again uh you know within the day or something but it's a it's a great way you can kind of use any currency and you know you can I as a I always thought this was going to happen right I always thought for

example payment processes which is take um any currency because it's pretty trivial for them to trade it like as a merchant you don't have um you don't really care and and shapeship sort of makes it possible uh to do it on the other side right so that you can do it on your side and yeah there was I think there was a time we were speculating that uh you know most payment processors would just integrate all you know most I mean right now there's no reason that they're not doing that because there's no adoption and nobody uses these currencies exactly but if they were going to be used that's what you would see right and and shapeshift kind of makes it possible for you as a user to do it sort of on your own right now at least when the extensions were

from the gun right we'll have to let them know about that uh yeah so they accept uh they accept a whole bunch of altcoins so Bitcoin black coin Bitcoin dark Dogecoin Dark Coin feather coin Litecoin new bits name coin NXT purecoin the list goes on cork bread coin and ripple and uh so you can convert any one of those coins into any other one of those coins so the possibilities are I haven't I haven't calculated possibilities but they are numerous so ship shift is a fast and easy way to to uh convert your altcoins and no accounts needed your personal information stays uh protected and you only pay a small upfront fee that uh isn't integrated in the uh in the transaction amount so head over to shapeshift.io get a try tell us

what you think and we'd like to thank them for the support of epson or Bitcoin so we've been talking about consensus as a service and uh and famous mentioned hyper electric which is a project he's involved in I think it's an advisor I've heard of it uh but I don't really know exactly what they do although we did have a quick look at the website can you um can you explain to us what hypoletree is sure yeah so it's open source project uh and the idea is is in order to be a node on the network you need to take out an SSL from a certificate Authority so it's not fully decentralized but it's not fully centralized and uh instead of having coins uh you just have heuristics you

just have blacklisting white listing uh just like spam uh spam mechanisms from Gmail like there's no Gmail coin and yet you're able to still filter out and get most of uh you know signal to noise ratio is pretty good you get most of the mail you want whereas like in your regular mailbox that you you meet space in real life real life uh you still get a lot of spam and those are already marked with money and if somebody actually paid money or got bulk rates or whatever the US Postal Service is like the largest spam producer in the world or at least transmitter so and yet people pay for it so the idea is okay how can we do some of the useful things with Bitcoin how can we do track asset tracking in a cryptographically verifiable way but not have to worry about coins and being vendor have a

vendor lock in with needing a particular you know Bitcoin or whatever the altcoin is and again I'm not saying they'll be successful but uh it's a it's an interesting uh way of different approach to their consensus mechanisms called something called practical Byzantine fault tolerance as a 15 year old algorithm it's been tested uh paxos is uh is his actual mechanism it's done with um again I'm not saying it uh is equivalent in terms of uh secure uh the 51 or secure as Bitcoin is there's a spectrum of security um but it's it's not designed to be on an untrusted Network where Bitcoin was so if you already know some of the nodes or at least you know some of the people

then you're on a nominally trusted uh Enterprise or Enterprise Network is uh is paxos is really the Cassandra no I didn't really know anything about databases but we did have a talk at our Bitcoin Meetup uh a few a while ago by uh a guy named Trent who does a startup called The Scribe in Berlin like they do some um basically a blockchain software digital artwork and uh he is comes from like a machine learning Etc background not from a cryptocurrency background so but he was very familiar with paxus and uh Cassandra and some of

these database technologies that actually have their own consensus systems so he was like why and and of course in terms of scalability they're just insanely better than at Bitcoin could ever be uh so it's not judgmental gosh why are you so skeptical man um so he was like why isn't someone doing a cryptocurrency based on that wouldn't that work I'm not sure so it's interesting that it seems like that's exactly the direction hyperledger is going in sure and there's there's some other people you could you could talk to too that are working on some interesting projects like tender mint uh they're doing a different approach Pebbles doing another approach

um hyperdex which is a is a cool database software from um Iman sire he's a professor at Cornell um I've heard really good things about that again uh people need to look at what are what are the actual business requirements what are the consumer requirements and and how do these different Technologies fit into that not everyone has a Cypher Punk problem not everyone has a has a need to get around trusted third parties if you want to go for it but at the end of the day you know it consumers seem to want to have insurance Assurance uh you know customer service I mean if you wanted to recreate Bitcoin just go to Visa fire their whole anti-flog team fire their other metrics teams and get rid of the customer

service and you've got Bitcoin but it's only faster so like if if you want to replicate any of these you know useful networks with value you have to you have to add on these different things that the customers actually want and therefore you just become a very expensive PayPal so so how hypo can you it's a hyper Ledger it's not because it's not a coin it's not a Bitcoin alternative really right so is that sort of a software as a service thing where you know you would basically sell that to let's say you can sort them of banks to do the settlement between them or can you run us through an example yeah it's basically if you want to track a

particular asset and you could design the uh you could program it to be any any particular asset I don't want to say it's currency obviously everyone talks about currency but I I think that the use cases that the team is primarily looking at right now is equities and uh basically and again I'm not saying that they will be adopted by lots and lots of banks it'd be cool if they did but uh or something like it uh but like the way the way the current system works with Equity clearing or Securities clearing and settlement is it takes several days not because the banks hate each other and want to get lots of money is because there's hundreds of ledgers that DTC a depository Trust Company they're the ones who basically maintain The Ledger in which all these other sub ledgers are

based off of and if there's a way to to somehow allow the percolation process the movement and title transfer to take place much faster uh then you would obviously reduce the role of systemic uh systemic Domino effects and so forth um again I'm not saying hyperledger will be that but Bitcoin isn't even you know there's there's no rule for Bitcoin to do that it's a 10 minute window you know that's just not even uh I know that's faster than two to three days people are like yeah let's clear it but uh at the end of the day you're you're reliant on Anonymous Miners and and to talk to Securities or the you know big large Banks involved with settlement they don't want to trust Anonymous miners they want to be able to

trust somebody else an actual entity yeah I think that's I think that's something that's really really interesting that I feel like I've seen come up again and again especially in the last few months it projects that you the the decentralization and the anonymity of Bitcoin mining more as a liability than an advantage which I find is really interesting and it goes so much against the the original idea of Bitcoin I think sure I mean necessarily a bad thing I'm not you know I think I think there's it's quite true that in many use cases uh you just can't sell Bitcoin

to existing institutions because it's just too much like too hard to predict there's no one to complain to there's no room for error this they can control it right so I understand it but it's also it's really really far away I think from the original vision sure you're shoehorning uh a certain product into all these Universal clown cars basically that's the example I use is like clown cars can move you can fit a lot of clowns in it but it's not particularly safe or effective and that's kind of what's happened with Bitcoin everyone says cobbling tons of stuff on bitcoin or or if the example I used a couple months ago was like Superman like if you look at like what Superman's powers were like in the 30s very different than they are today like

he could only jump really high and he was changed to be able to fly because cartoonists didn't want to spend all day in the 20-minute cartoon having him jump they wanted him to get to the place and so that's kind of with Bitcoin is it started out being a certain solution to a certain problem and now it could cure cancer and end Wars and do all this other stuff it it's not going to it's just it's just creating uh over promise and under delivering so so how because I I played around with this a little bit like I installed the command line tools uh so there's a server and a client so in order to become a node I guess you have to install the server on your system I believe so you you definitely need to get a SSL I uh again I'd like to talk to

you about that but I don't want to be seen pushing the product I think I think the developers would be much better guests to talk than just the the simple lowly advisor but anyway it's really easy to install uh at least on a Mac it is and uh you can create an asset and like with one line of code so I mean it's a it's a cool idea and definitely something that uh you know that is uh interesting to I mean what I what I like about this is you know it's easy to get started right I mean you just have like your lines of code here on this on the um on the home page you can install the command line tools and get started right away make I mean it makes it easy for anybody

to actually get their hands dirty yeah sure but don't you know if you're supporting this enjoy uh if you're if you're supporting anything but Bitcoin is going to destroy Bitcoin like it's uh one of the funny things about the the Bitcoin maximal is is they have no like review mirror of History like Mercedes-Benz like Ben's was the largest car company in 1899. it still exists but the competition didn't destroy the whole automobile industry same thing with flight uh same thing with like credit cards himself Diners Club was the first credit card uh that came out like in 1950 and it was later acquired by discover like just just because you're the first mover just because you've invested a lot doesn't mean you're the you're you're supporting the the platform that that will win I

mean web crawler Palm Atari Friendster I mean Palm was actually bought by HP so just because you're the first mover uh you see this with Google Google was not the first search engine it was like the 15th um iPod was not the first NPC player it was like the ninth I've written about this before so like uh again I'm not saying hyperledger version one will be it uh maybe there'll be something else uh but yeah I I think that competition is really good um we saw that with with Linux itself one of the first distributions was was slackware came out in 1993 it still exists even though there's hundreds of other distributions there wasn't like this massive destruction of of uh of the industry it didn't just stop because of all this competition so I think uh these

maximalists uh should really uh look back at history to see you know empirically uh how competition helps uh and doesn't actually Hinder yeah I know I think um it's it's an interesting and a little bit strange argument we sometimes see right I I personally at least in my view that the idea that we should sort of rally behind and one thing and and at this point just kind of unrealistic right yeah if it's if it's useful somebody's gonna Fork it [Music] and again I have nothing against block stream I think they're they're very well intentioned really smart people out to create real value but at the end of the day how are you going to convince all

coin developers to get on your platform without providing them some kind of fund and like 21 million sounds like a lot of money but there's like 10 all coins that have market caps of like 10 million and again I'm not saying those are all liquid and so forth but the ideas is those developers have an incentive to continue building that product because they have money they could tap into and pay the developers or pay their own bills unless unless uh blockchain does something similar there's no way that they will onboard their competitors effectively um I mean why would you drop everything to go work with uh build a chain a side chain uh when you don't get paid for it so I I wish him good luck and I hope that they do create value and succeed but I just don't see it from a business

side yeah no I I do think the getting removing the ability to do uh crowd sales and create uh coins that way is a huge a huge issue uh it's a huge downside and I think as vitalik say that's just something too good to pass up but speaking of cloud sales can you tell us a bit about your involvement in melodic um because I think you're an altcoin exchange right but also quite connected with the whole decentralized application and and appcoin space sure sure so I mean when we talk about scam coins I have to listen to these

guys all the time like we get emails and or people you know send me messages on Skype hey check out my clients so I and I have my own process of like oh who's who's a verifiable developer and funnily enough Satoshi probably wouldn't pass it because I want to see your face or I want to see your voice or at least somebody on your team uh do that and uh again not to single out so she whoever he or they were um but uh yeah uh we we only list uh specific assets that have a an actual Community uh behind it some actual developers correspond uh at least uh on a regular basis either to the public or to us um or to other exchanges if it is and if you look at the list uh We've pretty

much narrowed it down to basically the top 10 top 15 assets out there that doesn't mean that they won't be delisted uh that doesn't mean that they won't that they will succeed again I don't own any asset I'm not out there promoting any particular one uh in fact and this is a slight tangent but look the reason you have these different assets being made in part is and why I think calling these protocols is incorrect that's not a good analogy TCP is not the equivalent analogy because look when you have a distribution of special interests like we have with Bitcoin like a certain amount of shareholders effectively that own the the coins or the people that joined they're like oh this I wanna I wanna have that same amount of assets so they Fork it and then another people Fork it you see that NXT switched to nem

and and so like with with ripple the stellar and again I'm not saying that one's gonna be successful or unsuccessful but my point is is the reason these aren't protocols is because you don't have special interest in SMTP or HTTP uh forking it there aren't 21 million internet packets ever just made and people just sat there and held on it hoping that these internet packets would would somehow become you know worth so much you could buy you know uh islands and it's like going to New York and going to the subway and taking all those tokens and then burying them underneath your bed and thinking oh yes these tokens are going to be worthless New York Subway is going to make a bunch more the utility is the actual Network Bitcoin the actual utility is the network it's not supposed to be the token and uh I think that's why these

these guys who are so uh ideological with the money supply are missing the greater point of what the actual utility was created it's a blockchain this is a utility not the coin there's plenty of assets and coins out there in Fiat currencies to look at and I think Robert sands on your in your show two weeks ago made a beautiful uh you know statement it was you know a good hour of discussion on this and uh again I'm not saying that we support are actually going to be able to incorporate the ideas Robert suggested but uh I think we'll continue to see uh these different forks and different crowd sales and so forth because people just want to either fund their own development that way or because they see something that's not being done in the market that they can try to provide but I I actually think

that that idea of the limited Supply and you know people buying into it and then it appreciating that much was absolutely I don't think Big Pun you would ever have gotten to where it is without that you know so I think that incentivization is is hugely important and I actually think that's why also Robert Sam's uh proposal is so nice is because potentially you would have the on the one hand the sort of a stable coin but on the other hand with that the scenery shares part you still have that exact same speculative than Dynamic that you have with Bitcoin and and personally I think that's a really really powerful thing

so I I think projects that um leave that away I mean in some cases makes sense right if you do like a B2B of a problem especially when you reach a white mass or giving that sort of incentivization I think is something really powerful it may but it also might attract like gamblers like I think the funniest quote I saw about Reddit Bitcoin was like listen looking at the comments people make every day is like peering into the mind of people who are gambling addicts and you know what's the price what's the price what's the price and again I'm not

saying that that Bitcoin would have failed we can't no we don't unless we like reverse history we have no idea what an alternative Universe in which you know or Senor share was integrated with Bitcoin originally and that's not to make fun of Satoshi like I uh I'm not to I don't think he had any idea that it wouldn't be used as an actual like modern currency people would just hold it as an actual asset or commodity instead I I don't think he he saw that and I'm not saying that you you can't have a a successful project that uses something similar to a limited Supply or semi-limited or however you come up with a dynamic Supply um but yeah I mean uh yeah I I I'm just saying empirically what we've seen is uh as as you said you know uh Roberts Robert's examples have

uh have borne out or at least his his thesis is borne out more so than the hyper bitcoinization guys who are saying it's gonna you know monetize and become you know millions of dollars and so forth maybe it will uh I have doubts though yeah I mean I actually wanted to get to that earlier but somehow we skipped it but when we had Gary kyleman on um just recently to talk about the state of Bitcoin report one thing we touched on was that the merchant growth and just sort of general adoption right and and you uh I think you someone else wrote a post on this and I think you've been uh sort of quoting that on your blog uh who tried to analyze the actual volume so not just a number of merchants

that like bit pay and coinbase have signed up but actually the volume that they're doing and uh can you just very briefly tell us about what this data um showed about how merchanted the optional and and perhaps most of the actual usage as a payment system is developing sure yeah okay so again for starters to quote the white paper the title of it was a peer-to-peer payment system and the abstract was about payments and the section one was about online Commerce so the whole purpose of Bitcoin was to provide a payment system but nobody uses it really for payments and we know that for on-chain volume and I got a lot you know the guy who got me into Bitcoin he

yells at me all consistently for saying I don't look at the data correctly I have a new article I sent you guys a draft it'll be out in about a week or so um and one of the segments uh that I that I look at uh was in this article is from uh is some data from Jorge Solstice he's a CS professor in Brazil um and what he did is he took information from walletexplorer.com wallet Explorer basically identifies and docs's reused addresses bitpay reuses addresses we can see I exactly you know how many Bitcoins they received they received two different numbers we would call wholesale and Retail wholesale numbers would basically be uh large batches of Bitcoin coming from miners mine are selling to convert to Fiat and the other ones is retail uh basically you know you or me buying something

online uh with like Newegg or Microsoft one of the I guess bitpay you know suppliers or merchants and uh if you add that up in aggregate since it's all on chain they only do like a thousand Bitcoins a day and they've been doing that like for over you know a year so like they may have uh you know they don't release Public public numbers but we do have an idea uh publicly because it's on a blockchain what their actual numbers are and it hasn't grown and I know people get angry oh I've spent I've spent yeah but you're you know you're a marginal player and we see the whole aggregate so there's no there's no smoke and mirrors we know exactly what's going on with them coinbase two um you know they're they have they publish an off

chain off chain numbers which is whatever their own internal uh you know Merchant sales are or maybe their vault movements it's unclear exactly what they might be and it's been flat too and this is not to say it won't take off but or won't change but again we need to look at who is the the largest holders of Bitcoin who are these you know people with Bitcoins in order to use Bitcoin the network you have to have these prepaid vouchers like these these collectible plastic figurines that's basically what how Bitcoin is treated by market participants they treat them as these these antique spoons if they don't want to you know get rid of and that's rational they all think also hold on to it it's not suspended if you spend it you're not being rational economic actors it's true so and we see that in practice you know 70 80 of coins

don't move for more than you know six months or so and uh and that's not to say it it won't change but again if you want to pay for fees in the long run uh it brings and introduces all these other issues that that didn't take place because uh Satoshi assumed that fees would take over Senora shares or seniors if people aren't spending it then that's not happening and uh we see this uh you know time time again with the different charts uh hopefully the audience will have a chance to look at the article in a week or so yeah we'll um we'll definitely well we'll link to your blog into show notes so people can check that out and uh and then they can find the article there um well we're sort of towards the end of a

show but there's one one thing you forwarded Us in email that was about something I hadn't heard about and I thought it was sounded totally crazy and we I talked about Sebastian before showing you about like really um so this thing is called trusted transparency Tim can you share what that is sure so there's this effort by specific miners like uh bit Fury in spontoolies the idea is uh they want to create trusted nodes effectively with Bitcoin and uh you know I talked to uh Greg Maxwell's talked about it he calls it smart property

um I met him I guess seven months ago in a block stream event um and uh generally the original idea was hey you know uh what happens if specific Hardware is being used to attack the network wouldn't it be neat if we could just you know get rid of that and so you have a remote kill switch in effect but it before that before that I idea came up the idea was we know these data warehouses exist and that probably the the reasons data warehousing for mining exists is because it's so much more efficient to scale that way over for admin and operational expenses uh which become the biggest uh cost for for these mining facilities the capex actually becomes less but anyways the idea is well what if somebody broke into one of

these facilities and started tampering with the hardware wouldn't it be neat if you could terminate that Hardware with a private key and the only way you could use that Hardware is with a private key so uh anyway so you've had this Evolution uh that started with being able to terminate stolen Hardware to terminate 51 attacks to where now uh basically the the manufacturers are working with core devs to to basically it exists each each manufacturer basically has their own proof of work uh Fork if you will um the allows them to run Bitcoin or be terminated that's hardware so like for example bit Furious Hardware was attacking the network you could you could send a kill signal to terminate

that specific hardware and the reason this is important is because of side chains side chains if it's free to mine side chains like we've seen with to do merge mining then it's also free to attack it so the only way to secure these is to effectively uh you know building kill switches saying hey if you want to participate in the Bitcoin Network you're also going to have a kill switch in it they they obviously have good intentions I'm not saying they don't but it creates a trusted scenario that's why they call it trusted transparency and again I'm not saying that they won't get miners on board but from at least the conversations I've had with some non-bit Fury non-spontoolies uh people that they're not interested in integrating because it introduces backdoors into their own Hardware they'd rather not have people have so you

basically have two blockchains the Bitcoin blockchain and then the private key for the for the uh the hardware and now you have to secure both so it's much easier to to make these other guys vulnerable with this private key now like all you have to do is get on the airplane find these core developers or find these people that do this mining manufacturing and just beat them with a wrench or you know blackmail um there's many easier uh single points of failure and and vulnerabilities to that model than it was with for example uh pre-smart property uh mining yeah I know I mean this just seems so crazy to me you know because of course on a whole a number of levels so first of all you do trust in bit Fury for example or whoever you know manufactured whoever

holds those keys and another risk that then arises now is that a government could come and like extort those people it just seems to be it seems to grow really strongly against the whole idea of Bitcoin so it's really it's bizarre to me and it seems to me that if side chains do require that to work it's sort of a roundabout argument right you say like oh you want to keep Bitcoin alive because this is a hand loss thing and everything should be on bitcoin because you know that's the future and believe in Bitcoin but then you also have to like totally undermine uh the idea of having a purely centralized cryptocurrency or a

decentralized cryptocurrency with something like that and by controlling the hardware essentially it's it's really absolutely crazy to me uh well ironically you'd recreate the various systems that these you know maximalist dislike which is trusted validated nodes running from either triple or even hyperledger I mean we know where the nodes are or we have an idea who runs the nodes and now with with Bitcoin if if this comes to pass again I'm not saying it will I'm just saying that this is something that they're quietly pushing uh then you end up with a very system that they dislike but cost you know 500 million dollars to maintain exactly right absolutely you you don't need that proof of work anymore because there's no there's no civil so that everyone knows each other

yeah exactly right I mean it's just so absurd because you can just you really can replace it with a much much more efficient system if you should get rid of all the mining and stuff sure this is not a by the way anti-proof of work anti-bitcoins understanding has a different way a different approach I'm not pumping them I think that it'd be interesting in a couple months they're supposed to announce uh their their look at this space um they did a different approach on blockchain maybe they won't work too I I don't know Dave Hudson he works with them um and I know I know we're about almost out of time is do we have a moment to talk about uh remittance at all sure sure yeah so I know this is one thing that

you and I were going to try and talk about and again in the community for whatever reason his has no idea of how remittances actually work like everyone thinks that the Western Union and MoneyGram have like these like 2 000 margins and stuff like that at the end of the day the their costs are are largely two things and they have to file reports quarterly you know their 10K report the two costs they have are compliance in the physical Network and not just a physical network of of the stores and people but like commissions to the agents to help out with the cash Network because again developing countries they they don't all use US dollars or Euros or r b they have a local currency and the same thing with Bitcoin like there are no merchants in these countries like in Kenya there are

you know there's not five ten a hundred thousand Bitcoin Merchants uh you go to coinmap and you see that so they have to cash out somehow so Bitcoin doesn't solve a problem Western Union has and Western Union doesn't have a problem with with the Bitcoin solves because Bitcoin in this instance is just a transmission mechanism and Western Union already has a secure transmission nobody steals money from Western Union's wire just like nobody steals money from visas wire it's always these edges and so we with the the cost of remittance again when you actually look at like how much it costs to move to Kenya it's still cheaper to use Western Union than for example than bit PESA maybe that will change but again the cost structure is going to be the same because you could have to deal with compliance if you have

a physical Network and if you have a physical Network then you have to pay the agents to go out there and help out help people cash in and cash out so yeah again I think that the the animosity towards uh Western Union the the CIO he was actually he did an interview with coindesk he's like hey I have some Neptune miners I'm mining I understand how Bitcoin is it doesn't solve a problem for us for the last mile you know this this agent Network maybe maybe somebody will like 37 Coins Plus coins.ph but at the end of the day you know you might as well just use like Ripple or some other some other network if you're having to do with identities and stuff like that so again I'm not saying that you can't squeeze margin somewhere but I think that the the animosity and the anger towards uh

remittance companies is largely unfounded they provide a value they provide a utility uh if you think you could do better then get in line with you know a bunch of other startups like transferwise or getting get in line with 1400 other payment process payment uh companies startups like if you go to Angel list there's like 1475 payment uh startups out there so there's Bitcoin is not being developed in a vacuum the remittance side is not being built in the vacuum and I think it unless we want to end up like Harold Camping he was this guy in you know 2011 who who promised that the world was going to end and he had these followers and it didn't end and so you know the followers became disenchanted I I think that you know if we're if we're selling fear or we're selling anger uh the community is going

to be largely disappointed and maybe even burn out because these promises won't be up kept yeah I know I mean I think I think you're totally right in in many of these points right I mean we see I for example started using a company called currency fair right for the like from Switzerland to here Etc and it's really really cheap already right so it's it's hard even if you have like perfect Bitcoin on both sides perfect liquidity really like it's just marginal any benefit you can get out of there and you have a few minutes is right so even if Western Union did use Bitcoin maybe it was really liquid on the back end uh but they already have mechanisms for moving back maybe if they accepted

Bitcoins in and out okay sure but they don't necessarily need those rails they already have perfectly secure rails uh that nobody you may be able I mean I I don't know exactly I was meeting with a friend the other day who was actually looking at a starting room in this company uh but not Bitcoin that's a traditional uh and they do have some costs it may be possible to be like you know marginally maybe they could save like at some point not right now like 0.2 percent or something like that by using cryptocurrencies on the back end you know where the rest stays the same but even that it's A Hard Sell to make and we're far away from that and the sort of immediate promise yeah it's it's difficult right maybe in some Niche

cases it does work better but for the most part it's um it's at least not as hard it's not as easy and obvious and immediate um a market for Bitcoin as we think and and one thing I found was kind of interesting when I was reading about Western Union uh a while ago was just how often they've changed their business no because they used to do like telegrams and they really totally reinvented themselves as a company a number of times and they're really really old so you know I I mean I don't know if they've retained that ability to transform and leave you all behind in Search and you but at least they have done so in the past

but I think to some extent you know what you're talking about is also uh so what Tim was talking about uh it has to do with this ideological uh component to bitcoin which is you know you can send money to anywhere uh around the world instantly at a low cost and you know when when you think of that in a practical sense well you're almost obviously going to go you know after a company like Western Union because you know they take huge margins on uh but you know one could argue uh huge margins on uh remittance payments to people who will need the money so I can see also like how on the other side you know um you know one could argue that Western

Union model the ribbons model uh does need to uh to to change and you know much like uh um much like the long distance Market was completely either the phone market was completely the uh disrupted and we can now call everywhere around the world uh pretty much for free I mean this is what we're doing right now I'm doing this 20 years ago would have cost I don't know how much to do but um you know I think that as a society we should be sort of tending towards that in all areas yeah I mean I think obviously it is happening yeah I mean I see you shaking your head there Tim future I mean the future remains is not going to be

Western Union right like I think in future you will have this cryptocurrencies I mean or something like that it could also be Ripple or something [Music] else maybe right that works in a different way but it will move in that way but it's just I guess uh Tim's point if I'm correct there is that you know just right now the reality is different right because the real the real costs are are not with the value transfer per se but with it distribution and that does that sort of stuff there maintaining this huge agent Network which is obviously very expensive and and you don't just get rid of the need for that if you have Bitcoin Bitcoin Come On

To The Moon I mean it's uh there's a difference out there uh that exist in in different countries I believe I believe uh there's like 80 countries in Africa that had to use at least one of them and they're they're mostly interoperable there they're sorry they're not interoperable there and that's not because of Technology it's it's largely because of taxes in in transaction fees each country wants to get a hold of and that's not going to disappear just because you use Bitcoin I know everyone's like oh you get around that but no if you if you run an actual business with a storefront with you know uh actual employees you are identifiable you know the cops and the officials will come and ask you hey where are your papers so all you're going to do is

absorbing the same cost structure if you have to do the same exact thing and again Bitcoin was designed to get around trusted third parties but if people want to continue to use it the way they're trying to you're gonna have to build these trusted third parties so you have this like funny kind of seesaw like everyone wants to create value but when they end up doing a recreate the same middleman or same intermediaries and uh they had to end up with the same same kind of problems except this time the marginal cost is much higher in the long run because of the way the block Awards and fees work okay well Tim thanks so much for joining us today it was really interesting talking to you hearing some of your views now we will have in the show notes links to to all the things you've talked

about you know from hyperledge to the article coming up and of course you blog also to those who want to check it out and now it's called off numbers.com so of1f offnumbers.com uh you know you have a lot of nice articles and and some books too uh on bitcoin so I think one is on Smart contracts and do you have another one too you know um hey thanks for having me I appreciate it and I appreciate your patience and not not yelling and trying to burn me yet um maybe maybe you're outside my door maybe you'll kick it down and um and yeah thanks for your work uh you know great work you're doing keep keep on writing and we like and keep on you your work in raising the important

issues that you know you have to face to make this make this all work and there have to be um have to be solved um yeah um and we will be back next week if you want to support the show you know please follow us on Twitter at Epson BTC or leave us an iTunes review uh or a third thing you can do is also subscribe to your YouTube channel so you hear about the new shows and you can also see when we do the live Hangouts thanks much and we'll be back next week