This week, CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian, Kurt Wuckert Jr., joined The Subversive Spectrum podcast to talk about privacy, the need to scale Bitcoin, how little ‘crypto’ has actually achieved, and much more.
Why not Monero?
As Agorists and advocates for human liberty, Sal the Agorist and his co-host are interested in why Wuckert isn’t more involved in a privacy coin like Monero.
“16 proofs is great, but it’s still only 16,” Wuckert says. Monero isn’t as private as some people think, and while there’s lots of marketing around privacy tech in general, there are always vulnerabilities.
Instead of relying on flawed technology, Wuckert favors massive scalability and huge transaction volumes. BSV allows people to construct lots of unique transaction types, even using tech like ring signatures, but the real secret to privacy lies in billions of on-chain transactions and how they make it impossible for law enforcement in authoritarian states to track and trace people. With so many transactions to sift through, police are forced to focus on hardened criminals and serious crimes.
Donald Trump’s crypto moves and the strategic reserve
Wuckert recently wrote an article on CoinGeek titled ‘Economic slowdown is here—Bitcoin’s utility is even more crucial.’ In it, he explores the recent market pullbacks, how HODLing is not good for the economy, and why Bitcoin can be better used to create more efficient markets. Sal asks him to expand on the thinking in this article.
Wuckert explains that Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, and others in the administration aren’t ‘crypto guys’ but bankers who have figured out how to make a buck in the industry. Marketing BTC as a store of value was a solution to the fact it doesn’t scale, and now it seems the U.S. government will be the “bagholder of last resort.”
However, we need Bitcoin to work now more than ever. We’re still using ‘80s payment technology, which is highly inefficient and has many unnecessary fees built into it. “Reduce the friction in the economy, or you’re just LARPing,” Wuckert says.
Elaborating on the myth that currencies must first be a store of value and then become a medium of exchange, Wuckert says there’s no evidence whatsoever to support this. While BTC advocates like Saifedean Ammous say they detest Keynesian economics, this very same myth is a byproduct of it. The hosts agree, highlighting how Ammous is saying the opposite of what Mises promoted while claiming to represent the Austrian school of economics he championed.
Why not BCH?
Sal the Agorist asks why, given that BSV and Monero are both widely delisted on exchanges, Wuckert doesn’t go for Bitcoin Cash.
Wuckert responds that he agrees with the “pamphlet version” of BCH, but the technical reality is quite different. Fundamentally, it just can’t scale enough to act as the replacement for fiat currency.
It has taken a decade and tens of millions to scale BSV to one million transactions per second, with a team of experts focused on that goal. It would take just as long and cost just as much for the BCH camp to catch up, by which time BSV will be even further ahead.
If Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) or Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT) were to embrace Bitcoin tomorrow, only BSV could deliver the required transaction throughput.
The White House Crypto Summit and the Strategic Reserve
Wuckert says he finds the Trump administration highly entertaining, aside from the tariffs and trade wars, which are objectively bad. He thinks everyone at the summit was a clown or a crook, labeling the entire thing a “clown show.”
As for the strategic crypto reserve, which includes assets like XRP, SOL, and ADA, Wuckert is against it. There’s no reason to stockpile assets that have no utility; using either seized funds or taxpayer money to do it is insulting. There’s a justification to have strategic stockpiles of oil, gold, or ammo in case of war, but not for these totally useless assets.
To hear more about data sovereignty, efficient payments, and why the blockchain industry has achieved so little despite so much investment in the past decade, watch the replay of the podcast here.
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