Transcript: The First Bitcoin Miner: What the Debug Log Reveals

Alex Waltz [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [0:32] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be.

Alex Waltz [0:34] Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:36] The hottest man in Bitcoin this week, Alex Waltz. Welcome to the show.

Alex Waltz [0:40] Thank you, Marty. Thank you for having me. And when he says hot, just to be clear, he does mean physically hot, not in other ways.

Marty Bent [0:48] Yeah, it's a double entendre. You know, it's physically hot and main character vibes this week with the video that you launched after doing many months of research and production, getting back to the roots of what started Bitcoin and trying to dissect who was the first person to launch, or excuse me, to get into the Bitcoin project after Satoshi. Many people flagged Hal Finney and his node after he tweeted running Bitcoin But your piece argues that the real story is messier, more interesting. So I think for the context of diving into your piece, First Bitcoin Miner, and the video associated with it, which we'll link to the show notes, what sent you down this journey? Why was this a nagging problem in your mind to solve?

Alex Waltz [1:38] Well, for people who follow me on Twitter, they know for the last years I just kind of really dove into this Bitcoin archaeology stuff, right? And there were two instances, one last year and one the year before, where I did thirty days of thirty facts about Bitcoin. Sorry, thirty days of Bitcoin facts, you know. And clearly the historical one kind of made a bit more sense, and I just happened to be more interested in them, you know. And I actually was. I realized that I want to find out more about this Hal Finney stuff, but I never really touched it because it always felt solved to me.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Because I mean, just how many times did you hear people mention the emails? And there's always this air of like. It's solved. We know exactly what happened, and it just feels like this this has been around for such a long time. Clearly, there's nothing to find there anymore, right? And I I decided to write a thread about the Hal Fidian. I'm I just could not believe there's nothing written about this, right? Like zilch, nothing. I mean, there's an article here and there, but nothing like concrete, right? Just people claiming certain things. And I found it so strange, and then I was like, all right, you know what?

Alex Waltz ⋮ Let's try to dig into this. And I started looking and looking and looking. I was like, oh my god! I think I'm the first person who looks at this. I just could not— the first part was I could not believe no one looked at this because it's such a low-hanging fruit, first of all, right? And after I started digging a bit of things, I was like, oh my God, there's some interesting stuff here. And firstly, I figured out what Bitcoin client he was running when he made the Bitcoin tweet. log file. When Hal Finney tried Bitcoin for the first time, he he it didn't work for him.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And there used to be this forum called Search Forge where people would post about Bitcoin. And the first time he wrote he tried Bitcoin, it didn't work, and he posted on this forum what Satoshi was literally the four for something day. log file, which is a file that saves everything that happens, right? This is not new. This was known. Other people wrote about this, and I you could download it still today. And when I started looking at that file. I've realized that actually no one actually really looked at what the files means, and I went line by line, line by line. And when I saw there's two other other people also sorry there you could also see Satoshi's clearnet IP, and we'll probably get into this a bit more in depth and whatever.

Alex Waltz ⋮ But you can see there other two nodes, and when I saw the two other nodes there, which again this is undeniable posted by Hal, this is there's nothing speculative about this part. You can see it there. And when I saw that, I mean I couldn't believe it. I was like oh my god! I was like grazie a Dio yes! I started jumping around. I was you know I was bowing to the ground and. I was just so happy. And I mean, I know I'm kind of rambling right now, but like, uh, there's just so much to it. And the— that's kind of when I was like, all right, let's just see where this goes deeper.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And there was obviously more.

Marty Bent [4:20] Yeah. I mean, and so let's get into it. I think timeline's important and maybe we can pull in why understanding this is important just for the, the broader context of Bitcoin and maybe some misconceptions about who launched it or whether or not it was an NSA project, but I think we can get to that at the end. But jumping in, starting with block 1, timestamping VMM pool, that's base API. You've caught that at January 9th, 2009. And then I think that's where the big sort of mystery unravels is between that block and block 78, to block 309, which were produced between January 11th and January 13th. So you have 2 days of Bitcoin operating essentially. And that's another thing, people have the Times of London headline in the genesis block, which was January 3rd. But what many other people don't realize is that the network was up and running consistently on that date.

Alex Waltz [5:26] Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm not sure if you want me to address specifically something or I mean, what was the misconception people thought?

Marty Bent [5:39] How was one and like what within the debug file?

Alex Waltz [5:42] I mean, oh yeah, well, so the thing is like when I saw those things there, so I opened the file and you could see, so the way Bitcoin worked back then. When Satoshi launched it, so as we all know, a Bitcoin node is peer-to-peer, which means it needs to connect to other nodes. But before you connect to other nodes, you need to find them somewhere, right? " What does it mean? An IRC channel for your younger audience is more—it used to be like a Telegram group or a group chat that was just more bare bones, and you connect to the server directly, and you could just chat there.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And that's what Satoshi did. He created a group chat, literally, that was called #Bitcoin, and it was hardcoded in the nodes there. So when your node starts up and connects to the internet, you would connect to this IRC server, and then you would go in the lobby there, and you would start being— you would start creating a username, which will probably go in the name, how that is created, which is very important also. But you can— it's mostly random. It looks like it's random, and it looks like a Bitcoin address. It uses the same Stuff that you generate Bitcoin addresses with, which is also very important, which is why we call Bitcoin addresses addresses.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So you can see it's a you can tell it's a username, and then there were two other usernames there. And these usernames, the way it constructs them, it's like I did say I claim it's random a second ago, but it's not completely random because the way it is actually structured is that they take the your Bitcoin sorry you join the the channel and now you are you have to construct your own username and register with this thing. And your node will do this by default. 9 blah, blah, blah. 6 point whatever, 2 dots colon 81084. And well, it takes these things actually, that's kind of it actually.

Alex Waltz ⋮ It takes those things and it converts them in base 58. What is base 58? I mean, if you look at a Bitcoin address, even though it looks random, you could tell it's a Bitcoin address. something specific about it looks a certain way. So what it does, it just eliminates lookalike characters mostly, pretty much, right? And well, there's some other stuff also, which maybe we'll go into. But you have this function which you take like a public key, which is a bit bigger and messier and whatever. And then you do some other stuff, you do the checksum and whatever, and then you apply this prettify function, you make it a bit more prettier, right?

Alex Waltz ⋮ So Satoshi takes these IP addresses, and so you take these IP addresses and whatever, and that's how you get the username. So now, the reason why this is important is because, well, since we know the usernames are constructed in a certain way deterministically, we can actually figure out what the username means because they're not quite random and they have other information. I forgot to mention one thing. So they do take the IP address and whatever, but there's one more thing that it does. If your node is connected via Tor for some reason, it will actually have an X in front of it and then the other letters are going to be random.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Why? Well, because there's no IP address with a Tor. You could have an IP, but practically speaking, there's no IP address belonging to you. So it's like, well, just add some jumbled numbers. So now we can see there how Hal generated his username, which he did this thing that we mentioned. He takes his IP and whatever. And we know Hal's IP address because they were public. And then you can see 2 other nodes. One has this X in front of it, which is whatever, blah, blah, blah. And then there's another username that has an symbol, the email sign in front of it. The symbol on IRC means that you are the operator of the channel.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So already just by looking here, you see those usernames and they leak so much information that you can get, again, provable information, not speculative. And I also like in the article, I had to read the old sources of Bitcoin. I mean, that was so fucking fun because you have to read the old sources of Bitcoin Core and understand how this thing is done. And it was kind of crazy. And by the way, there's this GitHub repository that Jeremy Rubin shout out to Jeremy Rubin, boy genius. He actually looked at this like about I don't know a few years ago, and he added comments and stuff like that.

Alex Waltz ⋮ You know, so that was really helpful for me anyway. So anyway, so now you you have this debug file. You have these free usernames. They're only free. One of them we know is hell. One of them, it's a Tor node, which we don't know zilch about. And then the other one, there's this node that's the operator. Who would be the operator of the channel if not Satoshi? I mean, right? Let's be serious. But also, so we know Hal's IP. So that means we know how he generated a username. We can do the math and we can see generated username. So we can be certain we have this Tor node we know nothing about anymore.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And now we have this operator node, but we don't know his IP. Well, if you actually scroll up a bit more in the debug file, you also see the IP. So now we can take this IP of the operator node, we convert it in this thing and they all match. So even from this alone, it's like, again, it was something that no one ever talked about. And this is, again, there's no speculation because we trust that Hal updated a real file there. We can still download it today and we can inspect it for ourselves. So this was, again, this was the first thing and the first part.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And this was kind of like, wow, this is quite interesting. But also, and I'll shut up and You can feel free to push us in any direction you want. I also forgot to mention that as I'm doing this stuff, I also gathered every single digital artifact that exists from that time, like emails, anything you could imagine. I convert them all to the same time zone, UTC, because just to make it the same, you know? And I also like keep track of the time zones in each email and whatever what has. And then, and also email, sorry, by emails I mean private emails Hal had with Satoshi, which he made public later on, but also public emails on the cryptography mailing list and also the P2P Foundation and other— even the Cypherpunk mailing list.

Alex Waltz ⋮ But the last 2 I didn't really mention because there wasn't much activity. So now that I know there's only 2 nodes and I know there's almost no activity there, you know, um, I, I was confident I'm onto something here. And I also was— and also like it confirmed what I find here. That's also very important. You find something and find something else that confirms, you know, Yeah.

Marty Bent [11:52] Let's get on to block 49. Why is block 49 so important? And it is fun just relearning how Bitcoin worked in the early days.

Alex Waltz [11:59] It's, it's nuts though. It's nuts because you kind of like, it's, I just even said there that there, it's like, it's, this is the way you can see how you can feel how that was, you know, and you can trace it with code and stuff like that. Block 49. Yes. I forgot to mention this. So the, um, the, the, the, before we had this stuff in the debug file that I just said with the nodes and whatever, So when there's a debug file, you see the history of what the node did there. So the first thing a node does there— no, sorry. It does connect to the IRC.

Alex Waltz ⋮ It finds one of these peers, it tries to connect to it, and then it says to one of those nodes, hey, how far are you in the blockchain? And give me the block headers. The block headers, not the blocks yet. What does this mean? It's kind of like just the import. It's just the short version of the block, just like the main fields and stuff like that. So the Hal's node was like, hey, how far are you? Give me all the headers. And the reason why this is important, they're not blocks and headers, because we know they were easy to transmit, right? So it wasn't like an internet interruption or something like this, right?

Alex Waltz ⋮ So now we see in Hal's debug file, he gets a list of all the blocks from 0 or maybe to 1. I don't think they got 0, right? Because it was hardcoded. Yeah, from 1. And it goes all the way down to the block 49. And we have the first character of the hash. Right? So when you see this thing, you're like, oh my God, this is as far as this. I think the correct, the absolute correct thing to claim would be this is as far as that node went on the blockchain. But practically speaking, that's as far as the blockchain was going, right? So now you can also see like this is when hell entered.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So now the yes, of course it makes sense now. So now you're kind of thinking like, oh, block 49. Well, why isn't it block zero or whatever? And that's when the emails came in handy because another very important thing, and I know I feel like I'm jumping all over the place, but I promise you it's in the correct chronology in the article as things happen. But the thing is that in 2014, Hal, before he died, he shared his private correspondence with Satoshi. And he did this once with the Wall Street Um, uh, reporter. And then he did it with some— then after he died, some other reporter from CoinDesk that got some, some few other emails.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And, um, uh, his, uh, his wife authenticated and says those emails are sure. So now we also have some private correspondence from Satoshi to, to Hal, which we— one of them were submitted by Hal. We're gonna Operate on the assumption he was not lying, and the others by the wife, which again I think we should operate. Well, I'm going to operate at least. You do whatever you want. I'm going to operate under the assumption that they are truthful. And now we have these private emails, and now we if we look at these emails, we can actually see that initially Satoshi posts on the cipher on the cryptography mailing list, and people get you know whatever.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Halley's the only one that likes it. A bit more time passes, but then when Satoshi actually launches the the Bitcoin again, the white paper was launched in 2008. Early 2008, and then the Bitcoin was like 8th January. I don't know my.

Marty Bent [15:11] I think it's the Genesis block was the third, and then depending on time, it was like the eighth or ninth, right? Depending on time zone, was like the first block, block one.

Alex Waltz [15:22] Absolutely, absolutely, exactly. Yeah, yeah, but but it's around the eighth, so there was a bit of time. And and then when Satoshi actually announced the the the client on the bit on the cryptography mailing list. Since literally Hal was the only one who kind of liked this thing, he obviously sent it to him and he said, "By the way, I launched this thing. " Then he goes like, "I'll take a look at it over the weekend," which already this was. By the way, I'm sure a lot of people know about this. Take a look over at the weekend because I've seen the shirt around. But when you again now we have another source that confirms like oh so Bitcoin started mining in block one when he makes the announcement and whatever and all these things.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And then he sends this email. So he's already getting late. So by the time he looks at it, I think this was like a Thursday in California PST time. And by the time he gets to look at it over the weekend, it gets to block 49. And when he does do this, it crashes because as we'll see, there were like— it just didn't work and whatever. So now we have a confirmation because we see block 49. We can look at the time when he sent the email and whatever. And now we have another thing. So this was the first part, which I was like, oh my God, this is insane.

Alex Waltz ⋮ This is nuts. I cannot believe it. I just couldn't believe it. There were a few days when I just thought there's something I'm missing because there's no way. It's too easy. That's why it was, it was just too easy to figure it out.

Marty Bent [16:43] Bam. And Hal's node crashed when he originally tried to connect to the network because of the Tor node, right? There was some intricacies around how to interact with the Tor node that It wasn't that.

Alex Waltz [16:56] It was just that— so Satoshi, and he says this in the email, he did all the tests he can, but you know how it is when you do testing, then you have launch day. He— it was just some weird error, and, um, no nodes work, not just the Tor ones. None of them work. Um, so, so yeah.

Marty Bent [17:12] Okay, so what, what was the do not mine unless connected to a peer rule? Didn't that shape of your conclusion?

Alex Waltz [17:21] Yes, yes, yes, he did.

Marty Bent [17:22] Um, oh, so this, this comes to the interaction between the Satoshi node that you're assuming is the, the IP, because he's the operator of the IRC channel, and the Tor node, um, which was the first 2 nodes that were in the IRC channel before Hal joined. And so there's, uh, he couldn't have mined unless he had another peer on the network, right?

Alex Waltz [17:44] Yes. So what Marty is trying to say here, um, is that I mean, this is also kind of— this is fairly a known thing. And I mean, I even wrote about this in the past at some point. But what Martin's trying to say here is like, so when Satoshi made a Bitcoin client, he had this condition where he said, if you are on the internet, don't start mining straight away. You need to have at least one peer connected to you. Either he connects to you because you have to have one peer connected. Let's leave it at this for now. You have to have one peer connected to you.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And if you're just alone, solo on the network and you don't have anyone connected to you, Do not mine. And the reason why he may he added this, I mean, it's pretty obvious this is why he had is like let's just say we both connect right now on the internet download Bitcoin, but just because maybe there's a bit of lag or something, we have some problems and we don't yet connect to to each other as fast. So now you start mining on your own block, I start mining on my own block, and then we meet each other and we have a fork. So that's why this this this rule was out there.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And I know I think I may have even claimed this in the past, and people speculated it was to avoid pre-mining and stuff like that. I don't think so. I mean. I don't think anyone cared about it really.

Marty Bent [18:49] It was more coordination to make sure there weren't no forks.

Alex Waltz [18:53] Absolutely. I think that it seems very obvious to me that's the reason.

Marty Bent [18:57] Well, so let's dive into this Tor node more.

Alex Waltz [19:00] Sorry, one second before. So, because you actually had a really good point bringing this up, right? So why is this important? Because now, so now getting back to the initial thing, it's like, so we have this debug file, we know there are HAL joins and there are 2 other nodes there. Now the question is, but why would there be another node there? Why would there be a Tor node? This is like, well, if there wasn't this Tor node or there was just another node, Bitcoin should have been to block 0, or what could have happened? Maybe there were other nodes and maybe they left. That also could have happened.

Alex Waltz ⋮ There were 2 other nodes before they started the chain and then left, but that's not what happened. We know for a fact at that point there were 2 nodes, and it seems like maybe there were others, maybe some came in and left, but at least because there was that Tor node, This confirms that that's why, at least that's why Bitcoin was invented.

Marty Bent [19:45] Sorry, I cut you off. What are your thoughts behind the Tor node?

Alex Waltz [19:50] Well, the thing is, like, now I'm kind of like, I have this, this thing and I figure it out and I'm like, you know, it's quite interesting and whatever. And, um, I, I kind of like started going on a— I, I couldn't find any more stuff from, from back then, you know. Um, so I'm just scrolling through the article because I feel like we kind of went over the place. Should have went chronological. But anyway, um, well, the thing is, like, at this point I'm like, I can't believe I made this stuff. This is fucking nuts. This is incredible. This is whatever. Um, and might I want to say, I'm not going to give names, but I will tell you this.

Alex Waltz ⋮ I sent it to some people and they shit on me so fucking hard, man. They shit on me. They, they said, this is bullshit. What you call this fucking piece of shit? These are not discoveries, whatever. But, you know, again, I won. So, you know, I'll see you in the history books, you pieces of shit. Um, so the thing— but, but, but think about it. And I do want to mention this because I find this thing out, I don't want to share with someone, I give it some people, and again, I know it's real at this point, and they're just giving me shit. And I will tell you this, I know this is very pity, but I'm a very fucking pity person.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And they gave me some shit, and I— and that's when I knew, when that happened, I said like, oh, okay, all right, fine. My life becomes about this. I'll make the video, I'll make everything. We'll see what happens. But so now I'm filled with anger, you know, in my soul, in my mind. And I want to get vindicted. And I said, I need to fucking come up with something just to fucking shove in these people's face. And, um, but I didn't have any more leads, right? Because I looked at the emails, I looked at all the things that everyone knows, and I just couldn't find anything else.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Then I remember Dustin Trammell, and I'm sure a lot of people that are somewhat, um, involved in Bitcoin and whatever know who Dustin Trammell is. He's a Bitcoin VC, and he's been around for like a lot of times. And I remember around when actually was that? 2000, 2000. Oh, in 2021, I think, or maybe the first one was 2018. He makes a tweet and he says, guys, I think I was the the first Bitcoin miner, and I think I was the the sorry. I think I was the second Bitcoin node, and I think I may have even beaten Hal. And the thing is like. He makes this this tweet and he claims this, and then he he he posts all this again.

Alex Waltz ⋮ It's linked in the article. Everything we're talking about here, go see it in the article. It's explained every all the assumption. Everything can find everything on it. So I remembered this tweet, and then and then just to like you know just not have empty words or whatever, he he also posted. A proof that he mined that block. So the thing is like this in Bitcoin. I'm sure everyone knows that the blockchain is a chain of digital signatures. What is a digital signature? A digital signature. So you have a private key, you have a secret that belongs to you, and then a digital signature does some mathematical operations which are more simpler than you think actually.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And the and the output of that could prove to to someone from the exterior that you actually own this this public key and well you own the public key. And the private key, which you don't share without actually revealing the private key, right? That's that's the main thing. That's what a signature does, and that's what Bitcoin works on. And I'm maybe sounds overcomplicated. I know everyone understands what a signature is, but the the reason why I'm explaining this is because you can use this signature to prove any other things. It's almost like you can you can sign anything. So if you if any data is signed by this private key, you can say oh it belongs to this private key.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So you can also do this with random text, first of all, right? And the reason you might do this, so you might make a Bitcoin transaction where, I don't know, maybe you donated to a cause you want to like brag about. People are like, well, I don't believe that you, anyone could claim you prove the signature. It's 100%. There's no denying. There's no nothing. You can't really say anything about it at this point. You know? Um, so he was like, well, I claimed I mined a block. I mined block. I mined an early block. I have to do the, the, I have to prove this thing.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And he posts the proof there and you can use Bitcoin Core. And you can verify the proof and it's true. So Dustin Trammell, from this proof that he pointed here, we know for a fact that he mined block, which, what was it again? 309. Yes. So, so yeah, sorry. So he posted 2 proofs actually. He posted a proof that he mined block 78. Am I right on 78? I really don't want to, like, people are going to be crazy in the comments.

Marty Bent [24:23] Yeah, seventy-eight.

Alex Waltz [24:25] Seventy-eight and three oh nine. All right. So so he he when he makes the proofs, he he makes he shows to prove that he mined block seventy-eight and block three oh nine. Now the interesting part is like the block seventy-eight which he mined. He said that those current those coins are unconfirmed. Maybe you can take that sus, but that's that's what he said. But the proof still verified, but it's just that we can't see the coins on chain. But then block 309, it's still today. We can still inspect it and whatever. So now I'm looking at this stuff here and now this kind of like another thing fell in my lap because I was like, oh my God, now by just by incidentally, I also solved the problem and the question with like what happened with Dustin because we know we have block 49 from Hal's debug file.

Alex Waltz ⋮ We know Dustin may have, Uh, mine block 78, but certainly has block 309. So we, we kind of know this for a fact. And, um, okay, this is interesting, but it's not really like pushing me in, in the right direction. So what, what else could I do right now, you know? Um, and I also should— I also forgot to mention that there's also this other article where Hal at some point shared a pretty— or almost close to him dying, he shares this screenshot of his Bitcoin wallet where We're not a reporter. So now, and there we can see the first block that Hal mined, which was—

Marty Bent [25:51] Block 170, or no, that was the first transaction I guess he received.

Alex Waltz [25:57] Okay. Wait, I'm so sorry. So correction. So Dustin Trammell mined block 76 is the one that wasn't confirmed, and 309 is the one that is confirmed. And now Hal, in this article, mined block 78, which we can still see here and whatever, and we can see in this wallet, so we can be fairly certain. So now there's also quite interesting because— so maybe, maybe Dustin was before him by 2 blocks, but we can't prove it, you know. So, um, uh, where were we going at this?

Marty Bent [26:36] Uh, it started with the Tor node. Do we get back to the Tor node?

Alex Waltz [26:39] Oh yeah, so yeah, so so I looked at um at we were at we left off at Dustin. So I look at Dustin's stuff, and this is all great. Another discovery. Grazie a Dio, grazie. You know, I'm going crazy. I'm doing this underground, you know, and um but this didn't really help the investigation, and I just couldn't come up with any idea of where to look for data anymore, and I just needed more data. And um I also like I I kind of figured that there's there isn't going to be any data to find because They just—you could tell from the emails on the cryptography mailing list there wasn't anything left.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Then I'm just sitting there, you know, and also as it's dramatizing the movie, maybe not as dramatic with the lighting and whatnot, but it was pretty much that. I'm just sitting there and I'm like, "Dude, why don't fuck when I just look at a blockchain? Maybe I'll find something there," you know. So I took the the first blocks and I started looking around, and I'm seeing when I look. Let me just pull this up here. So I took all the blocks from up to block 49, and I started looking around there, and I looked at the times, and I'm like, dude, there's one instance from block 14 to 15 where there's 24 hours and 12 minutes between blocks.

Alex Waltz ⋮ There's another one which is 30 minutes, statistically probable, but still worth looking at. And there's another one that's 8 hours and 34 minutes. So now I'm like, ah, I think I want something here. There has to be something. There's so much stuff that doesn't fall into place. Another one. So why don't we look here? So then I started looking around even more, and I took this all the way to block 170. Sure, we should have said this is actually well known and well established, which is actually exactly what you hinted at earlier, that there is the famous transaction that Hell sent that Satoshi sent to hell, and this was at block 170, and it's the first Bitcoin transaction.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So I was like, ah, let me just let me just try to see what's happening up until there. So now I look at all the blocks, and I'm like, whoa! I there's like eight instances where there are big time blocks between time gap between blocks. Bitcoin is not working, which we know from here. There's all this weird fuzziness going on here, and I'm like, oh man, this ha there's no way this is not connected. There's no way this is a coincidence, but like how the fuck can I figure out? I so now now I found um I found the um sounds suspicious, but now I need another one.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So like what how I just I just spent so much time because like there's no way I could get more from the blockchain. How could I possibly get more from the blockchain? I'm looking at the blockchain, and then again after I spent a bit more time and prayed to God and whatever, and you know when fuck. retard, I realized, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's that guy, Sergio Demian Lerner, that estimated how much money Bitcoin Satoshi has. And you may think, well, what does this have to do with everything? Well, the way he does it, he actually looks at some other parts of the data, which I was mistaken, in the blockchain.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And that's how he managed to figure out how Satoshi mined blocks. Now, here's the thing. He didn't really figure out how much Bitcoin Satoshi mined. What he did the conclusion that comes from what he looks at is like, you have a group of blocks and this seems to be mined by a single entity. Well, that's exactly what I'm looking for here. I'm looking to find a way to group blocks to draw the conclusion if there's an entity or another entity. So yeah.

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Alex Waltz [32:53] Well, that is where it gets, right? But, but, but I didn't know that. I didn't even dare to suspect that at this point, right? So now I'm looking at this stuff, I have this data. I was like, shit, let's do the Satoshi pattern. So we need to bring a bit of context here on how Bitcoin mining works. So I know, I'm more than certain any one of the listeners is familiar and knows that the Bitcoin mining is just a big lottery and you have to try a lot of numbers until you get lucky, right? The thing is, when you hash something, and this may sound very counterintuitive, every output has the exact mathematical probability of being valid.

Alex Waltz ⋮ If you sit down and you do a block by hand right now, you have the exact same chance as another miner. That's why people are talking about the bid axes and all these things. The only reason the miners make more money, they just try more times than you. That's really what it is. It's just pure dumb luck. There's nothing you can do to game or whatever. That's how mining works. But the thing is like, okay, great, but now we need to look specifically what that actually happens. So what happens is that you're a miner, you get some transactions, you make the block header, which you say, this is block number whatever, it was mined here, Some other things.

Alex Waltz ⋮ I'm hand waving a lot, and then you have to put the transactions in order, and you hash them. And and is this block valid or not? I'm sorry. I should have also clarified the the way the mechanism works. What draws the well, sorry. I'm sorry. Let me backtrack again. So you you take them. You take this transaction. You you have the header. You put a transaction there, and then you hash them all, and you get a number. All right. And then you you can submit this to the Bitcoin network. And the Bitcoin network needs to tell if this is a valid block or not. What makes this block valid or not?

Alex Waltz ⋮ Well, anything you have on a computer pretty much can be translated to a number, right? And the thing is that we want— so the thing is you have this process that is random that you could have, that could be any number and whatever. Then you have this number, you can set a number here and you can say, well, if this is below this threshold, this is valid, or this is— if this is, um, you have this number and you want— sorry, you have the number that draws the validity, and then you have the hash. And then you can say if the hash is bigger than the number, it's valid.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And if the hash is smaller than the number, it's valid. Now, if you, if you have the valid number very small, look at all this gap here. There's so much valid numbers, right? But if you actually make the numbers smaller, smaller, smaller, like if you made the number 10, well, there's only 10 possible outcomes out of literally all the numbers. Well, it's not all the numbers, but it's 2 to the 32 minus 1. But But pretty much, and I'm sure at this point everyone goes like, whoa. Well, that's what makes it difficult is the smaller you make this number, the less number there are. And the reason we have this mechanism, and Satoshi came up with this, which is truly probably the only thing that actually he did invent in this Bitcoin stuff, everything was used, is he figured out a way the more people come in, we have to make it harder.

Alex Waltz ⋮ How? You just make this number smaller. But that's how mining works. And so, so I so you you take the block, you put the transactions there, you start hashing them, and probably the first time you're going to hash them, this is not going to be it's not going to be in the target there unless you're extremely lucky. And and Satoshi realizes and says like well let's just add a counter here which you just literally increment. You go tick tick tick tick and you can try these things right. And this this counter in the block it's called the nonce. I'm sure a lot of people heard of this nonce means number used once.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And the single purpose of this number is just so you can have lotto tickets pretty much, so you can keep iterating, iterating. Now, this number here is 2 to the power of 32, which even though may seem a very big number, it's not. And because of statistical variations and other things and the distribution of— well, distribution of luck pretty much, you could absolutely— because this is a strictly purely random process, You could go for the full range of these numbers and you're just not going to get lucky. It's not enough. So you have to try one more time. And Satoshi knew this also. And he said, well, you can go for all these numbers from 1 to the power of 2 to the 32.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And if you don't have another one, we just have a second number here, which you increment. And because another very important thing with a hash, if you change one small minute thing anywhere, it changes the whole output completely. So now you already went through all the options. You can go from 1 to the power of 32. So you have a second number, you tweak this, and you just get a fresh new set of numbers. Quite simple, quite brutal, but quite elegant. Now, the first number that I'm talking about, you can see it in the block header. space or wherever, you'll see there is this— well, actually it's called bits, but that's the nonce.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And equivalent is kind of the same thing. But the extra nonce is kind of a hack The extra nonce because you're the miner, and when you're the miner, you create all this transaction. You create a coinbase, and in the coinbase, you pay yourself. And Satoshi was like, "Well, just tweak a random fucking number here. " This is again from first day, right? So Sergio Demolerno, which I mean the guy to come up with this fucking idea. in 2000, I don't know, '13, wherever it was, because everyone looked at this. But to look at, at the second number that you tweak and be like, you know what, I think we can extract something from here.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So what ended up happening, this second number that you— so not the nonce, the nonce is 1 from 2 to the power of 42, and it's, it's just really random. But the second tweaked number here, this has a bug. Satoshi fucked up when he implemented this thing. All right? So you would be thinking to yourself, well, this makes pretty much sense. You're a miner, you start mining 1 from 2 to the power of 42. You go for it. You start from 1, you make it 2, and now you go again. Maybe you go 3 times, 5 times, but then let's just say it takes you 5 times.

Alex Waltz ⋮ These numbers are just— they don't reflect reality, by the way, just to be clear. So you do that 5 times, you found the block. Really makes sense to reset this thing and start from zero like a respectable gentleman, right? And the thing is, Satoshi, when he implemented his Bitcoin mining, he made some small mistakes and this number doesn't reset, right? Even though this number should reset, it only resets when you turn off your node on and off. Let me just pull this bit of code here. Right. So you would expect this number to reset, but it doesn't reset. So now if you turn on your node and you start mining, And this number doesn't reset.

Alex Waltz ⋮ This number just became an uptime counter, right? It's just like, so how long has this guy been mining from? Well, as long as his extra nonce was on, and the extra nonce is on the block in the coinbase. So now you have this as a as a as a counter. Now the thing is that there's like a few things to understand here. I'm not sure if like it makes sense to really like explain it, but the thing is like. It not only doesn't reset after this thing, but it also increments when it checks for a block. What does this mean? So you are a miner and you're mining, you're doing your own business, but as you are trying to— as you're mining and you're constructing this new block with this new nonce, you have to check, is this valid?

Alex Waltz ⋮ Is this below the hash? So because again, it was just like where he placed the function to— well, it's a while loop, it's not a function— to check this thing, He just made such a small error, it just triggers it more times. So the extra nonce counter doesn't reset when you find a block, and it also increments when you look for blocks. So not only that it doesn't reset and it tells you how long this node has been online, it also does it at some kind of a random thing. So it makes it like a fingerprint, makes it even more identifiable and whatever. Now, I should be very clear here that And this was pretty much the criticism that a lot of people threw at the Satoshi pattern, which I don't 100% agree with, but it is somewhat valid.

Alex Waltz ⋮ It's like, right, but if you have tens of thousands of miners, which the Satoshi pattern focuses on a bit lower period, other things could happen. There's statistical anomalies and whatever, so maybe you shouldn't be too sure of this. Well, who cares? Who gives a fuck? Because for me, I know at block 49, there's only 3 fucking people. One of them couldn't get it up, can't get the node up. Uh, Hafini is what I'm talking about. And, um, and, and there's 2 other nodes, like the chance of having more nodes. Let's just say maybe there's 5 more that came up and whatever. Get outta here. Forget about it.

Alex Waltz ⋮ There's no way. There's no way that happened, you know? So for me, this analysis and this logic, it's like sent from heaven because guess what? I have almost no noise here. So I could start drawing, I could start looking at and draw my conclusions. And, um, so I did. Let me just take a sip because I just ranted for such a long time.

Marty Bent [41:47] No, it's a good refresher on the difficulty target nonsense, extra nonsense, and the fact that Satoshi was fallible in the beginning, launching with this bug, this hardcoded bug.

Alex Waltz [42:00] I mean, he was so fucking fallible. So fallible. And he said the word retarded, which counts for something. Is there any way by which we can add this This picture on the screen because I think I would be able to share if you hit share. Oh my God! Share my browser. I think it's okay.

Marty Bent [42:24] Just send me the link. I'll pull it up. Is here to convince me to have unprotected sex, which you didn't convince me. Bitcoinminer.com.

Alex Waltz [42:35] So I send it here in the in the in the thing. And then this other one also. Oops. Well, all right. So where we're looking at, we have the— we have a chart here, which is— I'm telling you, it's way more simpler than you actually think it is. So on the horizontal, all x-axis, we take blocks. So the number there means that if you go at 50, that's block 50. It goes to 0 to 200. We're focusing on the spirit because we know block 170 is when we know how many transactions. So we'll just focus on the spirit. And then on the y-axis, on the other thing there, we're just charting this value, this value of the counter, the extranance, the second counter that I was talking about, right?

Alex Waltz ⋮ And the thing is, remember, what happens here is that this number goes up All the time, right? And it tells us how much how much it goes up. And the thing is, like when it resets, we know for a fact it only resets in this particular version of Bitcoin code. It only resets when you turn off your node. Like if you turn it off and then turn it on, that doesn't get saved anymore in the memory and gets resetted. So every time we see we see sorry. So we have all these like so so a blue dot here on the chart. If you look there, and it's like around 50 and 50, because you can see it there.

Alex Waltz ⋮ That means at block 50, there was an extra announce of the value 50, right? That's what this means. So now we can kind of see that they form these kind of squiggly things that go like this, and then they're kind of grouped a bit more. You can already see there's some kind of a grouping or something like this. And the thing is, this is the way we interpret this. So the number starts from 0 at the bottom and it goes up, it goes up, it goes up, it goes up, and then Nothing happens, and then we see it starts another line. So that means that the no reset.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Sorry, you were going to say? No, no.

Marty Bent [44:33] So I was going to pull up the other chart, which I think highlights.

Alex Waltz [44:36] Let's leave this one for for a bit more because I think there's a bit more to clarify here. Okay. Right. So the thing is like the we can see the reason these grouping groupings form is because again at some point the chart goes up, but then it starts from zero. So if we know the number starts, the second counter, the extra nonce number goes to 0 only when a node resets. And now here's another thing to understand. Well, if you have the groupings and it goes from 1 to 2, that could be really lucky because all nodes start from 0, all nodes go to 1, right?

Alex Waltz ⋮ But the thing is, as each number you add, it's less likely to be a random occurrence, right? It just makes sense. It's like if you have one random event, And you're like one. Okay, it's like if the more coin flips you do, the harder is to guess. You know what I'm trying to say? So not only that, this means that the so the the bigger this this this thing goes, the cert the more certain we are because it's like really what is the chance someone is going to go up to two hundred? Come on, let's be honest. On a smaller one, yeah, you know you can't be sure.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So this is so just by looking here, we can see that oh wait a minute, this is quite interesting because we see we kind of see these groupings here. So We don't know if they're all the same node, but we can say maybe, maybe one third like that with the red thing. I think that's, I think that's a node, you know?

Marty Bent [46:02] Yeah, yeah. Again, going back to the probabilistic chance of different nodes having consecutive higher extra nonce numbers is, is very low, particularly at this point in time in Bitcoin's history.

Alex Waltz [46:16] Absolutely.

Marty Bent [46:16] And so we're assuming, looking at— if you're looking at the screen, if you're not looking, we're looking at the Satoshi pattern. And you basically just assume that Satoshi mined all these blocks that we're highlighting here, or one entity did.

Alex Waltz [46:29] Not yet. Not yet. We're saying one entity mined at least one-third. That's for now. For now. But yes, of course we're going to get there. But that's where we are right now in the story. That's all we can claim for what we have, from what we have.

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Marty Bent ⋮ Yes, please. So now we have Included context here, which gets back to the fact that the, uh, the network was halted or may have been halted 8 times based off the time analysis that you did on the first, what, 170 blocks?

Alex Waltz [49:16] Yeah. So the thing is like, so now, uh, this is pretty much the same chart. It's just a bit more elongated. And, uh, you know, the, the earlier chart was just more obvious that to point out the groupings, right? So every time we see, we go from, from, um, so, so now we have these groupings and I was like, you know what's so interesting? Because remember I found the big time gaps, right? So now I'm just looking at this thing and I was like, oh man, wouldn't it be so strange if somehow there would be some alignment between when this thing, when this event of node reset happens and the times?

Alex Waltz ⋮ And I look at it and I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is nuts. It actually happens almost every single time with 2 exceptions, and those exceptions actually help our case. We'll see later. Every single time the node resets, so it goes from top to down, there's a big time gap between blocks. So we know that's an event that means the node resets, and then we see a big time gap between blocks. Oh, this means whoever is mining this stuff is turning off their node. That's why there's no more blocks to be produced. And now you're going to be like, yeah, sure. I mean, maybe there was internet or whatever, right?

Alex Waltz ⋮ But the reason why I'm so certain it's turning off, because you can look at all the other time gaps and be like, maybe, I don't know, whatever. But it's like when it's 24 hours, clearly that person turned off their node. There was no one left to get online and no one mined any blocks. And so the 24 and the 8 hours one, I mean, I don't think anyone could argue with me, right? Now there's another 2-hour and 45-minute one, also the same. And there's a 3-hour one and there's a few like 30 and 44 minutes. And you're right, that would be statistically sound, but it's statistically sound to have some of them but not to have so many.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Right. So when I looked at this, I'm like, oh my God, this is kind of interesting because this kind of means there was just no one here and the network halted 8 times. And this, I mean, again, it's just feels so together to not make any sense. So, yeah.

Marty Bent [51:17] And so this is where it ties into the Tor node, right?

Alex Waltz [51:20] Right. The Tor node. Exactly. I forgot about— so now, because that's why we started on this whole fucking thing. So now I'm looking at this thing and I'm just kind of thinking to myself, well, we know for a fact there weren't that many people around here on the network as the first thing. And then we know that we have this condition and we need Two people to mine, two nodes, two nodes at least to mine on the network. That being said, you could have like opened the code and changed that. However, I doubt it. And and here's the thing why I doubt it because even Satoshi had trouble compiling the the code and make it run.

Alex Waltz ⋮ So whoever was running this was most probably like using Satoshi's code and whatever. Anyway, so we know there's like no no. We know there's very low activity. We know we have we need two nodes, and we know from how deep backfill at least at block forty nine, and there's a yellow line there. So we know at least this, this round we can be very certain. We, we know what I'm trying to get at. Sorry, I'm overexplaining right now. It's like the fucking network is halting. We know there's 2 nodes there. Jesus fucking Christ. Clearly they must be the same entity because they're too in sync, right?

Alex Waltz ⋮ They're too in sync. Like when they go out, both of them probably look like they go out, right? And here's the interesting part. There's an exception. There is an exception to where there's no big time gaps between blocks. You know where the extinction is? At block 49, when we know both of the nodes were there, right? You can see there, it's a 12-minute— all the other have big time blocks. Only these ones have 12 minutes, which is normal and whatever. And I also do a very crude statistical analysis here. And this is from block 29 to block 77. 7 minutes, which is what we're going for.

Alex Waltz ⋮ It's not a proof per se, but it actually looks like it was a healthy thing. Which again, we know this was happening in the node. So when I looked at this stuff and whatever, I was like, oh my God, I just think it's so hard to not really be like, it must have been Satoshi because Satoshi started off, he saw not even Hal was like, yeah, sure, let's jump in and whatever. He's like, dear God, if I don't have anything here on this network, it's not going to go further. People need to jump in. And also maybe they start their own Bitcoins or whatever. Let me just spin up a Tor node, you know?

Alex Waltz ⋮ And then to tie it in a bow and whatever, there's this other email that Satoshi had. So after this whole hullabaloo happens and whatever and whatnot, Satoshi writes an email to Hal and says like, dude, you were keeping the network alive. And sorry, I can't try things out right now because I'm in a place where I can't accept incoming connections. And that is what a Tor node could do, at least in the context of this node and whatever. It cannot accept incoming connections. So I was like, oh yeah, this is fucking nothing.

Marty Bent [54:07] Yeah. So he couldn't get to his clearnet node to accept incoming connections. I don't know why. Tor wouldn't have done it anyway. Is that what you're saying?

Alex Waltz [54:17] Not quite. I could have been more clear. One second. So the thing is, like, in the Bitcoin Core version 0.1, the one we're working with, you could not accept incoming connections. So Satoshi says here, Unfortunately, I can't receive incoming connections from where I am, from where I am, which has made things more difficult. Your node receiving incoming connection was the main thing keeping the network going for the first two days. So Satoshi, what I'm reading here is like where I am. So Satoshi is somewhere else where he's not home, but he's on setup. So he's probably just connecting via Tor to be private. And with Tor, you can't accept incoming connections. So it's a hint towards the fact that, again, I mean, again, what is the coincidence he mentions this when we have the Tor node and whatever?

Marty Bent [55:07] Yeah, it's fascinating. What fascinates me about how much work you put into this, some research, is that it's just like the first few days of the network going live. There's so much in this short period of time, the 72 to 96 hour period, that I mean, you articulated it in the video and in the article, so much rested on this early interaction with the Bitcoin network.

Alex Waltz [55:33] Yes. And the thing is, like, in most of those— by the way, so we didn't really touch this, but most of the emails with Satoshi and Hal, Hal says this doesn't work and they try to fix it and it's just hair pulling and nothing works and this doesn't work and there's one node and whatever. So dude, this thing almost barely take off. I mean, it was the most Dinkiest. It almost is like God was pushing it from behind because it's like everything that could have gone wrong went in the absolute worst way that could have gone wrong. It was a fucking shit show. And think about it like this, with all this shit show and whatever, it's Hal Feeney and Dustin Tramiel.

Alex Waltz ⋮ I don't even know what— I mean, they're probably fucking retarded or crazy or something because you have to be so retarded to look at this and to be like, you know what, man? I, I think this is— I think this deserves a chance. I think, um, I think we need to look at this. Um, well, again, we can't ask Hal. We should ask Dustin at some point because it just almost makes no sense, you know? It just— wow. Wow. That's all I can say.

Marty Bent [56:34] Yeah. Now I feel like I need to get Dustin on, if he would come on to talk about this stuff, because it's fascinating. And you, you highlighted too, you have the emails, um, sort of lining up with Satoshi sending version 0.1.1 to Hal and then him tweeting out a few hours later, running Bitcoin. And so you can tell that like the tweet sort of lines up with the back and forth email he had to try to fix the bugs and get a new version.

Alex Waltz [56:59] Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we can turn off the screen share. Um, I don't think we need it anymore or— no. Um, yeah. And also like another question that you may think, well, what if Dustin was the Tor node? Sorry, I forgot to mention Dustin also had some private conversations with Satoshi, which he also released. So I also looked at those emails in some other— for some other stuff, and he actually shares his IP address with Satoshi there. So that's why I think it's not him, and I think he even said this.

Marty Bent [57:29] So the thesis is essentially that to bootstrap the network in the early days, Satoshi had a clearnet node and a node running through Tor that were connected and mining blocks so that when other individuals join the network like Hal and Dustin, it looked like there was activity already and they could have peers and begin mining immediately to improve the user experience. So why is this important? Why is it important to know all this?

Alex Waltz [57:58] I don't— because it's cool, dude. What do you mean why it's important? It's like, why do you fall in love with a woman? Why do you go there? Why do you sometimes feel like you're like, there, that's— I have to go there. That's where it is. That's the prize. I fucking see it. I know it. That's why you do it. I mean, how could I have ever foreseen this? You know, there was no way. It just, it just, I just couldn't leave it alone. I just could not fucking leave it alone. And I was right. I mean, I'm always right. Not everyone, when they feel it, they say you're always right.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Doesn't matter what, when you just like, you know, it's, it's, it's like this tiny string that kind of like, and you have to listen to it, you know? That's why I don't, you can't, you can't have bullshit around your head because you have to listen to that, that, that tiny whisper, you know? Or maybe this is how I'm telling the world that I'm fucking crazy and retarded. It's the whisper that told me.

Marty Bent [58:45] We all are. But no, I think you made a good point in the video and in the article. I think if the thesis that you put out there is believable, which I think it certainly is, what does it debunk? Was Bitcoin created by the NSA? What was the type of person? What type of person was Satoshi?

Alex Waltz [59:02] I think that's a very good point. And yeah, I even forgot about that. That kind of came to me Later, but it was like, dude, when you see how fucked up this whole thing was, and again, how many like things were just happening wrong, I just feel like the chances of thinking this was created by the NSA—I mean, I did. You have to be really, really, really. I can't prove it, right? Because you could say, well, the NSA may have done this and whatever, but that I think that that's a bit retarded because I mean, I just feel like if you'd give me a million dollars and you would say construct the chaos like this.

Alex Waltz ⋮ I don't think you— I don't think you could do it. I really don't think so. So yeah, when you look at it, and the, the biggest— the fact that it went so bad and so poorly and nothing worked and whatever, I think this is the biggest proof that it was organic, really, you know? So yeah, and also like this whole bullshit about it was a woman— nothing against women, by the way, I'm not trying to say anything— it was, oh, maybe it's a woman, maybe it's a group of people. Dude, come on, look at this. This is some fucking guy with a laptop like you and me.

Alex Waltz ⋮ For some fucking reason, he figured this out. He put it on the internet. He was talking with some random guy on the internet and with 2 random guys on the internet. That was it. He made a fucking pet project. Come on, let's be honest. This is what happened. Well, that's the other point, too.

Marty Bent [1:00:19] Could Bitcoin have easily died in the cradle if Dustin and Hal didn't care to actually try to get it working?

Alex Waltz [1:00:26] My opinion is that, I mean, the thing is, You never know, right? But I, I just feel like— do you guys know that video? It's a very old video. There's this guy at this rave on a, on a hill, and he's dancing like this and whatever, you know?

Marty Bent [1:00:44] Mm-hmm.

Alex Waltz [1:00:44] And then there's one, the first person that comes, and the other one, and whatever, and whatnot. And it grows. And then, oh my God, it's, it's so passé to not be a part of it and do that. I just feel like that's really what it is. It's like, well, and see, the guy, the narrator says, if the second guy doesn't come, And nothing comes afterwards. So I really feel like it's hard to even put into words how important it was, not only Hal, but also Dustin equally, equally, absolutely equally, just being willing to do this and to participate there.

Marty Bent [1:01:14] I mean, I know you were focused on the first 170 blocks, but did you research how long it took for more nodes? When did Marty, Malmi join? Get beyond three people and the Tor node that we're suspecting is Satoshi.

Alex Waltz [1:01:31] Well, I haven't really looked because fucking it took a year to look at this. I don't want. So maybe the next research we'll see. But um, while Maomi came way later actually, when Maomi came, he was I I think he came before they have they had Bitcoin Talk, which wasn't even called Bitcoin Talk. It was hosted on Bitcoin Network, but it's the same interface. Um, I really don't know. I have any miners, but I don't know by by. But it was way more popular at this point. There were people talking. It had a community at that point. We can claim at least that.

Marty Bent [1:02:00] Yeah. Well, that brings up another good point. What other forensic excursions do you plan on going on or what other—

Alex Waltz [1:02:07] Oh, I have a few other things that I'm going to— I mean, I already filmed one video. It's not as big as this one. It's not as grandiose or a bit more smaller. I also figured out some very interesting— I just don't want to share them because they're not super important, but People have questions about why Satoshi made certain weird decisions in the code and whatnot. And there's so many questions on Stack Exchange and the answer is always like, you have to ask Satoshi. And I think I figured out one of this, but it doesn't change anything. I just kind of have enough context from the chaos and I'm like, oh, that's why. It was actually nothing burger. I just got traced to this part of the code. But what other thing that I want to do and whatever, I mean, I don't have any more forensic investigations, but I'm making movies, man. I'm a movie director. That's what I do. So are we wrapping up, by the way?

Marty Bent [1:02:54] No, we don't have to. We can keep going. I actually wanted to touch on that, like the art side of this, because, I mean, the production value was incredible. And I think telling these Bitcoin stories in this way, in this engaging way, is very important. And I know you've been sort of iterating on this art form within Bitcoin for years. I think the output is incredible. So just like your worldview on bringing this artistic touch to the Bitcoin world.

Alex Waltz [1:03:21] Yeah. Well, I mean, I never really think about it like that. It's going to sound so insane, but like everything I said here, but I just want to see that video. I know no one is going to make this video, never, ever in 1,000 years. And I have to see, I just need to see that. I need to see it on the screen. I don't get this bullshit about, I don't watch my stuff. Shut the fuck up. I watched it. I watched it yesterday. I watched it today. I love it. I fucking love it how good it is. And I just want to see that video.

Alex Waltz ⋮ I like it so much. I love this stuff. I can't get enough of it. Everyone that knows me in real life knows this is what I breathe every time. If I'm somewhere, I talk about Bitcoin weird things. I just want to see this thing. So I just wanted to do it like this. That's what I was thinking about. But I do kind of feel like, I don't know, we'll see where it goes, but I feel like, without sucking my own dick, fucking set a new standard, I think. I think I signed it. I think this is a new standard, if I don't say so.

Marty Bent [1:04:22] Well, good. We need to raise the standards. It's a pretty high standard. I mean, the behind-the-scenes sort of B-roll cut that you included in there, we have the camera on the track and you're pushing it towards your laptop. Took a lot of time and effort to set it up.

Alex Waltz [1:04:38] Yeah, but the thing is, like, dude, what is there else to do in life when you think about it, man? You're gonna die, dude. You're gonna die. Everything you know is gonna die. Everyone you know is gonna die. And, and the craziest part is that you can't even be sure that when you're awake this is real. I mean, just think about it. Think about how many times— I'm sure everyone can relate this— you have a dream, you think it's so sure, And it goes away.

Marty Bent [1:05:03] That happened to me this morning.

Alex Waltz [1:05:06] I don't believe you. Really?

Marty Bent [1:05:08] Yeah.

Alex Waltz [1:05:08] Are you serious?

Marty Bent [1:05:10] Yeah. I mean, I, I, I have pretty vivid dreams. Yeah.

Alex Waltz [1:05:14] Well, anyway, the point is like, that's what life could be. So the only thing you could do philosophically, if you want to be philosophically rational, is you have to pick something and go get the high score on that. That's the only thing. And it doesn't have to be staying. This is just my own retardation, which is fine, but it could be other things, you know? So the reason why it's like you have to put everything in something, when you do something, it has to be the best of all time. You owe it. You owe it to, to yourself. You owe it to whatever that you kind of, it's kind of like, like, uh, it's like you, you, you, life is like a bag of goodies. You keep taking back things.

Marty Bent [1:05:53] Yeah.

Alex Waltz [1:05:53] Only you can put something back because it's so vast and so big and such a crazy hard thing to contribute is you have to really, really, really give it everything. And even if you don't contribute something back, at least you spent your time well. So that's how I think about it anyway. It's never like the stuff I— but yes, I like to brag. I'm very braggadocious. Absolutely. And I do like this. I like to be like, ah, look how good my stuff is. Yeah. I put in the work though.

Marty Bent [1:06:16] I appreciate the confidence. We need more confident people in this world. What what movies are you working on right now? If you're allowed to elaborate, absolutely.

Alex Waltz [1:06:25] I have two movies coming out. The the one that's going to come out the next month. I don't know if it's going to be thirty or forty days. Depends. It's filmed. It's a short movie about Bitcoin Core, and it follows this fictionalized story of myself where I start. I use Bitcoin Core, and I need to verify the PGP keys. And I'm so retarded that I decide that I need to find. So when you verify the PGP keys, there are certain people that sign it. And I'm like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go across the world, take planes, and find the people to who verify the PGP key to verify the PGP key around them.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And you have in this video MZ, George Provost. You also have some few other cameos there. And it's again, it's still very jokey and whatever, but it's way more narrative. And, and, and by the way, if you like this stuff, if you want a place in history, you know what? I'm looking for sponsors in this, uh, in the, in this movie. Um, because, uh, I mean, um, well, I just, in this specific video with the thing, I really didn't want to add any sponsors because I wanted to be pure and I didn't want it tainted in any way. But I'm a businessman. I'm not a fucking priest and it costs a lot of money out of my own pocket to make these things.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Uh, so, um, I would, I would be very happy to have sponsors and your logo will be included there. And it's not going to be just the fucking logo there put It's going to be an object, as you can see at the end of the video and whatever. So if you want to do that, please hit me up. And I also have this other movie that I've been working on, which is called Satoshis Don't Exist. I started in 2023. And well, again, it was just one of those things that annoyed me. It was like, when you think about it, the Satoshi units don't exist and they're not present in the code.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And I was trying to have conversations with people like this and they were so like, you're wrong, you're stupid. I was like, can we please just look at the code? And they said, no. I was like, well, I'll make a movie about it. We'll see. And the thing is that when I started that movie, I wasn't so versed in cinematography, but I kind of got to that point and then I was like, oh, you know what? And I got some money. People were very helpful. It was absolutely cool. But I just felt like I know at this point with my own two hands, a light bulb and a camera, I can rival any Hollywood production.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Of course, not in scale or things, but I know. I mean, I know I can do that. I've done it now. So anyway, so I wanted— I feel like the Satoshi Don't Exist, because that's a proper feature film. And I also went to Azores. I filmed there and did just a lot of stuff. I wanted to really show that I'm good at cinematography. Give me a lot of money because I know this could be a great thing that's going to go all over the world. So I took all the money that I raised for that one and I made this MVP version of the Vito short movie, the How to Install Bitcoin Core.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And then I swear to God, I was ready to launch it. This whole thing started when I was ready to launch it last year. I was absolutely ready. And then this thing fell in my lap and I was like, okay, here we go. Another side quest. Let's go. I promise I'm— listen, I promise I'm not taking any side quests. And for the people, like, the movie is filmed, by the way. It's not gonna take— it's filmed. It's ready. I could release it tomorrow if we want to. I just, I just need to find some sponsorships and whatever, you know? And it's, I mean, again, just think about it as if you wanna see more content like this, uh, send me a donation or something.

Alex Waltz ⋮ Because again, it, it, it, I, you cannot imagine how hard it is and I mean, the minimum amount of takes is 50 takes. So, you know, there's, there's moments in this movie, like the beginning of the dusting thing that took 2 weeks. That's a 4-second shot. Took 2 weeks just doing it and doing it. So, you know.

Marty Bent [1:09:42] Damn. Yeah. But Alex, I was told AI's gonna take all the, uh, all the filmmaking jobs. Is this true?

Alex Waltz [1:09:50] I, I think there is truth to this because, you know, I, I, first of all, I never used AI in my stuff because I'm at a, as, as of this recording, there's no AI on the planet that could do things better than I could do with a camera and a light bulb. But it's going to change. You know what's going to happen? Here's what I predict, and I hope I'm going to be one of these people. I think we're going to have the first feature film done by a single person, and there's going to be one guy in his living room, and he's going to act out all the parts and whatever, because that's the hardest part is directing really with AI and being precise with it.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And I think there's going to be one guy in his living room acting out all the parts, and the AI will get so good at augmenting this stuff, and then you're going to see a lot of stuff like this. Uh, you know, there's Francis Ford Coppola and there's the film, the famous movie, um, uh, Apocalypse Now. And he went through hell. And, and again, he's just— I, I fucking love these stories. I like it when someone just tells the world you're wrong and everyone just tries to fucking bash him and then he wins. But the thing is like, and that being said, collaboration is really good.

Alex Waltz ⋮ And it's not like I'm, I'm trying to say like, that's always better, but sometimes you can just eliminate The people you don't really need there, and they're just trying to bring the vision down, and they don't believe in it. And you just eliminate overhead, and we're going to get better, better everything for that. You know?

Marty Bent [1:11:03] Yeah. I love to hear it. I love to see you making this art because I'm putting these short films and feature films out. Very much looking forward to what you release next month. What are they called?

Alex Waltz [1:11:16] What are they about? What are they called? What are they about?

Marty Bent [1:11:19] I'm talking about you. I said I love that you're making them.

Alex Waltz [1:11:21] Oh, sorry.

Marty Bent [1:11:21] Because like I said, we need to elevate the aesthetics and the attention to detail when it comes to storytelling within Bitcoin. I think your First Bitcoin Miner short film is what I'd call it, or exposé. I don't know what you're calling it, but that's what I view it as. It was beautifully done.

Alex Waltz [1:11:42] Thank you.

Marty Bent [1:11:43] Engaging and Highly educational. So thank you for doing it, brother.

Alex Waltz [1:11:46] No, thank you for watching, man. And I mean, I just couldn't be more happy, you know, because I will tell, like, there was some time— because here's the thing, I knew this was good. I knew I had Lightning in a Bottle. And I— if there's something in my control, there's not an ounce of doubt I will fucking find a way and I'll find it. It never happens that I know I can make that. There's nothing that'll get in my way to get the vision that I have. It never did. Of course, I kick and cry along the way, but then scream, but, but I get there eventually, you know.

Alex Waltz ⋮ But the thing that you can't control is how people react to it. And there was this moment where I was like, oh man, I mean, what if people don't like it? And also, it's just like, even if they would've shot me in the head, I still could not change a single pixel of it, right? So it was never like an option to be like, oh well, if you want people to like it, change it. It's like, that's not an option. I make the art. That's all. I make the art, you consume it. End of story. There's no changing or anything like that. My vision is pure and goes out in the world.

Marty Bent [1:12:40] Yeah. Yeah. How was the reaction? What you expected, or—

Alex Waltz [1:12:46] I mean, I feel like it deserves a million fucking views. I'm not going to— look, 220K is respectable. And thank you to everyone who retweeted. I really appreciate it. And there are so many people that I know from a long time and they really kind of championed this a lot. And I, without a doubt, if they would have not done this, you wouldn't have got all the, you know, the push and whatever. So I'm very happy and very thankful for that, you know. Um, but I feel it deserves some— I mean, it's the most important and the most discussed moment in Bitcoin history, you know.

Alex Waltz ⋮ But in all fairness, in all jokes and all arrogance aside, like, the thing is, like, if you would give me this video or this article a year ago, I'm gonna be honest, it would have took me more than probably 2 weeks to really understand what the fuck is going on here. And I think I have the best context. So as this is going to become more mature and whatever, I think people are going to look at it, people are going to find things. hope they find things that are wrong. I hope they build on it. And I think I'm pretty confident we'll get to a million views at some point.

Marty Bent [1:13:43] Yeah, it's evergreen content and it'll get out there. This will be something that professors reference in the future when they're saying, you want to understand the early days of Bitcoin, go check out Alex Waltz's first Bitcoin miner exposé.

Alex Waltz [1:13:58] I mean, of course you can see how vain I am as a human being. Of course I wanted to have my name there. But in all fairness, I think The thing that I'm super happy is that I just got to contribute to this thing, man. I got to contribute it. This this thing I've it's like thirty years now of my existence was important. This thing and and I've only got benefits from it really. And I actually made a contribution right now. A perfect contribution. And and again, now I'm switching arrogance back on. You know all the clients and all these things that you have here, they're going to become obsolete. The story will never become obsolete. You know so. 100 years from now or whatever they will, if even if it doesn't matter if they don't see what's down the line, but, but in this, in this darkness of what the Bitcoin moment was, I got just a tiny bit of a spotlight, you know, and that, that's everything, you know.

Marty Bent [1:14:49] Yeah. No, if anything, it shifted a conversation towards a more productive, uh, more productive, uh, topic, I would argue. Um, 'cause that's the discourse has been pretty piss poor last year.

Alex Waltz [1:15:02] Yeah, well, you know, I also feel like the problem with the Bitcoin stuff you were saying, like, do you see Coinbase, man? They have the best marketing on the planet. They are up to up with Apple right now, you know? And I really don't— I mean, I know I'm asking for money, I'm probably gonna piss off a lot of people, but like, guys, come on, you really think you're gonna be better than Coinbase and take over the world and being the Bitcoin domestic when you share fucking memes that are low resolution? I mean, step up your game. Fucking hire me to make a commercial for you. You know what I'm saying?

Marty Bent [1:15:32] If you're listening, and I know many of you are working at Bitcoin companies, seriously take him up. We need to elevate the game when it comes to competing with Coinbase commercials and telling the story.

Alex Waltz [1:15:42] Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like your responsibility to tell the story because you got to spit at people to get it and whatever. And I think everyone has a really interesting story. The problem is you really need to be able to articulate it. I think I know a thing or two about that.

Marty Bent [1:15:57] Yeah. Well, we're going to link to it in the show notes. If you haven't watched it yet, make sure you watch it, freaks. And then if you're out there and want to support Alex and his work, reach out. Got more great art coming to market. But thank you for telling the story. It was fascinating. And I think it's a, like you said, it's an incredible contribution that will give people better context of the early, the literal early days of Bitcoin, the first few days of Bitcoin. Which, again, I think that that was my favorite part, is like the attention to detail to a—

Alex Waltz [1:16:30] Thank you.

Marty Bent [1:16:30] 96-hour period.

Alex Waltz [1:16:31] Thank you. Well, again, thank you very much for having me on. And alexwaltz.com, Waltz spelled like the dance. If you want to find other shit that I did, find me on Twitter, raw_avocado. Tweet at me, send me dick pics. I'm kidding. Only tits. Only tits. I don't like tits. And I don't know if you, if you, if you, if you feel like you want to do something great that could change the world and whatever, Fucking hit me up. Let's fucking do it. Let's turn the world fucking upside down.

Marty Bent [1:16:56] Let's do it. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating, on the podcasting platforms. That goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.

Alex Waltz [1:17:51] Okay.