Name: Benthecarman

Country: USA

How long have you been into Bitcoin and what got you interested? 

I got into Bitcoin in November of 2017. I had heard about Bitcoin many times and was told it was the future of money but had never looked into why that was. In 2017 I heard about the price skyrocketing so I did some research about it, I quickly fell down the rabbit hole taking the orange and red pill in one gulp. Initially the tech was really interesting for me, but finding the econ side of it was what has kept me interested. Never before had I questioned what was the nature of our money and why it is the way it is. After reading and listening to tons of content about the Austrian school I became convinced that sound money is the best way to solve lots of societies problems and Bitcoin is the best way to achieve that goal.

Best Bitcoin experience and worst Bitcoin experience?

Best: Getting my first PR merged into Bitcoin Core

I was on my Christmas break in college and decided that instead of wasting my time playing League of Legends all day I would instead try to make a contribution to Bitcoin. The first thing I did was a simple documentation change to release notes. This was my first contribution to any open source project so just doing this small change taught me a bunch about the review process and using developer tools like git. Since then I did some other small contributions to Bitcoin Core and even recently got a small new feature added!

Worst: Losing everything in a boating accident 😭

What is the biggest fail you have ever seen in the Bitcoin world?

Trace Mayer. The guy was revered as one of the best Bitcoin shills and in one weekend destroyed everything and now has completely fallen out of favor. What really saddens me is that he didn’t own up to the mistake or anything, he just dropped off the face of the earth. In my opinion, it was pretty clear he was going for an exit scam given the coin had a 50% premine and was promising people 150x returns. I don’t know what led him to do this but it’s damn shame and wish we could have kept him around because he was a great mind in the space before then.

How did you get into developing and what led you to work on Bitcoin?

As a kid I was always into computers and was naturally drawn to software development from this. I took basic classes in high school and immediately fell in love with it. After breezing through all 2 of the programming classes my school offered I did some small stuff on the side. One thing I did was hacking in an old kids game called Toontown. I later went on to study computer science in college and fell in love with programming even more.

In my junior year of college, I found Bitcoin and spent the better part of a year learning all the ins and outs of the system from the technicals to the economics. I was completely hooked and wanted to start contributing. I started out doing some small contributions to Bitcoin Core and later went on to work on Wasabi and now am employed full time at Suredbits. It’s been a wild ride, and I am thankful for it.

Any suggestions for anyone out there wanting to get into the development side of Bitcoin?

If you already have some development experience I recommend to just dive right into a project that you love. This is what I did when starting out and learned a ton. There are lots of extremely intelligent people working on these projects, and you’ll be able to learn a ton from these people just from reviewing their code and having them review yours.

If you are not a developer of any kind, I’d recommend learning to code through some free online resources. After you’ve done a few projects and feel comfortable with a language or two, then you can dip your toes in and try to contribute to an open source Bitcoin project.

Coming from the development side, what do you see in Bitcoin that people might miss?

Getting into the technicals you find out how Bitcoin was both equally well thought out as well as poorly planned. I find it amazing how genius Satoshi was to create Bitcoin’s scripting system and how much creative other developers have been to use this basic framework to upgrade Bitcoin. With just this basic scripting system we have used it to enable things like Lightning, Liquid, Vaults, DLCs and much more. On the flip side we have seen a lot of woopsies that have been caused by this. My favorite being a bug that let you spend anyone's coins. But besides bugs there have been lots of other things that had been overlooked like transaction malleability and small cases where incentives weren’t properly aligned. Luckily, developers have been slowly fixing these things over the years through small incremental changes making Bitcoin all the better. The next likely being Taproot where now people will be more incentivized to use things like multisig as it will have similar costs and privacy concerns as regular single sig!

2020 has been a crazy year with covid and the lockdown of global economies? How has this helped or hurt Bitcoin?

I think all the money printing has really shown that governments do not care and will print however much they want. I had a good friend of mine who had never questioned authority or thought about Bitcoin ask about it after he realized that the US government was just printing trillions of dollars. I think once Bitcoin reaches the previous ATH it will really put the idea in people’s head that Bitcoin is the answer to inflation. So, in my opinion this has only been good for Bitcoin and I think we are already starting to see the signs of that.

What are your thoughts about the US Federal Reserve injecting so much money into the economy because of COVID?

No bueno. I understand why they felt the need to do as they were literally banned people from going to their jobs but most of this newly minted money went directly to their cronies leaving the common man with nothing. In my life I’ve already started to see this with some prices on food going up but I think this is only the beginning. The world is still not back to normal yet and people aren’t spending their money like they used to. Once people’s spending behavior returns to normal the inflation will really set in and it’s going to really hurt. I hope that Bitcoiners will have spread the message enough to help people not get hurt by this.

How do you think this affects Bitcoin?

Number go up.

Why do you think some people, especially noobs gravitate to shitcoins?

I’ll preface this with saying I sadly gravitated to shitcoins in the beginning.

There’s a lot of bad information out there. Pre-Bitcoin, the primary way I interacted with communities I was a part of would be through reddit and youtube. As you may know, these are the worst places to get information about Bitcoin as they are riddled with shitcoiners spewing their bullshit. When you first enter the space and know almost nothing it is hard to see why it is bullshit.

To truly understand bitcoin you need to throw out all of your previous notions about money, however, shitcoins can seem viable if you do believe that it is natural for many monies to exist. From my observations, I find that there are almost no shitcoin maximalists, there are primarily Bitcoiners and crypto people. Bitcoiners tend to understand that markets will tend to use a single good as their money whereas shitcoiners think that in a free market many can and will exist.

Getting into the technicalities of how Bitcoin works is too much for most people and with all the “fancy” stuff that shitcoins are doing it’s even worse. Lots of people can be sold total snake oil thinking they are buying into fancy new tech that is going to change the world, when in reality it is a buggy copy of bitcoin with some buzzword taped on.

What are your thoughts on DeFi?

DeFi is a total shitshow. From what I’ve seen, It is mostly just different projects printing a new token and paying people to come use their new project until the tokens run out and the project inevitably burns. I think there is a positive in DeFi however, it has shown that there is a potential market for things like decentralized marketplaces and betting. To me, this is very reassuring as it shows that once we have fully built out things like DLCs and RGB into Bitcoin and Lightning that they will be used while being built on a sound system.

What do you have to say to shitcoiners who claim Bitcoin will fail?

Good luck competing against the hardest money humanity will ever create.

Who is the biggest Bitcoin sell out that deserves to be put on blast?

Andreas. He helped me and tons of other people enter this space with his tremendous library of educational content. His recent foray into ethereum has been really sad. Now that he has tainted his channel with stuff on eth it’s hard to recommend people to him because you’ll then have to spend time disputing the bullshit he is saying about eth while still trying to convince someone what he previously said on Bitcoin is legitimate.

Why is it important to call out the bad actors?

It is important to call out bad actors for two main reasons. One important reason to let outside observers see that what this person is saying is wrong and they are likely trying to get something from you. A lot of people don’t follow the “Don’t trust, verify” mantra that us Bitcoiners do and this leaves them much more vulnerable to bullshit artists and scammers. By calling out bad actors, it can shed a light on the lies that are being told so people can make their own judgements while being more informed.

Another important reason to call out bad actors is for the bad actors themselves. I presume that a lot of people spouting the bullshit actually believe it and think they are spreading the truth. It’s good to challenge these people and try to inform them that they are wrong. Even if you cannot convince them you will at least have an open debate that others can read and make their own opinions about.

Who are some of the most hardcore Bitcoiners you know and why?

Francis Pouliot is one of the most hardcore guys I know. That man will stop at nothing to get his freedom and to tell you why you’re an idiot for not wanting the same thing for yourself. He is by far one of my favorite twitter follows, and he is always first to call out the bullshit spread by others and especially governments. I was not around during the fork wars but I know Francis was and I know he was one of the people on the front lines fighting for Bitcoin and calling out the people who wanted to cripple Bitcoin. I am eternally grateful for people like him who fought to keep the system we have today because Bitcoin is all the better for it.

What potential obstacles in the road do you think Bitcoiners need to pay attention to?

I think by and large Bitcoin has already won. Governments can try to regulate and ban on and off ramps onto Bitcoin but they will at best slow down adoption in their country. Saying that, I think Bitcoiners need to make sure that they are ready for a Bitcoin world. This means that we should have our security prepared for this eventuality with good storage for our sats as well as our homes. If you’re able to become socially mobile this is likely the best thing you can do. Being able to change jurisdictions may end up being the most important thing a Bitcoiner does in the coming years.

What Bitcoin innovations have you the most fired up?

I am super excited about Taproot. Taproot is going to enable a ton of awesome new things and optimize a lot of existing use cases.  A lot of the new things that taproot will enable, for example PTLCs, will be a new foundation for a lot of upcoming new innovations. I think a lot of the cool things that Taproot will bring to Bitcoin haven’t even been discovered yet. By the time this has been released, the Taproot PR should have been merged into Bitcoin Core so I am sure you saw me extremely excited about it!

What Bitcoin startups or companies are you most excited about?

Shameless plug but I think the stuff we are doing at Suredbits is pretty awesome. We are working on bringing DLCs to Bitcoin which enable Bitcoin smart contracting. We have been working alongside some guys from Crypto Garage and Atomic Finance who are also doing some killer stuff.

Otherwise I am excited about any project that is working to help users run a full node. This is one of the most important things a Bitcoiner can do and making that easier will make us all the better for it.

What are your goto Bitcoin storage options?

Cold Card is the best in my opinion. I love being able to do completely air gapped signing, it is a very empowering feeling and feels so much more secure. I am looking forward to switching to a multisig solution, but in my opinion is not fully ready. I think once we have more standards around it making backups much easier will it then become fully ready. However, if you are currently doing multisig, then you are ahead of the curve and I thank you for

Any tips you want to give to people new to Bitcoin?

Stick to Bitcoin only. This might seem wrong at first as some people will try and convince you otherwise but Bitcoin is simply the best money humanity has ever created, and there is no sign of anything outcompeting it. Even if some altcoin has “better tech” it won’t matter because people want their money to be good at being money, not do fancy things.

If you are already on the Bitcoin maximalist train then I would say you should spend some time learning the basics of how Bitcoin works and what its security model looks like. This will go a long way in helping you secure your coins as well as give you peace of mind.

Name some of your favorite information sources and/or podcasts in the space.

Marty is always killing it with his newsletter and podcast TFTC, highly recommend anyone who hasn’t been following him to give it a look.

Stephan Livera has a killer podcast that gets into the weeds on tech and econ, always a great listen.

If you haven’t read The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous then you need to stop what you’re doing right now and go read it because it is amazing, this book made me go from Bitcoin being a thing I was interested in to something I want to commit my life to.