BITCOIN SEASON 2: What Satoshi Got Wrong About Bitcoin
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Peter Todd, mistakenly identified as Satoshi in an HBO doc, discusses Bitcoin's technical history, mining economics, block withholding attacks, and controversial ideas like demurrage.
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Peter Todd joins us to talk about Bitcoin's technical evolution, discussing terminology like "blockchain" vs "timechain," and revealing flaws in Satoshi's original design. Peter dives deep into mining economics, explaining the risks of block withholding attacks, the problems with activation mechanisms for soft forks, and controversial funding models like demurrage. Despite surviving significant challenges, Bitcoin faces ongoing security concerns as block rewards diminish, requiring creative solutions to ensure mining remains economically viable long-term.
Notes:
- Block withholding attacks remain an unsolved risk
- Mining rewards currently ~0.5% tax on Bitcoin savings
- Bitcoin difficulty algorithm relies on halving events
- Miners have ~24-30% hash power can disrupt network
- Transaction fees alone insufficient for mining economics
- Demurrage could stabilize mining revenue long-term
Check out our Bitcoin scaling conference! Visit opnext.dev to learn more.
Timestamps:
00:00 Start
02:03 Timechain not a good word
04:28 White paper terminology
09:17 Difficulty
11:35 Price vs hashrate
12:53 Block withholding attack
21:08 Arch Network
21:40 Risks of a block withholding attack
26:50 Soft forks
31:01 BIP 8 & BIP 9
34:12 Signaling for soft forks
35:51 Nodes vs miners
38:04 Transaction IDs
43:22 OP_NEXT
44:14 Solving soft fork activation
48:50 Are drivechains dumb?
50:44 Miner centralization
56:54 WTF is demurrage?
1:01:18 Tail emission
1:07:04 ETH mansion
1:09:47 Ordinals
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to Bitcoin Season 2. I've got Peter Todd on today. Peter was recently identified as |
| 0:06.2 | Satoshi in an HBO documentary. Now, while we know that he's not Satoshi and he denies being |
| 0:12.8 | Satoshi, Peter has been around a really, really long time. So I've got him here in my studio |
| 0:18.5 | and we actually talk about Bitcoin's history, what it's |
| 0:22.0 | looked like over the years and how it's come to look the way it currently does. |
| 0:26.1 | We talk about a bunch of different subjects, risks to Bitcoin mining, risks to Bitcoin users. |
| 0:31.5 | And we even touch on some of Peter's, I would say, controversial opinions about ways that Bitcoin could look in the future. |
| 0:40.1 | Bitcoin Season 2 is brought to you by Arch Network, building bridgeless apps on Bitcoin. |
| 0:45.5 | More on Arch later on in the show. |
| 0:47.4 | Let's kick it off. |
| 0:58.9 | So I'm here at the Blockspace Oklahoma studio. |
| 1:04.8 | We've flown Peter Todd in all the way on one of the... Hey, I flew in. |
| 1:05.8 | Okay. |
| 1:06.7 | I mean... |
| 1:06.8 | Peter, you, I'm amazed you made it. |
| 1:09.1 | Tell me how you... |
| 1:10.1 | How did you get to Tulsa and why is it significant |
| 1:12.4 | that you made it to Tulsa today? Oh, it's really easy. I just hopped on three different planes that had |
| 1:17.2 | been delayed by two days. And finally at the end of it, among other things, you know, it gets Tulsa, |
| 1:23.1 | it's like two hours late. And then the captain goes up said, oh said oh you know we got to wait a bit because |
| 1:27.6 | you know the the gates are congested 30 minutes later comes oh yeah actually no we also got to wait |
| 1:32.6 | because the tow bar is buried in snow and they are digging it out right now with shovels |
... |
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