Let me first begin by dispelling the myth that Chris DeRose and I showed up uninvited to the Satoshi Roundtable. We were made aware of the event by nearly 10% of those in attendance. Through various channels, 7 or so people told us where the event was and asked us to please come. On principle, I find even the pretense of a secret event to be laughably childish. The only way I would generally consider going to such a pompous, masturbatory, self-ingratiating, ego-stroking meeting would be if it were a parody of such a meeting. And to be honest, the Satoshi Roundtable isn’t far from a parody of itself. Its biggest problem is that those who attend are too serious. They look upon the Club Med-shaded vista and tan their pasty white skin in the reflection of a heavily shellacked sheen of ersatz importance derived from a contrived exclusivity; a spiritual anointing; the Knights of Bitcoin enriched with titles granted by Queen Bruce Fenton, lady of the Intercoastal Waterways.

The problem at these things is that no one laughs. They are there to be important. And like the opulent over-compensation that defines new money, most of those at the event, Brian Armstrong most notably, are new important. They do all the things they think important people do, and none of the things they think important people do not. And thus, end up caricatures of important - like the kind you see and laugh at in movies.



I am writing my thoughts as nothing more than an extension of Stephen Pair’s post yesterday, in which he so graciously mentioned me and Chris’s show. He mentioned that we should take it easy on the kind-hearted Bruce Fenton, however. And while that might be something Bruce would greatly appreciate, I’m not so inclined to let him off the hook. For those who went to the event, I encourage you to engage with the content here. I’m quite certain that many of you will take issue with my characterizations of the meeting, and I invite any pushback.

The Meeting was a disaster from the outset. The content was more patronizing than helpful. When I arrived, I heard Queen Bruce speaking near the front of the room. I couldn’t see him because I was behind a wall sneakily disguised in a sombrero, poncho and Groucho Marx mask so as to not draw attention to myself.

As the transcripts have not been released, I can’t remember for certain what was said. But Bruce was asking the room what a blockchain meant to them. “Permissionless,” I remember hearing someone say. He wrote it down. The discussion was patronizing - an utter waste of time. There were occasional laughs, but for the most part Bruce lost the room.

Chris and myself proceeded outside, where we set up the cameras and sound equipment. Contrary to Bruce’s multiple claims that we were recording people without their permission, we pointed the camera toward a wall and set up some chairs. In their boredom, a couple of Bitcoiners came around, one even interviewing with us while the group session going on.

Unbeknownst to me or Chris or BitcoinErrorLog (BEL) (who joined us for the outing), while the morning session was droning on, there was a discussion happening in a Satoshi Roundtable slack. Complaints about the morning session abounded. But Paul Sports offered what might be the most accurate indictment of the meandering and pointless exercise being carried out at the front of the room. “You see,” he wrote, “this is what happens when you don’t allow people like Junseth in.”

Little did Paul know that I had set up shop directly outside of the discussion room, where he and others greeted us with delight.

We cajoled Paul and a surprised Luke-Jr to go to lunch with us, laughing all the while at how we’d pulled one over on Bruce. We brought our equipment, our hats, my poncho, and every other thing with us, as we made our way to the lunchroom. In the core slack, just the day before, Luke-Jr had asked me if I knew where the event was. When I told him I did not (which was a lie), he said that the event must have been well hidden if even I wasn’t able to figure out where it was. While I’m not certain, I think he was amused to see us. We made our way to the lunchroom, and sat at a table in one of the wings. There was a sign for the Satoshi Roundtable there, but having not bothered to read it, I failed to realize that this was a cordoned off section meant to be exclusively for the Roundtable participants. No matter, had I known, I don’t know that I would have given it much thought.

After about 5 minutes, having a good time, explaining how we got there, Bruce Fenton and his wife came to the table. Bruce was shaking. He said timidly to Chris, “sir, this is a private event.” We laughed. As if the impersonal “sir” weren’t enough, the approach was so effeminate and unaggressive, we thought he was going to congratulate us for uncovering the location and tell us we could go about doing our weird form of media so long as people consented to our interviews. That isn’t what happened. He got slightly louder, became slightly more aggressive, and his wife’s shrill voice was yelling in conjunction with his things like, “you aren’t invited, get out of our lunchroom.” Bruce threatened to go and get security, to have us kicked off the grounds. Chris argued a bit with him, but eventually, we acquiesced and retreated to one of the non-roundtable rooms.

Immediately after lunch, we were stopped on our way back to the check-in by a very gay Club Med worker. They told us that Bruce wanted for us to be kicked off the grounds entirely, that we had disrupted his private meeting, that we had recorded people without their permission - a fact Fenton continues to claim but that is both irrelevant (since the only video that matters is the video that you make public) and untrue (all our recording was public and obvious). At this point, we told the club that they could either let us go, and we would need our money back for the weekend, or they could kick us out and risk a chargeback, or they could simply let us continue our weekend. The very reasonable Club Med manager told us that he had no intentions of kicking us out, and that he wanted us to have a great weekend. That is when Chris posted to Reddit that we were going to broadcast a live Bitcoin Uncensored from the grounds that evening.

Now it’s worth noting that while a good number of the Roundtable’s participants were very happy to see us, there was a strong contingent of those in attendance who were livid at our appearance - Bruce included. Bruce announced in the session after lunch, suggesting that participants not speak with us. He implied that I am owned by Chris (getting my name wrong despite speaking to me nearly every day on both Reddit and on the core slack), and that our motivations are to make people look bad when we interview them. Notably, Bruce has never heard one of our interviews, best I can tell. If that is true, his statement is disingenuous at best.

Asked by BTCDrak why we were removed from the meeting, Fenton further explained.

The statements are less bothersome than offensively untrue. Certainly, if you are reading this, you know that I have a blog. If you have listened to my podcast… you know I have a podcast. But to call me or Chris mere bloggers is a gross understatement. Chris and I have spent numerous hours and years of our lives both building our own businesses while both working to understand the protocol, bringing awareness to scams, contributing our efforts to various projects (both money and code), and working to bring people into Bitcoin at a higher level than your general n00b. I am told every day that some of Bitcoin’s biggest content contributors came here as a result of our Youtube videos, or stumbling on one of Chris’s American Banker articles, or hearing the podcast, or something else that we contributed to quietly and behind the scenes.

After the meeting, we had a number of participants come up to us and speak to us about what happened during the afternoon sessions. “You won’t believe how boring it is. No one is paying attention,” one of them told us. Perhaps the most shameful moment, came when T0′s head and CEO of Overstock, Patrick Byrne, stood at the front of the room and told Bitcoin’s most impressive programmers what a Blockchain does. When pushed, Patrick admitted that his project doesn’t even use the Bitcoin blockchain, though, as I understand it, he deferred to the catchphrase, blockchain agnostic, to attempt to salvage his blockchain dignity. And when it comes to discussion, we heard numerous times that whenever any movement on an issue of note was made, Bruce would grab the microphone and tell everyone that they needed to stay on topic. At one point, one man who shall remain unnamed, even picked up the microphone and curtly asked why Fenton was so bent on halting good discussion. Whether these accounts are true, it’s hard to say. But I will note that we heard similar accounts from multiple attendees, enough to think that there is quite a bit more than a grain of truth here.

Even the entertainment was a bit embarrassing - Bruce brought some world-class Jiu Jitsu fighters to do a demonstration. When the entertainment began, we have been told that the room cleared out, and Bruce was left standing in the room by his lonesome, watching the entertainment that he had so carefully planned for everyone else.

To those in the room, it was clear that Fenton was bent on achieving consensus during the weekend. He was obsessed with an 8 point document that he wanted everyone to sign. Post-roundtable, he has claimed that the document was to be nothing more than a 10 minute diversion. Though it became a bit of a focal point for the weekend - later released and displayed on Twitter. It begins with the ironic line, “Bitcoin should be open to participation by everyone,” a strange conclusion one might think would call into question the entire premise of an exclusive weekend. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson put so eloquently: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” So it might be that Fenton is simply much smarter than the rest of us.

Bruce’s desire had been to get everyone to sign the awkwardly phrased memo. Though it seemed that the general opinion at the meeting was that no one was going to sign anything, and the picture tweeted appears to have no signatures on it. So, as to whether the bumbly, ill-fated document has been signed or not, or even what end signing accomplishes, we may never know - and should Bruce decide to reveal it, it’s likely that it won’t even be of interest.

If, indeed, the attendees of the roundtable believe that Bitcoin ought to be open to all participants, then why the pretense of exclusivity? Bruce has continually compared our invasion to the unsolicited entry to a house party. But I ask you to consider, what riotous house party have you been to where a man puts 60 or so people into a room, and asks them to sign an 8 point document that they will construct over the course of the party. When Bruce asks me if I would show up to a house party uninvited, I would say absolutely not. To me the distinction between this and a house party is obvious. The analogy is absurd.

the only real reason to get angry at our arrival at the Satoshi Roundtable was because Chris and myself ruined the air of exclusivity. We broke the inter-dimensional wall that existed to keep community members out. Was it rude? Probably. But I don’t care. Etiquette is for fancy people. I’m just a poor, fat idiot who grew up on a Christian commune. So you can make the argument that we shouldn’t have been there on the grounds of etiquette, certainly. You can say we were breaking some sort of ethical boundary, or you can say a host of other things. The truth is, the only real critique that can be made is that we tore to shred any veil of secrecy and made certain that the event was revealed as nothing more than a display of importance for the insecure CEOs of Bitcoin whose companies are currently in upheaval because many of them decided to speculate on the Bitcoin price rather than running their companies.

For me, it was unfortunate to see many of the people I respect show up to the Satoshi Roundtable. I think in a world of opaque governance, we have enough backdoor pandering. And making decisions with a self-important disposition is every bit as dangerous as a man making important decisions before masturbating. Chris and I have a great respect for the Bitcoin developers. But when it comes to protocol-centric decision making, I refuse to be left out of the process. Not only do I have a stake in the protocol insofar as I own Bitcoins, but I am heavily involved in Counterparty, the Drop Zone project, have one of the biggest media outlets in the space in Bitcoin Uncensored, and I have done quite a bit more intangible stuff as well (I got Tony Gallippi his first FOX news interview, for example).

I do not take money in Bitcoin, I do my best to not let greed cloud my vision, and the only reason my name is known is because I have accidentally become a highly competent person in a space with very few non-technical people who understand the technology. I happen, weirdly, to also be a Bitcoiner who owns a business bigger than almost any Bitcoiner has ever owned. Fenton will remind you that I am merely an “alarm salesman” at every turn. But his exploration of my work went no deeper than that. I am a marketer with a fairly prolific history of innovation. You have probably happenstantially encountered my work in places like ING Direct, Unilever, Tunecore, and more. The company I started does a fair amount of business each year, and even heavily supports Blockchain projects, hackathons, and more. These aren’t the kinds of things I generally advertise, because as a good marketer, I have always stayed in the background, let my work speak for itself. The artwork is the product, and I have always viewed my role as more of the artist. It’s why, while I have been around for a very long time, Chris DeRose is the public face you all know and love. I only stepped in front of the camera and microphone because Chris encouraged me to do it.

This as opposed to Mike Terpin’s Transform PR. Terpin, one of the events invitees brought Dash as his +1, charging them to attend. Bruce denies that this is the case. Terpin has a history of pumping bad projects along with another attendee of the weekend’s meeting David Johnston. Johnston, who is heavily invested in Factom and who orchestrated some of the most problematic crowdsales of the last few years (arguably to dump Mastercoin he and others are holding), was there with his children and Factom’s lead developer Paul Snow. Paul, a notorious fruitcake filled with bad ideas, lost some $50,000 a few years ago when organizing the Bitcoin conference in Texas. His bumble forced him to sell equity in he conference to Johnston and a few others. Snow was subsequently booted from the Texas Bitcoin community. His relationships with prominent Bitcoiners like Justus Ranvier went belly up, and he began to write one of the weirdest, most Rube Goldbergy projects man has ever seen. Needless to say, all of that led to Johnston running a half million dollar prize hackathon wherein winners like Storj discover that the prize money was to be given in OMNI (Mastercoin at the time) if and only if the project found a way to tokenize and crowdsale their platform. These projects would then be asked to sell to Johnston’s camp at a hugely reduced price. Snow’s project has exaggerated claims of partnership with big organizations like Honduras’ government and banks in Singapore and more since their inceptions. Needless to say, this small subset of the people at the meeting should be enough to cause any onlooker alarm. But the conference was replete with shady characters like Marshall Long who profited from the Mintsy scam, Paycoin, and most recently Cryptsy. Accidentally working for one scam… might get you a bit of a pass. But three in a row is a discomforting trend.

Are these the people you want in the room when consensus happens? Are these the people you want arguing for your interests? Now you can say that I might not be that person. Luke-Jr has equated my projects with blockchain rape, and he might be right. But I have never asked for money, and I am well aware of what the Blockchain can do. My interests are the interests of the community, and in a world of permissionless innovation on a permissionless ledger, it becomes fairly obvious to me what the risks are here. Bitcoin’s biggest risk once the Classic debate is over, will be that it suffers from use. And while there are people like Roger Ver, whom I respect a great deal, who speak dulcet poetry about the necessity of ending war through global use of Blockchain, I am not an idealist. If Drop Zone works, and I think it has every chance to work, people will regularly encode large amounts of data into the blockchain for small amounts of money through multi-sig outputs - as much as 100 kilobytes for 10 cents (I have tested this). If the core devs try to attack multi-signature encodement, then people like me will encode data in the inputs which is highly inefficient and will make blockchain validation times skyrocket. 2MBs exacerbates the problem to a significant degree. And while Classic’s miners claim to have tested up to 2MBs and even as high as 4MBs, they have no idea what kind of damage someone like me is planning to do to the blockchain. Permissionlessness has a strange by-product that most of us have yet to consider - you cannot test use cases like many think that you can.

So while Bruce Fenton sits in a room with scammers, businessmen, and core devs alike, praying to the LORD that he comes out the overseer of consensus, how can anyone take seriously those claims when the people who understand the necessary inputs for consensus number in the low 10s, and they are surrounded by Lobbyists whose interests do not align with yours or mine. Luke-Jr wants spam to stop. He tells me that this project cannot work if spam persists as it so cheaply does right now. I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment, though I do not believe in spam. The blockchain gives users the power to prioritize transactions. Right now, it costs you 3 cents to move money from point A to point B, even if you are buying a $100 million helicopter that needs a quick confirmation. For that same 3 cents, you can encode dozens of penis emoticons into the blockchain. Now, Luke-Jr would call the second transaction spam. I would simply say it’s a transaction that very few people would pay to have processed. The helicopter transaction, on the other hand is a high priority, high stake transaction. Users can choose the priority of their own transactions by paying some kind of dynamic price that will signal to miners how much they want the transaction to go through now, and that is what makes Bitcoin remarkable. And while today’s world allows penis emoticon encodement and high amounts of value to be sent from here to there for about the same cost, I think we all recognize that this is not an ideal world.

How can these sorts of concerns be brought up and heard in a world where all dealings are done behind closed doors and by those who one man deems important enough? If Bitcoin is to remain permissionless, then I think the most important thing anyone can do is force accountability into the space. The interests of users (real users) need to be represented, and those in charge of the decision making, need to make decisions away from the high-stakes lobbying and car-salesman like tactics that I saw at this event. “Don’t you want to sign the 8 points? Don’t you? What do I need to do to get you to sign the 8-point memo today?” The problem with the Satoshi Roundtable is that there was no engagement of science, no engagement with the community, and absolutely no recognition of what is and has truly been accomplished here.

So as to whether I will let Bruce Fenton off the hook for trying… I think not. He can take his desire for exclusive clubs, and importance back to his Freemason lodge. There, he and his other pay-to-play friends, can go on as many retreats as they want and pretend to be taking over the world.