Live at the Libertarian National Convention w/ Chris Luchini | EPI 313

Doug

You are the real deal, my man.

Chris Luchini

I really did I had way more fun than you people who actually had to sit through this this morning, so

Doug

Give a little background. I was talking to you the other day, and I was talking about Monero, and you were dropping some old -school knowledge on me.

Chris Luchini

just

Doug

Give us the background that you can

Chris Luchini

So to be clear, I am not a Monero expert way back when I did a lot of cryptography when I was in grad school met Phil Zimmerman and He had a project called the PGP voice and the idea was to take your PC and apply the same algorithms with some data compression to allow you to have a completely encrypted computer to computer phone call and And well actually one of the most interesting things about it and this was purely Phil's idea And it was great was a precursor to mp3 format, which was Take out the data that's actually important to the human ear Leave the rest of the data behind because the PCs of that era had so little compute power We had to do something to knock down the data rate And it was a it was a successful project On the relatively high -end machines of the day could make it work And then all of a sudden one day the project was canceled and you know all charges against Phil were dropped And all sorts of other things happened So anyway, it was a fun project and interestingly nobody has replicated it since You would think we could do that wouldn't you?

Doug

I love the way you so casually talk about that. I mean, that's a pretty big deal. You're working with Phil Zimmerman, working on PGP tech, so I feel like you're the perfect guy to talk to because in Monero land, it feels like we're approaching those same crossroads that PGP had a breach in the 90s, essentially when the government was trying to ban encryption and ban PGP. It feels like we're about to have that moment right now in crypto with privacy coins like Monero.

Chris Luchini

And actually, so again, I'm not an expert Monero. I know a lot more about Bitcoin And most of these public ledger Algorithms that are out there are intrinsically anti privacy, right? You have a public ledger of every Transaction that's happened and it's it's it's really the antithesis of privacy Right and this idea that you have security Once you add traffic analysis, right who communicated with who and that kind of thing Bitcoin is you are basically putting your life your financial life on a billboard and if you're okay with that, that's fine It's a surveillance chain at the end of the day and it's a surveillance change that lasts forever Thanks to you know, public free encryption.

It's there forever, right? You can't argue with it Monero has got some privacy features that I'm aware of I haven't actually dug into the algorithm But I will you've actually prompted me to look into this Fantastic, but I am I'm very interested in Secure Crypto that can in fact be truly anonymous and there are lots of technical hurdles with that double spend and everything else so It is something worth looking at I'm glad to see Monero has actually got you know, real world applications at this point but

Doug

some argue they're being used for nefarious things and that makes it an evil technology.

Chris Luchini

everything is used in criminal enterprise. If you want to stop crime, ban cars because people get around in cars. It's silly. It's just silly. Having said that, too many people are giving into the state when it comes to regulating crypto. I had to do a Bitcoin transaction to pay somebody out of recently. The stuff I had to go to to be allowed to actually use this particular app to send Bitcoin was very intrusive and annoying. I'm literally asking, can I literally drop some Benjamins in an envelope to you?

It turns out, no, it doesn't work because it doesn't work in its currency. I've done three or four Bitcoin transactions in my life, one for a very large sum of money, on a Saturday, internationally, where I had a German mainstream bank facilitating this because it was the only way to get money to Africa quickly. Absolutely, it has utility. Again, I would never use it for anything even slightly embarrassing. Just don't do it. There is no privacy whatsoever.

Doug

immutable. It's immutable and everything you put on there is immutable.

Chris Luchini

Absolutely. And so, again, I'm going to look at Monero. I know it has some privacy features. I'll be investigating it, and I hope maybe one day, if you guys have a podcast or something, I do have the expertise to look at the algorithm and understand what's going on.

Doug

Take a good look and we could talk after that as well. Monero, I think one of the best things about the community, the project, is it is very self skeptical and aware and takes a scientific approach. There's not really maximalism. It's always questioning the tech, realizing that privacy is a constant battle, and just trying to be the best version of that at that time, as opposed to trying to use moon math and pretend you have something that really is just theoretical.

Chris Luchini

So actually, one of my relatives is really into, although the crypt is quite young, and I'm gonna have a conversation with them and try to figure out where it is. I know there's a lot of developmental stuff. The biggest thing, and I'm talking about somebody who's been in this space, is traffic analysis. So once you have the ability to do pervasive traffic analysis, and trust me on this, there is, assume for the sake of argument, there's 100% traffic analysis.

The powers that be know every single transaction, who it connects to, every other transaction you've ever made, and if you're trying what's called security through obscurity, you're playing a shell game, right? Oh, I'm gonna put the coin under one of 20 different cups. Trust me, they can trace the cups, right? So this is my biggest issue with some of the previous crypto schemes was, it was security through obscurity, and sure, you can figure it out, but trust me, the guys that want to, whether you're third transaction, they got you nailed, okay?

And also keep in mind, everything is recorded everywhere, forever, they may not look at it, because honestly, they don't care about you. You're just not important, until you are. Until you are. Until you're important, and then they care. So yeah, so anyway, I will look at it, and I hope to have a conversation with you in the future, it'll be kinda cool, and yeah, I'd be more than happy to get into this space. I do like the idea, especially what you're doing with the indigenous primary producers and stuff, so that they can bypass.

I've done a lot of stuff in South and Central America, and it's a total kleptocracy, and anything you can do to help the people down there not get their money stolen by the state is a fantastic thing.

Doug

Not that you can speak for Phil Zimmerman, but I mean, you know the guy, you were there, you were working on an attack with him. We had him speak at Monero Atopia, our first conference in Miami. It was amazing. He did it remotely. But one of the things that the Monero community was kind of shocked to hear come out of his mouth was, and I don't want to misstate him, but basically when we asked him about how he viewed the concept of something like Monero that is purely untraceable, and he took issue with the fact that governments can't trace it, and that might be a problem.

And I was surprised to hear that from a cypherpunk who had been through PGP, the PGP wars, literally built the tech, and he himself was like, well, I don't know if we want something that's completely untraceable, because it could be easy to avoid taxes, for example, things like that. I was confused by his philosophy being a cypherpunk who created PGP, but then also having these beliefs that seem more statist.

Chris Luchini

And you are correct, I am not going to speak for him, okay? Keep in mind that my time with him was back in the 90s, okay? And I really haven't spoken since, especially given the way P .G .B. foies ended, you know? I'm sure he had his reasons, not privy to them. My impression is that Phil was not a libertarian, he was a First Amendment absolutist, but the rest of the space, I think he was sort of a doctrinaire, sort of big state progressive, right?

Again, don't want to, don't pick me up my word on this, prove me wrong, but that was just an impression. And so I'm not surprised that he, you know, wants traceability, disappointed. Yeah, that's a good question.

Doug

They were all like yeah, and maybe maybe I'm going too harsh on them, but it's pretty pretty much what exactly what he's

Chris Luchini

And I'm actually the exact opposite, right? A fully completely untraceable digital currency is the same as freaking cash. If you hate cash and you want the cashless society and you want every transaction traced, okay, I get that. If you're gonna don't want the same thing for crypto, but at least be consistent. And there aren't people like that. They don't want cash to be a thing, right? I'm definitely not one of them. I want it exactly the opposite.

I want a electronic currency that has security, the safety of any of these cryptocurrencies with complete anonymity, complete.

Doug

So I'm surprised you haven't found your way to Monero being like your old -school cypherpunk roots You're extremely knowledgeable. You're a Bitcoiner So you obviously saw the flaws and what you've used Bitcoin from you've known about it from early on see you've known the flaws from early on

Chris Luchini

And I've known the philosophy early on, and the thing is, it's not a stable currency, right? It's not currency because it is speculative, right? And that's part of the reason I had no interest in it. You know, at least I know with my U .S. dollars, they're declining at a known rate. I'm getting inflated out of my wealth at a known rate, right? Versus crypto, so I've used it when I had to. And again, it had its utility.

Try transaction, large transactions on a weekend. You can't do it through the normal banking wire system. The wire system shuts down on the weekend, which is bizarre, but it does, or did, anyway, back when I did this. But no, I just, I haven't had a motivation to do it because it's not, until it's pervasive, it's not useful for the normal person, right? I have cash out. Only reason I have cash out is I hate PayPal, fuck you PayPal, because they stole a bunch of money from me.

But I have relatives that want to use, the younger generation wants to use one of these cash things. My daughter's circle of friends has cash app, so I got cash app. And yeah, I've used it to pay for coffee, et cetera. It's very quick, et cetera. It's certainly not a digital currency. It has all of the defects of hooking your credit card to it, right? If I could do that pervasively with pretty much any stable crypto, I would do it.

And stability comes with adoption, right? If you have a billion users of a cryptocurrency, you're not going to see price changes of 600% in a month. It's not gonna happen.

Doug

Especially if people are using it for purposes of transacting and not just speculating

Chris Luchini

And that's the thing, the motivation right now for a lot of people is not a store of wealth, it's not transaction, it's definitely not transaction. Yesterday, I tried to do a Bitcoin transaction with you guys and I wanted to pay you $4 and they wanted a $2 fee. I'm like, yeah, I don't make any damn sense, right? Plus, it's not going to happen for a long time. So, yeah, Bitcoin has all of its issues.

Doug

Are you familiar with Monero's dynamic block size? No.

Chris Luchini

I know that it has one. I haven't actually looked into it. I know it's much quicker. It's much cheaper. Again, there are some anonymity features on it. I had a dinner conversation with somebody who was trying to tell me about it. Again, I'll look into it. I don't want to say more than I actually know on it. But Bitcoin is not it. That's all I really have to say. Bitcoin is not it. And I'll give you another issue with Bitcoin.

Advice to anybody out there that holds Bitcoin. So I work in the supercomputer space, like seriously large hardware, and you know who owns it. And so I did a calculation based on the price of electricity, because you can get an answer for anything based on the price of electricity. And in my estimation, it's going to cost about $30 million to crack Satoshi's key. And if you can crack his key for $30 million, why hasn't it been done? You know, there's nation state. Why hasn't North Korea done that?

Of course, North Korea doesn't have the computers, but whatever. Why hasn't another nation state just

Doug

with just supercomputers or with like quantum computers?

Chris Luchini

yes really supercomputers right I mean you have to understand what's the hardware that's actually out there okay and there is tremendous amount of ability to brute force these things and there's new algorithms that make it orders of magnitude easier but still 30 million dollars of electricity that's just the power you got to put through the chips to make this happen and that's the 50% solution you get a 50% chance of having cracked the key by then so it might be double that so you know how much how much quote billions in value are in the untransacted Satoshi coins I don't know the answer to that but it's a lot it's billions right oh yeah yeah so it's when you first hear that Satoshi spending his coins sell your frickin bitcoins as fast as you possibly can because somebody has pulled the ripcord and by the way it's the same amount of effort to crack your wallet with three dollars in it or you know or three whatever Satoshi's in it as it is to crack the one that has gazillions of coins yeah of course of course but

Doug

I haven't heard this that it's it's crackable with super this is news this is news to me I mean quite you you hear theories with with future quantum computers being able to do

Chris Luchini

They're not future, dude. They're not future. They're not. The future is now. The future is now. So the thing is, they are crackable. But the thing is, nobody is going to do this at home. You're literally not going to do it at home. I mean, it's not possible. You need... The computers are very specialized, okay? And so it's definitely doable, and it's basically nation state, right? It's not going to be done by anything other than...

Doug

If they ever want, that would be another means for them to nuke Bitcoin if they ever want that.

Chris Luchini

Absolutely, they could do it if they wanted to.

Doug

They don't want to because it's a perfectly trace traceable ledger where they could perfectly tax it

Chris Luchini

Yeah, exactly right. It is the perfect, other than the transaction speed issue and a couple other issues, they love the perfect traceability. This is perfect. Government loves this, right? We can absolutely track where and when you did what and who you transacted with forever, right? So they don't want to kill the concept. They just want to own it. They want to control it and put a collar on it so they can lead it around on a chain. So that's my interest is, you know, get me a truly anonymous coin, then I'll care, right?

I'll look into Monero. We'll see, maybe we'll have another conversation.

Doug

Awesome man, great media.

Chris Luchini

Nice meeting you too. Thank you. That's fantastic espresso, and I'm gonna get on to some other

Doug

the information out where people could see where you're working next time next time we have a

Chris Luchini

maybe I'll do that, but this is not an area I work in. Like I said, I don't have a, I used to work in crypto. I don't, that's not my area anymore, but I will look into it, maybe we'll have a conversation and we'll talk about other liberty topics. I like your applications. This is the thing, the reason I'm here is, I like what you're doing with it, rather than the technology itself. So, very interested in making sure people in areas with don't really have governments that like them can actually keep their money and not, you know, not ever, everything's stolen.

And we kind of live in that third world.

Doug

100% awesome man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.