Peter Todd is a Bitcoin veteran. Describing himself as an Applied Cryptography Consultant, Peter has been interested in digital money ever since he read Adam Back’s seminal Hashcash paper as a teenager. Having spent a lot of time himself thinking about how to create a digital currency – when the bitcoin paper was released in 2009, Peter realized that the solution had been found.
Formerly a Bitcoin Core developer, Peter has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the space, regularly providing a more technically-based commentary to the changing winds of the crypto scene.
Short, sharp and to the point, Peter answered a few of my questions about bitcoin, crypto more broadly, and what the future holds for the industry.
Avi Rosten: How did you get into crypto?
Peter Todd: Via the Freenet Project, back in highschool. Like any good civics/democracy minded high schooler would be, I believed in freedom of speech and Freenet was an obvious way to promote that.
AR: What are some of the developments in the crypto space in the past couple of years that you find most interesting?
PT: Lightning is probably the biggest one. Monero and Zcash second, although remember that “interesting” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”.
AR: What do you think about recent talk by some Bitcoin Core developers around reducing Bitcoin’s block size?
PT: Some? I think you mean basically just one, Luke. I think it’s a dumb idea that’s a mere tweak at high cost.
(Peter explained a little more expansively in this interview for the WhatBitcoinDid Podcast why he doesn’t like small block sizes: “I think his technical arguments for that are good, but I think he doesn’t understand the social side of that, which essentially makes it impossible.”)
AR: When the bitcoin block reward eventually goes to 0, will mining fees act as enough of an incentive?
PT: Maybe? Maybe not? It’d certainly have been less risky to have some small perpetual inflation, or at least a Monero-like “tail emission”
AR: What do you think of the Lightning network? Will it enable bitcoin to become a widely-used medium of exchange?
PT: How widely used is widely used? Bitcoin is already a fairly widely-used medium of exchange amongst use-cases that need it – lots of services and people at risk of censorship use it, from Patreon alternatives to file hosting sites.
If you’re talking about replacing credit cards and the like, it’ll probably never happen.
AR: Do you think Bitcoin should incorporate some privacy features or do you think it would make Bitcoin less useful as financial regulators might then treat it as a privacy coin e.g. Japan’s FSA’s order to exchanges not to deal with privacy coins?
PT: From a purely technical perspective most of what people think of as “privacy features” are risky to implement, with a high chance of a bug leading to the destruction of the entire system. Monero has already had one inflation bug, and Zcash has had two (including the one caught just prior to initial release).
On the other hand, Bitcoin already has many onchain privacy features, ranging from the UTXO model to various technical things that make Lightning possible. And on the second layer, having at least some level of privacy isn’t just a feature, it’s mandatory: without decent privacy you can’t get scaling, as to scale you have to make transaction data less widely distributed.
AR: What do you think of the two most recent implementations of the MimbleWimble protocol (Beam and Grin)? If the community decided that Bitcoin needed to have these privacy features, what do you think would be the best way to implement them?
PT: I just don’t see that happening for another 5-10 years. These protocols are just too new to trust for something as valuable as the entire Bitcoin system. Better to adopt them as additional layers, as Liquid has done.
AR: If you wanted to work with smart contracts, which of the existing platforms would you use? Ethereum, EOS, TRON, Rootstock (RSK) …?
PT: They’re all bad. Their idea of smart contracts doesn’t make much sense for most applications. Lightning is currently the best example of a smart contract system in production, and the on-chain scripts it uses are trivial.
There’s very little reason to have complex on-chain smart contract schemes.
AR: What’s your biggest criticism of Ethereum?
PT: See the previous question.
It’s just not a model that makes much sense.
AR: How do you think crypto news and media could improve?
I’d say get more competent journalists and give them more time and resources to write articles. But realistically, where’s the money to do that going to come from?
