In the review I posted earlier today, I wanted to remain as objective as possible, but as someone who believes in the vision of peer to peer electronic cash, it was hard not to see the new documentary through the lens of a Bitcoin Cash supporter.
Here's my running diary of "Cryptopia: Bitcoin, Blockchains, and the Future of the Internet".
8:20 We are introduced to a Jorg Platzer, owner of a Berlin bar that started accepting BTC at his business to avoid paying credit card fees and having to worry about chargebacks up to 180 days after a transaction. The man clearly gets it, and he serves as a perfect example of how businesses can benefit from using Bitcoin. More on him later.
12:47 Journalist Laura Shin tells a story about female bloggers in Afghanistan who were paid in Bitcoin. One of these women was in an abusive marriage and using her saved Bitcoin, she was able to divorce her husband because for the first time, she had control of her own money. As a blogger myself, I couldn't help but think of our very own read.cash where people can post content and earn BCH through their posts. I often get small tips anywhere from as little as a penny to $1. Imagine trying to tip a blogger $0.50 when the tx fee is $2. It would make no sense. But with BCH you can.
24:53 This segment on the Swiss Fort Knox alleges that the wealthy are hoarding $10B of Bitcoin in secret military grade bunkers. To me, this is the epitome of the hodl meme, and I can't help but find it depressing that such a revolutionary new tool has been relegated to being nothing more than another way of storing wealth for the elite, who do nothing with their money but bury it in some bunker in Switzerland.
29:10 Sir Richard Branson when asked if Bitcoin is a currency that's going to work eventually: "I think it is working, and there will be other currencies like it that may be even better." [emphasis mine]
30:15 Wences Casares is the CEO of Xapos and it is his company's Bitcoins that are being stored in those bunkers. But to me he sounds like just another BTC maximalist who only cares about number go up.
34:56 It needs to be pointed out that the documentary gets the facts wrong here. Roger Ver, Calvin Ayre, and Craig Wright had nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. They played significant roles later, but they jumped on the bandwagon after its creation like the rest of us.
38:14 Jorg Platzer again, the owner of that Berlin Bar. He returns on screen to say that Bitcoin Cash is a scam and feels sorry for people who are buying Bitcoin Cash thinking it's Bitcoin. First of all, it's sad to see someone who originally understood the purpose of Bitcoin become so brainwashed that he's lost his mind. He first started accepting BTC at his bar to circumvent the credit card companies and their fees. Now he supports a version of Bitcoin that will charge his customers higher fees than even the credit card companies, not to mention the chance of being double-spent. And if you're buying Bitcoin Cash thinking its Bitcoin, when it's currently worth $2.50 for every $100 worth of BTC, I don't know what to tell you.
39:47 This is what Andreas Antonopoulos had to say on the subject of the scaling wars: "This thing that Satoshi Nakamoto launched is much more resilient than anyone even hoped." What I think he's trying to say is that BTC proved resilient as no one was able to change the direction of the network, keeping blocks at 1MB. But he's looking at it all wrong. Bitcoin proved to be resilient with the creation of Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is the thing that Satoshi Nakamoto launched. I don't know that BTC longer is.
50:46 Jorg Platzer again, but this time he is joined by a Dr. Mervyn G. Maistry who is the founder of Kintaro Capital, a $100M crypto fund. Jorg, being the maximalist that he is, says something about how all other blockchains are useless. This is how Mervyn counters: "What you're saying is a maximalist point of view. You are speaking from a perspective of a cult or a sect. My problem is that you are hijacking a movement of a technology that is far greater and has far more potential than just these individuals." Wow, someone that gets it.
51:06 Brian Fabian Crain, host of the "Epicenter" podcast: "There's all of these different things that you can use blockchain for, right? ... They're almost like different ecosystems, and then what you see is almost like an evolutionary process where the blockchains fork and they have the same ancestries, but they adapt to different environments and we see this ever increasing level of diversity in number of blockchains, so I think the idea that there's gonna be one blockchain, and it's gonna fit for everything, it's almost like disregarding the nature of evolution." I agree completely.
1:00:50 And finally, Andreas Antonopoulos again, now talking about the beginnings of the internet:
"There was a very big battle over the protocols. TCP/IP didn't just win by default. It won through attrition basically by being better, simpler, easier to deploy than all of the other proposals."
"And more scalable," Torsten jumps in.
"And more scalable," Andreas affirms. Then he continues:
"And it had a lot of competition from phone companies that tried to make the internet a closed, metered, controlled system. They tried to do what people are trying to do today with blockchains, which is take the open decentralized network and turn it into this sterile, closed corporate system where they can charge by the minute and be in control."
There's a lot to unpack here, so let's go back to what he said in the beginning. That TCP/IP won by being simpler and easier to deploy. Bitcoin Cash is simpler and easier to deploy than Lightning Network, I think, and it's at this point in the documentary that I notice the Lightning Network hasn't been mentioned even once. It doesn't the rest of the way either.
Moving on, he also says that in the early days of the internet, companies tried to make it a closed, metered, controlled system. But what he's describing is exactly what Blockstream did to BTC. Ever since the blocks started getting full, they made it a "closed, metered, controlled system ... this sterile, closed corporate system where they can charge by the minute and be in control."
To me that describes Lightning, liquid, high fees and full blocks and slow transactions. That's BTC.
The thing is bitcoin and Blockchain in general are just like a mystery to so many people. They claim they understand it fully whereas realistically, they don't understand in-depth how it works. It is so evident in hat jorg guy of the Berlin bar.