Every once in a while, something comes along, and Gordon can say "thank you... thank you for gifting us something with entertainment and educational value".
That day came last Wednesday when Goko set up the poorly produced, somewhat poorly argued debate between Richard Heart and Peter Schiff:
The first error (not really) in the debate is that it places Peter Schiff's name first- hehe jk.
The second error is in the production quality. There are a few things that are missing from legacy systems, and one of them is production quality. The major broadcast channels, networks, did make an attempt at a standard both for video and audio, and will still use local trained professionals to prepare lapel mics and green screens or room stages to host events so the look and sound is great.
Yes, a lot of this is Gordon picking on the production quality. Continue to read if you wish to learn a little audiovisual fundamental. If not, skip down.
Audio Visual Disaster- lol
In today's environment, something like this event that involves two very public, important figures in their respective fields, and Richard who streams regularly, was in charge of providing his own stream to the host, and whomever helped Peter on his feed to host, neither of them tested or prepared the audio correctly; what is the value that a platform, assuming Goko, is supposed to bring if it is only promoting the heavyweight fight?
So, as an audio guy and somewhat computer guy, I will tell you the two separate problems they should have immediately been on top of:
First on Richard's end, what was heard is staggered audio. Nothing to do with his audio level, which as stated his FEED to them was clipping already. They have the final say in adjusting output levels. But, the skipping or digital, or staggered sound was a streaming quality issue. They were not addressing this, but they should have. I paid attention to the audio quality and also his argument, but I should have been focused only on one of those things.
There is a technical issue to resolve in every video stream on the planet, and that is bandwidth, which is resolved with buffering. Memory is buffered ahead of playback so that it can smoothly play the flow of programming. If you do not have enough of either, you have to source the problem to fix it. Since Richard Heart has never, that I can recall, had an issue streaming live without freeze or staggered quality, I have to assume the issue was with the host feed, or sending Richard's feed to the host. Either way, I can't imagine Heart only having a bad connection when in a heavyweight fight, so shame on Goko for simply not knowing the fundamentals of hosting a live feed debate.
Much worse, was Peter Schiff's mic'ing issue (also called miking, both meaning the process of setting up a mic).
When you hear distortion coming from a microphone, the first place you look is not just general "volume". If you think about it, the loudness of Peter's mic was on par with Richard's. The issue is the mic was distorting, and if it was doing so while we watched live, that means it would have been doing so 5 minutes before when some Bozo should have been asking for a "test 1, 2, 3" duy! Unless Peter specifically asked not to give any attention to the sound of his voice in an hour long debate, there is no excuse for the sound we heard.
But, what IS the issue if not volume?
The issue is the input source. When you plug in a mic, it is amplified through a mic preamp. You might not know this. Your audio interface, or built-in computer audio chip, has a cheap little IC chip that amplifies sound. Most super cheap audio chips provide remarkably efficient and reasonable sound compared to 30 years ago. The sound comes in to the mic pre, and you can set up the input volume so it is not too quiet, but turn it up too much and it will distort. Then, there is an output, and again, if your input is too low, you turn up the output and get floor noise if not properly, adequately turning up the input.
Somewhere in the chain, if on Peter's end, whoever stuck the lapel mic on his jacket, should have run a test. If he did it himself, someone from the Goko professional streaming team should have instructed him well in advance to test and how to fix the input level. The other possibility is that Peter was fine on his end and Goko didn't have a clue what they were doing on their end, again unforgivable if all they bring to the table is promoting the event.
Okay, now that I have used my entire first post on the audio, let me get into at least SOMETHING interesting in the debate, and I will tackle the easiest argument of them all!
Now, real debate stuff
Peter Schiff explains that his love affair with gold is purely centered around using it as a hedge against fiat, which we can agree it is better to hold gold and it's massive 40 year loss, because pretty much anything holds value better than fiat. The only real advantage, value-based, that the dollar has is that it performs better and is more widely used than any other fiat. Being the best at being the worst, isn't a great feature set and none of us should be proud of it. The more readily available that alternate payment, transactional values are, and the better ones that can be brought to market, the better it will serve all of us.
So, the idea of Peter Schiff and his continuous debates on Bitcoin having no value, gonna go to zero, should be debated SO much better by anyone in the crypto space, and Richard is in a position where he doesn't debate it nearly as well as he should. In fact, this is a really important point, so I'm only going to stick on this one topic, and will move to the next in Part Two.
Something to understand about Richard Heart, and I am 100% certain of the truth of this statement even if Richard isn't aware of it, or honest with himself about it: Richard is about framing the argument. He is not a dishonest person, unless Hex is a scam, in which case we have a few more years before any cracks can form, and I think it would be an awful waste of intellectual, emotional and financial time for him to go about scamming in this manner, so I maintain he is genuinely interested in making cool crypto products. But, something about Richard to understand, is that he is framing a position.
He knows that there is a lot of value in Bitcoin. What he is frustrated by, and thus has moved over from Bitcoin to Ethereum, is because like many, Richard likes innovation. Bitcoin sacrificing the original purpose, peer-to-peer e-cash, to become more of a store of value, in his opinion, is a weakness and not a feature. But, he counters this by making the strong anti-Bitcoin arguments to battle his case for other assets.
The reason we do not hear about Ether's horrid gas fees until Richard talks about Pulse and Pulsechain, is because that is a separate project from Hex, as a digital CD to delay the investor's impulse to sell early. Pulse is about fixing what is wrong with Ethereum, so we will hear, in that product, Richard's arguments against Ethereum.
It is important to understand that while he is honest in his reasoning and assessment, Richard also knows there are greater truths that are debatable, but there is never, ever, ever, ever a valid debater on the other end of the debate. Never.
There are things I agreed with on both sides with Schiff and Heart. But, neither of them, in my opinion, were lifting up a professional-grade defense, which bugs me. Richard is great at framing his points of logic with vigor and maintaining confidence that he is right about what he is saying. So, it matters a great deal that in promoting Hex, which well he should, he makes arguments against Bitcoin that are only so sincerely held, because they deepen his resolve for Hex. I am certain Richard has sold, and regretted selling, Bitcoin at many peaks that made profit, but paled in comparison to $68K.
I'm also certain that the 2 peaks and 1 dip Heart called on the nose were not the only calls he made, and the call to $11K now may or may not happen. We see SO many moves to and from lines of support happen because of blatant governmental market manipulation, and sometimes even truckers and wars seem timed just at the right moment when an asset is about to break out of a bear trap. All of this to say, I am also very certain that Heart still owns a nice stack of Bitcoin and he doesn't hate it enough not to remember how deeply he has been invested in it emotionally and as a miner.
For the years he vigorously defended Bitcoin, it was as an investor, a HODLer, and also a miner. Sure, he mined when blocks rewarded 50 Bitcoin, but he also tried his hand at GPU mining and was a video gaming junkie, all of this from his own years of proclamation. This is not a criticism of Richard, but an observation of his debate style. He is aggressive, has sometimes gotten off track and other times answered with non-answers, and somehow there isn't a great enough intelligence either with a host or with the opposite side of the debate, to recognize the actual weaknesses that could be pointed out. Again, this bugs me. Richard would be the first one to recognize a more formidable foe on the other end, if the argument was actually there.
There ARE counters to Richard's claims, but no one is ever intelligent enough to state them, and it is very possible that being on the other end of Heart feels a lot more intimidating when it is happening to you, than as a 3rd person observer; I think that is fair.
So, framing the "Bitcoin is bad for the environment" position is a little weaker when it didn't bother someone from 2009 to 2014.
The fact that they shifted camps somewhere between 2016 and 2019 doesn't make it a better defense of Ether than Hex, but more than this, why doesn't anyone take up that part of the debate? You, Richard, yourself, were once a Bitcoin miner, were you not? So, what changed from then to now?
The awareness that mining rigs burn out fast and are expensive and are filling up to the tens of thousands of used gpu's piling up around the landfills of the world. Why didn't that bother you, an intelligent man also aware of other new crypto coming out, for the years you were trying your hand at continued mining? Why did you care so deeply about Bitcoin still, to defend it to tears, when other options already existed?
That isn't a strong debate, because he is smart enough to counter it, but I would certainly think that someone who hears part of Heart's defense is that he prefers his asset because it isn't 'destroying' the environment. The best debate against PoW should be about whether it hinders speed and scaling if it isn't necessary, but there are SO many ways around the "bad for environment" no one seems capable to counter it, and that of course... bugs me.
Difficulty, scarcity, real-world hash rate, defending the network with nodes, the actual labor as a part of the value in an asset defend the narrative that something is real and tangible as well as any argument in favor of gold. If, on top of that, it also outperforms in actual price, meaning profit, then that is the icing on the cake. You don't have to defend Bitcoin as just TA values, meaning someone can say just because an asset goes up doesn't mean there is any underlying value. But, if something is a technology that is proven to have tangible values that are intellectual, and it is gaining adoption because years of proof provide a solid foundation in those things, then one can build on this argument by pointing out that economic value surely is real value, and infrastructure surely is real value, the valid ASIC use of specific computer power to protect the challenge of a real, better economic model than fiat, should be easy to defend. The debates like this never, ever, ever get there. There are also years of proof that there are tens of thousands of people who would sit through hours longer debates to hear the better points be made.
Next, is the point that there is a direct, debatable comparison to Bitcoin as digital gold vs actual gold, both of them perfectly debatable as real store of value vs fake store of value. But, Richard would do SO much better against Schiff, to argue in defense of all crypto including Bitcoin, than to use the narrative that Bitcoin PoW is bad, where Ether PoS will be good. It is a really interesting scenario, but the great point is that Richard says what he says, because he knows the point is to hold a position and defend it, not because it is the entire truth he is capable of seeing.
Understand, there is a difference between knowing all of the different sides of a topic and choosing, selecting, what to frame as your position, than simply not telling the truth. Richard likely becomes more deeply convicted about his truths, the more he is taking a side, so if I were to introduce the other points to the vital nature of Bitcoin in the crypto landscape, I would work on those arguments he has been right about in the past.
People have tried and failed at this, because the moment he uses the defense that conditions change and it becomes appropriate to adjust your view or position if the facts adapt or change over time, there are holes in the defense to attack.
There is SO much to unpack from this little nugget of gold (see what I did there?).
I'm going to 'dig' in deeper, perhaps value-mine, the debate more in Part Two!
Thanks for reading and for now, Crypto Gordon Freeman... out.
