What's better for Bitcoin, a pro Bitcoin politician or an anti
Bitcoin politician? It's like choosing between, you
know, cancer and the common cold I guess.
And I'll take the common cold. We are the satoshis.
Everything divided by 21 million is like the least amount of
characters I can explain Bitcoin with.
Ignorance is the only thing that can kill Bitcoin.
All Fiat currencies die at some point, and they all die in
hyperinflation. And how does this end?
It ends in hyperbicronization. The orange pill is the the
remedy to the black pill. You're 100% confident that it
does? Yeah.
Welcome to another episode of Simply Bitcoin IRL.
We're here in the beautiful Lake Lugano in Switzerland and I'm
here with a dear friends Canutes Vanholm and also uncle from
another mother. Does that even make sense?
I don't know. Anyways, Canute of course is
well known for being an incredible authors, also has
podcasts, but most importantly I think most of the community.
Knows him by. Infinity divided by 21 million,
Yeah. So could you explain that meme
because it's the reason it's so effective is because it explains
many, many things in a very condensed meme or number
division equation. There we go.
Yeah. So, so that's why I fell in love
with Twitter in the 1st place. Like you had to condense your
thoughts to 140 characters and that was really good for my
writing because I had to compress everything to the like
and everything divided by 21 million is like the least amount
of characters I can explain Bitcoin with.
It alludes to the fact that the the purchasing power of a
Bitcoin or of a Satoshi can, can and will go up forever as long
as Bitcoin works. Can you elaborate a little bit
on that? Because that sounds crazy.
Yeah, so the thing that intrigued me about Bitcoin in
the 1st place was that here was this claim that we had something
on the Internet now that couldn't be copied by anyone.
And to me that was very a very strange statement.
Like how can something in the realm of computer or the in the
realm of information not be copied?
Like if I say something to you, you hear it and then I still
have the information of what I said.
And you do too, like if I all information can be copied.
It's in the very nature of information, which is why all
intellectual property laws are bullshit and we should.
You can't really own information.
So. So I looked into it deeper and
tried to like everyone else tried to debunk it and like this
must be a scam and so on and so forth and took me like 10 years
to figure out the the deeper reason why why the Satoshi's are
sacred and special. The conclusion I came to is that
the ability to move the satoshi is really just a secret that one
person keeps from everyone else. So if if so they really live in
your head rather than on the time chain.
So the reason that I can act as if I own the satoshi, which is
not ownable because it's just a number, is that I have a secret
that being the private key, the seed phrase or the location of
the private key doesn't matter. Like I have a secret that gives
me access to move these things and I can thereby act as if I
own them because I find it very on improbable that you have
access to the same secret as I do.
And I also find it very improbable that bikprints
consensus rules will change to such an extent that my key will
be worthless in the future. So we are the Satoshis in a very
literal sense. We are, we are now some part of
the same entity, which is also, by the way, that that that has
so many implications. The the biggest one being that
you and I are from a simple pumping our bags perspective,
incentivized to be awesome to one another.
Yeah. And keep on on click.
So and I think that that doesn't end after hyperbicronization.
There's no reason that that would ever end.
Since the Bitcoiners are the bitcoins.
We can, we can play this game forever and we're all of a
sudden humanity is incentivized to be awesome to one another
rather than to aggress against one another.
And we, we can go deeper into that if you want to.
Absolutely. I, I think the incentive aspect
is fascinating, right. And the reason for that is I
think Fiat causes a misalignment of incentives.
And I think Bitcoin causes an alignment of incentive to such
an extent that it is almost unbelievable, right?
Because we're so used to this winner takes all, which is
basically life under a Fiat standard versus life under a
Bitcoin standard, which it's not to say that there aren't going
to be winners, but specifically within the Bitcoin network,
you're incentivized to talk about Bitcoin.
I'm incentivized to talk about Bitcoin, why we hold Bitcoin.
But let's say you're listening. And you don't.
Own Bitcoin, you buy Bitcoin, you're going to benefit from me
and you talking about Bitcoin. In fact, you're going to be
benefiting from Larry Fink talking about Bitcoin and
Michael Saylor talking about Bitcoin.
And that's where Max Keiser's quote came from.
I mean, his meme is this really a meme came from which is like
Larry Fink is a Bitcoin employee of the of the month, right?
So let's let's explore that topic a little bit more, right?
Which is this radical thing that I think is very difficult to
understand, which is the alignment of incentives that is
possible under Bitcoin. Yeah.
We we've been conditioned to think that economics is a 0 sum
game or that there's always a loser where there's a winner.
But in Bitcoin, if we denominate in Bitcoin, we can all be
winners. Yeah, sure, winners at different
paces, but but we're still all directionally winning.
And I think what what the other aspect of this that is important
is that it literally makes aggression less profitable
because I can threaten you and try to take your bitcoins, but I
have no way of knowing how many you actually had.
So you can give me a, a tiny fraction of what you had and I
have no way of verifying how how big of a fraction I actually got
from you. And if I kill you?
You know you get it all. I'm not, I'm not going to get
any of it. In fact, the scarcity of the,
the, the assets increases in that case and which benefits
every other Bitcoin holder. So we get more like it's, it's
truly unstoppable in that sense. So this leads me to my next
question, perfect segue, which is you wrote a book called
Bitcoin, the Philosophy of Everything, and you're just
talking. About.
I don't know. I think you did.
Did you know I I wrote a book called Everything Bitcoin the
everything divided by 21,000,000 and once called the Bitcoin the
inverse of. We're not uncles anymore, so
yeah. Could you talk a little bit
about that? Yes.
My first book is called Bitcoin Sovereignty through Mathematics.
The second one is called In Bitcoin Independence Reimagined.
And that is the one we're at at the in the Academy at the
moment. And we're doing a YouTube show
each and every chapter of each and every one of my books where
Luke and I read a chapter and discuss the ideas in each
paragraph. And then I wrote the everything
divided by 21 million book. And after that a book about
praxeology called Praxeology, the Invisible Hand That Feeds
You, which is more about economics in general than than
Bitcoin. And my latest one is called
Bitcoin the Inverse of Clown World which I Co wrote with Luke
the Wolf, my pod Co host and pod producer.
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So could you talk a little bit about your latest book, right,
which is Bitcoin the inverse of Clown world?
Do you think that Fiat is directly correlated with clown
world? Absolutely.
I think equality is the opposite of quality.
So what we're, what we're living in now with and and also all of
these other sayings like abundance in money, scarcity
everywhere else and scarce money, abundance everywhere
else. So we're if we have an elastic
money supply and then that incentivizes people to spend
their time and effort on frivolous things.
What it also funnels well from the lower and the middle classes
up into the so-called elite, which is basically just the most
successful themes in society. While if we had something that's
no single person can control but that controls itself rules for
rulers, then every all prices will drop to the marginal cost
of production and even further than that.
I'd say the question I ask in the book is like when when a
human being practices doing something, do they usually get
better or worse at the thing they're practicing doing?
So for instance, do you consider yourself a better podcaster now
after you've done it for a couple of years?
Like, do you get better at the thing you're?
Doing well? Apparently not, because I asked
you about a book you've never written.
Don't worry about that, Uncle, but yes, yeah, through.
Repetition is like my fourth interview.
But yeah, in a repetition you obviously get better.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
So the natural follow up question to that, that no one
asks themselves this. So why aren't all prices falling
forever? And if you denominate in
Bitcoin, you can see that they actually are.
So the it's the first time in history that we had a a type of
money that accurately reflects the deflationary nature of of
the free market. Yeah.
And and I think that that concept right, which is
something that is. I don't know.
It is very simple, but it's actually very difficult to
understand, which is the concept that naturally because of
productivity games, because of technological games, prices
should be falling. The Bitcoin is the only currency
that is actually able to truly reflect that, you know, because
it can't be manipulated, because it has absolute scarcity and
every other currency, because it is manipulated, because it
doesn't have scarcity, it has the exact opposite of scarcity.
It doesn't reflect that at all. And it creates, to borrow from
your books, you know, title. It creates clown worlds.
It really messes up society in ways that I don't think a lot of
people truly understand. Now the reason the reason it
creates clown world is that everything becomes political.
Everything becomes politicized because the the fastest way to
acquire wealth is no longer to provide something of value to
your fellow man that they asked actually asked for, but you can
instead for a kiss ass within the political sector and within
the banking sector and get your ways through that.
And that is also why I think the hardest pill to swallow here is
that democracy itself is a slippery slope to towards
totalitarianism. I think in if you play out
democracy over a long enough time period, it will always be
be more and more corrupt, especially if you have
inflationary currency. Yeah, I mean that subject in
particular, I just had Svetsky on the show, so you could
imagine, and you know that that rabbit hole is is a deep 1.
And I was actually talking to Prince Philip, yeah, about this
specific subject as well, and the general consensus in the
West. And actually this is such a
taboo subject, right, as that democracy is the end all be all.
But the outcome that it's led to is basically the majority leads
to basically like vote to loot the treasury.
Right to to. Benefit themselves right there.
It's a popularity contest, and the winner basically controls
the money printer to benefit their voters.
And then if the other side wins, the exact opposite happens.
And it's just kind of like this crazy pendulum that starts
happening, right? And that's what you define as
clown worlds. And I think that's what we're
seeing. And do you think it's a
coincidence that clown World has accelerated the way it has been
accelerated in the last decade or so, as Fiat money continues
to disconnect itself more and more from reality the more they
print? No, absolutely not.
I mean, I think, I think it's inevitable when you have
inflationary money, all Fiat currencies die at some point and
they all die in hyperinflation because they have to follow a
hockey stick curve, because the way the system is set up is that
every single dollar in your pocket is owed by someone to
someone else. And so, so it's all based on
debt and that debt has to be paid back with interest.
And the only way to create enough money to pay back the
debt is to print more of it. So, so and the the debt
compounds. So all Fiat currencies are
following a hockey stick curve to hell which is they why they
sometimes have to reboot these systems and and do the same scam
again. Which is what happened here in
Europe with the Euro. Like they replaced fail other
failing currencies with a new destined to fail currency and
they will do it again when when shit hits the fan.
But it's it's still a scam. And how does this end?
It ends in hyperbicronization. That's why I'm so bullish.
I mean the orange pill is the the remedy to the black pill.
You're 100% confident that it does?
I wouldn't say 100%. Why not 100?
Because like, I don't want to predict the future and there
might be unforeseen events that I can't predict.
However, in my praxeology book that I just rewrote and made a
second edition of, I added three chapters and the very last
chapter or the last but one chapter, the the last one of the
added chapters is called What About the Roads?
And in that chapter, I talk about the movie The Shawshank
Redemption. Are you familiar with the movie?
I love that movie. Yeah, it's actually a movie
about about libertarianism, I'd say, or above freedom because
there's there's 90 year old inmates that gets released and
two weeks later he hangs himself because he's become so
institutionalized and used to they like the prison routines,
previews, free meals per day and all of that.
He knows the but he doesn't know the outside world.
So everything he finds when he's released is fear and the the
protagonist, Andy Dufresne. He has his friend Read, played
by Morgan Freeman, who warns him about the dangers of hope.
Like, if you have hope, you will, you will only be
destroyed. But Andy refuses to listen to
that. And whilst everything else is
going on in the movie, he's slowly but surely.
Yeah, he. Figures out a way.
Minds literally minds his way out to the prison.
So the sense morale of the the movie is that hope is a rational
choice. If we're not hopeful, then we
the Shawshank walls become real. There's that's what enables.
That's why the Soviet Union was a a giant continent sized prison
for 70 years. And hope is what ended it.
People actually seeing that there's a way out of these
things. So you can't do it collectively.
You have to. You have to come to these
realizations yourself and start living as a Freeman.
Canoe that is extremely powerful and I connected it with when I
asked you, I said, are you 100% certain?
And essentially what you're reminding me of is that very
famous, that very famous viral video of the the guru.
I am, but the people are. Retarded.
And he's like, the problem with democracy is that, you know,
it's by the people. For the people.
But the people are, this is going on YouTube, not very
smart, yeah. And the people are the R.
Word and I'm connecting that with with what you're saying,
which is people have so been accustomed to living in the Fiat
matrix that even though they're presented with clearly a better
alternative actual freedom. What the hidden variable that
you're thinking about is that potentially there's a percentage
of the population that might not even want that because they're
so accustomed to being in prison to use the Shawshank Redemption.
Yeah. Reference.
Yeah, I'd say. I'm 100% certain that hope is a
rational choice. It's like the warning that Andy
gets from Red is that you're going to die in here.
You better get used to the thoughts.
But but the the counter to that is that you're going to die
anyway, so you might as well be hopeful.
Yeah. 'Cause it's a, it's a single,
you're going to end up in the same place, right?
Yeah. So might as well fight I.
Guess might as well, yeah. And at least be proud of the
life you LED. Yes, 100%.
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Check out Leaden today. So Canoe, Bitcoin has changed.
Bitcoin is a little bit different than early days, you
know, 5678 years ago, 10 years ago.
It's matured a little bit since the approval of the ETF two
years ago, January of 2024. I wouldn't classify that as
maturing. But no, the reason I'm saying
that is, you know, it's become a little bit more.
The suit coiner is my friend. Oh, yeah, yeah.
You know, before. Before it was all hitties and
all memes. Yeah.
And now a lot of suits. And ties.
Yeah. What's your take on that, man?
Because like what worries me specifically with that is people
are forgetting what makes Bitcoin so powerful and that is
the self custodial aspect of it. That's the sovereignty aspect of
that. And I think people are
forgetting that with this kind of institutional adoption of
Bitcoin. Yeah, a phrase I miss hearing at
Bitcoin conferences is not your keys, not your coins.
Because it's still true. It will always be true.
None of these reserve companies have any Bitcoin.
Like some guy at Coinbase has those bitcoins or a group of
guys if it's a multi sync thing I actually heard.
It's Brian Armstrong. He's a Ledger and his night
stand. Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, whoever it is, this some guy can go off and buy an island
somewhere. You can bleep that out if you
want. So.
So I'd like to like stress that. And Bitcoin is more resilient to
attacks the more it belongs to individuals rather than
institutions. So I don't, I don't necessarily
like these honeypots. I think people should acquire
their bitcoins KYC free and absolutely not sell them to the
exchanges to the KYC, the exchange, because you don't want
you don't want them to be in this honeypots in the.
In the 1st place, and I see that the saying is now you either die
a big coiner or you live long enough to to see yourself become
a suit coiner. I I I I choose to be Batman.
Like just be yourself is always good advice.
But if unless you can be Batman, then be Batman.
Canoe. Technically, you're wearing a
suit. Damn.
So man. Let's talk about this cycle,
right, which is definitely been quite interesting to to say the
least. You know, I think Bitcoin has a
way with expectations, right, of just grinding them down,
pulverizing them, making them disappear.
I think that this cycle is is played out a little bit
differently and it's precisely because of of the institutional
adoption of Bitcoin. Retail doesn't even know Bitcoin
exists at this point. If you look up the Google
trends, it's like hasn't even surpassed the 2021 all time
high, right? So my question to you is, you
know, are the is the era of the parabolas over?
I mean, I don't know and honestly I don't care that much.
Like 1 one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin and as long as that is
true, they will inflate the Fiat money supply.
So in measured in Fiat your the value of your bitcoins will
eventually go up whether that happens tomorrow or like a
couple of generations from now. It's not really important if you
lower your time preference as long as you can like and sure,
skim off the top of your stack if you have to.
But still the the best thing you can do is acquire some Bitcoin,
wait a decade or two before you use any of it, and stack in in
the meantime. That's that will always work.
Or make sure you have more Bitcoin than the day before.
Yeah, if if you're one set up per year, you're an absolute
winner because at the end game of this there there will be no
more sets and everyone's under estimating the upcoming SAT
squeeze like 96 point something percent of the coins have
already been mined. So in the the 1st 15 years.
So we have like over the next hundred, 120 or so years of the
the, the the remaining 3 and 3 1/2 percent will be mined.
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Does the paper Bitcoin aspect where you at all as you were
mentioning earlier, right this centralization of of this giant
honeypot that is Brian Armstrong's night stand the.
Future I'm looking forward to is not like a Fiat Fiat economy is
integrating with Bitcoin. I'm here for the last scene of
Fight Club where I've just shot myself through the face and work
metaphor. Yeah, yeah, the credit card
companies are crumbling down like the the irony is that
Bitcoin needs to be that to survive in the long run at all.
And sure there are scenarios where where this experiment has
failed. We, as in the users and the node
runners, if we don't remain vigilant and if we if we become
too passive in defending this thing, then then we're on thin
ice, I think. Yeah, yeah.
No, I agree. I agree.
Ignorance is the only thing that can kill Bitcoin.
Yeah. And you know, what gives me a
little bit of hope too is also if you see the breakdown between
who holds Bitcoin, even though you hear all this news about the
institutions and BlackRock and strategy and they're just
acquiring all this Bitcoin, this still the vast majority of
Bitcoin is held by individuals basically.
We don't know. No, no.
And you, as I said, you can't prove ownership of a Bitcoin
because you at that score, you cannot really own them.
You can just act as if you did. So it's impossible to know who
owns what. So.
And that's a good thing. Yeah, So man, as we.
Head into this next decade, right and hyper bitcoinization
is starting. I think it's accelerating in my
opinion. You know, in the United States
you had the the victory of the first pro Bitcoin
administration. Even though he's had a little
bit of a, you know, was, it wasn't perfect, but it was
definitely better than Operation 2.2 point.
Oh, I'm going to like push back on that a bit because like
what's better for Bitcoin, a pro Bitcoin politician or an anti
Bitcoin politician? And I don't think this is a
there's a straight answer to that because if if the
government can dictate what a notice and what you can do with
it, then it's it's not permission less anymore.
Yeah, so, so, so I'm conflicted about this.
And yeah, we got the crony scammer instead of the
communist. And the crony scammer is better
than the communist. But it's the it's like choosing
between, you know, cancer and the common cold, I guess.
And I'll take the common cold. I think it's a great way of
explaining it. Anyways, Canoe, we are getting
to the top of the hour and I want to ask you this, 100 years
from now, 500 years from now, 1000 years from now, how do you
want to be remembered? What do you want your legacy to
be? I I don't care too much about
that. I I try to live in the now and
whilst having a low pro time preference which are not
mutually exclusive I think, but it can be hard to square
sometimes. But I try to enjoy the moment
and go with the flow and say yes to like this.
You can just do things. It's very just do things, right.
You could just do things, you know, record a podcast.
Yeah. Like and I.
Have to I remind myself everyone once in a while that you can
also just not do things because I'm not very good at that.
So man, where can people find your books?
Bitcoininfinity.com, That's where we accept sets for the
books if you want to use shitty Fiat to get rid of it.
They're also available on Amazon and Audible and all of that.
And yeah, look up the Bitcoin Infinity Show and the Bitcoin
Infinity Academy. And to make sure I don't fuck it
up again, could you actually name them?
One is called the Sovereign. Sovereignty through Mathematics
is the first one, and I wrote that in my bedroom and I went
with a with 50 books in a suitcase to a conference in Riga
in 2019. And nowadays that book is
recommended on hope.com. Strategies Bitcoin website is
one of the first five books that would have ever put up there.
The second one is called Bitcoin Independence Reimagined.
It's my least the famous one, I guess.
The third one is Bitcoin everything divided by 21
million. The 1st 4th one about Bitcoin is
a Bitcoin inverse of Clown World Co written by Luke Dwolf.
And then there's the praxeology, The invisible hand that feeds
you, which is my attempt at condensing Mises into 200 pages.
Absolutely. Knuts Fanholm, thank you so much
for joining me. Thank you, Uncle I.
Appreciate it. Thank you, Uncle Knut.