If money's being debased, then you can't express your, your
values as fully. You, you may have predicted that
you would have been, you know, sometime in the future I'll be
able to do X thing and I'll be able to express my value in some
way because I, I want to buy this, this thing that I want.
All the money that you have right now is worth the most
right now, you know, so you have to spend it.
And that's why people are also competing to gather that money
quickly. All right, BITS team, welcome to
Bitcoin for Millennials. Thank.
You so much for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for coming
on. I, I, I just shared with you,
you have, you have been one of the people on my journey to
yeah, give me insights, point me to, you know, other podcast
articles, etcetera. And yeah, I, I just want to say
again, like I'm, I'm grateful for that because I, I always
think it's nice to hear that back.
And you never know how far the stuff you do on the Internet
travels, right? So yeah, just wanted to share
that. You know, it's, it's always
humbling and I'm always honored to have helped people learn.
And it's so true that you never know who's listening.
I've, I've had some of the most the, the the strangest people
reach out to me before. And it's, it's always a it's,
it's fun, it's interesting. And it also one of the things I
love most about it is that it shows the sort of true global
nature of Bitcoin and that, you know, Bitcoin really is for
everyone. And these, these ideas are that
they're universally applicable. And so anyway, yeah, thank you.
Yeah. Yeah, 100%.
And I think that's a nice leeway into kind of like the where I
wanted to start in this conversation.
And I was thinking a nice place to start is with a question that
lots of, you know, critics ask when talking about Bitcoin.
And that is, what does Bitcoin produce or generate?
Nothing. It is a a worthless Tulip and
it's a Ponzi scheme. So Bitcoin, what it what it is,
is the best monetary technology ever produced.
And to understand that, you know, we need to understand
that, you know, money itself is not something that that
generates some other good money is, is it's a special kind of
good. So there's consumer goods and
there's capital goods. Generally speaking, you know,
it's something that you actually, you you get so that
you can consume it, you know, some, some food or entertainment
or some kind of product of, you know, and then there's capital
goods, which are goods that produce other goods.
Money is neither of those. Money is a a special good that
we use specifically for trading for other goods.
And So what Bitcoin, by virtue of being the greatest monetary
technology ever, it best supplies what money is meant to
supply, which is certainty in an uncertain future.
So all of us have to deal with the fact that we don't know
what's going to happen in the future.
And because of that, we want to have some way of dealing with
all of the potential weirdness that we have to deal with,
whether it's, you know, good or bad, good opportunities or, or,
you know, bad situations, you always want to be prepared to
deal with everything. And Bitcoin offers that
certainty because of the fact that it is an extremely reliable
network that has all kinds of properties from, you know, the
the classic, the classic, you know, divisibility,
transportability and and so on and so forth.
And we, you know, we can get into the details of that, but
basically what it actually offers is that certainty going
into an uncertain future. Yeah, what I love about this,
that eventually the the the point or this what Bitcoin is,
is very simplistic, right? It's like there's a set of rules
every 10 minutes, we check if it still works as advertised,
right? As as rules enough nodes say
yes, you know, and then we and then we just continue basically.
But in the, in the, in the Fiat money world where, you know,
this asset is like trying to compete, it's, it's, there's a
lot of noise, right? There's a lot of like
abstraction and, and all these things.
So I feel like Bitcoin is so hard to understand because it's
so simple in a world that's like not really or, or very hard to
understand, right? Can you share with me why is
this constant and so important? Is it, well, as you said, you
know, like this, this uncertain future, but isn't it also
because what should serve as this constant is constantly
changing basically? So it's not acting as the
constant. Yeah.
Well, and so that that's one of the major that that's certainly
one of the major kind of uncertainties that Bitcoin
relieves is the fact that you don't have to worry about about
it being debased because it has, you know, finite scarcity as far
as like, you know, the different ways that people kind of get
confused. I, I don't think they think
about money that way. It's, you know, to me, money
seems pretty straightforward. You know it, it's exactly that
it's a hedge against future uncertainty, But that itself
takes a lot to unpack in the way that people generally think
about money tends to be just in what they're doing day-to-day Is
like money the thing money is the thing I get my groceries
with. You know, money is the thing I
use to go buy stuff. And yes, that is true.
That is literally what we use money for.
But it doesn't, it doesn't peel back and ask the question is
like, what problem existed there?
That having money means we no longer have that problem.
And it's things, you know, the, the, the classic double
coincidence of wants problem of, you know, that's the uncertainty
of will I have the thing that the other person wants and will
that person have the thing that I want so that it magically
matches up that we can make a, a fair trade to all get what we
want. That that's a very difficult
thing to do. This is why we don't live in a
barter economy because it is simply doesn't scale.
Even even with two people can be very difficult because you don't
know if you have what you want. And then when you have a bunch
of people trying to all, you know, they have all kinds of
different things that they they need and want, it just doesn't
work out. And so people start seeking out,
you know, what is the good that I can expect other people to
want? You know, if I, if I just bring
eggs to market, there's an uncertainty as to whether people
want it. But if there's a good that I can
expect everyone to want, then I have some level of certainty
that whatever good I'm bringing to the market, someone's going
to want it. And, you know, I have a higher
chance of being able to get the thing that I'm looking for.
So Bitcoin and money in general is like actually solving that
problem, but people usually just think on it on, on it at the
sort of surface level of like the, the act of the problem
being solved instead of what problem is being solved, if
that, if that makes sense. So I, I, I think that's AI think
that's a big hang up for people. And it, it, it takes, you know,
it, it takes some some time and thinking to kind of like dig
back and, and, and think through that.
And so despite the fact that the actual final answer for what is
money is rather simple, it does take a lot to unpack.
You know, what, what all of that that is.
I think specifically with something, so you have a lot of
gold bug types, people who, who want to, you know, return to a
gold standard. They want to see gold
reintroduced as money because classically it was a, a, you
know, is the, the harvest money and it, it powered a lot of
great economic development and so on and so forth.
A lot of those people get hung up, I think on sort of the, the
some, some wrong properties of gold within their analysis.
That is to say they, they understand that the scarcity,
divisibility, fungibility, like all these kinds of great things
about gold. But then they also get hung up
by and I'm specifically thinking in terms of the physicality.
So I think they often mistake the physicality of gold versus
the digital nature of Bitcoin as as being an advantage and one
that for Bitcoin doesn't make any sense.
But, but I would argue that that's actually a a benefit to
Bitcoin because of the fact that it allows for types of
transportability and storage and security and so on and so forth
that the physicality of gold actually holds back A great
example of this 2 great examples.
One, I guess that transportability, you can send
it instantly online anywhere in the world and sending it to your
neighbor is just as easy as sending it to someone who's
literally on the other side of the planet.
And that is that is an incredible feat.
And you cannot do that with gold.
Gold is very heavy. You have to physically carry it
somewhere. And then you know, from the
security aspect, the fact that you can, you know, with it, with
gold, if you're storing it, it all has to go, just go in one
big gold vault. And historically, you know, if
you're in a war and stuff like that, that's where you go first.
You know, when you, when you invade your enemy, it's like
you're going to go straight for that, straight for that gold.
And we see that time and time again throughout history.
And obviously that happens at a small scale too.
People, people rob houses and so on and so forth.
And Bitcoin has things like multi sig and that's by virtue
of the fact that it's digital. And so the uncertainty of, you
know, security, like making sure you 'cause if we go back to,
well, let me finish that. Basically, you know, the because
it's because we can split up keys.
You don't have to have it all physically in one place.
Yeah, exactly. And that is that is an
incredible boon. And likewise, it's like you
don't even have to. You don't even have to open the
vault to put the money in, which is something very interesting.
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Like if we think about, you know, heist movies and stuff,
it's like that's often the time that you're, you're basically
making the heist. It's like at some point they
have to open the vault. That's when you should go run in
and and take stuff. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's all
cryptographically locked up, cold storage, etcetera.
And you just have to share the public key and people can send
the, the digital gold right into a multi geographic, multi
jurisdictional, you know, multi sig.
And and So what does that mean? It means that there are
uncertainties that gold faces the the, the cost of dealing
with the gold and the uncertainties of dealing with
gold that Bitcoin is able to overtake.
It's like it has like a sort of absolute advantage in many ways.
And that is just an incredible thing.
But because they get caught up because they like the feeling
of, you know, holding something they're used to growing up where
more people use dollar bills as well.
So money is a, a very physical thing.
Or, you know, when you make it big, you get to, to riffle
through your, your stack of Benjamins.
You don't get to do that with Bitcoin.
I think they they they place too much emphasis on certain
properties that I think more more thought about what is
actually being solved by those properties can show us that
Bitcoin actually does a better job of addressing these problems
from a sort of economic and engineering point of view.
Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good
reflection, right? The people that have gold
understand the problem, but I mean that, yeah, they're,
they're stuck in, in their choice of the solution.
Whereas, you know, the, the, yes, the characteristics they
use to show superiority are actually, you know, inferior to
what, what Bitcoin can do. And I love what you said about,
you know, this fault thing. Like I really have to own the
gold, physically hold it to be able to use it right.
And the implication of that is, is huge with regards to to
security for once. But also, yeah, the goal that I
hold is that real, you know, like all, like all these
questions that come up there as well.
That's what you said about exactly.
I once tweeted that tweet did really well.
Like if you have someone posted like this suitcase full of gold,
you know, and for me, like it really feels like an ancient
thing. I don't know, I I really just
don't get it. But once you realize that you
need like 3 machines to verify it being real.
Like what are you doing? You know, worse than that, the
the the quote gold standard in a saying gold and making sure it's
real gold. You have to literally take the
gold bar or gold coin, melt it down and then use one of those
machines to be doing all sorts of chemical analysis on it.
And then you have to restrike it into the coin or the bar in
order to in order to know that, oh, this one is actually gold.
And this is many reasons, like I, I, I've seen before people
criticize, you know, Bitcoin in reference to like you have, you
have things like the, the London I, I'm, I'm blanking on the, the
exact name, but basically the London gold Exchange.
And there's certain things around, you know, where people
demand centralization and, and, and such.
And so actually these are solving some real problems or
whatever. But like, what's interesting
about thinking from this perspective of uncertainties,
some of the things that we've done in the past that we don't
like as Bitcoiners, you can't think of them as having solved a
real problem, but in a very suboptimal way, which opened it
up to, you know, various forms of regulatory capture.
So when you realize that gold is that difficult to truly know
it's gold, it actually makes sense to have, you know, various
centralized mints. What those are doing is saying,
you know, they, they are able to produce a recognizable form of a
coin or a bar so that you can trust it enough.
You know, it's like you can just you can, you can sort of offload
the trust a a a bit and just assume that that gold bar is,
is, you know, fine because it has the right stamp on it,
because otherwise it would just be too expensive and things like
that. They they, they aren't like good
in and of themselves. Is that you needed to do that
because it was the only way to sort of quote scale, you know,
metals usage when you have Bitcoin and anyone can run a
node suddenly, you know that whole that whole class of
problem is completely gone because all of that is happening
automatically under the hood. And so these things that we sort
of took for granted, no, we just simply don't need them anymore.
The same way that we don't need to hire people to sweep poop off
the ground after our horse carriages because now we just
have cars. Yeah, exactly.
I I think this is a good like I don't have anything against
gold, like I just don't get it. But what I think eventually
people should see or realize that there is a superior
alternative, right? Like gold, gold is doing its job
and and you know, it has its place in the world.
But yeah, the properties of Bitcoin are just superior.
And I love the vault example, by the way.
I I share that a lot, right? Like, so if you put a private
key in a vault and you have the public key, you can send value
into a fold in Switzerland, right?
Or if I just take, you know, a a pen and a paper and I write
letters and numbers that could represent a billion dollars in
value, right? Like that makes it tangible.
Like you can put it in your pocket, but you can RIP it up as
well. Like it's just that is the in in
some way for some people. Like pretty much the mind
blowing part as well. Like you can have it now.
You don't, you know, like just on the on on the piece of paper.
But yeah, this is I, I think part of the difficulty of
understanding it again, it's, it's better and more simple,
right? Like, oh, how would you verify
an asset like this, right? Compared to what people know?
This is way simpler, quicker, etcetera.
But yeah, I think, you know, gold is a narrative.
It's a narrative, right? Like, yes, it's a, what you are
talking about is a is a, is a narrative.
And I think that's I, I want to talk, talk about that later with
the memes and stuff, But that is also what we are battling,
right? So you, you don't pitch Bitcoin
as being like, oh, it's superior.
Now you need to explain people, not only that, you know, the,
the, the, the factual things, why it's superior, but also take
them along. You know, this is the narrative
that you are following that comes from XYZ because problem
ABC, you know, and then you go back again to talk about what
Bitcoin brings. Yes, and I think this, you know,
some of that, you know, we were, we were talking about gold bugs
in particular. I mean that's that's one group
of people who have their hesitation to a Bitcoin.
But I think the much, much bigger population of people who
and, and quietly like larger pools of capital that are having
trouble making sense of Bitcoin, you know, are, are basically
coming from a, a Fiat mindset rather than a, you know,
different hard money asset. And for those people, I think
some of the same things apply. So I think, for instance, there
is a, a lot of what's called charnel ISM in the, the, the,
the Fiat world. And this is basically the, the,
the basic idea is that money is something that originates with
the state rather than the marketplace.
Whereas sort of the, the Austrian theory of money would
argue that it, that it arises from the market basically as a
natural process of people dealing with those uncertainties
and so on and so forth. And so they have a natural
inclination to find, find the good that works among them, much
in the same way sort of language develops.
But some of the, some of the things that a, a, you know, but
most people are not even walking around even thinking about that
word chart ISM. It's just sort of in the water.
In many ways, they're used to using money with dead presidents
on them or some other sort of national emblem.
And because of that, they, they associate because of the, the,
the modern forms of currency, they heavily associate those
monies with the nation states. And so it's like, oh, it
originates with the nation state.
And I think this shows, you know, the the the the same
process. So, you know, people having to
stamp stamp their own coins, like, you know, the government
or something might might stamp coins as a way to kind of help
with knowing whether gold is actually gold or silver is
actually silver, etcetera, etcetera.
That same process can be Co opted by basically monopolized
forces. So we can turn into, you know,
the, the government monopolizing that process of running a mint
so that only we can do it. And they stamp, you know,
national symbols onto it, whether it's a a person or, or
something else that people begin to then see legitimacy of that
currency coming from that national emblem more than the
process for which they were finding themselves needing to,
you know, stamp the thing in the 1st place.
So if, if that makes sense. It's like, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So, so people start to they,
they kind of get tricked right where it's you, you are
mistaking the fact that the government is the one minting it
for the government having to be the one to mint it.
Whereas the actual process of it was that minting was a, a
necessary component of a metals market because it, it it's, you
know, difficult to do your own metals saying all the time.
And so you have these things. And when the state starts
monopolizing that people now treat it as though that's they,
they forget that prior story of money.
And I think that happens a lot with Fiat.
And so people think that a, a money is only a legitimate money
if it's coming from the government.
And so we base our our judgement of how well Bitcoin is doing in
the market based on, you know, how much is the government
explicitly supporting it or, or something like that as opposed
to, you know, well, that would that would actually be, I think
a positive sign in many senses if the the government was just
explicitly like, yeah, we're Bitcoin now.
Like, you know, El Salvador being an example.
At the same time, if, if you have an understanding that money
is something that originates in the marketplace, you can,
instead of looking for different institutional validity
validations of Bitcoin, you could look for market indicators
of Bitcoin success. And this would come in the form
of, well, how, how much reserve demand can we see in, in
Bitcoin? So how much are people, how much
are people holding it? What's the, the, the price, you
know, in market cap relative to how much is being held?
And you know, how much is actually being transferred on
the account. So I you know, Bitcoin
transfers, I believe, you know, over a trillion dollars every
year, which is a staggering amount of of economic activity
and that's happening all in the market, whether there is someone
giving it their stamp of approval or not.
Clearly the the the market is giving it its stamp of approval
to summer degree. So I think that's a way that
Fiat people can have difficulty with this is they get confused
one by not thinking about the kind of from this view of
uncertainties, but just in oh, it's just this thing that we use
to to buy stuff. But then on top of that, they
have taken hook, line and sinker the the story that the
government having had monopolized things then is the
source of all things good when it comes to money, as opposed to
maybe they actually were even solving something to some degree
at some point. But they're they're ultimately
doing that at at best in a sub optimal way relative to what
money could be if you look at what Bitcoin has to offer.
Yeah, I think that's a that that that last part is a fairly
friendly conclusion, I would say.
But you know about that. They're doing it in a suboptimal
way, right? But you know I.
Try to be nice here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What I get from this is that, you know, people don't ask the
question, what is money? Also, because especially in the
Western world, you don't, you're not really challenged, right, to
ask that question. Perhaps kind of up until now or
like after, after COVID where you, you're more people are
really aware of money printing and the debasement and all these
things. At least that's what we think we
see. But I'm not, I'm not sure about
that yet. By the way, you know, we don't
get taught this in school, but the people who get taught, you
know, basic economic education in high school or, you know,
university or, you know, if you do an economic study that's
based on Keynesian ideas, right from from Keynes.
But there's this other School of Economics, as you mentioned,
Austrian, Austrian School of Economics.
And I wanted to ask you, what's what are the differences there?
And also how, how did you know this Austrian school influence
your thinking about Bitcoin? One thing I wanted to just add
to that as a note based on, on what you just said, I recently
realized that, you know, the Keynesian model or what they
follow in the, in the in the field money world, you know,
it's kind of like we have a philosophy for money and we set
the rules for that. We, as you know, the, the people
in charge of government. But because the philosophy is
kind of kind of flawed, they change the rules all the time.
And you know, if you have the a philosophy about hard money,
like the Austrian school has, right, you basically let that
philosophy or that that idea for hard money, you let it out into
the marketplace. Someone comes up with this rules
based money system, which is Bitcoin that cannot be changed.
And from that the actual, you know, how do you say like the
effect of that initial philosophy will show its way
into that marketplace? And I recently just realized for
me, that's the biggest contradiction, right?
It's either flawed philosophy and then flawed rules that just
change all the time, right? Or it's just, yeah, an open
philosophy set of rules and that yeah, it's just a is is more of
a free market than than than than other thing.
But yeah, so the the question is like what is kind of the
difference and and how did it evolve your faults around
Bitcoin? Yeah, well, the, The funny thing
for me is I, I learned about Austrian economics sort of
before I, I learned any Keynesian economics.
And so, you know, there's, there's a lot of people they,
they had to sit through, you know, many economics classes and
they probably actually know more about sort of Keynesian models
than I do. And then they later found
Austrian stuff. I, I learned Austrian economics
first and the, the Keynesian stuff.
I'm, I'm less of a, an expert on more of a, you know, the, the,
the arguments just simply never make sense.
Like you said, it's just like it's, it's flawed
philosophically. And so it's just like you're
just talking crazy talk. And so Keynesian economics is
something less to study because you're trying to get like an
alternative view of economics and more of something you would
study to, you know, understand what is going through the minds
of the people trying to, you know, destroy your life through
all kinds of, you know, government action and, and, and
such. But, you know, I, I, I would say
like, you know, a, a big difference is Keynesian
economics is, is primarily, you know, kind of focused on a lot
of economic aggregates. And so a lot of it's modelling
has to do with, you know, looking at aggregate demand and,
and you know, how, how these things affect employment and so
on and so forth. And because of that, Keynesian
economics and a Keynesian economic kind of view tends to
view the, the market as a, a sort of, there is something you
can, you can sort of control. Like there's a lot of different
levers you can pull to change to, to change the factors that
change the, the economic conditions of these these
aggregates. And through that, you can kind
of like guide the economy in some correct direction.
Well, basically human behavior, right?
That's the goal. They want to influence our
behavior by pulling these levers.
Yes, and and doing it from the sort of like aggregate point of
view. So in some sense there was just
a bunch of, you know, statistics and, you know, inputs rather
than like, you know, actual humans.
The, the Austrian school is, is less based on, on looking at
these, you know, large, you know, data points and trying to,
to, to move them in certain directions.
And starting with the basis of, of human action and trying to
logically deduce the necessary implications of the fact that
you have human actors acting. And if you're acting in a world
of scarcity, like what, what does that mean for, for you know
what, what is that logic of choice?
You know, the fact that you can't choose A and not A at the
same time means that you know, you can you can glean certain
things about that economically. And so it's it's less dealing
with quantitative measurements instead looking at qualitative
stuff. And I think by nature, those two
viewpoints, Keynesians tend to be a much more top down look at
the economy of oh, the economy is in a certain way.
So we need to pull these levers so we can get it back on track.
Whereas the Austrian school is instead trying to understand
what is the the logic of those individuals that make up that
that economy and just try to understand why it is they do the
things they do and what are the sort of necessary implications
of what they do and going from there.
And this leads to very different views of a number of things.
So for instance, you know, I, I think uncertainty, you know, is
one thing that I, that I mentioned, I think Austrians
have a, a much more thorough view of that.
I'm sure some, some Keynesian expert can come and, and tell me
why I'm wrong about everything. But there's also so like for
instance, capital in a Keynesian model or even, you know,
neoclassical models that they they themselves are sort of
against. But a lot of a lot of non
Austrian economics views things like capital as what we would
say is like sort of homogeneous. Like it's just all, it's all
just units. Like you just have a factory
that just makes a thing, you know, it just makes, it makes
widgets that give people utils. If you sat through an economics
class, you've probably had to deal with people talking about
like widgets and noodles and, and all that kind of stuff.
And so it's all just, it's all just whatever.
It's just factories. Whereas in, in the Austrian
school, there's a heavy emphasis on time and sort of the
heterogeneity of circumstance and, and goods and such.
So it's like you don't just have a factory, you have a car
factory or a pencil factory or some other factory.
And because of that, when you look at how you would, you would
want to change an economy, you know, if you're an entrepreneur,
you're someone who wants to change the economy because you
want to be producing something else.
You can't look at it and just be like, oh, let me just snap my
finger. And these models for just
factories. Now you have whatever magical
factory you want. Instead, you actually recognize
that if you have a car factory and you now want to make
pencils, it is going to take time and resources to actually
just to get from the car factory to the pencil factory.
And that has that has many implications about how we look
at the, the economy. It's going to change how we look
at money. Like all all these things, these
these sort of differences in view just have, have radically
different views of, of money and the economy.
And I think, you know, one of the notable things that is, is
sort of the business cycle where Keynesians tend to look at the
business cycle as you know, you have this boom in the bust.
When the bust happens, well, something bad happens and we
need to go, you know, address that.
Whereas Austrians tend to view the boom and bust of like, well,
why was the boom happening in the 1st place?
And you know, we, we, we could get into the details of that,
but basically it's, it's looking at a different thing.
If you want like the really basic version of that, there's
the Hayek Canes rap that covers it pretty well at a very, very
high level. Nice.
I will, I will look that up. Yeah.
So what I know from Austrian economics is it kind of also
emphasizes on the psychological act aspects of of the economic
behavior, right. I, I had a recording with Seth
Bunny and then we talked about money and it was really
interesting. He said money is like a a tool
to express value. I thought it was very that that
wasn't like an interesting fault, right?
Like what I spend my economic energy on.
It's a kind of an expression of my, my tastes, needs, wants,
interest, what whatever. But yeah, these psychological
aspects of of this economic behavior, how, how does Bitcoin
then fit into this with the characteristics that that it has
in this also like Austrian, Austrian model, why does it
align with that? Well, so, yeah, I'd agree.
So Austrian focuses on sort of things like subjective value,
which which mean that, you know, a given good is not going to
have the same value in a different place and time.
You know, there's the classic, if you're, if you're in the
middle of a desert, a bottle of water is going to have a lot
more value than if you are just, you know, in a, in a city or
something. And then there's also marginal,
you know, the marginal value and marginalism, which is looking at
economic action at the margin. So each each sort of individual
action. I like the idea about the, the,
the uncertainty in the in the future, right that that you
alluded to earlier. As you know, the future is
uncertain for everyone. So if I take risk right now with
my job or my venture, and I gather this economic, you know,
energy that is represented with, with the money that we use in
like engine money system, that money is debased right on, on
purpose with two percent or, you know, in, in reality, it's, it's
all way more right. But so, and, and also, as you
said before, I think correctly, you know, the fact that that
money is debased into the future makes your future like double
uncertain. There's no like 2 factors that
make your future uncertain. And if you have a hard money
that is not debased, you know, 11 Bitcoin now is one Bitcoin in
10 years, that actually reduces the uncertainty of the future in
some way because you have a tool that you can bring towards the
future. Yeah, I guess what I would say
there is that, you know, that sort of subjectivity and so on
and that need to express value in some way that is just, that
is an inherent part of being human.
You know, you, you can't, you can't not act without all of
that stuff being implied by the fact that you are making any
choices in the 1st place. Like I said, if you're, if
you're choosing a instead of not a, which you know, if, if,
what's the, there's a, there's a rush line of like, if you choose
not to decide, you still have made a choice.
It's like you can't not be acting.
And when you make that choice, you are choosing one thing over
another, which is necessarily meaning you prefer something to
something else. So you are expressing a, a value
judgment in in some way through that act.
And this is, this is the basis of literally all of economic
action and economic choice. And thus, you know, it's at the
basis of of all of our lives, everything we do to to, you
know, go through this world is caught up in that.
And that's a it's, it's a wonderful and beautiful thing,
but not every money is going to give you the same ability to
express that value. So if you, like you said, you
know, you're pointing at money being debased.
If money is being debased, then you can't, you can't express
your, your values as fully because in the sense that you
know, you, you may have predicted that you would have
been, you know, sometime in the future I'll be able to do X
thing and I'll be able to express my value in some way
because I, I want to buy this, this thing that I want or
whatever. If your money is debased from
underneath you, now you get to that point and realize it's
like, oh, now I have to work harder just to express that
value of mine. And so when you're able to
actually put money into savings, your, your labor is, is actually
able to be directed to economic value that is actually valuable
to you and not valuable to, you know, just just some external
force. So another way to think about
that is the, you know, we, we talked about inflation almost
being like a stealth tax because you know, there's, you know, we
talked about cancel on effects, where when, when new money comes
out, it's, it's not going to everyone all at once.
In fact, if you did that, the whole thing would be pointless.
It's going to the friends of the money printer first.
And so those people get to to reap the benefits of having
newly printed money at the expense of everyone else.
And so everyone else effectively sort of loses out at whatever
that sort of rate is. And so we, we, we talk about
that as as the, the, the cancel on effect when that happens,
What that means is whatever organization it is, you know,
that's printing the money and effectively inflating that away.
They are simultaneously taking away your ability to take the,
the labor you were doing and being able to sort of use that,
you know, whatever economic value you created to go express
that elsewhere in the market to actually suit what you need out
of the market as opposed to, you know, giving to others what they
need out of the market. So they'll pay you.
So they're simultaneously taking that away while also deciding
for you where that value should go.
And, you know, unfortunately, in the the age of central banking,
you know, is the, the great Ron Paul said, you know, it's, it's
no coincidence that the, you know, the century of central
banking was also the century of Total War.
So what do we see that going towards?
It's like, you know, your, your value, rather than being
expressed in, you know, more, more gifts for your family and
more, more charity and more, more wonderful businesses making
nice things that people want. That value is being expressed
as, you know, drone strikes and you know, all, all, all sorts of
extremely, you know, nasty, violent affairs and, you know,
like war. So that's a it's, it's
disturbing to even think on, which is why I'm going to I, I
speak about it with such euphemism because I don't want
to get too angry here. But you know that that that's
showing us how when you have a sound money that's under your
control, you can actually express your value properly in
the marketplace. Whereas when you have the people
debasing your money and making it harder for you to act in the
economy, it's coming with that double whammy of not only taking
away your ability to actually get what you need out of the
market and and be expressing your values in the marketplace,
but also often times working against you by using those
those, you know, sort of inflated, you know, cancel on,
cancel on, you know, bucks towards things that are
detrimental to you, to say the least.
Yeah. So basically, you know the the
cantillon affect the people that are closest to the money printer
can spend the new money without that new money being debased,
right. That's.
That's so their values get to be expressed in the market when
they it was supposed to be your values expressed.
Exactly, Yeah. And when you said external
factor, I think that's an interesting term, right?
Because it, the, one of the, the core things of this Keynesian
money philosophy is this 2% inflation or basically, well,
inflation of the money supply, right?
So 2% debasement of the value of the money.
So it's already at the core of you being nudged to spend this
money, right? And you hear this argument a
lot, right? But 2% inflation is good because
it helps keep grow the economy, right?
But as you just explained, how free are you then to move or or
express your value in this economy when you are basically
forced? Notched is a friendly word,
right? Notched to to spend the money
that you earn, right. And, and we shouldn't be
surprised that there's not that many people that I don't know,
save up for five years and then build something like the Trevi
Fountain or some cathedral or something that is actually
beautiful, right? And not like are, are are are
valuable. I mean, we could talk about food
and like, like if you are not to spend in the quickest way
possible, you are also not to build quote UN quote in the
quickest way possible because you have to capture that, that
money that is constantly moving as also something that Sep said
that to me, which I, which I thought was really nice
thoughts. Like all the money that you have
right now is worth the most right now, you know, So you have
to, you have to, you have to spend it.
And that's why people are also competing to, to gather that
money quickly, right, as the producers of, of, of goods and
services, because they know in either conscious or not that,
yeah, if they, if it takes too long to earn money, it'll be of
less and less and less value over time.
And that's also why all the, the quality of our products,
services, food, all these things go, go down because basically
people have no time to create something that has value.
They're not incentivized. So.
Yeah, they, they, they don't have time, but they also none of
their work is able to produce as much as it otherwise would.
You, you if, if your money is losing 2%, which you know, at
least in the United States, I know that's much higher.
In most places it's even much higher than that.
I would say in the United States, I think it's probably
more like 12 to 20% or something like that.
When that's the case, you have to literally work 12 to 20%
harder every single year just to just to have what you had.
And so, you know, it's, it's a little difficult, obviously with
technological progress, you can kind of kind of mask over some
of this because your productivity grows, but you
still have the, the unseen, which is with that same
technology, you would have been making even more productivity
had, had they not been siphoning wealth off underneath.
And and so it, yeah, it's, it's harder for, for people to kind
of think straight about their long term future and think
about, you know, what values do I want to express?
Not just now because like right now, like I, I have the most
like base animalistic feelings like, oh, I want to go, I want
to go get a drink. I want to go get some.
Some food to. Eat.
You know, it's just like very, very base things.
That's what I'm thinking about, you know, as far as right now
where real economic development happens, where where real sort
of civilizational progress happens is being able to look
into the future of what am I willing to give up now because I
really want that amazing thing in the future.
But when you're, when you're having to work harder
essentially for less, that time horizon shortens and your time
preference increases and you are just more focused on the now,
which, like I said, just like tends you more towards just the
sort of base instincts of just, you know, wanted to get fed, get
your belly full, as opposed to more long term things, which I
think are going to do things more like, you know, nourish
your soul, which is is, you know, kind of ultimately going
to lead to, to sort of greater prosperity.
You know, I, I would say even, you know, materialistically, but
also, you know, you know, in many senses spiritually as well,
because you have that, that freedom to, to contemplate and
think about, you know, what is good in life and, and have the
proper thanks for that. Yeah, yeah, I, I, I fully agree.
I I talk a lot about this on on the podcast.
This is, I think could be one of the talking points that triggers
people to also look into it more, right?
I mean, I, I also wanted to ask you about risk.
I think, you know, subconsciously people are taking
more risk than they they could be taking if they would adopt A
hard, hard money that helps them save their economic energy
towards the future, right? Because, yeah, if you come home
from your your job or your venture, which is basically
taking risk because you take it, you make a choice, right?
As you said before, you make a choice to do something to earn
this economic energy. But then when you were at home
and this external factor already debased the money that you
basically earn today, you have to take more risk to even
mitigate, mitigate that, right? So you are.
Yeah. You can never stop.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
You have to, you have to get into Sigma grind sets and you
got to, you got to hustle, you know?
Exactly you. Need 10 side projects and if
you're not making millions of dollars right now offline,
you're losing. But if Bitcoin is this hardest
money to ever exist and, and the best way to preserve and store
your, your economic energy, right, why is it still
classified or viewed as this like risk on risk off asset by,
you know, people who talk about this stuff like in my honest
opinion, this is the lowest risk asset you can own, you know, so
where does this dichotomy come come from?
So I think this is another funny one for me because, you know,
just in the in the same way that it's like I learned Austrian
economics before I learned Keynesian economics, It's like I
became a Bitcoiner before I ever had like a a real interest in
finance. So, you know, things like, you
know, stock markets, bonds, you know, stocks, bonds, you know,
all all these sorts of, you know, real estate, all these
sorts of things. I was coming into that already,
already into Bitcoin. And so it wasn't coming from the
perspective of Bitcoin having the burden, burden of proof
needing to prove itself why you should go buy some Bitcoin.
It was OK, well, I have Bitcoin like, why is it that I should
buy this stock? And there weren't a lot of like
good reasons, good economic reasons for me to go buy a bunch
of equities or something or like bonds.
Like it just it didn't really didn't do it for me.
So I think a lot of that, that talk is, I mean, my, my gut
feeling, just as someone who's from the outside on this, you
know, just coming in as a, a sort of natural bitcoiner, a
native Bitcoiner, I think those people are just caught in the,
the, you know, Fiat mindset of, of how to think about these,
these assets. So it's like, you know, they're
they're thinking about even just like the concept of risk and
stuff from a sort of Fiat mentality of the playing the
Fiat game and trying to win with a Fiat scoreboard.
Whereas I don't, I don't have that same Fiat scoreboard.
And so to me, risk has just natively has more to do with
will I do I have a chance of ending up with fewer amount of
Satoshi's in my stack? And if that's the case, it's
like, well, that I don't know, that sounds risky.
I don't know that that to me is a risk on event is a chance to
to lose your Satoshi's. So I come at it from just like
this, this native Bitcoiner perspective.
And to me, the, the burden of proof on that is on them to tell
me like, you know, why, why that's kind of incorrect.
And hopefully from a Bitcoin perspective, But yeah, I, I, I
think they, they are playing the Fiat game.
And so even in so far as there are various risks that we could
talk about with owning Bitcoin of, you know, the, the risks of
losing your keys, the risks of, you know, a, you know, if you're
using a custodian, the risks of, of using a custodian, the risks
of, you know, your Lightning hot wallet getting hacked or the
risk of a bug being introduced to the Bitcoin code base and so
on and so forth. We can talk.
They're all of these are, are real risks.
But when they're talking about it, they're not, they're just
not, they're not. They're thinking about it from
the Fiat perspective of and yeah, I don't know, it's just,
it's, it's not my way of thinking about it.
No, I, I love that. I mean, I, I, I didn't know what
you were going to answer. I look at it in the same way as
as you look at it, because I never understood stocks.
I've never been into stocks and all all this other stuff like it
in some way didn't make sense to me.
Now I, I have the same as you. You know, my hurdle rate is, is
pretty high, you know, to, to, to move to something else.
I'm not, I'm not even doing that because.
Yeah, exactly as you said. Like what?
What's, what is the point in it helping me to get more, more
sets, you know? Like, no, yeah, what I will say
is like, I mean, typically, what are they really saying?
They're saying that, you know, the, the the price of Bitcoin
could fall precipitously. And so then, you know, you lost
everything. And that's the sort of thing
that it's like, it's, yeah, it's.
So I think this is where one like an understanding of
uncertainty can help us think about.
It's like, what does it actually mean for something to be
speculative? And it's like, well, literally
every asset you own is is speculative because we don't
know the future. That's by definition.
Speculative and you want to know my reply?
I always say life is speculative.
Like it's not an argument. You know it's right, right?
As you said, doing nothing is a choice, which is a speculation
on whatever. You know, if, if, if you own a
house, you know, what if the property value like, plummets
tomorrow? It could happen, you know?
Yeah. What if you know?
Something. Yeah, I mean, that's, and we, we
see that going on in the United States right now and it's like
it's, it's extremely tragic. It's it's very painful to watch
when people say that. When I, when I think about, oh,
it's, it's speculative. What I think is not, oh, oh,
this asset is more speculative than this.
It's like, well, they're all speculative.
The question is the, the question is like, which one
should we speculate on? So it's like you're asking,
you're in some way, you're asking the wrong question.
It's like by what basis do we determine how to speculate on
something? And for me, when I'm thinking
about the nature of money, I, you know, I, I go about these,
these things from a very qualitative kind of fundamentals
point of view. You know, others are going to
have different ways of looking at that, but like I, I come in
at it from that and when I look at Bitcoin, it's able to solve
the problems of money better than anything else.
We look empirically in the, the market.
It follows a sort of kind of clear, broadly exponential trend
in the market, which I think makes sense based on the nature
of a network good like money and it's, it's scarcity and all of
that. And you know, when I, when I
look at those, those trends, I, I asked the question not of
like, oh, when is it going to fall?
But you know, just simply can't we expect it to continue as it,
as it would like? I, I think they're so used to,
you know, what, what goes up must come down that they forget
that, you know, money is kind of the thing that just doesn't come
down because everyone wants it. It's the one most liquid good.
And so those, those people, once again, it's like they what, what
I would encourage them to do is instead think about is like,
what are the fundamental problems that Bitcoin are
solving? Is the people that say that are
often the ones who also, you know, are the ones saying it's
like, oh, it's a Ponzi scheme. It's, you know, tulips, it's,
you know, whatever. So I, I, I would encourage those
people to think about, you know, why is it that people speculate
on Bitcoin and why is it that despite these, what you think of
as speculative bubbles around Bitcoin, certainly hype cycles,
why does it still continue to grow?
And I would, I would say that like, as you explore those
questions, you are likely to find similar answers to me, in
which case it's just when you look at the market, it's like,
well, why would I, why would I buy anything else?
In fact, once you start to look at it that way, everything else
does seem like a risk on assets in the sense that if I go buy a
chair, I'm going to be losing sets.
It's and if I go buy stocks or bonds or whatever, I'm also
going to be losing sats relative to what I would have had if I
just held sats and continued to sort of save in sats.
Yeah, yeah, I I agree with this. I think so.
So I say like life is speculative, but also, well, you
speculate on Tim Cook waking up in the morning or Elon waking up
in the morning. You know, like it's, yeah, it's,
it's, it's, it is from this old paradigm asking these questions
because they are actually valid in the Fiat money 0 sum game
paradigm. Yeah, like I said, it's like
when you're trying to weigh in at the Fiat scoreboard, you're
going to play a different game, you know, So you don't, you
don't bring a dollar to a sat fight.
I guess I don't know, like we can come up with.
Some creative good one. Creative flying around that I
don't know what it would be, but.
I think, I think that you should tweet that.
That's a that's that's a good one.
Well, yeah. Well, talking about, you know,
memes, I think. I think, yeah.
I think you're somewhat of a meme Lord.
You helped popularize the meme. Bitcoin fixes this.
What? What does that mean?
Why is it so important to understand that Bitcoin fixes
this? Bitcoin fixes this.
So, you know, I'm trying to remember if I can, if I can
think of what the initial thing is.
Because I actually, it's so hard to trace memes And I, I try not
to take too much credit for any memes because I see them as sort
of a, it's a, a sort of collective good.
It's a, it's a, you know, it's just, it's out there.
It's, it's not meant to be sort of owned by anyone.
And but I, I, I think that I think Stefan Lafaire may have
been the first one that I saw using that in a sort of direct
kind of Mimi way. But basically the way that I
think about Bitcoin fixes this is that, you know, money.
Money is basically half of every economic transaction in a large
economy. If you're not in a a little
barter economy, money is going to be half of every transaction.
It is. It is what guides our economic
thinking because all of us are typically thinking about our
profits and losses in terms of money.
You know, do we want to, do we want to go get a new job?
Why? Because it's going to earn us
more money. You know, do we want to buy this
thing or not? Well, how much how much money is
it going to cost? You know, we're typically
thinking in terms of money whenever we're making all these
choices because of the fact that it's that most liquid good.
And so when money is so foundational to so many
different economic decisions, you can start to imagine how
when you start messing with the money, it's going to shape
people's decision making in a different way.
And I think for a lot of Bitcoiners, and not just
Bitcoiners, but a lot of people who have, who have studied sort
of, you know, Austrian economics or other other paradigms around
sound money, look at how money has been debased over,
especially over the past, you know, century and a decade or
so. And they can start to see how
monetary debasement may have changed the ways that people
interact with all sorts of industries, ideas, concepts, you
know, and so on. So it's like, you know, like you
were saying, it's like how much time you can spend in leisure is
going to change. You know, what kind of what kind
of art are you going to be thinking about?
It's like if you're working all the time, you don't even have
time to think about, you know, what is, what is the art that
pleases you? Whereas if you can have time to
rest, you can really think about It's like what, what art truly
embodies, what I believe about the world and what I want to, to
see in the world. And you, you have things like
food where when you're debasing the money, food is one of the
things that is going to increase very fast in price and people
start changing the way they eat to deal with the changes in food
costs. And so especially in the United
States, but it's basically it's, it's a global issue at this
point. We have the rise of things like,
you know, seed oils and, you know, all kinds of other junk
food, which I, which I'd coined like, you know, Fiat food
because it's like stuff that, that we're eating because it's
been kind of pushed by, by Fiat economics and also just, you
know, Fiat government science, which is funded by Fiat money
and so on and so forth. So a lot of the, the, the food
itself is sort of getting debased and so on and so forth.
We can, we can just go industry by industry.
It's the thing that, you know, people get annoyed by Bitcoiners
because we just everything we're looking at this and what annoys
them the most is that then we come in and we say Bitcoin fixes
this. But what we mean by that is that
because, because so many of these things, such a, such a
strong factor, such a major factor in what led to a
degradation of, of the production of some kind of
particular good or service. Because we can tie that, we
believe that we can tie that to the debasement of money.
The fixing of the money is also going to allow conditions that
will realign the production of those goods and services with
what people actually need and want, which is, you know, going
to be health and wealth and all that good stuff.
So you know, there's the line. Fix the money, fix the world.
That's what Bitcoin fixes this means.
But it's much easier to just say 3 words than go on that long
rant rant. Yeah, I love that.
I Yeah. Oh, something else I was just
going to tack on to that is, you know why?
Why deploy the meme? And one of the cool things is
because Bitcoin is so ubiquitous.
Or, sorry, money is so ubiquitous and it's going to
affect everyone. It's also a good jumping off
point for anyone who senses any economic trouble in the world
around them, whatever industry it might be in.
It might be an architect who's sick of producing buildings in a
certain way, or it's it's a farmer who is sick of having to
grow crops in particular way because he can't even afford to
actually own his land. So he's at the whim of some
large Agri business and so on and so forth.
Each of these people, they are dealing with something that's
been debased by money. And so it also becomes a foot in
the door with those people to start to like, you have specific
knowledge around this thing. Let's take a look at how your
decisions can get realigned with what you actually want.
If you start adopting Bitcoin and you start using Bitcoin as
money and so you can Bitcoin fixes.
This also helps like show you know, Bitcoin is this global
universal thing. And so you know, whatever
problem you have, we can start to think, OK, in what ways can
we fix it by introducing just simply a better money, a better,
better savings vehicle. And so I think it allows for a
great, you know, you know, for for evangelizing Bitcoin, that
doesn't mean necessarily just going up to someone and saying
Bitcoin fixes this is going to win them over, but rather the
mindset of Bitcoin fixes this can help inspire how to
encourage people to better think about money and how it affects
them and how something like Bitcoin can improve their
ability to go express those values in the world.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I again with with Seb Bunny, we
had AI just had a really great conversation with him.
I'll I'll link to it. I feel like any people
listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll
link to it in the description and and at the end, but yeah,
you should listen to that because Bitcoin fixes this is
the answer to or like kind of the conclusion of everything is
downstream from the money. That's what I talked about with
with a lot, right. And I think we touched upon that
in the beginning. Why is that?
Because, you know, the quality of the money creates the
incentives for you to act in this economic marketplace and
transfer value with with other people.
And I, I also always say to other people like, you know, if
they're activists or, or complaining about stuff, like
think about anything that you would want to fix in the world.
And if you go deep enough, you realize that it is because the
money is broken and incentives are broken and that people are
acting in a, in a, in a certain way.
Like last week I had a discussion about there's,
there's like a steel factory in my country that's like on the,
on the water and they got caught like dumping, you know, like
steel garbage or whatever that, you know, comes from the
factory, like in, in the ocean, right?
But think about that. Like there's a there's this boat
with this waste on there, there's a crew on there, there's
a captain on there, right? And they get this, you know,
it's their day job and they have a family and all these things.
And you know, they are, they get the assignment like, OK, you go
to these coordinates in the ocean, then you dump whatever
your load is, right? Maybe they don't even know about
the load or whatever, you know, so, so the captain just chugs
along that he gets to the GPS point, he just presses a button,
the thing opens, dumps in the ocean, etcetera.
Like people are not consciously doing this, but in the in the
line of incentives slash instructions that are eventually
created for them to do their job.
It is eventually the money, the quality of the money that makes
them do that. And it's not that the guy who,
you know, pushes the button of and and and ways out of the boat
that he thinks that he thinks about this, right?
But the people that are activate active, I would say like
activists around a topic like this, they focus on those people
that are that are doing it. But it's the they have to zoom
out like 2-3 layers. Why?
Why was it that that was the right choice?
Or. Seemingly the right choice from
their perspective. I mean, yeah, And you know, a
lot of people who get annoyed by Bitcoin fixes this, they sort of
mistake it for meaning that on the very first order, just
fixing Bitcoin just magically fixes something in the.
World, Yeah. Yeah.
Whereas what we're really typically saying is that Bitcoin
like fixing the money has an NTH order effect of fixing all of
the incentives from the source of economic decision making all
the way down the structures of production.
Finally, to, you know, this guy who's who's stuck with steel
waste deciding, you know, what to do, you know, maybe steel
would be produced in a completely different way if up
the chain money was a different way.
I don't know. It's it's I'm not trying to like
plan ahead what these these worlds are supposed to look
like. I'm simply saying that somewhere
down the line, the quality of the money is having a
disproportionate effect on why people make the choices that
they make. And yeah.
Yeah. Well, we, we, we came across
that, right. Like if you are incentivized to
spend it as quickly as possible and other people are
incentivized to earn it as quickly as possible, the
decisions that are made are of, you know, low, low quality.
But if you are incentivized to really consider if you should
spend, you know, the hardest money ever to exist in the
existence of, of people, then you will, you know, if you have
five options in front of you, you will be, you know,
scrutinizing the option. Yeah, Right.
Yeah, yes. That's, that's kind of what I
think. Yeah.
So how, you know, we, we, we use these memes.
The memes are kind of of of, of a, of a tool, I would say, you
know, I think everyone listening should follow you.
Then they will figure out, you know, then they will know what
I'm what I'm talking about. How, how does like this, this
narrative of Bitcoin fit into or challenge kind of like the
current narratives, You know, that that we kind of mentioned
before around money, wealth, technology.
I think we touched upon it a little bit, but this is kind of
the battle that we're in, right? We are trying to dismantle a
narrative that people have been told, whether it's about gold,
whether it's about money, you know, whether it's about wealth,
you know, all the, all these things that we kind of touched
upon, like how, how do we fit Bitcoin's narrative into that?
Well, I, I think you're right that there is basically a, a
battle of narratives. This is something I, I think
it's a biology who, who kind of, you know, defined, you know, the
great debate of the 21st century, sort of Bitcoin versus
MMT, you know, modern monetary theory.
So, you know, just think of that as just like hyper Fiat.
Orange versus green, right? Yeah, exactly.
So it really is sort of this, this narrative battle.
And yeah, I mean, when I, when I speak of memes, you know, I, I
don't, I don't simply mean, you know, just, you know, funny
tweets or something, you know, little sayings.
Those are examples of memes. But they're, they're not,
they're, they're not the concept of memes themselves.
Like memes as a whole, I think of it as as really just a, a, a
cheeky way of, of saying rhetoric.
You know, it's, it's, you know, the, the art of, you know,
persuasion and rhetoric of trying to communicate to others
in a way that they will, you know, come, come to see things
as you see them. And, and you know that, that
that kind of battle is going to have many fronts.
You're going to have people who, you know, are kind of shock
troops, you know, going in and just saying crazy things.
You have other people who are going to be, you know, you know,
educators and, and so on and so forth.
And so there's, there's not like, you know, 11 sort of
mimetic strategy. It's, it's a, it's a big
division of Labor to deal with different, different aspects of,
you know, helping people see money in a different way.
But I do think it's important to, you know, understand, you
know, what it is people are arguing and like, try to
identify, you know, where the errors are and that can kind of
help you inform, it can help inform you, you know what, what
kind of like rhetoric and dialectic of, you know, actual
like arguments. We shouldn't just, we shouldn't
only exist in a, in a world of rhetoric.
People should go check out my, my meme talk from 2019 if they
want to know kind of my views on, on rhetoric and dialectic
and, and stuff like that. But, you know, I basically say
that, you know, people who are showing good faith, you should
be engaged more in something like dialectic, which is just,
you know, proper argumentation and, and sharing of ideas and
stuff like that. But people who are acting in bad
faith are, are typically going to be on the receiving end of
more mocking rhetoric, more sort of trollish rhetoric and and so
on and so forth. But I also did argue that all of
these should always as as best to our ability, be grounded in
truth. You know, we, we don't want to
be going out into the world and, and lying about things, not we
could be wrong about things, but we shouldn't be lying about
them. And yeah, so, you know, some
people, you know, they just have good faith questions about
Bitcoin. It's because they have, you
know, certain errors. And for those people is you just
have to sit down and and kind of work through it.
Then when you have journalists who are mouthpieces for the Fiat
regime writing articles that say that actually the reason prices
are higher or because of like Beyoncé concert tickets or
something like that. I forget what they were.
At one point it was Beyoncé and another point it was Taylor
Swift. You know, it's always, you know,
it's something like that causing like changes in, you know,
global economic factors. You see, when those people are
writing things like that, you know, they, they should be
probably just pointed out and laughed at.
And it's a good time to just kind of point out the, the
obvious facts of like, well, what, what are the actual
things, you know, going on when you have politicians saying that
it's the greedy corporations that magically made, you know,
the, the, the prices go up. And those politicians are also
basically, you know, threatening to, you know, you know, increase
taxes that are only going to put a bigger burden on both the
consumers trying to buy things and the entrepreneurs who are
trying to get goods to people. Somehow everyone magically
became greedy now as opposed to before.
But in any case, like those people also, you know, deserve a
little bit more of a, probably a combative rhetoric because they,
they are typically not acting in good faith.
Yeah, I, I see it. It's just like a big division of
Labor of, of different, different things.
And, and, you know, there, there isn't 1 answer.
And it's, it's up to all of us to kind of know who are we
talking with? What are their hang ups?
What are their, you know, dispositions?
Are they, are they acting in good faith or bad faith?
And it's kind of up to each of us to, to kind of to, to be able
to make good judgment on that and try to do the best, best job
possible communicating for whatever situation that is.
Yeah. So what's a, what's a spiky
point of view on Bitcoin that that not many people share with
you? A.
Spiky point like a like a. Something like you really
really. Think like a contrarian sort of
take. Oh man, I, I mean, I'm sure I
could think of a lot as like I, there's a lot I don't, I, I
don't know if it's a lot I don't, it's hard for me to come
up with like a, a specific thing on the spot.
It's, it's something that probably, if you know, the topic
came up, I could probably point out, you know, some, some
differing point of view on something for, for a lot of my
work. So for people who are unaware,
I, I run the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, which is is, you
know, advancing and preserving Bitcoin knowledge by having a
lot of, you know, archiving and sharing a lot of the sort of
historical ideas that that kind of forged the world that Bitcoin
came out of and as well as economic analysis of Bitcoin.
And because my focus has been much more on that, I haven't
been engaged with, you know, Twitter, Twitter memetics and
such as I once was. And so a lot of these debates
that that tends to be happening in the Bitcoin space these days,
I'm aware of them happening, but I have not been like as sort of
as engaged directly. And so I don't really have a
spicy takes, yeah, just just ready to shoot at the hips.
I've been, I've been kind of focused on, on my own work.
So unfortunately, I, I'm sure we could find something later, you
know, or if you just like listed stuff, we could probably find
something. But it's hard to just, yeah, pop
out with something. Well, well, maybe some there's
something in this answer. Yeah, as you said, so.
So you run the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, you're preserving
this knowledge of between history, economics, the, the
tech, what is what, what do you think is like the biggest lesson
or maybe lessons from, from the history of Bitcoin that are, are
critical for newcomers to understand, right.
So my goal with the podcast is to hopefully, you know, with the
angle of millennials and my point of view and like reach
more new people and get them into Bitcoin.
But I also think, you know, we need to keep educating on
Bitcoin. It it's, I don't think it's
inevitable. We need to also teach our kids
why decentralization is important, etcetera.
Yeah. What are the biggest lessons
that that Yeah you would mention to to people coming in?
Would you? So it's, it's, it's hard to give
a blanket answer to that because of the fact that, like I said,
many people come into Bitcoin for many different reasons.
But just just to clarify, do you mean Bitcoin history as in since
the white papers dropped or you just mean kind of in the history
of ideas within that world? Oh, good one I would say.
Bitcoin history. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would say, you know, if you get into Bitcoin now and, and
let's take the the angle of, you know, most people come at it
from, you know, the number go up.
So the number goes up. Oh, interesting.
I'm going to buy some, you know. Oh, it goes up more.
What is this thing actually, you know, OK, I'm going to study.
Well, then, you know, there's, there's a, there's an immense
amount of volume of things that you could read, but I, I think
the base of my question comes from it.
You could miss historical lessons from, you know, this
first era, let's call it off Bitcoin, his 1st 15 years.
Of course. You know, I think we should
advise people, everyone, to read the white paper.
But like, yeah, stuff that came along the way, that's important
for the current course. I'm going to give 22 separate
things. The first one is just a general
lesson that I, I, I, I, I've, I've shared quite a few times
and I just think it's a, it's a good overall lesson, which is I,
I like to call it rule 34 of Bitcoin.
If you're familiar with rule 34 of the Internet, if you don't
know what that is, you can go look at that.
But rule 34 of Bitcoin being that if you have a a, an, an
argument against Bitcoin or something like that, you will be
able to find a Bitcoin talk thread about it from, you know,
2012 or 2013 or whatever. And the reason I think that's a,
an important lesson is because Bitcoin is it demands humility
out of us. So you know, you know the Odell
phrase. If you know, stay humble.
Stack SAT The reason you want to stay humble is because otherwise
Bitcoin is going to humble you for you.
So it's like you are going to be humbled.
It's just do you want to do it the easy way or the hard way?
And a lot of people come into Bitcoin both, you know, maybe
antagonistically or or not, and their, their lack of humility
often motivates them to misunderstand things in a
negative way. So a antagonistic way would be
coming into Bitcoin and saying, oh, here's why it's stupid.
And here's how, you know, it should have actually been
engineered. And exactly the, the classic
meme of I'm new to Bitcoin. I mean, I'm here to fix it.
And a lot of those people fight. Well, it's like, you know,
there's there's a reason, you know, Satoshi made Bitcoin as it
was. There's a reason why your little
thing hasn't hasn't been added and you're not the first person
to think like, oh, what if we made like faster block times?
It's like you're not the first person to think that.
And it it's there, there's there's a reason.
And instead of coming at it with I know best and I should go and
like, you should listen to me instead, you should ask the
question. It was like, why is this not the
case? And go try to answer that
question, almost like a Chesterton's fence kind of thing
of like, why is this fence here? Try to go ask that question and
go learn that before trying to do that from a positive angle, I
would look at, you know, different schemes of of things,
functionality that people want to add to Bitcoin because they
think it's cool. And there's some more obvious
things that we could go along these lines that have debates
going back to 2013 and before, But just for the sake of non
controversy, just to to annoy you because you wanted spicy
stuff. There is a, you know, someone
might come in. It's like, oh, Bitcoin is this
amazing thing. We could use it as a data store
and let's build like a social network on top of it because
then it will be like a decentralized social network or,
you know, whatever. And there's been, you know, many
attempts, you know, people, people have done this on other
chains and those have not ended well, but people come up with
that kind of thing and they bring it to Bitcoin and they
have such excitement. It's like, oh, we need to do
this and this is how good coins going to get to $100,000 or
higher because everyone's going to be wanting to use this like,
you know, Bitcoin based social network.
And I'm not meeting Noster there.
I'm meaning like using Bitcoin itself as the social network,
like data on it, which which Noster is sort of a separate
thing, just just to be clear. But like they come in just like,
oh, this is the way that Bitcoin's going to go to the
moon because everyone's going to want to do this and everyone's
going to be tipping all the creators on this thing and it's
going to be awesome. It's like, you need this thing.
Those people, what happens is they tend to put their vision of
an app ahead of Bitcoin itself, and they don't stop to ask one,
has anyone thought about this before?
And it turns out it's like, yeah, all the all the cool apps
that you think you have, we're likely already discarded by
people a decade ago, because I remember back in 2013 having
great excitement for different things that you could possibly
do on Bitcoin. And that is like, oh, no, This
is why. This is why this is not
happening. And so a good point.
Yeah, you also have people, it's like they get so focused on
their particular app and think that their app is the killer app
for Bitcoin that they forget that Bitcoin itself is the
killer app. And so when push comes to shove
and their app is rejected by the market or not brought into
Bitcoin in the way that they want or whatever, they view that
as a failure of Bitcoin rather than just, you know,
entrepreneurial loss of like, you had it, you had an idea and
it didn't work out. And so that lack of humility
puts their idea above Bitcoin itself.
And I think that's generally just a, a bad practice.
You should, you should bet on Bitcoin and conform yourself
around that rather than the other way around.
So I think I think that is a very important lesson for anyone
coming into Bitcoin is try to ask the question is like, why
are things the way they are rather than why aren't things
the way I want them to be? Probably good for life in
general. Well, you can take that broader
than than you can take that broader and and that
encapsulates, I think what we talked about for the past 90
minutes, right? If you know.
Yeah, yeah. Bitcoin is the killer app.
Money is the killer app. OK, Why should that thing exist?
Dive into that more. I mean, I was already into
Bitcoin four years when I, you know, discovered Ethereum and
Icos and NFTS and I did all that stuff too, all just to get back
to Bitcoin and realize that yes, money is the killer app.
And, and just a depth and, and breadth, I would say of fixing
that as a killer app is already stimulating in an intellectual
way, you know, for, for the coming years, I would say,
right. And that is, I think, the
humility also. Yeah, here.
Here's a spicy take. I think to to some degree that
kind of goes along with this too, which is a lot of the
things that people are excited about of something you can add
to Bitcoin to help it scale. I think Bitcoin would be just
fine without it, whatever, whatever it might be.
And what I mean by that is that I think people should, should
think about what we already have.
There's there's AI, I've brought this one up a lot, a lot.
But there's a there's an old like kind of Jewish song around
Passover called Dayenu. And the word dayenu is means it
would have been enough. And it's basically, you know,
when, when Jews are singing that they're basically saying, you
know, God could have just let us out of Egypt.
It would have been enough. But he also, you know, did this
and this, you know, he, he, he, you know, he, he, you know,
gives us mana from heaven or whatever.
And that would have been enough. But that and just like continue
to go on is like it would have been enough.
But we got even more. And when I look at a lot of
things in Bitcoin, I, I see Bitcoin as it is.
And I think Daenu, it's like that alone would have been
enough to give us a global sound money that would just change the
foundations of civilization for the better.
And any additional thing that does happen to get into Bitcoin,
which there are many to be excited about, everything from
lightning and so on like these. These are things that I, I'm
very much excited about and grateful that they exist.
But I also, I view those as like, well, it would have been
enough. Oh, but we also have lightning.
Wow, well, that also would have been enough.
But we also get things like tack route and so on and so forth.
And I think that attitude of just waiting for the whole world
to actually fully appreciate what we have before assuming
something else is truly needed in order to get Bitcoin to its
its ultimate conclusion. Multi sig.
We mentioned that earlier that was in Bitcoin from day one.
And yet it took basically almost a decade for there to finally be
a UX around it where people felt comfortable really using it sort
of at scale, so to speak, where is a a common institutional
practice. So just the fact that something
as simple as multi sig took that long to embed itself in the
economy makes me think that a lot of the other sort of
primitives of Bitcoin that we're working with as money are going
to take maybe even longer to really, you know, seep in to
like the the full scale of the entire global economy.
And so perhaps the things that people are quick to think are
absolutely necessary for some kind of form of bit Bitcoin
scaling, they might have, in my opinion, and this is not calling
any particular thing out. It's just sort of a general
observation. You know, some are going to be
different from others, but some of those sorts of feelings of,
of needing X to scale might have too narrow of a vision of what
it means for Bitcoin to successfully scale such that it
might not be the case that we actually need that thing in
particular to, to scale more than than what we already have
and and so on and so forth. If you if you have time, I'm I'm
happy to share my more historical lesson as well, but
I'm also happy to stop boring. Well, no, I love it.
I I was looking at the time I, I, I wanted to wrap up with with
two short questions. I perhaps we could do a Part 2
at some time. But I love, you know, I wanted
to conclude to what you said. That is also the humbleness in a
sense that once you see Bitcoin C as in yeah, again, all the
stuff I think we talked about, it doesn't mean it's there,
right? And just because you see it and
it's not there doesn't mean you should start adding stuff to it.
So it gets faster to that point. No, it means you need to stay
humble, stack the sets, you know, take the the low time
preference and help Bitcoin move towards that, that phase that
you already see, right. And I think the fact that people
see it, but but that Bitcoin is not there yet makes them
motivated to try to add on all this stuff where as you know, as
you, as you said, just don't do that.
This is this is just a thing, this is the killer app.
You know, just point your energy to work towards telling more
people that this is the killer app.
You don't have to build all the all the other stuff.
And that also requires some sort of humbleness, right?
Yes, I think it was Saint Augustine that said, you know,
humility is the foundation of all other virtues.
And I think the the way that we could apply this here is that
having that sort of humility towards Bitcoin is going to
allow you to step back and think more critically about Bitcoin,
about yourself and your own view of Bitcoin and so on and so
forth. So that you could the the best
ideas can actually come through. Because as as humble as we might
be, new ideas do come along, you know, TACOR, SegWit, you know,
these things did not exist at the beginning of Bitcoin.
They came later. And there's many things like it
that came later. And we, we all view those as as
wonderful things. So, you know, someone did have
to come up with new ideas. And that is a good thing.
New ideas are a wonderful thing. But we should have that.
We should, we should probably try to have it guided by
humility so that that we know that we're not like we said,
like we're not putting like our ideas ahead of the thing itself.
Yep, I agree. All right.
Last two short questions to to wrap it up.
What makes you most excited about the next decade for
Bitcoin? Going along with the last
answer, I mean, I think starting around 2020, I think especially
like the the entrance of Sailor, I think was a good indicator of
this. But just broadly speaking, since
then there has been such a massive shift in the way that
people look at Bitcoin. It's it's been a very positive
shift. It is incredible to see, not
that I agree with them on everything, but to see BlackRock
coming out and pumping my bags often in a way that I might say
the same thing is strange to say the least.
But it just goes to to show you how how much the the vibe shift
has happened. And so with that in mind, now
that like a lot of people have woken up to the problems of
inflation, the problems of banking on, you know, being able
to freeze people's accounts and all that kind of deep
platforming stuff that that many people have, have kind of had
been been had their eyes open to because of that.
What I'm really excited about is to see over the next 10 years,
how do we, how do we with, even without, if we didn't change
anything, how does just the fact that people can now look at
Bitcoin in a positive light mean that Bitcoin is going to start
subsuming the entire economy just because people have a, a, a
better view of it or, and, and have a more openness to, to take
a look at it. So I, I think there's a lot of
exciting technical stuff happening, but I'm really
excited to see how just the, the, the full extent of the like
the, the, the fact that this vibe shift has happened, just
seeing that to its, its full fruition.
Of that All right, last question, and I ask everyone the
same question, which is what is a core belief that you will
never let go? A core belief that I will never
let go. Well since it's a a Bitcoin
podcast I'll say 21 million is non negotiable.
Awesome man. Well, thanks so much for your
time. This was a a great long
conversation. I will link to, you know, your
social profile, Nakamoto Institute, so people can follow
you and check that out. And yeah, man, I want to thank
you again. Really appreciate your time and
enjoy this conversation. Yeah, thank you so much for
having me. It was a pleasure.
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