If you ask critics, they'll tell you that Bitcoin has no
intrinsic value. Interestingly, my guest today
actually agrees. Freddie Nu, CEO of B Huddle and
former City of London lawyer, argues that Bitcoin isn't
valuable because of what it is, but because of what it does.
It tells the truth every 10 minutes in a way that no bank
and no government can manipulate.
From the metaphysical nature of sending an idea you can no
longer control to EU KS massive legislative shift that
recognizes 12 words in your head as actual legal property, this
conversation goes deep into why Bitcoin is an accounting
revolution and the most profound monetary discovery of our time.
And stick around to learn why banning Bitcoin is absolutely
absurd. If a government tried to make
holding a private key illegal, you could turn every person in a
room into a criminal just by shouting 12 words.
If you're enjoying my content, it would mean a lot to me if you
could subscribe to the channel and like my video.
To support my journey. Thanks a lot.
Now let's dive in to this episode.
All right, Freddie Neu, welcome back to Bitcoin for Millennials.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Lovely to be back Graham. Yeah, I'm happy you're here.
I think you are a great person to talk to about, you know, I'd
say bigger picture Bitcoin thinking, but also, you know,
from from your point of view from the UK, like what is
happening there. So I'm excited to, to chat
because, you know, you spent I think about like 3 years
campaigning with the, with the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
And yeah, I kind of wanted to do just start with, you know what,
what is kind of the, the moment where you realize that something
was actually happening. Like I think it's called the
FCA, like Financial Conduct Authority, right?
It feels like something is happening.
And yeah, you know, I talk about this a lot.
I'm, I'm just so interested, like fascinated about the fact
that, you know, you would say the Bitcoin use case, you know,
and the thesis, et cetera, is very logical.
But you see, you know, in the, in the, in the bigger scheme of
things and especially policy wise, things go very slowly.
But now it seems like something is happening.
So I thought that would be a nice point to start.
Fantastic. And yeah, you're completely
right. It's almost exactly 3 years of
the day since we founded Bitcoin Policy UK and it's been quite a
long and arduous fight. And initially it seemed hard to
ascertain that we wouldn't make any progress, but to talk about
it from a positive perspective for a change.
There are a number of things that have happened in the UK
which counter intuitively, I think may have given us some
cause for hope. One such one I've tweeted about
in the past. It's the fact that strangely,
Bitcoin is now officially recognised as a form of property
under English law. And I got very excited about
this when this happened because you remember, I was a lawyer by
training. And if you want to geek out over
English property law, this is quite an interesting thing to
geek out over that I, I won't, I won't geek out too much.
There were two different types of property under English law.
One was something like a contract, which is a right,
something that you can enforce in court.
And the other is a thing a which called a shows in possession.
Like my pen is a shows in possession.
And the Law Commission realised that Bitcoin doesn't really fit
into either of those buckets. It, you know, it's not a
liability. So it's not, it's not a contract
or anything like that. And it's not a tangible physical
thing. And so they helped to draft this
very clever piece of legislation which effectively creates this
new new third category of property, which could include
your 12 words or your 24 words, which you hold in your head,
which are neither a contract nor a physical thing.
So that that's, that's fantastic.
We took a bit of a punch of the face from the FCA when they
classified Bitcoin as what's called a restricted mass market
investment. We did push back very hard
against that. The consequence of that for
people in the UK is that if you're looking to buy Bitcoin on
an exchange, you have to do a quiz first.
You have to answer questions about what you're buying in some
ways, and that's not bad. You should probably, you should
probably do your research before you buy anything, but it created
a lot of friction for people to buy it in the UK and also meant
that a lot of businesses either left the UK or didn't open open
here in the 1st place. But you mentioned some
positives. It seems to be that the FCA shot
their ward with that restricted mass market investment
definition and they've been on the back foot against a lot of
the industry advocacy since then.
Some of the things I might flag, they were going to try and
restrict your ability to buy Bitcoin with a credit card.
That's gone. They say they're not going to
not going to try and enforce that anymore.
They're also backtracking a little bit on what are called
some of the conduct of business regulations, saying that in some
cases those may not apply to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency firms
opening the market a little bit. And for me, one of the most
positive things that I found when I was reviewing the
legislation, they appear to have listened to all of our arguments
saying that mining is not a financial service and shouldn't
be regulated and node running is not a financial service and
shouldn't be regulated. And that should also include
running lightning nodes. And that that word is actually
in the draft legislation, which is fantastic.
Yeah, that's, that's very interesting.
I'm, I'm thinking about maybe you could explain a bit more
about like that third or new way of defining it as property.
And I kind of, I want to relate to a tweet I saw, I think it was
today by Knutz Swanholm. I, I thought it was very
interesting. I, I won't read the whole tweet
or maybe I will. Let's see how long it takes.
But he said, and I've been thinking about that a lot and
also wonder what do you think? Right.
Like the the 12 words of a private key, right?
They they are not a password like they are the actual access,
right? They already like if you possess
the 12 words, you also have the thing, right?
It's not access to the thing. It is the thing which which is a
sounds like a small, but it is a significant difference, right.
So Knut tweeted, some governments tell you that you
have to declare I'm doing air quotes, declare that you again,
air quotes own a Bitcoin. Now how how do you do that
right? And so he says, in short, if you
know a private key that allows you to request the network to
apply a specific alteration to the time chain that you you
which basically is moving the thing, right?
So then the time chain changes basically.
But how can knowledge of that be equivalent to the ownership?
So what happens when you say the keys in like the private key in
in court, right? So these 12 magic words are
again, not the password, but but the thing.
So when you say it in court and everyone in court is then guilty
of owning the Bitcoin, that is the subject of whatever the
court case is about, right? So how do you, how do you prove
that everyone else on earth doesn't know the same 12 right?
So that you are the the only one that owns it?
Does that does that make sense? Like I, I love that I love that
idea because he says I'll finish under man made law, Bitcoin
ownership is, is a paradox. Under natural law, the key
holder simply is the owner. No declaration is required and
no state is needed to to validate it.
So what do you think about that? And how does that tie into maybe
how it's defined right now? Because I find this extremely
fascinating, right? Because eventually Bitcoin is
just code and it's just word words like you can look at the
whole BIP 360 list, right? That is all the Bitcoin that
ever exists. So yeah, I, I, I thought it
would be a, a fun topic to, to ask you.
That's a. Super interesting one.
And it's funny, I read that tweet myself and I think I
replied to it with a silly example.
You could shout bacon 12 times in court and that would have
that effect. You, you know, the bacon wallet?
No, I mean, oh, oh dude, sorry, random tangent.
The the bacon 12 words 12 bacons is an actual wallet.
It's it someone found it ages ago and it's just become a meme.
So people are continually like dropping Bitcoin into it, but
it's, it's continually monitored and it's always being swept
because it's just, it's, it's like an open, it's an open
season. It's public.
Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, you could go
into court and shout bacon 12 times and then everyone in court
will control that private key because it's, you know, it's an
easy one to remember. What I think what's super
interesting about what Knute says there is that there's, for
me and. And again, as a lawyer, there's
a differentiation between control and ownership in that
sense. So in if if I had purchased
Bitcoin and put it into a wallet, then that is my Bitcoin.
And even if I tell someone else that private key, it doesn't
become their Bitcoin even though they can control it.
So maybe that maybe an analogy is if if I have a key to my car
and I create multiple copies of that of my car key and then hand
them out to people, the car is still legally mine because I
bought and paid for it. And if anyone else takes the car
and drives it away without my permission, then they, although
they're controlling it, there's a difference in the legitimacy
of that control. So it's not their car.
And so the. They would have stolen it,
basically, Yeah. OK, Yeah.
So the the interesting thing arises if the ownership of a
private key becomes illegal. And I think that's the that's
the probably the heart of what Knut's post was about.
So if the let let's say, let's take an extreme example, if
Bitcoin is, if a government attempts to outlaw Bitcoin or to
make the holding of a private key illegal, you can literally
cause everyone to commit that crime by shouting bacon 12
times. And and you'll get to a point
where the the absurdity of law is so clear and the
unenforceability of that law. Let's, let's again, let's, let's
develop the idea, let's make it an imprisonable offence to have
a private key. Yeah, we just take out an ad.
Yes. And everyone reads the ads,
right? Like in all the newspapers.
We put it on TV. It's just bacon, Bacon, bacon,
bacon. Yeah.
OK. You wouldn't be able to go into
the meat section of a supermarket or a store without
immediately committing that fund.
So as soon as you see the shelf full of bacon, you've
immediately committed the crime. If something happened to you
tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin?
Not probably not. They'd figure it out, but with
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So I, I think for, for me, the idea of legitimacy of ownership
is where the, where, where the crime comes in.
You know, I, I couldn't, I can't legitimately take your Bitcoin
unless you give me permission to do that.
If you told me the private key and said, yeah, Freddy, this
wallet is for you, that's fine. But otherwise that's not, that's
not OK. That, that's still theft.
And the interesting thing about the bringing it back to the EU
KS recent change in law, if I found your private key at home
and then I went off and I emptied your wallet, English law
would protect you now in that you, you could go to the police
and you could say Freddie broke into my house.
He took my 12 words and he swept my wallet because it's validly
recognized as property under English law.
The police will now investigate me and arrest me and they can,
they can force me to give that key back.
So it's a, it's a really interesting, nuanced technical
point. And if anything I think it's the
the absurdity of the point Knut's making really is some
protection towards a get against governments trying to ban it
because it's impossible. Yeah, it's also so interesting.
Why, why Bitcoin is so profound, right?
Like it is, it is nowhere and everywhere at at the same time.
I think Knut was actually the first person who told me, you
know, if you put a private key in a vault in Switzerland and
you have the public key, you can send value to a vault in
Switzerland, right? That that's that's mind blowing.
Is there kind of like a cascade or a, I want to say a pyramid?
I think cascade is better as to how you can kind of like
logically articulate why banning is futile, right?
Like what you just said, like the definition of the, of the
fact that Bitcoin is a new form of property, which I didn't know
about. So so thanks for sharing.
Like how how that's done in the UK.
Is that kind of like a primitive for everything?
Else. Or yeah, like how, how, how
could you think about it? Do you understand what I mean?
Like. Yeah, 100%.
I think you're completely right, actually, the way that the
legislation is drafted, it's, and if anyone wants to pull it
up, it's very easy to read. It's just one page.
It's a classic piece of English law drafting.
You know, it's one of the few things that Britain is good at,
drafting laws. They say a thing shall not be
prevented from being property by virtue of being neither a chosen
action, a contract, nor a chosen possession thing.
And So what it does is it's, it's an inclusive definition.
It's not an exclusive definition, which means that
arguably even an idea could be property under this.
And, and for me, I find the idea that the concept of Bitcoin as
an idea is so fascinating, particularly in the context of
sending Bitcoin. I, I wrote about this a long
time ago, actually, the, the, it's the, the concept that
Bitcoin is like an idea that I can only have once.
If I, if I have a, if I have Bitcoin and I send it to you,
then it's not like an idea where we can, I can tell you an idea
and then both of us have that same idea in our heads.
Correct. Yes, it's incredible, isn't it?
It's like a unique element of an idea which if I sign a
transaction with my private key and send Bitcoin to you, I can
no longer control that in any shape, form or, or or respect.
And I find that concept, I mean, you begin to get into very sort
of metaphysical ideas around what exactly it is we're dealing
with here. But I find that absolutely
fascinating. I have a lot more questions but
I want to keep on this track because you know it it is to
connect it to your background, right?
Like you have law, which is you can take it literally, right?
Which is the whole I well, sometimes the whole idea of a
law, right? And sometimes you have this
legal text that is, you know, the classic legal speak where
there's a lot of words, but the kind of conclusion is, well,
this applies to everything, right?
So I'm covering everything like all my liabilities, like
literally all my liabilities are covered even when we're talking
about one, right? Like that's how I could like
mush the words, but with Bitcoin, it is always the
literal thing. And I think that's what you're
talking about, right? Like it's also very interesting
to to think about like your, your, your Bitcoin and my
Bitcoin and everyone else's Bitcoin is is all like unique,
right? Like if you take all the Bitcoin
that exists, I have this sliver and you have that sliver, like
I've always visualize it as like a wall of bank vaults.
And I have bank vault X, you know, 123 and 456 and you have
bank vault 321 and, you know, 17160 sixty two.
And this kind of like attempt at visualization is is not enough,
right, Because, like you said, it's metaphysical.
So it's it's it's, it's the, the visualization is flawed, right,
Because what you're saying is that, and and this is also in
in, in what Knut said, right? The the and, and what you said,
the words actually change the blockchain, right.
So if my words go to you, it it alters the entire state of
almost, I don't know, like all the letters and numbers.
I'm, I'm even try I'm trying to describe it right.
And that is very profound because yeah, it's there or not.
Like you said, it's not a shared idea like we, we can I I can
share my idea with you and then we both own the idea like the
combination of words in our head.
But when it comes to Bitcoin, it can be in my head, but it's not,
I don't have it. It's which is very strange.
It's very strange it. Is, you know, if if we were
still in a in a society that sort of believed in magic,
that's really what it would feel like.
It's as though and you know, the the the whole the whole cultural
history of of magic, again, being slightly esoteric for a
moment is is around the idea of correct speaking and spells
spell is actually an old an old form for word And the idea that
you and Doug Gigi is very, very good on this.
You know, his old writings. I really miss, I really miss him
Twitter. Bitcoin is time.
Bitcoin is speech.
Bitcoin is sending. Bitcoin is sending a message.
But unlike e-mail, it's a message that can only be sent
once by, you know, And once I have sent it, I can't call it
back. I can't then forward that on to
someone else. So for example, if if we're
using an analogy, when we're speaking to a politician or a
regulator about the e-mail protocol, it's very important to
distinguish the e-mail protocol that that's SMTP from the
Bitcoin protocol. It's, and I think that's one of
the things that a lot of non-technical and non Bitcoin
people struggle to understand the it's we, we're used to this
world of endlessly copyable digital abundance where any
picture can be right clicked and saved down, any e-mail can be
forwarded, any film can be pirated.
It's very difficult for someone who's become habituated to that
world to understand that Bitcoin is, is digital uniqueness, it's
digital scarcity. And that's like we said with the
ideas. Once I've told my Bitcoin to
you, I can't tell it to anyone else.
Gigi should write another article on this, I I think.
I think the world needs, yeah. Well, and, and then to tie it
back to what you mentioned about the, the FCA admitting that, you
know, mining and writing a note aren't regulated financial
services, which I think it, it does tie into this, right?
So because what do you actually do as a miner or a note, right?
What with, with these words and this and this code, it, it is
again, so interesting that this is just, it's so outside of the
current paradigm, right? Because the current paradigm is,
is, you know, there's, there's policy, there's a, there's like
a, there's like a start and an end and there's a fence around
it. And, and, you know, we can kind
of like set the rules, we can change the rules, right?
But with Bitcoin, it's just a set set of rules, which you
know, people, you know, the people that that participate in
a Bitcoin network are incentivized not to change,
obviously. So how, how do we connect this
to how they label mining and running notes, right?
Not being a financial service like what?
Why is this so important? So in terms of in terms of
labeling, maybe just not there, we've been consistent in our
explanation over time that validation of transactions is
different from from mining and trying to explain in very simple
terms of what what the miners do is they determine the order of
transactions and once at you, as you and I know, but they they
may not once a once a transaction has been mined into
a block and once a certain number of blocks are mined on
top of that of that block, it effectively becomes impossible
to reverse. Obviously occasionally you do
get you do get competing blocks, but then as we know you, you
will get an orphan block and then then then the time chain
will revert to A to a single single sequence of blocks.
So for non-technical people in these kind of institutions,
explaining to them exactly how mining works with transactions
being scooped up in the mem pool, then hashed and then
subsequently determined determining the sequence of
transactions is quite a simple way to explain it.
And then also explaining the nodes in the vast majority of
cases nowadays don't mind, but they validate transactions.
They check that you have the Bitcoin that you were sending me
from your UTXO, they check that it's properly signed with your
private key, etcetera, etcetera. And once they're valid and they
have that tip, then they can go into the mempool.
And as soon as it then becomes apparent that neither of these,
neither of these activities relates to, if to any form of
financial services that a regulator would recognize it, it
then becomes logically consistent that they're not
financial services. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My, my big fault around this is, and I love that that we touched
upon this. It is the the value is is like
on top of this process that that we are talking about, right.
So the value is derived from the fact that this process works
like this. You know, you have you have the
Ledger which is, you know, literally the the book with the
letters and the and the numbers, right.
And the book is being updated or there's, there's stuff being
added or changed and, or changed to the book every every 10
minutes. And then that's the minors.
And then you have the notes that validate that this is the book.
And that is basically just it, right?
It's, it's just letters, letters and numbers in a sequence that
is agreed upon, right? That's the consensus part.
And I think the, the value comes from the fact that there's
nothing in the world that is like that, right?
And anyone, anyone can put in, let's call it a request to
change the numbers and the, the letters, right?
Which is my transaction to you, for example, because I can, I
control a certain combination of letters.
It's so funny, right? Like, it is so fucking basic but
so profound, right? And it's it's, it's, it's just
data. Like, it's literally a data
file, right? I don't know what the blockchain
is right now. Like 507 hundred gigs doesn't
really matter. And the fact that that data is
agreed upon continuously, right? And being secured more and more
and more continuously, that is where the value comes from
because you can use this accounting system.
I'm still trying to get Darren Feinstein, you know, Darren
Feinstein. Oh, yeah, I, I, I still have,
you know, he, he, he will be on the podcast, but he's talking
about, you know, a triple entry bookkeeping and stuff like that,
right? Like that.
Is this right? So if you know that the book is
true and the only change to the book is done by actual consensus
plus, well, it's done by proof of work and actual consensus so
that it becomes immutable, right?
The text in the book basically that is the that is the
revolution and there's nothing like that that exists in the
world. And that is why this is, is
valuable, right? So when you take it back to the
argument that, that, that you mentioned, right, like they,
they are not conducting the financial action basically,
right. They are just updating the book
and other people are, are applying the participating in
the consensus, right? But the the value is is a
separately derived or agreed upon thing.
You've said so much interesting stuff there, absolutely
fascinating. But I think that maybe picking
up the value point first, you're completely correct.
And often when people say they challenge, they say, oh, Bitcoin
has no intrinsic value. I'll say well, yeah, I actually
kind of agree with you. It's big, it has no interest.
It's true. It's.
The function has value. The function of it's exactly
right. Me Bitcoin represents value and
the representation of the value, the more value accrues the time
chain by virtue of what you said, you know the the, the the
process that speaks truth every 10 minutes that tells all
participants in the network what changes have taken place in the
preceding 10 minutes and which no one can manipulate or game or
corrupt in any way. That is where the value lies and
that's why value has been attributed to it.
But we forget, you know, for the first two years of its of its
life, Bitcoin had no market price at all.
There wasn't no value at all. It was just processing this
information. It was updating the time chain.
Truth was being spoken every 10 minutes, but no one cared.
And it's funny as well to imagine if humans became extinct
today, all humans vanished for as long as our computers were
still running and our note was still validating and the power
stayed on. There would probably be a little
time when this was just happening automatically and
empty blocks are being mined because no humans are making
transactions anymore. And there would be no value
attributed to those Bitcoin because the things that
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And this is also the argument against, you know, people saying
like, what if the EMP or what if the nuclear thing are blows up,
right? Or what if there's a media or or
whatever. The point you're making is that
as long as there are two nodes, right and there is consensus on
the book, then once the network grows again, right?
And, and the fun thing is that it can basically never die
because the oldest chain is the one that is, well, the, the
chain that has the most consensus is the truth, right.
So even after a certain time of, you know, global outages in
certain places, the fact that all these nodes are are
distributed in a certain way and can still connect to the network
after will make sure that, you know, there, there's a there,
there's an exit or like a certain fork, right?
There's, there's a version that's going to be chosen.
And that's why it basically lives forever.
And the fun thing then you come back to it's just letters and
numbers. That's the crazy thing, right?
That that that is, I want to say easy, right?
It's easy to maintain. There are no, there are no
buildings, there are no, you know, there's, there's no other
stuff that you need to maintain even when there's a solar flash
or whatever. Like there are probably miners
and nodes in Faraday cages like in the in, in the in the world,
right. So, yeah.
So that that's why it can basically not die.
It's just, it's just letters, numbers.
Yeah, you know block stream have a satellite in space that runs a
full node. Yeah, that's always my argument
also. Yeah, exactly.
So, OK, I love that we took this, this, this, this, this
exit because this is and I think this is also why this is under
discussed because if we translate that to, you know, you
mentioned it correctly, I think, you know, money is a social
consensus as well. That's why the what is money
question is so important when you know, we can talk about
Bitcoin in this way, but then the relevant question is OK, but
why is this even important, right?
Like, why is it important that, you know, a Ledger is basically
incorruptible and therefore verifiable and auditable for
anyone who wants to do that without any third party, right?
All the way back when people talk about my own history of
money, it is about the Ledger, right?
It is it is about the truth of of the Ledger and that that went
back to, you know, when people had chains with, you know,
these, these things on them, right, like that.
You know, the more tokens you had on your chain, the more
people were indebted to you, right?
Like it, it showed your kind of like claim on on on the Ledger,
So to say, right. Like it it, it was a way for you
to get someone to do something for you so they could change
their position on on the ledgers.
Yeah. And that that those tokens, it's
interesting you mentioned those because tracking back to what we
said a few minutes ago, those are exactly the type of property
that was already recognised under English law.
Those are effectively obligations.
They're a form of liability money.
Yes, yes, and. One of the fascinating things
about our modern money, Fiat money, is very few people
realise that it's, it's essentially all liabilities
nowadays. If you'd read the paperwork from
any central bank, they will tell you, you know, banknotes are a
liability of the central bank. Government money is a liability
of that central bank and commercial bank money, which is
how most money is, is created nowadays by is what is created
when banks make loans. People think that banks take in
deposits from you and me and they lend those deposits out.
That's really not how how money functions at all.
It's one of the things that I get so worked up about, you
know, particularly, you know, for house prices.
You know, back to the title of your podcast, millennials in the
UK, it's almost impossible for them to buy houses.
One of the reasons house prices are so expensive is because of
the ease with which banks were able to create new money for
people to get mortgages to buy houses.
And so the price of a house was determined not really by how
much it was worth, but by how much certain people could borrow
in order to bid for them. That's one of the reasons that
that their price is completely out of control.
We're seeing currently, I would say kind of we're, we're in the
end times of Fiat money, right. We can talk for turning or, you
know, cycles, whatever, but I, I talk about it like we're in the
end times of centralization and centralized control and kind of
also seeing that the centralized control doesn't bring what the
centralized people in charge are are telling you it it's bringing
right. And so we see all this kind of
crazy stuff going on, like, for example, a lot of talk about,
you know, age gating stuff on the Internet, digital IDs in the
UK and, and the EU. And I kind of wanted to ask you
like how I have my own idea, but I want to ask you first, like
how, how does Bitcoin kind of serve as, I want to say, like,
like a like a firewall, you know, against all of this
overreach, right? Like they're trying to the
Internet's kind of the last decentralized place of
information and ideas and stuff like that, right?
And you see that they are, you know, trying to move on on that.
How do you how do you feel about Bitcoin in that that picture?
For me, I think the answer to that comes down to one of the
fundamental properties of Bitcoin has always excited me
and been most important to me, which is it's censorship
resistance. I've, I've, I've always had that
as, as the primary importance for, for me after perhaps the,
the fact that it can't be inflated away or, or controlled,
the, the idea that I can still make a transaction even if the
government wants to stop me making that transaction for me
is fundamentally important. And I think it's because if you
track back all of the different freedoms that we, we, that we
think about that, that are human rights, most of them are
actually downstream from your freedom to transact.
And so my freedom to transact at will with you or with anyone
else to, to, to spend money to, to deploy my time and energy
however I see fit is so fundamentally important to all
other freedoms that it's, it's all, it's, it's so big that
people often often don't recognize this.
So to take a, a simple example, let's say you want to exercise
your right to protest. You want to travel on the metro
on a train to go to, to join a protest, a peaceful protest.
If you go to the station and you suddenly find that the
government has identified you as a person who might protest and
has frozen your bank card, they would prevent you from
exercising your rights to to to free assembly and and to free
speech very easily. So from for me, the extent to
which the government is able to reduce its cost of enforcement
in imposing its will on its population is extremely
dangerous. That's they will obviously look
to increase their ability to impose their will on us through
things like digital ID and age gating.
But to your question, the fact that there is a money which they
can't stop and cannot control and which we can go on using
even if they shut everything else down is a huge it's a sword
and a shield. I think, you know, it's a
defensive weapon and it's an offensive weapon against
government overreach. Being completely blunt.
Yeah. And this is also why it's so
fun, right? Like something that is purely
decentralized and has no rulers is fundamentally just different
from anything centralized rulers can attempt to, to, to do,
right. So and I think, yeah, I think
you just made the case why you need Bitcoin right now, right?
Like the Bitcoin is not only about preserving time and energy
and your wealth, etcetera. It is literally about opting out
of a system where there are central rulers that don't want
you to be a player in the game that they that they control.
Right. And I think that is kind of
like, yeah, I always talk about it like this is the little red
pill you have to take. Like, yeah, you are a pawn in a
game that other people play and control and you think you are a
player while you're, you know, growing up and, you know,
becoming an adult and whatever. But yeah, once you kind of see
that that is an illusion. Like you have to take.
Action, right? If you don't take the action,
you will. You will be stuck being a pawn
and like in this endless rat race, just running and standing
still basically. Yeah, completely right that
there's a fantastic quote, isn't there?
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do
nothing. I, I think the, the huge, it
seems globally coordinated push to restrict people's freedom of
speech and freedom of thought is unbelievably dangerous.
And it is frankly, it is time for us to say, you know, thus
far and no further, you know, it's, it's fundamentally
important for us as free human beings to stand up for our
rights. And you know, that's not always
comfortable to do that, but it's something that we must do.
Yeah, well, this ties back to, to, to when we talked about the
characteristics of Bitcoin, right?
It is speech, it is expression, right?
And, and you can think about that in different ways.
I've had Seth Bunny on who said, well, every time you buy
something, you're basically expressing your values.
I love that. Like you're communicating your
your values, right. So you can think about it like
that, but you can also think, think about it in the, in the
technical issue way that, that, that we talked about.
Like, yeah, it, it is just a protocol with letters and
numbers. You cannot restrict speech
basically. And so also back to that tweet
of Knut, like I, I would love to see court cases around this
because like you said, it's, it's just going to show the
ridiculousness of what they're trying to do, right?
If you can explain a deeper than than what we talked about how
Bitcoin functions technically all we're doing.
Is making edits to a shared book.
Yeah, we are. That's all we're doing.
I don't know if you've ever seen the the YouTube clip of someone
hashing by hand. It's now it's worth digging up.
And again, I've quoted Gigi already on this part, but it's
very worthwhile digging up his piece.
I think it's called implications of outlawing Bitcoin or
implications of banning Bitcoin because he goes into these ideas
in incredible depth. It's to this day one of the best
things I've ever read about Bitcoin.
And he talks about the impossibility of banning it
because it is speech and it is mathematics.
And he says in order to ban it, you would need to surveil
everyone at all times, everywhere, and prevent them
from doing things like flipping a coin in their room or rolling
dice or even thinking of 12 random words or observing the
flights of birds. Anything that creates entropy
can be used to generate a private key.
And in fact, I spent a lot of time a couple of years back
before the US elections trolling Elizabeth Warren, who wanted to
ban Bitcoin and ban unhosted wallets, as she called them.
She wrote a letter once, a diatribe as it were, about
unhosted wallets. And at Bitcoin Policy, we took
the first paragraph of her letter and we use that as
entropy to generate a private key.
We then we posted the wallet QR address on Twitter and said, you
know this, We call it the Warren Wallet.
This, this, this private key is, is generated by Elizabeth
Warren. You know, it's very clear of her
to hide A Bitcoin wallet in the first paragraph of her lesser
like yes. And then we raised donations and
donated them to Coin Centre in the US to push back against her
efforts to ban on her zoo wallets.
Yeah, but this is how ridiculous it is, right?
Like it, it, it is almost. I wonder if you've heard anyone
talk about it like this. But but I I don't even know how
to call. This.
I I don't even know how to label, you know, whatever
Bitcoin enables us us to do, right?
Like it it it is. Yeah, I don't even know.
It's like a it's like a new thing with words.
You know, I'm, I'm it's a little ramble, but I don't, I don't, I
don't, you know, it is so opposite.
Maybe it goes back to proof of work, right?
Like proof of work is in every fractal of Bitcoin, you know, in
in a field world, it's all proof of it.
It's like proof of words or just use of words, right?
Like I'm in a certain seat with a certain label, right?
Gives me a certain power because it's written down somewhere,
right? I'm in position XYZ and
therefore the words coming out of my mouth have a certain
weight, right? That other people, you know,
pairs or below or above me can receive in a certain way because
again, I have a label sitting in a certain seat, right?
And and with Bitcoin, it is just a total opposite of that.
Like you can do it or you or, or you can't.
Basically there's no one like you have it or you don't, right?
You control it or you don't. So it is it is way more binary
than kind of the, well maybe the all the legal speak right that
you can use to weasel your way through to a certain destination
or outcome that you prefer. Completely right.
And honestly, the, the meme that no one understands Bitcoin is,
is completely true. It's, it's so complicated and
it, it straddles so many different disciplines.
Everything you said there is completely correct, but so hard
for people who to understand it. It's hard for me to understand
and I, I work in the industry, so I can't even imagine how
difficult it must be for, for people who, who are sitting in
government at the moment. I mean, case in point, this
afternoon, I'm after this quorum.
I've got a meeting in London and one of my meetings is with a
friend of mine who is in the Foreign Office in, in London
now. So he's, he works on the China
desk. He loves, loves the People's
Republic of China. He is very much of the view that
government should control money and they and he is very he's a
big opponent of Bitcoin, but and I've tried many times to explain
to him he doesn't understand how I can send a Bitcoin transaction
even if the People's Republic of China doesn't want me to send it
for. So for him, it, it's almost
worldview breaking it it he can't end the idea that 2
individuals, 2 free individuals can transact with each other
using these protocols of letters and numbers and the government
can't stop it. It it it's, it's rather
interesting for me to to consider why that's so difficult
for him to to comprehend. I'll I'll try again as.
Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting.
I I I'm just thinking about, you know, someone should be in
control or something like that, right?
Like someone should be in control to do XYZ and, and I
think what Bitcoiners are just saying is and asking is why,
right? And, and this is something that
I think a lot of people don't acknowledge, like the fact that
something exists that can do what you don't think is
possible. That should be the signal to
you, right? It it, it is already a little
signal that you're partially wrong, right?
Because we can transact value without any third party having
an influence over it. Whether it is the, you know, the
interest rate put on the unit that, that we're using or the,
the, the permission for the transaction to go through on my
side to, for it to go through on your side, right?
The fact that you could even use it afterwards, right?
There's all these little kind of like checkpoints or, or gates
along along the way. And and well, it kind of ties
back to Jesse Myers talking about what the yuppie elite
dismisses Bitcoin, right? It's eventually about like
trust. Like do do you have trust in,
in, in institutions? And I think once you just start
asking the question why, you know, why should I have trust in
institutions? Well, the premise is always nice
and interesting and positive and value driven, you know, out
outcome, positive, outcome driven, etcetera.
But that is Fiat money thinking because those are words, right?
And so once you start asking the question why, and you're, you're
going to start looking at the outcomes and then compare the
intention with, with the outcome.
That for me is, is why I mentioned it's red pill, blue
pill, because a lot of times if you put these things next to
each other, they, they, they are not the outcome of the
intention, right? It's a different thing.
And then when you just keep on questioning why and how and what
and where and when, you will figure out that it's just not
created for you. It's, it's like created around
you. And then you have to make that
decision like, OK, am I OK with that or not?
Like, is there actually a way that I can literally opt out or
at least attempt to, to opt out or else, yeah, you just have to
live with that knowledge infinitely, right.
And, and, and that would make you very anxious at least.
Well, it it would make me very anxious if if if that wasn't the
case. Yeah, I, I like what you said
earlier around taking the red pill and realizing that you
don't have agency. You are just a you think you're
a player, but you're actually a pawn.
You're being played with. And the system and the people
who control the system do not have your best interests at
heart. You know, the the the government
in the United Kingdom likes me because I earn money and pay tax
and I keep the law. Yeah, you know that.
That I mean, I I want to add like apparently and
unfortunately right like it is not a nice realization.
No, no, it's not a nice realization.
You know, governments are, are, are supposed to be the servants
of their people, not our masters.
We live in democratic systems for a reason.
But unfortunately, whether or not your system is democratic,
it's almost certainly affected by the ability of your banks
endlessly to create new money. That an idea I've been playing
with a lot recently is the, the idea that value is hard to
create, but money is easy to create.
And over time we've very, we've conflated money with value.
And I think I, I love your idea and I may, I may have to steal
this brand, but I'll credit you if I do.
I, I love the idea that the value in Bitcoin is derived from
the process from and the fact that the pros, we don't need to
trust the process. The process is it demonstrably
works or it doesn't. The time chain is it continues
over time or it stops. And the longer it continues, the
more we can have faith in the mathematics and in the hardware,
and therefore we can attribute more and more value to to the
tokens that that that the position of which on the time
gene is updated every 10 minutes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, please, please steal it.
Because I, I talked about in my last episodes also about, for
example, how Alan Watts talks about money, right?
And he, I'll read it now. I just Googled it.
Alan Watts describes money as a symbol, like digits, paper or
ink. It represents wealth rather than
being the wealth itself, right? He frequently likened money to a
menu and real wealth, food, shelter, enjoyment to the
dinner, arguing that modern civilization suffers from
confusing the two and mistakenly eating the menu.
Oh well, you know, to keep on the to stay on the GG part, to
stay on the GG part. This is the map is not the
territory, right? And there's an amazing talk by
Jack Mahler's, which is called there is no second best, which
is at BTC Prague. So if you Google, if you search
Jack Mahler's, there's no second best.
He talks about this idea. And there's also the Jack
Mueller's talk in Madeira, which you know, is a introduction to
Bitcoin. I always tell people I, I, I was
there and I thought like, I don't have to watch this.
This is the introduction. I went there, I watched it.
Probably best talk in 10 years of, of Bitcoin because he talks
about what Gigi talks about the map is not the territory, right?
Like you're looking at the map and you're standing on the
territory and the map is a, is an abstraction, is a, is a, is
a, is a, is an attempt at a representation of the place
you're actually at. Same as, you know, what Alan
Watts says about the menu is a representation of, of the food,
but it's not the food. And what you're saying is, you
know, price is not value, right? The amount of units is not the
value. And even on, you know, I don't
know what is on the English # you know, bills.
But in the US it says, you know, this bill is what?
What does it say like? The British one says I promise
to pay the bear on demand 10 lbs because you used to be able to
exchange £10 worth of silver. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So the US dollar bill, this note
is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
So it already says like on the note that the note is an
abstraction of something you can probably not even identify,
right. Like that is layers, layers
separated away from from you. So whether the, the bill has a
5A10, a 20 or 100, that is just your perception of what, what
you can like. It's like a collective delusion.
But the cool thing with Bitcoin, as we talked about, like the
map, the key as Knut also refers to the key is the thing, right?
The, the, the key is, is the actual thing.
Sometimes Knut also says like you are the Bitcoin, right?
If the words are in your head, like you are actually a Bitcoin
like that, that goes even further out there.
But I, I agree with it, right? And that's the difference like
Bitcoin is the map and the territory in in one thing.
And therefore it would be a a way better tool to actually
determine the value there the the price would be the value.
Yeah, it's it's a ruler that isn't continually being
lengthened and shortened arbitrarily by people outside
your outside your purview and your control.
So I think we've been talking positively about what Bitcoin,
you know, brings and, and kind of, you know, how how it combats
this, you know, kind of like centralized quackery.
I almost want to say what in your mind is kind of like a like
a like a like a version of the future that most people are kind
of like missing in this, let's call it centralized versus
decentralized kind of battle. And these attempts, you know,
this age gating, digital ID, stuff like that.
Just, you know, for me, it's like I said, it's kind of the
end of this pendulum of centralization and therefore
it's just chaotic, like they're just scrambling to keep it all
together. But yeah, how do you look at the
future? I'm not, not entirely
optimistically, I, I'm a long term optimist, but probably
possibly a short term pessimist. So on digital ID, we've
mentioned a couple of times, there's, there's clearly a
globally coordinated push to try and restrict, I think people's
freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
And the way that they're approaching this is, oh, why
don't someone think of the children.
So certainly in the UK with the online safety, the.
Cheapest argument I always. Well, exactly, you know.
Like who doesn't agree with that?
Yes. Exactly, everyone wants to
protect children, so let's make sure that we have everyone Id'd.
Funnily enough, I also like protecting children.
The argument we've consistently made is that age gating the
Internet is not the right way to do it, that protecting children
starts with parents at home. And if it's, it's much, much
easier for you to have router based restrictions on what your
children can look at online in your home, which you can control
without giving your identity to a centralized database, which
will almost certainly be hacked and stolen.
So I don't need to go into the vast number of examples of of
this happening. It's it's actually all over the
place. Maybe a funny story instead.
So the Online Safety Act has required all kinds of websites
in the UK to age gate their services to children.
A really interesting report came up in the last week.
It's worth looking up. It turns out that children have
been getting around the face, scanning, for example, by
drawing moustaches on their faces with eyebrow pencils and.
I love that, yeah. I love that.
So you here, you again, you have politicians thinking that
they're going to come up with this brilliant piece of
legislation, which as you say, they're just words written by
people in Parliament websites, then desperately try and either
comply or as in the case of 4 Chan, for example, just ignore
it because the English law is not enforceable over Americans
freedom of speech. Americans have much better
freedom of speech protections than we do in the United Kingdom
and they are not subject to British laws at all.
And then you have clever children who are either using
VPNs or drawing massages on their faces with the pencils,
you know, well done children. And, and I, I think making the,
making the points like into a slightly more serious one, laws
should be fair, just and enforceable.
And if it becomes apparent that the law is completely
unenforceable, then it needs to be rewritten and revised.
And so that that is the longer term optimism that I, I hope to
see with the Online Safety Act. It's going to become so obvious
that it's completely unenforceable and unworkable
that over time I think it will have to be amended and hopefully
repealed. But that's going to take, that's
going to take a reasonable battle in the medium.
Yeah. Well, this is what makes me very
positive about the future, right?
Like a lot of the things that that we've talked about now will
be brought to light even even more, right and, and get to the
essence of what Bitcoin actually is.
And I think it'll also kind of like spillover in these other
topics that that you just alluded to, right?
Because if if something can exist like like this for money,
it also kind of shows the ridiculousness of any other, you
know, policy wording that has no.
How do you say it in the real world?
Substantial value in the. Physical world, yeah.
Yeah, completely right. Actually we a bit, a bit of a
spoiler Bitcoin policy are about, we're about to release a,
a sort of privacy toolkit which covers not just use of Bitcoin
privately, but also how to ensure that you, you you're set
up with AVPN. If for example, age gating is
brought in at the OS level on your computer, what kind of
operating systems can you use in order to ensure that you don't
need to give your identity to a centralized database?
That's going to be published in the next few days and hopefully
by the time this podcast is out, that will be, that will be out
there online. And one of the things we talked
about in there is obviously Nosta.
I've been working with an, an AI agent, an open clue agent for
some time. The first, the first thing I
used it for actually was to demonstrate to Liz Kendall,
who's responsible for the these policy areas in the UK.
She's a minister to demonstrate to her that it's impossible to
ban children from social media. Because my agent called Claudia,
I instructed it to go to Nosta, create a key pair and then begin
posting. And she, Claudia posts every
day. She checks Nostra daily at
lunchtime and within certain parameters I gave her, she can
say whatever she likes and no one can stop her.
No one can restrict her freedom of speech.
Her first post was literally trolling the British government
saying you know, they want to try and age gate the Internet.
They can't even restrict me and I'm not even a person.
Yeah, or or I'm a week old bot. She literally said I'm five days
old and already I haven't social media profile.
I love that, Yeah. To, to, to kind of wrap up you,
you've had a foot in, I would say both the old legal world and
this new Bitcoin world, the old finance world, the new finance
world. What is What is something that
is very clear for you, let's say, about the next decade, that
you think a lot of people still miss?
I think a lot of, again, again, maybe this is an optimistic
point. I think a lot of people
underestimate quite how exciting the world is going to be.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of dumorism about at the moment.
There's a lot of fear about what AI is going to do, about jobs
that are going to disappear. I'm strange, maybe I'm naive,
but I'm strangely excited by this.
And I think some people are missing that, that sense of
excitement, the idea that we're entering into a world where it
is going to be possible for anyone in the world to transact
with anyone else using a global digital money.
In the same way that we can communicate with anyone else
anywhere in the world, as long as they have a smartphone and a
Wi-Fi or satellite connection. The, the kind of opportunities
that that opens up are are extraordinary.
And you know, the fact that you, you and I can send money to a
friend in Zambia or in South America or in Bali and we can
work on the same thing, the same projects, the same ideas.
I'm immensely excited by that. And I am also excited by the
idea of kind of a hybrid world where where humans are working
with increasingly with, with AI agents to I suppose it's mutual
benefit rather than in competition with each other.
I like that. All right, If you if you had 30
minutes to convince high level policy maker that Bitcoin is a
profound technological discovery rather than just an investment,
where where would you start? That's a fantastic question.
I think I might start with the the fundamental point that we
made. We made earlier that we are all
mentally habituated to the idea that digital things are easily
copied and therefore completely abundant.
So getting into your head the idea that that a Bitcoin cannot
be copied and cannot be easily replicated.
So many of the properties of Bitcoin are downstream from that
idea. The fact that there is one
transaction record, there is one statement of truth every 10
minutes, and that can't be changed by a central bank, can't
be changed by a commercial bank, can't be changed by law
enforcement. I think if you grasp that idea
then a lot of the other pieces also fall into place.
Yeah, I would agree. I think it's interesting.
Well, I hope you have the chance soon enough to to to do that
more and and I'm very excited to see where this is all going to
go. Like for now, I want to thank
you for your time. I thought this was really great
and and also it went as I thought because I had a lot of
other questions. But with you, you know, we we
always get into this direction and then a bit deeper and I
think I think this was really great and I hope more people
will talk about Bitcoin like this.
So thanks a lot and I'll see you soon.
Bram, thanks so much. I I love chatting with you.
It was a super pleasure and thank you so much for having me
back on. Cheers.
Thank you. Cheers.
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