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And if people make mistakes with the monetary policy, they don't suffer as a result,
I think.

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It's hard to even tell that they have made a mistake because there's no control
group or

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anything. And so I think that what Bitcoin represents is this safety valve. It gives

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people an alternative. If they don't like how the monetary policy in their country
is being run,

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they can switch to Bitcoin. And if they don't like how Bitcoin is being run,

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they can switch to some other cryptocurrency.

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So hello, and welcome to another episode of Chatter. Today, I'm talking to Paul
Sztorc,

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who is an independent Bitcoiner and Bitcoin researcher. I hope I pronounced your
name

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00:00:56,800 --> 00:01:03,200
right. So welcome to the show, Paul. Thank you very much. No problem. So before we
start,

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I have to plug two things really quick. First of all, my book, Brexit, the
Establishment Civil

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War, is now available to order. You can get it on Amazon, on bookshop.org, and
hopefully in some

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00:01:13,280 --> 00:01:19,360
bookstores now that places are opening back up. And also, I have to plug our
sponsor, ExpressVPN.

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You currently get 35% off of 12 months of ExpressVPN when you follow the link in the

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00:01:24,080 --> 00:01:30,000
description below. So, Paul, we are here to talk all about Bitcoin, since it's been
very,

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very in the news. And this is hopefully the first of many podcasts on cryptocurrency
and

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decentralized finance that I'm going to do. So why don't we just lay the ground for
the

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conversation we're going to have. To you, what is a cryptocurrency?

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Okay. Well, the crypto part of the word, it refers to cryptography, obviously, but
that's in direct

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contrast to a government fiat currency. So when you have the US dollar or British
pound or euro,

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you basically, at the end of the day, if you boil it all down, you have an account
with the

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government. You may have an account with a bank, but that bank has an account with
the central

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bank, which is run by the government. So really, at the end of the day, you have an
account with

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the government, that's your fiat, your traditional government currency. And this is
in direct

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contrast to that, where you have basically an account that is calculated by a
software algorithm.

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And so the big implication of that is that the software algorithm, it doesn't have
any idea if

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you are physically located in any individual country or breaking any laws or doing
anything

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politically subversive. It doesn't know if you're white, black, male or female,

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four years old, if you're not even a person at all, and you're just a computer
following

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instructions. So that's the big practical distinction. So where did you first come

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across the idea of a digital cryptocurrency? When did it first cross your radar?

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Yeah. Well, it's funny because people had been telling me about it for a while, and
I always

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thought this is the stupidest thing ever. And in fact, the story I often tell, which
is 100%

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the truth, is that there was this free state project where a bunch of people in
America were

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going to move to the state of New Hampshire and then politically organized to become
more active

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there. And they were sending out emails about coordinating this big project. And I
had signed

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up for the email list. And one of them was like, if you come, we'll give you free
Bitcoin. It was

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like 50 free Bitcoin or something. If you go, this is like in 2010 or something, a
long time ago.

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And I literally was so angry. I was like, these stupid libertarians. You can't run
money like

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this. You can't just start a new one up because of network effects and because it's
a victim of

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its own success. If it succeeded, someone else would be copycats. And so actually,

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I remember distinctly, something like that email stood out as being annoying. And I
unsubscribed

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from the mailing list either immediately afterwards or sometime after. I was like,

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this is just so stupid. I can't believe I ever threw in with these jokers.

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But what really changed my mind completely about it was there was an article about
Silk Road.

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I think it was in Gawker maybe or Wired. I don't remember. But there was an article
about

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Silk Road. And it just explained a couple of things. One was that these people
absolutely

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needed Bitcoin to complete the transaction. They couldn't use a credit card. It
would have

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their real name on it. They couldn't use like a check. They couldn't use cash
because you'd

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have to just mail the cash to someone or whatever. And that's not a great idea.

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And so they absolutely had to use Bitcoin to do the transaction.

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But what also struck me as interesting about it was that a bunch of crazy drug

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dealers and drug addicted people, they had gotten it to work. It was a complicated
technology,

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but it worked well. It was user friendly enough to be used. And that really caught
me by surprise.

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I was like, huh? Because you thought about it as this complicated thing. But then
you're like,

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oh, random guy down the street. I mean, the joke's on you, right? Random guy down
the street

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is already using this. And Silk Road was doing enormous amounts of revenue. And it
was enormously

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profitable. So just objectively, the economic value was there. And so I thought,
well, this

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is going to be for every illegal transaction in the world. But it can also be used
for every

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legal transaction in the world. And the illegal, illegal distinction, a certain time
and place,

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like slavery was once legal in the United States. In fact, I'm in Connecticut right
now. There used

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to be a law that said if someone came up from the South and just pointed at someone
and said,

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that person escaped from my slave plantation in the South, you had to help capture
them and return

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them to the South. Or you could be fined an enormous amount of money and sent to
jail for

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the Fugitive Slave Act. So that was a law at a different time. And all around the
world,

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we have different governments who, governments are just not perfect. And societies
figure out

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what the law is over time. The law is growing and changing and improving all the
time, which means

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that at every stage in its evolution, it has flaws that need to be fixed. But it
also includes

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all kinds of stuff like just trying to get your money out of China and escape the
country with

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your life or something or anything in, what are you going to do if you're female and
you're in

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Saudi Arabia or something? What are you going to do if you're in a country with
hyperinflation?

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So this whole legal, illegal thing, everyone likes to, of course, pretend like

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they would never, ever, ever, ever be associated with anything illegal. And

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they wouldn't go out with someone who would and blah, blah, blah. So it's like,

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you want to avoid this thing. But deep down, we all know that there's a lot of tax
laws that no

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one obeys. There's speeding on the highway. There's a lot of these city ordinances
about

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when you can mow your lawn, blah, blah, blah. So I was just kind of like, oh, wow,
this thing is

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taken off. I thought it was so dumb. It's actually so practical. And people are
already using it.

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And I just thought, what's missing is that everyone else is thinking as I thought
before

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when I got the email. I was like, this is some scam or some stupid thing. That's the
mistake.

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They don't realize that the project is already completed. They're already being used
in commerce.

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Hmm. Yeah. The idea has already reached its conception. It's not like they're still

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figuring out how to work it. It's more about integration now than it is about

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figuring out how the technology itself works. Yeah. The thing I want to mention
about the drug

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dealer thing, it was kind of important because you would think the drug dealer is
already criminal.

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So if they could steal the money, they would. Yeah. Because they've got nothing. And
also,

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the drug addicts, they really want the drugs. So if they could gain the thing and
spend the same

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money twice or something to get more drugs, they would. So you had the situation
where actually

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really, really selfish people who had nothing to lose. It was working for them. And
so I was like,

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oh, man, that was what made me think the project is already finished.

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So you're saying if there was an opportunity to exploit it for fraud or if there was
a way

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to scam people specifically by attempting to make transactions in cryptocurrencies,

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Bitcoin in this case, but like in any other cryptocurrency, that they would have
already

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done it. That would have been the first breeding ground for it would have already
resulted in loads

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of scams. But instead, it worked. And that's, for you, one of the remarkable parts
of it.

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Yes, it was very stress test. Everyone wanted this transaction to fail, the buyer,
the seller,

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the government. But it would still go through. So that's what made me really think,
oh, I had

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really misunderstood it. And I was like, oh, I have to look into this more.

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And then you look into it more and you learn a lot more about your own. At first, I
was like,

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why don't they just use credit cards on this site? And then you're like, oh, of
course, because

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your name and your address is on there. But it's more than that. It's like you call
up the credit

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card company and just say you didn't buy something, you lost the card. They always
make the merchant

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eat it. So there's like this entire world that you don't see if you're like just
merely a consumer

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or even just like an upper middle class white guy. You just sail through life and
you just think,

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oh, like cash, a check, a credit card, a debit card are all like equivalent to you.
But then

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you start to dig into this and you're like, oh, there's all these big differences.

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I mean, I guess the speed of which it can be done is also a bonus, especially if
you're talking

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about transferring money around the world. But the big question I want to kind of
ask here

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at the start, I say at the start, we've been talking for a while, but anyway,

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is that up until the 1970s in America, and I'm not actually sure when we came off
the gold

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standard in Britain, but essentially the money in America, the dollar was backed by
gold up until

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the 1970s. I think it was 71, 72, it got removed. And so it was no longer backed by
something

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physical. It was just based on each individual's trust in the dollar, like the
dollar will still

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be worth $1 in one week, one month, one year, save for a small inflation. It's a
safe place

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for your money to be in, the dollar. It's not going to get hyperinflated out of
existence.

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It's not going to just, people are going to continue to take it. It's all based on
our

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confidence in the fact that the price will remain the same. So what is the
difference here between

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Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency now and how we now operate the financial system where
our currency

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may be like the central issued currency of a government, but it's not actually
backed by

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anything physical? What's the difference here between that and Bitcoin, aside from
the obvious,

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like the fact that it's digital? Yeah, well, I mean, the US dollar and most
currencies are

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almost completely digital already. And in fact, all currencies are really abstract
if you kind of

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think about it, but even like, you know, the cash in your wallet is really like a
physical coupon

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for the digital account at commercial bank. Commercial bank has an account at the
central

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bank. I think, well, let me see if I can try to answer your question. I mean, both
of them

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are really backed by nothing and they're really both digital. That, or we're just to
say they're

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backed by the community that would accept them. And the question is, why would
someone accept

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something for the first time if no one else is accepting it? But that turned out to
have,

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in Bitcoin's case and in fiat currencies case, that had turned out to have an
answer,

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which is that people would, you had a reason to believe that people would accept it
in the future.

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So I can get more into that if you'd like, but let me see if I can try to drive it
exactly with

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your, what is exactly your question is, how is it? I mean, as I said, one is run
completely by

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software algorithm and the other is not. And so the other is run by people. And so
when you have

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people involved, you have a lot of advantages. People can use reason, they can just
get out of

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a bad rule that they don't like. They can just, you know, in an emergency, they can
just drop the

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rule if they don't like it. But there's also a lot of disadvantages because you have
basically

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corruption. How do you know that the people are running it in the best interests of
the users of

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the currency and not in their own interests or in some, someone else, some
politician's interests?

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You really don't, unless you join the team and work for 30 years and try to learn
everything

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about what they're doing, it'd be very difficult for you to even tell whether or not
they are

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corrupt. But in the case of cryptocurrency is there's just this algorithm and a lot
of people

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have, the algorithm itself has been, it could be many ways, but the ways that this
Bitcoin is,

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for example, they made choices that are like the fixed, the 21 million coin limit,
the fixed supply,

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we will only create so many units. And this is now hard-coded into the software.

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So it's a very hard limit, you know, it won't, it won't be changed by any person.

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And so then when people say, well, what do I want to, you know, I have some savings,

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do I want to hold it in US dollar, which can be, you know, of which an infinite
amount can

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be created tomorrow and which trillions is being created tomorrow, you know, it's,
it's, it's,

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of which an infinite amount can be created tomorrow and which trillions is being
created

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as we speak, or do I want to hold it in Bitcoin where I know that this is the exact
schedule

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that the money would be created and it won't change at all because it's hard-coded
in.

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So what is, what is the idea of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mean to you? Because I've
seen

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and listened to a few people talk about it as, as this revolutionary piece of
technology,

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that's going to change the world and upend all of our current institutions,
financial, political,

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societal, otherwise, that it's just going to change the entire world, upend power
structures,

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finish fiat money altogether, that we will all just be using Bitcoin for the future.

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What is, obviously these people are quite optimistic, but I mean,

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they're a lot closer to being right than anyone would have said that they were this
time last

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year. So, I mean, I don't think we can rule them out, but what does it mean to you?
Like,

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what does the technology represent in your eyes? Yeah, well, I agree with those
people. I'm

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00:15:46,880 --> 00:15:51,600
optimistic. I'm a believer to me. I really think that it's a lot of things at once.
I mean, a lot

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00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:56,640
of people would just say it's freedom or whatever, but I think that, I mean, I have
a training in

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economics and I have a lot of education training and I've worked in the field of
economics in the

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United States for a while. And I think that a lot of economics, including monetary
policy is

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pre-scientific, which is to say there's no, scientific to me is like error
correction over

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time. And if people make mistakes with the monetary policy, they don't suffer as a
result,

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I think. It's hard to even tell that they have made a mistake because there's no
like control

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group or anything. And so I think that the, what Bitcoin represents is this safety
valve. It gives

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people an alternative. If they don't like how the monetary policy in their country
is being run,

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they can switch to Bitcoin. And if they don't like how Bitcoin is being run, they
can switch

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to some other cryptocurrency. So that it restores competition, currency competition.

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Something that's kind of been erased in a way over the past sort of 20, 30 years
with the,

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like for in Europe, for example, they've erased nearly all of the European
currencies in favor

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of the Euro. The dollar has become like really, really widely used around the world.
I mean,

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I can't, I still can't get over the fact that I was in Vietnam, like the country
that was

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terrorized by America for 40 years and aside from their own currency and sometimes
even more.

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So they want the U S dollars. I still find that such a bizarre thing. I was like a
bizarre concept

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because you're so far from America. You're seemingly no link, but people, people
trust

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the dollar so much that for whatever reason, I mean, maybe that'll change with how
much of it

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00:17:42,960 --> 00:17:50,880
is being printed at the moment, but it's it's hard to imagine something other than
that being,

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being the world currency. Do you, do you really see like a digital currency becoming

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the global standard in a, in, in a way? Well, I think it's, I certainly think it has
the

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potential. I don't think it's inevitable, but I do think that it it's absolutely
possible. I mean,

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how it would happen would be these lower, but you can see how, like, if there's
many,

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let's say there's 200, let's say there's 150 currencies that whoever's in last
place.

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No one really wants that currency other than the fact that they, the local people
that they trade

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with often are using it, but that's vulnerable to being taken over by like the U S
dollar

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then low, or something like Bitcoin that is kind of everywhere at once.

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So you can see it just working its way up the list and having these lower currencies
die

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and get observed and absorbed into the larger currencies. And then you can just see,
maybe

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there'll be a world where there's only like, you know, the British pound, the Euro,
the Yen,

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the U S dollar, the Chinese R and B and like couple currencies and then Bitcoin.

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And then you can just see, you know, it'll just, there'll be a new, there'll always
be a currency

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on the list that is the lowest rank. And that one people will just think, well,
maybe I should hold

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Bitcoin with my savings. And then if I want to hold Bitcoin, maybe I should accept

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Bitcoin cut out the middleman. And then they just think maybe I should try to earn
Bitcoin

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since that's, maybe I should try to, now that I have all this Bitcoin, I want to
spend it

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cut out the middleman that way. So yeah, it has that potential.

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So how close or how long do you think we are away from like a more mass adoption?

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We're, we're kind of, we're obviously in the middle of like a big crypto boom at the
minute

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over the past six months. We're like the, the, the, the market cap of both
individual

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cryptocurrencies and generally is just skyrocketing. Like I can't believe Dogecoin

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made millionaires out of people. That's, it's just madness. I know my brother has a,

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has a hardware wallet that he can't access with a whole bunch on that he'd mined in
like 2013.

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So he's not particularly happy about that. But yeah, exactly. I mean, my mom, my mom
can't get

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the heck their head around the fact that he can't get access to it. She was like,
Oh, why can't she,

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why, you know, why doesn't he have a backup code or why can't he email someone about
it or, or.

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Email someone. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. But.

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Can't email anyone. Yeah.

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Yeah, exactly. But it, it, it begs the question for me then,

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where do you get that, that crossover point where not just, you know, like internet,

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you know, denizens and, and people who are obsessed with technology, when does it,

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when does it become, or can it even bridge that gap? Or are we simply just going to
wait

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for the people who like legacy money, as I'm not calling it and to sort of just.

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Die off.

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Die off essentially, or just, or, or succumb or.

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Max, I think it's commonly misattributed to Max Planck, but didn't he say, someone
said

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science progresses funeral by funeral. Yeah.

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I think he didn't actually say that, but.

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I guess one funeral at a time, I think is the, is the quote, but yeah.

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And well, I think, you know, you have to consider that, consider like other things,

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like the car, but, or also the internet though, basically it's a big one. You know,
you can see

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how in, you know, in the seventies and eighties and nineties, the people in the, who
got involved

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in the internet were very atypical. But now today, you know, you can't, you can't
exist

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without, you try to open like a bakery or something, and you don't have a, you don't

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have a website, you know, you, you basically can't. So, you know, that took a while,
but

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there's a lot of reasons to believe it would be faster with Bitcoin, because first
of all,

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the, all technological progress is changing at an accelerating rate. So it's just
later,

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but also the internet never like really, really, really, really disproportionately

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rewarded you personally, if you were early, like in, in like secret, untraceable
internet,

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untaxable, like eCash or something. So there's like a huge incentive to like learn
really,

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really quickly. I think that will obviously a second factor that would make it go
much faster

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than internet adoption. Obviously there's an enormous learning curve, but think
about the

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learning curve with the internet also. There was all this stuff about everyone had
to learn about

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like how to unplug your router and plug it back in and like how to like what were
all the things

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that people, you know, people had to learn like how to use a web browser, how to
use, you can do

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this now, but I remember when you couldn't, like when you used Google, you couldn't
like type in,

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like, you know, where is the nearest bakery or something, question mark, enter, like
you can,

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you can do that now, but there was a time when you couldn't do that at all.

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You can type that in, the results would just be nonsense. And, but you had to like
learn how to

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use Google, like, okay, most important word first, second word. I always put like
troubleshooting,

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if it's about, put the name of the software program, you know, they're like, oh, the
stuff

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that we all know now that we had to learn over a long, many people had to learn how
to type.

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Doctors in America didn't know how to type at all until like many of them still
don't

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really know how to type because this is considered like assistance work. They just

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write it out and someone else will type it. So, you know, yeah, it's laughable,
right? That you

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could have such an elite professional, but they had to do, when they did the
electronic medical

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records, they had to have like talk to speech dictation software. This was like 20
years ago

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when that software was like cutting edge and it like basically sucked. They had to
do it because

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so many doctors could not, you know, type. It sounds incredible, but that was
reality

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because this was just considered like a secretary skill that you wouldn't do if you
were the elite

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doctor. I don't, you know, you should talk to someone who was in the industry. I
don't know

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that much about, but that was like a, that was like a shocking, you know, there's
just all these

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things, you know, society is always going to change. Remember like barcodes were
invented,

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you know, in like the fifties and sixties. That was like a weird idea at first. So I
don't know,

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you know, you ask like how long is it going to take, but I think probably,

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you know, we look at how far it's come in the first 10 years.

258
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So the first 10 years went from totally being written off by everyone to now today,
where it's still mostly misunderstood, but you do have a big difference today.

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I think Elon Musk like really was like a watershed moment or a milestone or whatever
metaphor you want to use, because he happened to be the richest person on the
planet, but he's also like inescapably serious person.

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Like, obviously he's very funny on social media, but he, he like means business,
right? Like he's not screwing around. Like he will get the rockets to land right
side up. If he wants to start, you know, a company that puts a microchip in your
brain, or he wants to start a company that, you know,

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Bill Gates wouldn't get away with that.

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Yeah. That's the irony. There was a funny meme about that. That was like all this,
like whatever Bill Gates. And then it was like the skepticism of the vaccine brain
control. And then it was like, Oh, I called my beer or whatever part of Elon Musk
would like.

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I'm going to volunteer to direct brain surgery on electrodes. So, but he'll just
like, he'll just be like, what do I want to see in the world? Okay. I want more
solar power. I'll just build it, you know? So, so something like that.

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It's so, it's so mad to have that level of resources. And I've heard that there's
some big thing coming with solar batteries and Bitcoin combined. And I have no idea
what on earth that means. I've just seen it in about like, I've seen like six
different things about it. And I couldn't, I was like, well, what on earth are these
people talking about? So, I don't know. I'll put the link in the description below
of what I read, if anyone wants to check out and maybe they understand it better
than I do.

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So, do you see this technology, not specifically Bitcoin, but cryptocurrencies and
the underlying blockchain as just new money? Or do you see it as something beyond
that?

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Yeah, this is a commonly debated thing. Like, will it just take over? I don't know
if my point of view is the same as most. Many Bitcoiners are only focused on the
money part. But I do think, and I have written about this on my blog a little bit,
that I do think it could take over a lot of anything where you would want to have
digital property.

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So, Satoshi Nakamoto himself mentioned the domain name system. Like, if you want to
buy a domain like google.com or whatever, you have your own domain. Again, right
now, you really have like an account with someone who has an account with like
ICANN, who has like, if you have an account with someone, you don't really, you own
the name because they have decided it's in their best business interest to not, to
let you buy one and then not give it away to someone.

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So, that's the whole reason they can sell them for enormous amounts of money,
because they don't just, they take good care of them. But really, they're running
this whole scheme. Satoshi was part of the invention of something called BitDNS that
later became Namecoin.

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That was like, you could do the same thing where instead of owning coins for money,
you would really own the domain and the algorithm would calculate very easily. You'd
be able to figure out who owned what domain and how to get to their server and
stuff. And so, you wouldn't have, like, right now, the domains can be seized by the
government and closed down. In this, they could not. They'd have to find the server
and seize that. But you could hide the server behind TOR or something.

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So, I think anything, like, if you want to, like, all of your, there's a project,
David Vorek, I know, is doing this project, SIA, which is like storage on the
blockchain. So, all of your private files, all of your logins and your identity.
Obviously, we have, like, the NFTs, which is like digital collectibles. But also,
you can manage, like, a cap table of, like, a startup or a company that way. You
say, who owns what equity?

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Well, we'll just have this, we'll have the blockchain take care of it. And then if
you want to sell it to someone else, you don't even have to, you don't even have to
let me know. Like, say, I'm the CEO. I give someone equity. I'll give them 1% of the
company. They can do whatever they want. They could lose it. They could sell it to
someone else. You know, and I wouldn't even need to know necessarily. They would
just own it. And no one else would need to know either. Like, you know, the lawyers
or the exchange or something.

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So, I think it could do that. I'm a big proponent of these things, prediction
markets, which say that you could have this scheme all inside, hermetically sealed
inside the blockchain, where it would be safe from tampering. And people can bet on
who they think, you know, what decisions they think should be made and what the
consequences would be.

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So, as a result of that, it'd be very easy to figure out, like, who we should vote
for, or what law we should have, or who should be the CEO of a corporation. Because
you could just say, if this person was the CEO, the stock price would be this. If
that person was the CEO, the stock price would be that. And that way, it would have
an enormous impact on something that wasn't money, right?

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Because if you were the CEO, you wouldn't want to be fired, right? You'd want to
protect your job. But there'd be this thing out there that you wouldn't be able to
stop that would say, if they fired you and replaced you with someone else, the stock
price would go up. And now you have to work very, very hard. You have to work very
hard every day to make sure that you are making the company more valuable.

275
00:30:50,795 --> 00:31:05,795
Can you go back there a second? I kind of lost you. I heard what you said. I just
mean, I didn't quite follow through what you meant. So, you're saying that the
blockchain could be used to make companies more secure?

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Well, right now, we have a problem where – so, you can imagine a giant pyramid with
the CEO at the top, or the president, or the prime minister, or whatever at the top.
And then they have their people that work for them. And then people that work for
them, and their staff, and then they produce something that they sell to the
customer at the bottom.

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And if you are the CEO, and you don't like what your employee is doing, you can
replace them. So, as a result – and you live it every day. So, you're going to work
24-7. Even if you're not there 24-7, you're thinking about your job 24-7. And you
have a lot of control and ownership over everything beneath the pyramid. And that's
very efficient if the guy at the top is a good person.

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But, of course, we don't always get the best people. It could be someone like, I
don't know, Kim Jong-un or something. He's running it very well, but for himself,
and not for the benefit, or not for any other – the point is, it's only being run
for himself, instead of any other thing it could be run for.

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Now, the question is, how do you know – people always disagree about who should be
this top person. And some people say, well, it should be someone from the labor
party, or whatever. And some people say, well, it should be this guy, my friend. But
then they all disagree.

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And it's very hard for a normal person to know who should be the leader. Especially,
just think of the corporation case. One person says, what if someone said we should
actually replace Elon Musk with this senior engineer at Tesla? Because he's actually
even better than Elon at running the company.

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Well, most people would just be like, I mean, I don't know. That could be true. That
could be false. They're going to stick with the devil they know, probably, versus
the devil they don't. But no one really knows is the problem. So the problem for the
corrupt CEOs is that we don't know which are corrupt and which are good. And the
same for the politicians. There's no way of replacing the bad politicians.

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00:33:19,795 --> 00:33:37,795
So what you do to solve this problem is you have all this betting. You make all
these contracts. Some are worth more money if you replace the CEO. And some are
worth more money if you keep the CEO. And some are worth more money when the company
does well, and some are worth more money when the company does poorly.

283
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You multiply them all together in this big matrix. And it's not very easy to
describe on a podcast using words, but it's actually pretty – if you just look at it
visually, it's – and I'm writing software to make this a lot easier to understand at
the moment. But it's not super – I mean, I have slides and visual aids and stuff.

284
00:33:56,795 --> 00:34:05,795
Would you send me them? I can splice them in when I'm editing this. That would make
it more useful for people. But I think I get what you mean. So let me just like –

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Yeah, let me just say the last piece is that you have something out there that pays
off a ton of money if the CEO – if you replace the CEO and the company does very
well.

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00:34:19,795 --> 00:34:32,795
And if that thing is trading at zero dollars, like it would pay off an enormous
amount of money, but no one wants it, then this is a clue to you that actually that
person wouldn't make a good CEO.

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00:34:33,795 --> 00:34:45,795
But you need the whole matrix of prices to really think of it. But that's just what
it's getting at. You say, well, I can – you just look at the prices and you just
say, well, this is worth money if we replace the CEO and the company does well.

288
00:34:45,795 --> 00:35:00,795
But you say that we'll never live in a world where the CEO is replaced and the
company does well. What if you say we're going to replace the CEO with a monkey and
then this is going to pay if the stock price doubles, but otherwise it's worth zero
and currently it's trading for zero.

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This is a clue. It's very hard to explain.

290
00:35:05,795 --> 00:35:28,795
No, I kind of get what you mean, but is this not – so essentially you're asking
people or you're going to create a system upon which you can bet on specific smart
contracts in a way that have an intrinsic value dependent on the performance of,
say, a company in this case.

291
00:35:29,795 --> 00:35:49,795
And if it – then you're using the betting market or the market of purchase on these
smart contracts in order to determine the prevailing sentiment about how that
company would do in the case of whatever outcome is listed in the smart contract. Is
that –

292
00:35:50,795 --> 00:36:01,795
Yeah, basically. I mean, you could do all this today. This is called conditional
prediction markets. You could do it today. Anyone could do it without the blockchain
tomorrow.

293
00:36:01,795 --> 00:36:17,795
But the trick with the blockchain is it's uncensorable and it's private. You can
just say – because everyone is going to be saying – like let's say you work for this
corrupt CEO. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Are you going to
complain? The CEO will fire you.

294
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Are you going to go over the CEO's head? You're going to try to talk to the board of
directors or something and say, well, this guy isn't actually that good. Well, the
board of directors is going to think, okay, maybe this guy is right, maybe he's not,
but he's going over people's heads. That's not through the proper channels.

295
00:36:34,795 --> 00:36:47,795
And then you get fired anyway. So most people have just learned over their life,
except for like the autistic people or whatever who are immune from this whole –
they don't even perceive this horrible political world that we all have to live in
every day.

296
00:36:48,795 --> 00:37:15,795
People have learned all these social skills that help them just live in this world
where they have to keep track of who their allies are and do favors for people, be
loyal to people, which is all well and good. But often when running the country or
when running a big corporation, it just immediately leads to inefficiency.

297
00:37:16,795 --> 00:37:26,795
So you're essentially allowing the people within a company to bet on its performance
with their – isn't that essentially like insider trading?

298
00:37:27,795 --> 00:37:38,795
Yeah. The original – there was a website called Intrade, and that was the joke of
the – Intrade.com, that was the joke of the title as I perceived it, is that it was
about insider trading.

299
00:37:39,795 --> 00:37:50,795
And they pioneered a lot of this and they were closed down in the year 2012, and
that is the year that I sort of started to get really interested in blockchain,
Bitcoin for the first time.

300
00:37:50,795 --> 00:38:08,795
So that was when I sort of got into it all the way back then. And so it has a very
long history. And yeah, insider trading is a very complicated idea. It's not – but
yeah, but you want all the information in the market to be aggregated into one
price.

301
00:38:08,795 --> 00:38:27,795
So it's also irrational to care about where the information comes from. That's the
ad hominem fallacy. But yeah, that is part of a – I wouldn't exactly describe it
quite that way. But think about it. This is the good information that's being
suppressed by a tyrannical leader.

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00:38:27,795 --> 00:38:43,795
You want it to get out. It's really whistleblowing is more what it really is. Think
about it. If you're the good CEO, then you actually aren't afraid of this at all. It
will just show that you're the best. You have to keep working as hard as you can,
but you were doing that anyway because you were a good CEO.

303
00:38:44,795 --> 00:38:49,795
So you're now immune from actually being challenged if you really are the best, and
that's how it should be, right?

304
00:38:50,795 --> 00:38:56,795
I wonder how the betting would look on Citadel's company right now if it was
possible.

305
00:38:57,795 --> 00:39:14,795
Yeah. Well, there are many – I mean for many of these – for large organizations that
just the sheer size means it's more – and the sheer complexity, it means that it's
almost impossible for a normal layperson to actually figure out, as I was saying
before, to figure out who – what the people at the top are doing.

306
00:39:14,795 --> 00:39:36,795
What if someone said that the US government shouldn't be involved in some military
conflict or another? I mean how on earth does a regular citizen even have any idea?
As far as we know, I have no idea. Maybe there is something really important there
that in 30 years it's all declassified and then we're like, oh, well, that was
really important actually.

307
00:39:37,795 --> 00:39:51,795
No one actually knows any of this. It's too complicated, especially when the
organization is big, but also a corporation. A corporation could say – you'd say
like, oh, why is the CEO getting paid so much or why are they having this giant
lavish party?

308
00:39:51,795 --> 00:40:16,795
Well, maybe the party is just corrupt. Stealing is just a misappropriation of funds
for a party, but maybe there actually is some incredibly clever – like it's
essential to make some kind of sale or to trick someone from an arrival company into
like doing something or else or who knows?

309
00:40:16,795 --> 00:40:34,795
You don't actually know which – that's the problem. You don't actually know what is
the corrupt thing. And the people in charge don't know how to justify themselves
either because they know – like they have the plan. They have the plan for what to
do. Their plan might involve throwing a big party like at a strategic moment.

310
00:40:34,795 --> 00:40:53,795
Maybe to reward their employees, maybe to reward themselves, maybe for some other –
just to get a bunch of people in the same room and this is the only way to get all
the right combination and this guy's wife is going to ask this other guy's wife and
there's this big plan involved that's half subconscious or something.

311
00:40:54,795 --> 00:41:06,795
And now, what if you had to say something like they have to explain everything in
writing to the shareholders? Well, they can't because they have a big strategy
that's constantly evolving and it's half secret.

312
00:41:07,795 --> 00:41:21,795
So, yeah. I like the idea. I actually really like the idea. The one concern I have
just off the top of my head like thinking about this and you can correct me if this
is a poor assessment of it.

313
00:41:21,795 --> 00:41:37,795
It's just that one of the things I don't like about the way our modern economic
system works, especially in Britain and America, is the increased financialization
of everything.

314
00:41:38,795 --> 00:42:02,795
So, the size of – it's not just the stock market anymore. It's the stock market and
then there's the futures market and there's the options market and there's just like
– there's that scene in the film The Big Short where they say, oh, you know, if you
could have – if you had like $50 million worth of CDO on the market, how much would
be betting on it?

315
00:42:02,795 --> 00:42:14,795
And he's like, a billion dollars. It's like 20 times the size of the market, this
gambling, betting, financialization, whatever you want to call it.

316
00:42:14,795 --> 00:42:34,795
And I'm concerned that that sounds like this is making that even larger. Maybe I'm
wrong because maybe the structure would be different if the whole financial system
was based on cryptocurrency and blockchain. But yeah, what do you think of that? Is
that a bad assessment?

317
00:42:35,795 --> 00:42:46,795
Well, I don't know about that, a bad assessment. I mean I think – well, there's a
different angle. One angle is that there has been the increasing – you could argue
that the increasing financialization has made the world less barbaric.

318
00:42:46,795 --> 00:43:06,795
So in the past, if you live in a tribe and if you like broke your leg or something,
people would take care of you just because you're a part of the family. But instead,
we would have health insurance today or – I mean the United States is like the
exception that – because we – no one knows what we have.

319
00:43:06,795 --> 00:43:28,795
No, I don't know, certainly. But you either have some kind of health insurance or
you have like a government thing that is like health insurance where people – this
thing, something will come in and take care of you until you get better. And life
insurance – so life insurance used to be – it was invented in somewhere in the UK, I
think Scotland or something in a church.

320
00:43:28,795 --> 00:43:44,795
But it was hated at first because it was thought that if someone – it's like you're
making money if your spouse dies or something or if your parents die. So it was
like, oh, that's sinister. It had a sinister angle to it.

321
00:43:44,795 --> 00:43:47,795
It's only sinister if you want your spouse to die.

322
00:43:47,795 --> 00:44:05,795
Yeah. Well, it's like if the person dies, the church would take care of the kid. So
the community would. So why do you need money? This money kind of is like setting
people off. Similarly, when the – but you see today, if you didn't buy life
insurance for your family, if you didn't, you would be irresponsible and kind of
crazy.

323
00:44:05,795 --> 00:44:21,795
So it's flipped 180 degrees. And people thought that the stock markets were just
gambling. But if you really boil it down, like let's say you have a rich guy who has
money that he doesn't need and you have someone else who has an idea.

324
00:44:21,795 --> 00:44:37,795
And that person is currently like whatever, a low-paid janitor or laborer or
something. Should they really have to work for 20 or 30 years and slowly save up
enough money so they can launch the idea with their own money?

325
00:44:37,795 --> 00:45:00,795
And the rich guy, meanwhile, he can't do anything with his money. He has to sit
there doing nothing. The rich guy can just be an investor. The guy can try his idea
immediately. There's no reason for you to be – it's requiring a kind of coincidence
that someone have good ideas about production and also be independently wealthy.

326
00:45:00,795 --> 00:45:10,795
It's like only the independently wealthy people are in. But if you have capital
markets, then the ideas are there in their own league, and then the money comes to
them.

327
00:45:11,795 --> 00:45:25,795
So people are often upset by financialization, but similarly, there was a
securitization for the – this partially created the housing crisis and financial
crisis in the world.

328
00:45:25,795 --> 00:45:46,795
There was this securitization that you had these mortgages. They would become the
CDO, and then anyone could trade it. But what that was supposed to be doing and what
it did to some extent – I did go horribly wrong, but what it did do is that – again,
let's say you live in like Tulsa, Oklahoma or something, and there's a bunch of
people who live in New York.

329
00:45:47,795 --> 00:45:55,795
Why is it the case that only the savers in Tulsa, Oklahoma can fund mortgages in
Tulsa, Oklahoma?

330
00:45:56,795 --> 00:46:11,795
If you want a mortgage, you have to live in a place where people are saving money.
That doesn't really make any sense. It should just be one pool of money that's
available to everyone at the best rate, the lowest interest rate.

331
00:46:12,795 --> 00:46:21,795
It's no different than buying the cheapest, highest-quality apples from a
supermarket that are shipped in from wherever. They can be obtained the cheapest
way.

332
00:46:22,795 --> 00:46:28,795
So obviously, that did go wrong because it deleted a lot of information about the
mortgages along the way, and then it opened the door to all the scams.

333
00:46:29,795 --> 00:46:40,795
But I think you can't – to really answer your question, I don't think you can go
back. Society can't go – if you want to go back, you have to go all the way back.

334
00:46:40,795 --> 00:46:58,795
Like as Karl Popper said, you have to return to the beasts, and you have to just
give everything up and just – if you want to really defeat the finance people, I
think you have to use their own weapon against them, which is the entire
financialization thing.

335
00:46:58,795 --> 00:47:05,795
You just have to make sure it works for you. I mean, you could say like, oh, I don't
like being trolled on the internet, so we should just smash the internet to pieces,
right?

336
00:47:05,795 --> 00:47:13,795
But then you have like spam filters, reputation, something. You have to come up with
some new thing. Like every problem has a new problem.

337
00:47:13,795 --> 00:47:23,795
So this isn't really even – this is like a – it's funny. It is a financialization
because it's like what Enron was trying to do where they're like monetizing the
weather or something.

338
00:47:23,795 --> 00:47:42,795
This is like that. It's like betting on real-world things that haven't happened yet.
But I think the key is to just go problem by problem, and this problem that people
don't know how to choose the leader is – obviously, it's like among our biggest
problems on the planet.

339
00:47:42,795 --> 00:47:51,795
And by solving it, we will open the door to new – just as the internet has new
problems, if we solve the problem this way, we would open the door to new problems.

340
00:47:51,795 --> 00:48:00,795
But I don't think that – it's very hard to say like what on earth is – where is it
going wrong in finance because money is involved, right?

341
00:48:00,795 --> 00:48:08,795
It's not like if you do someone a favor, you have to have a good opinion of them to
redeem the favor or they have to have a good opinion of you, whatever.

342
00:48:08,795 --> 00:48:19,795
The point is you always have like this kind of clause. If there's no money involved
and there's just friendship, there's always this clause where you say, if I don't
like this person, I can just walk away.

343
00:48:19,795 --> 00:48:34,795
It's funny if they sell you a car, a bad car or something, they can take the money
and spend. You can never get your revenge, so I think it's just everything involving
money has a kind of suspicion to it and rightly so.

344
00:48:35,795 --> 00:48:41,795
But you want it to be that way because that's the only way you can get through these
other problems like groupthink or whatever.

345
00:48:41,795 --> 00:48:51,795
Now, this is a rambling answer, but – so I think it won't – I think it's not so bad.
I don't think that – I don't think it actually increases financialization
significantly.

346
00:48:51,795 --> 00:49:03,795
And I think instead, a lot of what you had was in the past was a problem of
companies, people not caring about how their company would do in the long run.

347
00:49:04,795 --> 00:49:11,795
A lot of those – in the financial crisis, a lot of people were just like, we're just
going to try to get a higher return than the next guy.

348
00:49:11,795 --> 00:49:16,795
We'll push the leverage because it doesn't matter because I already have an enormous
network.

349
00:49:16,795 --> 00:49:27,795
And I have CEO clauses that are like the golden parachute clauses and stuff that are
like, if I get fired for any reason, I get $50 million immediately.

350
00:49:28,795 --> 00:49:35,795
So they're just like, I don't care. So a lot of it was run badly. So that was – so
who knows?

351
00:49:35,795 --> 00:49:38,795
But I think you can't just go back. Like what are you going to do?

352
00:49:38,795 --> 00:49:45,795
Like what are you going to do to stop me from even inventing this or to stop the
tide of financialization?

353
00:49:45,795 --> 00:49:51,795
Like what are you going to do? You have to go further into it and try and win.

354
00:49:51,795 --> 00:49:59,795
And then just wait because there'll be a new arena soon, I think. That's just part
of the accelerating.

355
00:50:00,307 --> 00:50:02,307
That was a rambling answer, wasn't it?

356
00:50:02,307 --> 00:50:04,307
No, it's all right. Don't worry.

357
00:50:04,307 --> 00:50:13,307
So say somebody wanted to step in and regulate cryptocurrencies as if they were a
security.

358
00:50:13,307 --> 00:50:18,307
Say the SEC, for example, as they are attempting to.

359
00:50:19,307 --> 00:50:23,307
How successful do you think they could potentially be?

360
00:50:23,307 --> 00:50:28,307
We were talking about like going back. Do you think the genie's out of the bottle?

361
00:50:28,307 --> 00:50:35,307
Like is this just – because I see certain governments kind of scrambling to get up
on this.

362
00:50:35,307 --> 00:50:38,307
Like America's talked about a digital dollar.

363
00:50:38,307 --> 00:50:42,307
Like Britain has said we're going to make Bitcoin, which is hilarious.

364
00:50:42,307 --> 00:50:45,307
You've got the digital yen being pushed.

365
00:50:45,307 --> 00:50:52,307
And it feels like all of these nations are now just suddenly waking up to what this
is.

366
00:50:52,307 --> 00:50:57,307
And they're scrambling to either get a piece of it or put a lid on it.

367
00:50:57,307 --> 00:50:59,307
Do you think that's even possible?

368
00:50:59,307 --> 00:51:03,307
That's a good – well, I mean I think we are going to find out, right?

369
00:51:03,307 --> 00:51:05,307
That's like what we're here to find out.

370
00:51:06,307 --> 00:51:16,307
But I think it was – it's important to keep in mind that this is what makes Bitcoin
different from its predecessors, namely EGOL, Liberty Reserve.

371
00:51:16,307 --> 00:51:19,307
What was that called?

372
00:51:19,307 --> 00:51:24,307
There's a whole list. I used to know the whole list, and I used to rattle it off to
people, but now it's been so long.

373
00:51:24,307 --> 00:51:28,307
It got me back to my Bitcoin, which I don't even remember exactly what it was.

374
00:51:28,307 --> 00:51:31,307
But there were a lot of things.

375
00:51:31,307 --> 00:51:38,307
But Bitcoin was designed to be decentralized so that it doesn't really – it's not an
account with a server somewhere.

376
00:51:38,307 --> 00:51:41,307
So there is no single spot that you could go to.

377
00:51:41,307 --> 00:51:44,307
Now, every single spot, it's all peer-to-peer. All the nodes are equal.

378
00:51:44,307 --> 00:51:49,307
So you have to close down. Instead of just going to one spot and closing it down,
you have to close it down to a single spot.

379
00:51:49,307 --> 00:51:52,307
And that's what we're trying to do.

380
00:51:53,307 --> 00:51:56,307
It's just designed to be difficult on the internet, especially when they're all in
different countries.

381
00:51:56,307 --> 00:51:59,307
Many of them are behind Tor, and you have no idea where they are.

382
00:51:59,307 --> 00:52:02,307
But Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized so that it doesn't really – it's not an
account with a server somewhere.

383
00:52:02,307 --> 00:52:05,307
So there is no single spot that you could go to close it down.

384
00:52:05,307 --> 00:52:08,307
Now, every single spot, it's all peer-to-peer. All the nodes are equal.

385
00:52:08,307 --> 00:52:13,307
So you have to close it down. Instead of just going to one spot and closing it down,
you have to close it down to a single spot.

386
00:52:13,307 --> 00:52:16,307
And that's what we're trying to do.

387
00:52:16,307 --> 00:52:19,307
It's just designed to be difficult on the internet, especially when they're all in
different countries.

388
00:52:19,307 --> 00:52:22,307
Many of them are behind Tor, and you have no idea where they are.

389
00:52:22,307 --> 00:52:25,307
Like Silk Road, the website, that was one server behind Tor.

390
00:52:25,307 --> 00:52:28,307
And it took them many years to find it and close it down.

391
00:52:28,307 --> 00:52:34,307
But I think there's like 30,000 or 40,000 Bitcoin nodes behind Tor and like 100,000
that are out in the open.

392
00:52:34,307 --> 00:52:43,307
And of course, once they start closing it down, people would react to that and start
starting them up.

393
00:52:43,307 --> 00:52:53,307
And if Switzerland and Iran and Brazil are the three countries that allow them all,
then it doesn't just spin up more nodes there.

394
00:52:53,307 --> 00:52:56,307
And then people can VPN into them.

395
00:52:56,307 --> 00:53:03,307
So there's something, Alan Turing's universality of computation, that you can make
anything.

396
00:53:03,307 --> 00:53:07,307
All the computers can do the same thing. It doesn't matter what country they're in.

397
00:53:07,307 --> 00:53:10,307
It can all be encrypted to look like something else.

398
00:53:10,307 --> 00:53:24,307
So it was designed to evade being closed down so that if you live in a country that
makes it illegal, you can still access the service.

399
00:53:24,307 --> 00:53:36,307
And so it was designed specifically to be that the blockchain itself would continue
to work regardless of whatever laws are passed by anyone.

400
00:53:36,307 --> 00:53:43,307
And the blockchain has no idea who you are and if you live in that country or if
that law is passed or not, again, on purpose.

401
00:53:43,307 --> 00:53:49,307
So they could, you know, the SEC can pass whatever law it likes. It could ban
Bitcoin from the country.

402
00:53:49,307 --> 00:53:56,307
But it's kind of like banning like the French language or like banning chess from
the country or something.

403
00:53:56,307 --> 00:54:00,307
It's like, you know, like you can go and find people who are that guy.

404
00:54:01,307 --> 00:54:04,307
You can put them in jail or you can burn, destroy all the books.

405
00:54:04,307 --> 00:54:10,307
But, you know, French is like, you know, it's an abstraction. So you can't get rid
of it.

406
00:54:10,307 --> 00:54:14,307
So that's but the other thing is we have many now where many people have been
flipped.

407
00:54:14,307 --> 00:54:21,307
Now there's so much money is involved. We have like senators from Wyoming, the
state, you know, the small states.

408
00:54:21,307 --> 00:54:31,307
And we have like a mayor in Miami. So people have flipped and now they're pro
Bitcoin because of the campaign contributions.

409
00:54:31,307 --> 00:54:36,307
So with the wealth comes the all that corrupt stuff.

410
00:54:36,307 --> 00:54:44,307
So it's been working for Bitcoin, you know, kind of like for better or for worse or
however you feel about that.

411
00:54:44,307 --> 00:54:50,307
But that now has and you never really know, like a politician could say whatever
they like.

412
00:54:50,307 --> 00:54:56,307
But maybe they after they're done speaking on C-SPAN on TV, they go home and they
buy Bitcoin.

413
00:54:56,307 --> 00:55:04,307
Maybe you have no idea. Like it's hard to tell who the real enemies are or how much
they care or what.

414
00:55:04,307 --> 00:55:08,307
You know, the governments are, of course, mostly distracted by their own.

415
00:55:08,307 --> 00:55:14,307
Their own issues, you know, have the left versus right, and then we have the entire
geopolitical world.

416
00:55:14,307 --> 00:55:20,307
They're all like worried about all that other stuff. An interesting thing that you
brought this up at the very beginning of this question that you asked,

417
00:55:20,307 --> 00:55:29,307
which is that it's so difficult for most people to understand that by the time it
filters into this like weird bureaucratic thing.

418
00:55:30,307 --> 00:55:34,307
Most of the people in the United States Congress are very old lawyers.

419
00:55:34,307 --> 00:55:45,307
Yeah. And they, you know, lawyers are kind of like very far away from engineers,
especially like Internet Protocol, like researchers.

420
00:55:45,307 --> 00:55:53,307
So they're going to have to rely on other people. Many people are really confused
about what to do.

421
00:55:53,307 --> 00:56:01,307
And there's also a lot of there's a lot of fear, like cyber attacks, cyber security
in the.

422
00:56:01,307 --> 00:56:07,307
I mean, at least in the public conversation that I can see again, as I was telling
you before, I have honestly no idea what they're really doing in Congress.

423
00:56:07,307 --> 00:56:10,307
But I know what I hear about, you know, they're worried about China.

424
00:56:10,307 --> 00:56:24,307
Like what if if if what if like you have like China, Japan, Europe and the United
States, and it's like whatever China bans, like Japan will probably push.

425
00:56:24,307 --> 00:56:34,307
And similarly, like so this is part of the cleverness of the design is that you have
all these people and these different interests, but it's all on the same Internet.

426
00:56:34,307 --> 00:56:38,307
So anyone runs, no, even if it's only Japan that runs all the nodes, it doesn't
matter.

427
00:56:38,307 --> 00:56:42,307
The thing will survive. And that adds a kind of futility to trying to ban it.

428
00:56:42,307 --> 00:56:48,307
And then now you would see a lot of business. So then people want to be pro jobs,
pro business.

429
00:56:48,307 --> 00:56:53,307
So I think it's an answer to answer your question. I would say, yes, the genie is
probably out of the bottle.

430
00:56:53,307 --> 00:56:56,307
But, yeah, again, rambling answer. That's right.

431
00:56:56,307 --> 00:57:02,307
Who honestly, honestly, how would anyone know? But, yeah, something dramatic is
going to happen at some point.

432
00:57:02,307 --> 00:57:10,307
Some country will make the mistake of trying to of going further and further down
the path of trying to suppress it when they are the only one.

433
00:57:10,307 --> 00:57:15,307
If you would, you'd really have to do is start a big international movement to ban
it.

434
00:57:15,307 --> 00:57:21,307
But that would require a lot of negotiating, you know, like coordination.

435
00:57:21,307 --> 00:57:29,307
The meetings that would take months and months of transparency that would take years
to do best case scenario if they ever do it at all.

436
00:57:29,307 --> 00:57:36,307
Well, they've been so quick on fixing. Yeah, they've been so quick on the global
agreements to to deal with climate change.

437
00:57:36,307 --> 00:57:43,307
Yeah, I know. I deal with sweatshops and all these other problems that we've had for
years that they dealt with immediately.

438
00:57:44,307 --> 00:57:49,307
We can look with confidence to the exact record of success.

439
00:57:49,307 --> 00:57:53,307
All right. So, of course, that's exactly what I'm saying. Like, you know, right.

440
00:57:53,307 --> 00:57:57,307
It's a very theoretical like they could all meet and coordinate to ban Bitcoin.
Yeah.

441
00:57:57,307 --> 00:58:00,307
Right after they do all that other stuff. Yeah.

442
00:58:00,307 --> 00:58:06,307
But then one of the one country will go, we should just buy some Bitcoin because it
will skyrocket once everyone else bans it.

443
00:58:07,307 --> 00:58:10,307
Thailand or whatever. And they'll be like the Bitcoin country.

444
00:58:10,307 --> 00:58:15,307
And then, you know, like it's like, you know, it'll be to many of these other
countries are run so badly.

445
00:58:15,307 --> 00:58:20,307
We have the problem in Venezuela. We like Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria. Right.

446
00:58:20,307 --> 00:58:27,307
Zimbabwe, these countries. No offense to their leaders, but they're just, you know,
they're just run badly.

447
00:58:27,307 --> 00:58:33,307
And there's like an open insurrection by the people that just like ignore.

448
00:58:34,307 --> 00:58:37,307
But, you know, so those people are now into Bitcoin.

449
00:58:37,307 --> 00:58:46,307
I mean, as an American, I don't think you're in a position to talk about
insurrections being ignored.

450
00:58:46,307 --> 00:58:51,307
We had a we had like a lot of insurrections. It's a sad thing.

451
00:58:51,307 --> 00:58:56,307
Those people were just so sad that, you know, you can really.

452
00:58:56,307 --> 00:59:01,307
Because those people do have to like you see how those people have to go to prison
for a really long time.

453
00:59:01,307 --> 00:59:08,307
But at the same time, you can really just tell that they were just like having fun
and they really didn't even know what they were doing.

454
00:59:08,307 --> 00:59:13,307
And the weird thing is, I don't know. It's an interesting thing.

455
00:59:13,307 --> 00:59:20,307
That event probably, you know, destroyed a lot of the support for Donald Trump.

456
00:59:20,307 --> 00:59:27,307
Actually, that's how those things go. So if you whether you liked it or not.

457
00:59:27,307 --> 00:59:32,307
I mean, we all learned something. Oh, yeah.

458
00:59:32,307 --> 00:59:38,307
And yeah, one of the things was that it's just actually really easy to just break
into that building, you know?

459
00:59:38,307 --> 00:59:44,307
Yeah. I mean, by the looks of things, they just like I felt I feel bad for the
people because they just sort of.

460
00:59:44,307 --> 00:59:48,307
It looks like the police just sort of opened the gates after a while.

461
00:59:48,307 --> 00:59:52,307
Like, yeah, go for it. And the people just sort of idly stumbled in.

462
00:59:52,307 --> 01:00:05,307
But this is part of the thing. There was actually an incredibly complicated, like
game theory going on, because if those were actually like, you know, soldiers from
the Chinese Communist Party or something, there would just be like all this machine
gun.

463
01:00:05,307 --> 01:00:11,307
They would never have gotten in. Actually, they'd be like people flying in on
helicopters, shooting missiles and stuff.

464
01:00:11,307 --> 01:00:16,307
But it was because it was like so non-threatening.

465
01:00:16,307 --> 01:00:22,307
That the police were like, I don't want to be like the guy who just opens fire on a
protester and just kills them, you know?

466
01:00:22,307 --> 01:00:28,307
So it was because it was so objectively not a threat that paradoxically they were
able to like.

467
01:00:28,307 --> 01:00:32,307
So there was a lot of like kind of complicated stuff, a lot of context going on.

468
01:00:32,307 --> 01:00:42,307
But it's sad because you can't you can't like carve out an exception for people say,
oh, you know, if you're only having fun, then you don't have to go to prison.

469
01:00:42,307 --> 01:00:54,307
It's like, you know, like yikes. And it just gave it it's annoying because it
actually gave all those those people that gave a lot of people a lot of political
fuel.

470
01:00:54,307 --> 01:01:01,307
You know, like now the left in Congress could say.

471
01:01:01,307 --> 01:01:05,307
See, we told you so, you know, he was Adolf Hitler the whole time.

472
01:01:05,307 --> 01:01:09,307
Now we need to put in and they closed everything down. If you go to Washington, D.C.

473
01:01:09,307 --> 01:01:13,307
Now there is like they have like barricades and it's very 1984-esque.

474
01:01:13,307 --> 01:01:17,307
They're very well protected now, but it looks creepy and annoying.

475
01:01:18,307 --> 01:01:23,307
So that's it. Yeah, it was. Well, that was obviously an interesting event.

476
01:01:23,307 --> 01:01:27,307
Yeah. It's a testament to America, though, that most people wouldn't.

477
01:01:27,307 --> 01:01:32,307
Americans have a very healthy disdain, actually, for the whole thing anyway.

478
01:01:32,307 --> 01:01:37,307
And so even if someone took control of Congress, most of most people just wouldn't
care at all.

479
01:01:37,307 --> 01:01:40,307
And they were doing even like most governors probably wouldn't care.

480
01:01:41,307 --> 01:01:44,307
Every state would just keep marching on the same way. Yeah.

481
01:01:44,307 --> 01:01:48,307
Before it's part of we have our free speech and we have our Second Amendment.

482
01:01:48,307 --> 01:01:51,307
People would just people would just be like, I don't care.

483
01:01:51,307 --> 01:01:55,307
Yeah. I mean, I'll take I'll take the horns guy over Mitch McConnell and Nancy
Pelosi.

484
01:01:55,307 --> 01:01:59,307
Right. Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people just hope like this, like the State of the
Union.

485
01:01:59,307 --> 01:02:02,307
We're all in the same room. It's like a common joke to just help.

486
01:02:02,307 --> 01:02:06,307
Like, why can't we have just the meteor fall and just get rid of all of them?

487
01:02:07,307 --> 01:02:10,307
And if you ever watch Designated Survivor, that doesn't go well.

488
01:02:12,307 --> 01:02:16,307
But anyway, I feel like we got a bit off topic and we're we're.

489
01:02:16,307 --> 01:02:20,307
Yeah, I'm hoping to shoot on here in a little bit.

490
01:02:20,307 --> 01:02:27,307
So do you want to just give people some info about what you do, where they can find
your work?

491
01:02:27,307 --> 01:02:30,307
And, you know, plug yourself a little bit before we finish.

492
01:02:30,307 --> 01:02:32,307
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I have a I have a blog.

493
01:02:33,307 --> 01:02:35,307
I try to write about my controversial Bitcoin topic.

494
01:02:35,307 --> 01:02:39,307
So it gets very advanced, just like accidentally, because that's what interests me.

495
01:02:39,307 --> 01:02:48,307
But I have a blog, Truthcoin.info, and it is mostly about people's attempts to
change Bitcoin into other things.

496
01:02:48,307 --> 01:02:56,307
So these it's like Bitcoin versus Ethereum and all this other stuff was was what it
was originally about.

497
01:02:56,307 --> 01:03:01,307
And the block size debate and things are very complicated.

498
01:03:03,307 --> 01:03:09,307
Things like that. I have a Bitcoin project called Drivechain, and they're all the
sites linked to each other.

499
01:03:09,307 --> 01:03:15,307
And the drivechain.info is the site that paradoxically or perhaps inevitably,

500
01:03:15,307 --> 01:03:20,307
that is a project about how Bitcoin can copy these other projects and simulate them.

501
01:03:21,307 --> 01:03:27,307
So you would send some Bitcoins to a different piece of software that would just
pretend to be like Ethereum or something.

502
01:03:27,307 --> 01:03:30,307
And then you could do whatever you could do on Ethereum.

503
01:03:30,307 --> 01:03:36,307
You could do over there and then you could get the coins back and it would all be
with just the one currency unit.

504
01:03:36,307 --> 01:03:39,307
And so you'd only ever have to invest in one currency.

505
01:03:39,307 --> 01:03:43,307
That's the idea behind that idea. drivechain.info.

506
01:03:44,307 --> 01:03:53,307
And then all that prediction markets betting stuff, that is a project that is now
called BitcoinHiveMind.com.

507
01:03:53,307 --> 01:04:03,307
And there I have a cool little, I do have a bunch of videos, but there's one that's
20 minutes that tries to explain that plan that I was telling you about.

508
01:04:04,307 --> 01:04:07,307
And I gave that at Anarchapulco in 2019.

509
01:04:08,307 --> 01:04:16,307
So that's the site and then I'm Truthcoin on Twitter because that paper was
originally called Truthcoin and the blog became Truthcoin.

510
01:04:16,307 --> 01:04:20,307
And my last name is impossible to spell. So yeah, I'm Truthcoin on Twitter.

511
01:04:21,307 --> 01:04:26,307
Okay. Yeah, I'll put the links for everything in the description below for people,
anyone wants to check that out.

512
01:04:26,307 --> 01:04:30,307
But yeah, Paul, thanks very much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

513
01:04:31,307 --> 01:04:32,307
Yeah, thanks for having me.

514
01:04:33,307 --> 01:04:34,307
Thanks so much for listening.

515
01:04:34,307 --> 01:04:39,307
If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, follow me on Twitter or sign up to our
mailing list.

516
01:04:39,307 --> 01:04:44,307
Thanks a lot to our sponsor, ExpressVPN, the number one most trusted VPN.

517
01:04:44,307 --> 01:04:50,307
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518
01:04:50,307 --> 01:05:00,307
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of ExpressVPN when you follow the link in the description below.

519
01:05:00,307 --> 01:05:05,307
Don't forget my book is now out and available to order on Amazon and on
bookshop.org.

520
01:05:06,307 --> 01:05:08,307
That's Brexit, The Establishment Civil War.

521
01:05:09,307 --> 01:05:12,307
And most importantly, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.