Bankless - 108 - I Was Wrong, We Need Crypto | DHH

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

David Heinemeir Hansson is the Co-Founder of Basecamp & HEY. DHH is a best-selling author, technologist—responsible for creating Ruby on Rails—and a recent crypto skeptic, turned crypto-curious experimenter. DHH recently wrote a viral blog post titled, “I Was Wrong, We Need Crypto” in which he explains why he’s skeptical of crypto, what ultimately changed his mind, and how he’s thinking about the future of the space going forward. It’s not every day Bankless brings on a crypto skeptic, but DHH is different. He provides a balanced—well thought out perspective on what the current state of crypto is and what needs to change to make it go mainstream. ------ ✨ DEBRIEF ✨ | Ryan & David's Unfiltered Thoughts on the Episode https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto  ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot  🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:20 Who is DHH 14:02 Crypto Observations 17:00 DHH’s Top Crypto Skepticisms 29:55 How to be Wrong About Things 37:00 What Changed DHH’s Mind 45:50 Pushback on DHH’s Post 52:50 The Release Valves 1:02:00 New Skills Needed 1:11:20 Other Crypto Rabbit Holes 1:17:44 Russian Sanctions 1:24:50 What Crypto Can Do Better 1:29:50 What’s Next in Crypto For DHH 1:33:50 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: DHH on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dhh  DHH’s Website: https://dhh.dk  Episode #55: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpzFU7MW5y4  DHH Books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/23587.David_Heinemeier_Hansson?from_search=true&from_srp=true  I Was Wrong We Need Crypto: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb03  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, the title of this episode is, I was wrong. We Need Crypto. From David Hannemeyer Hansen, DHS, a crypto skeptic who's turned into a crypto advocate. And this conversation will show you exactly why. A few things to look out for some takeaways. Number one, we get in the mind of a crypto skeptic.

How do they see crypto on the outside? Number two, why most people won't actually be convinced until they have a catalyst. For DHH, that was the freezing of bank accounts in Canada. It's another thing I took away from this episode. Number three, why crypto is the most important release valve for preserving civil liberties that we have right now. David, this was a really cool conversation. with somebody who's been on the periphery of crypto and been super skeptical for the entire time. But due to recent world events has just become crypto-pilled.

It was a really fascinating discussion. We don't get to have these very often on bank lists. I'm grateful for it. What were you some of your thoughts? I think the value of this episode is being able to view the crypto industry from a bird's-eye view. DHH, he's got a lot of just alignment with who he is and what his disposition is as a person with people that you would find inside the crypto industry. He's a big picture thinker. He's a futurist. He's a coder. And he's also a first principles thinker that is able to connect

things like code to philosophy, which are all the ingredients that kind of make up somebody that generally becomes like crypto woke or crypto-pilled. So the fact that he wasn't prior to this what was interesting to me. And hearing why he wasn't, I think is a useful lesson for everyone in the industry, because it paints a picture as to like, what does. do we look like from the outside? And I've seen this happen many, many times before. It's like when big name celebrities, people with like over 100,000 followers on Twitter that are anti-crypto and they are publicly anti-crypto on Twitter, their first interaction is with like the laser-eyed hoddle army. Like they get to them first. And then when they flip their minds,

it's also the laser-eyed hoddle army that like starts to like give them praise. And it's just that a lot of the people's first impressions of crypto come from like the crypto Twitter armies, whether they're like the frog armies or the Bitcoin Maximus Laser armies. That's people's first impression about crypto. And it's not often the best like best first impression. It doesn't often leave a good taste in people's mouths. And so like that's kind of what we are up against because in my opinion, the more pragmatic people that promote this industry don't break through the noise of just like the moonboys, the shillers, the pump and dumpers. Because those people are super loud and super first. And so learning from DHH that it takes a moment like the

freezing of Canadian bank accounts to break through the noise that people see in this industry, it's an important lesson to learn. And I hope as an industry we're able to reflect on like, hey, how do we route around all of the negative, loud, noisy parts about crypto and get straight to the hearts of people without them having to be exposed by some of the crazy shenanigans that we see in this industry. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very fascinating story. In DHH, very eloquently kind of takes us through his process from going from skeptic to advocate. And he's very early in his bankless journey so far. So we sort of end with some next steps that I think he's going to take to dive deeper down the rabbit hole.

And I hope you are diving deeper down the rabbit hole as well, listening to Bankless. A fantastic way to do that as well is to stay tuned for these awesome tools from the bankless sponsors that make a bankless life possible. We'll do that and then we'll get right to the conversation. Hey, Bankless Nation, just a quick disclaimer before we get into the podcast with DHHH. He holds nothing back. So there are a few F-bombs and other naughty words of that nature or so. If you are listening with kids, you might want to save this one for later. I hope you guys enjoy the podcast.

Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and NFTs. Over 250 projects have already deployed on Arbitrum, and Arbitrum's defy and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Arbitrum increases Ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fractalienable. of the cost of the average gas fee. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of decentralization and security.

If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, as well as EVM compatibility when developing, visit developer.offchainlabs.com to get started building your application on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps or NFT projects building on Arbitrum. Many of your favorite apps are already live, with many more coming over soon. You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.1, and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum using bridge.orghum.com. In order to experience defy and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, and friction-free.

The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 Internet, with built-in privacy and ad-blocking to keep you in charge of your digital footprint. And inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet, built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. What's Web3? Web 3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street. More control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web 3, your crypto wallet. The Brave wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave browser,

no extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets, and can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets in Defi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto, or a Season Pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions. It's time to switch to the Brave Wall.

Download Brave at brave.com slash Bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price.

No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem?

No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at Uniswopgrant.org and helps steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. Bankless Nation, we are super excited about our next guest.

This is David Hannemeyer, DHS, he's many things. He's a product guy. He's a creator of Basecamp. It's one of the first software as a service projects in the space. Also a technologist, the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is an open source application framework. He's an entrepreneur as well. Talks a lot about building high margin businesses with no VC funding. He's a writer as well. I've read a couple of his books, a bunch of them on digital work culture. And lastly, and this is the topic we're going to discuss today, he's a former cryptoskeptic who recently changed his mind on crypto, on Bitcoin. And that's what we're going to be talking about

a lot today, his thought process, and why he changed his mind. DHH, welcome to Bankless. It's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me on. Well, we're going to divide this show into two parts. And I think the first part is really to try to get into the mindset of a crypto skeptic, because everyone is in a bubble these days, including the Bankless audience. Honestly, we are crypto natives. We are hyped on the crypto Kool-Aid. We've fallen deep down the rabbit hole, as you might say. And we want to hear what it's like being a crypto-skeptic, kind of us a few years ago. So talking through that. And the second part is talking about why you changed your mind. Like what was the catalyst for that and what you think about crypto moving forward. But first, I think

DHH, some in crypto might not be familiar with who you are. So let's start there. Who is DHS? Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? Sure. Well, I am originally from Denmark and now I'm actually back in Denmark, but I spent 15 years in the U.S. building a business called Basecamp. It's a project management and team collaboration tool that we started before SAS was even called SAS. Back in 2003, we started working on it. Back then when you actually had to talk to a real bank to get a merchant account, to be able to accept credit cards, there was no stripe, there was no easy path to get on with this. So we very much were not bankless back in 2003 and had to deal with that whole legacy infrastructure madness.

And then I spent together with Jason Freed, my business partner, the next 15 years, building a series of different businesses. Some of them we started. Some of them we wound it back down. Base camp was the red threat through the whole time. And then two years ago, we launched a new email service called hay.com where we finally mustered the ambition to take on the Gmail. and the outlooks of the world after spending many years kind of shying away from a challenge of that proportion.

Went really well. We thought we were going to go up against Google with Gmail, and we ended up having our existential battle with Apple over the App Store monopolies and the gatekeeper role, which I'd probably say is one of those seeds that made me more interested in the crypto story, having to deal with gatekeepers who can block you out of marketplaces definitely radicalized me in certain ways. But over those 15 years, we also spent a lot of time thinking about how to build a business. I was an employee before I was an employer, and it left some deep scars on my psychic about how not to run a business. And I wanted to do things very differently when we had our shot.

And Jason and I documented those decisions that we took from first principle. which is one of the other things I've been liking about crypto and Bitcoin in particular, rethinking some of the fundamentals of society and monetary policy and methods of exchange from first principles. Anyway, we spent the time thinking about some of those things from first principles, putting them in action, actually doing something, which is another thing, again, on the Bitcoin side, I like a lot of people talking like, well, we should have different ways of organizing society, which is just sort of philosophy, which has its place, but there's

also practice and actually trying to change things. I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. And that's what we tried to do. We tried to put our ideas, our conclusions from analyzing things from first principles into action. And then after we tried it, a bunch of it didn't work. And the parts that did work, we wanted to tell other people about it. So we wrote a bunch of books starting all the way back in 2006 with a book called Getting Real about how to start essentially a SaaS business on the cheap. without venture capital and all those things. That led to a book in 2010 called Rework, which is our big bestseller.

It sold half a million copies around the world. And that really was the greatest hits of 10 years of thinking, 10 years of experimentation and 10 years of doing. Then we wrote a book called Remote Office Not Required in 2013. And at that moment, I thought, as perhaps people in the crypto space, they're like, once I've gotten the wisdom and the gospel, of course everyone is going to come over.

Of course remote is going to be one of the dominant ways of working. And it turned out that it didn't until about spring 2020. All of a sudden people were interested in what we had to say about that book. We had a spike in sales that we hadn't seen for many years. So that was kind of interesting is a lot of this is timing. And sometimes you can be so far ahead of the curve that you might lose faith a little bit that like the curve is ever going to grow mainstream, but then boom, something happens and it does, which I'm sure we'll get into about this whole Canadian business and Bitcoin, that that was

that sort of moment for me as other people had remote once the pandemic hit. And then finally we wrote a book called It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, which is one of the other things I'm really passionate about is beating down the hustle mania. This idea that we all have to work 80 hours or 100 hours a week, otherwise we're not real true entrepreneurs. Total bullshit. I've spent 20 years working in technology on a 40-hour work week, taking Fridays off in the summer, enjoying vacation, enjoying hobbies, racing cars, having a family, having other things go on outside my life instead of this one thing. I actually just wrote about this this morning. Diversifying your life. Not having a single pillar that tries to hold up everything.

I think it's a good idea. And then, of course, during that whole time, I am also a programmer, and I've been a tireless evangelist of the Ruby programming language ever since I adopted it back in 2003. And Ruby on Rails is the toolkit that I made for others to build web applications back then. And I'm still super duper pumped and passionate about it. I know that several of the major players in the crypto space used that. Coinbase is started and run on Ruby on Rails and many others. So that's been a delight to see. And I think that's a good, quick tour.

Well, yeah, that's a very, very robust resume, David. And actually, I think there's a lot of alignment with how you lead your life. You're a technologist, also a futurist. And you, I think, focus on just the cultural relationship between technology and future society. But also, I think, are interested in big picture thinking, like philosophy and first principles thinking. And I think there's a lot of alignment there between a lot of the crypto industry and the crypto people where a lot of us are coders, a lot of us are heads down builders. but they also zoom out and share their philosophy about like how the world works and how first principles thinking might suggest changes to how society works. And so I think there's a lot of people

like you out there. And it's just a matter of crypto finding its way into the minds of people like you and finding the right angle to convince you that like crypto has tools to enable all of those values. Is that kind of what you've seen out of crypto in the last year or so? I think that's very fair. And I think that part of why I had a particular slant on crypto and a particular take on Crypto for many years and quite forcefully so was because I saw echoes and shadows of other things I really despised about the existing ecosystem of entrepreneurship. I was forged into dot-com boom and bust and I saw the charlatans, I saw the scams, I saw all that bullshit that went on. And even though I'm now far more

sympathetic to some of the fundamental theses around crypto, I still also see so much of that. But in some bizarre way, that is comforting that the whole technology world could go through a dot-com boom and bust that was so jam-packed full of scam

and bullshit and fraud outright and still survive, get out on the other side and turn into this that we have today where in some bizarre way, we're actually happy that the dot-com boom bust happened because it allowed some totally ridiculous investments in fiber cables across

the continents and so forth that were fueled by some of that fraud and some of that whatever setup. So sometimes you have to go through an awkward phase, I think, with any new thing. And when it comes to crypto, I've been perhaps overly focused on those aspects of it and not seeing as much of the big picture because it smelled too much like all. the nasty stuff from the late 90s, early 2000s. Actually, DHA, so let's camp on some of the nasty stuff a little bit longer because you wrote this fantastic blog posts about this.

And by the way, I've been a follow of your writing for quite a while, the Signal versus noise days and your original manifesto and I've really appreciated your clarity of thought in many of these things. And this blog post was no different, a very clear, concise writing. But you titled it, I was wrong, we need crypto. and you started talking about all of the things that you saw that you didn't like in crypto. You said there was so much to oppose. And I was interested to learn that you've actually been skeptical about crypto.

You must have heard about it in the early days since the early 2010s you said in your blog post. But then you list a number of things that you were skeptical. And I want to go through these because I think a lot of people listening or a lot of people who need to break outside of their current crypto bubble need to hear the criticism. They need to hear the skepticism. You talked about the hoddle army. You talked about laser eyes that kind of feels like a flavor of culture they didn't identify with. You talked about the proof of work energy consumption. Is this bad for the environment? That doesn't necessarily hold with your value system. The ridiculous fees. And I imagine that kind of traps out those who aren't wealthy from the system. That's probably a criticism.

the shit coins, which are everywhere permeating the scams, the volatility, the tether as an example, so definitely some sketchy things going on, the lack of real decentralization, and on and on, you say. Can we talk about some of those and parse them apart? I'm wondering about maybe the first section, the hoddle army and the laser eyes. Sounds like you've had some up-close encounters with them on social media before. From the critics' perspective, how does that culture feel to you, And how did it ring previously? Yeah, it rang like I was faced with a cult because it would be a set of theses of talking points

that were just repeated ad nauseum over and over again by people who dressed a certain way and looked a certain way and usually it was the laser eyes, right? From a motive, I had a hard time to find genuine that it was felt like a bunch of people talking their own book. Hey, I bought some coins five minutes ago. I'd like them to go up, please. So shut the hell up if you have any criticism that might make them go down.

And then I thought a bunch of the arguments were almost tenets of faith, that it had some of these religious whiffs to it, that it wasn't necessarily so much about practical applicability today, which ties into some of these other things. Like, for example, the throughput and the transaction fees. Like, how realistic is this as a currency? How well can it be used as a replacement of the dollar today? And I very often found the arguments for that lacking, which is perhaps part of this notion where you come into, like, what timeline were we looking at? Are we analyzing what crypto and Bitcoin is right now in this moment, which is sort of what I was doing. And I was getting some answers that I had a hard time squaring with reality. A bunch of people saying, no, no, no, you can actually buy a hamburger in Venezuela or wherever it is.

And I was like, that's not an argument in my book or I wasn't accepting that as. like, okay, that means that this is a credible alternative to fiat currencies, right? Now, where I missed and where I was wrong was a little bit on that time horizon. Yeah, a lot of things aren't ready for sort of the long haul. That doesn't mean it couldn't be in five years or in two or in ten. Some things does take a long time. Like you look at virtual reality, for example. I remember watching The Lawnmower Man in 95 thinking,

holy shit, we're all going to live in the metaverse in about two years from now. And what happened? Nothing. That's what happened for about 20 years, right? So that was so far ahead of the curve. And now my kids have this Oculus thing they can jump on. And like, oh, yeah, that's actually the lawnmover man. It's just like 20 years late. Or look at self-driving cars. Elon was telling us, no, no, no, 2017, you might as well sell your car because all the cars are going to drive themselves and it's going to have this robot army. And it was like, yeah, that didn't happen, did it? And then now you get like, oh, yeah, actually it was a slightly more difficult problem. then we first anticipated. And maybe now the correct time frame for the self-driving army of taxis is 2075. So sometimes it's really hard to gauge when that glimpse of the future is actually going to happen. You have these, whatever, Jules Wern's video phones predicted in 1872, right? And it took a while until we got FaceTime. But now we did.

And I will say that I like the optimism of that. And this is where, in retrospect, I'm a little disappointed in myself because sort of the pessimism of today has utility, but a diminishing utility. And it needs to be counterweighted by the optimism of tomorrow. It needs to be counterweighted by some people seeing that there's a future that may not happen in two years, even if they predicted it. But, like, I'd probably be on Team Elon about the self-driving cars if the time frame was 2050, which in the grand scheme of the thing is not that long. Human history is quite long. And what we've accomplished in a few short years, in my lifetime, is incredible, right?

So this was one of the things where you fall into this trap of analyzing everything about today. Does it work today? Is it good today? And you're like, eh, do you know what? I find it coming up short, which actually, to be perfectly honest, I still do. I've just changed my bias, and my bias is for the future, not just today. And the bias has been infused by some of these things that have happened around the world where I don't just like, oh, that could be neat if it happens, where I'm like, I really want this to happen, which is also

a bit of a shift. I mean, all the things I mentioned that I oppose, I still oppose those things. Like, the fundamental analysis of crypto and Bitcoin's problems have not changed for me. I have simply decided that I've seen that the costs in terms of bullshit and energy and all these other crap are worth it. Right. So that's the changing to different from cost to looking at value. And you go like, holy shit, the value is substantially higher than what I thought. This is the same thing I have about stock analysis, right? You can look at the best company in the world and you can go, that is the shittiest investment in the world because it's way, way, way overpriced. The best company in the world can be the worst investment in the world at the wrong price. And a fairly

shitty company can be a phenomenal investment at the right price. And I was simply mispricing crypto and Bitcoin's value in terms of what I want in the world and what I thought was possible. Like we crossed some rubycons here with the Canada situation that just fundamentally changed my perception of Western society. You started off this conversation talking about like, the Bitcoin Twitter army, the Haldal army, the laser eyes army, and calling them like a cult. And I mean, I see it too. There's just many of them. They all have very similar profile pictures.

They all have the red laser eyes. They all come chanting the same lines. And so like inside of the crypto industry, we kind of get that perception as well. But I'd also make the claim that, well, the crypto industry as a whole is a little bit cult-like. Definitely less cult-like than the concentrated amount of like Holdel army laser eyes maximalists. But if you zoom out to the whole entire industry, we all kind of exhibit similar behaviors. We'll all kind of chant the same things as like the sacred values of open source software, for example, is something that almost everyone in crypto values.

Even though we're less cult-like, I think when you zoom out and view the crypto industry as a whole, like we still kind of get that cult-like branding. And I think a lot of it comes from a little bit of what you said, where the first principles thinking is so important in crypto, because that's kind of all we have at the very beginning. of this industry. We only have an imagination. We only have something to extrapolate upon. It's like, yeah, Bitcoin, 21 million hard cap, proof of work. These are very simple components. But according to Bitcoiners out there, in 100 years and 200 years, these two ingredients create like a utopia of

fairly valued assets and free money. And I think as crypto has developed, it's become easier and easier to imagine a better future because we actually have made real innovations. But we're only like 12 years into this whole crypto industry. And really in my mind, most of the crypto industry has only really been developed in the last four years or so, the crypto industry that people know it today. So it's still a big ask for the rest of society. Like, hey, use your imagination, which is a hard ask when there's like scams, pump and dumps, like how the audacity to ask people to use their imagination to look around these things. How does that reflection land on you?

It squares very well. And this is also one of those ways where I've sort of grown milder on the cult aspect of it, because I actually think they're necessary. When you're trying to bootstrap a vision that broad, that large, that different, you need delusional people. Because only delusional people will push against reality in the face of all odds, in the face of all feedback, in the face of all sanctions. you need delusional people to change the world.

Now, the thing is, just because you're delusional doesn't mean you'll change the world. But most people who ended up changing the world were delusional. They had outrageous ideas and imagination. And I think this is one of the things with Musk, and sometimes these things connect, where I had a sort of bemused slash fairly critical perception of Musk as a character. And he's obviously a huge character in crypto particularly. for people who are not in crypto, right? Like, he's the foremost spokesperson on off for this. And you sometimes go, like, well, is this a referendum on whether I like Musk and people like him? Because if it is,

and I don't like Musk for whatever reason, then I also don't like crypto. Like, that's pretty lazy thinking. That is not first principles thinking. It is very motivated reasoning. And I got sucked into perhaps a slight little bit of that, which is also perhaps how some of these things soften, right? go like, well, I didn't think Musk was going to sell a million Tesla's. I thought there's no fucking way. And fucking he sells a million Teslas. He bootstraps this thing, or not just

bootstraps it, he rockets it, pun intended, into space to the moon in much shorter time, perhaps not the timeline he originally proposed, but much shorter time than anyone else would have thought and I'd go like, you know what? Yeah, I was wrong on that. I didn't think he'd do it.

Just good time to revisit what other things might I be wrong about. what other delusional camps? Because if there's one thing Musk is, it is absolutely delusional. He's probably one of the most delusional people on earth. Again, it doesn't mean he can't make his delusions true. And there's inspiring aspects of that. It's hugely inspiring. And I'd rather see delusional people try and then fail than everyone just going around in this hyperrealism of like nothing is ever possible anywhere, anytime. Everything has to be the way we've done it for the past whatever, 30 or 100 or 200 years. And that's just it. This is the end of

of history. That is just a deeply pessimistic view of human ingenuity. And I want to be on team human ingenuity. I want to be on team like we try new shit and it won't all work. Now, all of that has limits and it doesn't mean there are negative externalities and it doesn't mean that there are reason to criticize things and so forth. But I want to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. I can be skeptical about all these things I list to propose while still being like, go on. Let's see where this goes, because I, particularly now after this business in Canada, have just come like, I would very much like this to be true. I'm not 100% sure I'm convinced it's going to be, but I am convinced now that it is very, very worth trying. And we're going to get to the business

in Canada and why you changed your mind. But there's one more thing I want to camp on before we get there because you just said it, a couple types of this podcast. and the title of the article has this in the title as well, I was wrong. I feel like no one ever says that, DHH. No one ever says that anymore. Like it's very rare to hear people say flat out, I was wrong and I changed my mind and here's why. Is this something you've just started recently doing or like, tell us how to be wrong about

things because I feel like people today, myself included, it's very difficult to admit that we're wrong about things. What have you learned about even just saying those three words? Clearly that they have a magic power because I think half of the virality of this post was in those three words. I was wrong. Like the tweet ended up being tweeted like or seen five million times and the posters read a lot. And exactly because this moment of all the moments that I recall is such ideologically divided. We're all in our little ditches here. We all have our helmets on to protect us against the other side. And it makes it very difficult to go over to the other team and say, like, hey, you have, you had a good point. But this is something that I've been really

interested in for quite a while, this deterioration of our shared debate. And I think Twitter actually is one of the key catalyst as to why this has fallen apart, why everyone has fallen into ideological camps that they can't get out of and their minds just close in on them until they can only recite the same points that their team is chanting. And I particularly saw this in the handling of the pandemic. are you able to process new information and update your worldview according to that new information, or do you just stick with whatever you decided at the time you decided it? I was quite forcefully for the early and harsh response in terms of lockdowns and masks and all these other things that we need to do something.

This was a critical threat. And then as things carried on, I kept keeping up with, I was about to say it, but I won't say it because even that has fallen into a goddamn. can't, which is like follow the science. Sidebar, it seems like most people who go capitalize that follow the science or the people least likely to actually follow the fucking science. But that's sort of a besides things. I just saw enough during the pandemic.

I saw enough of myself being thinking something is true and then finding out it's not true because data came out and disproved it. Finding a bunch of people who were so certain about what was true and not true fall flat on their fucking face when what they thought was true wasn't true when it changed five minutes later and just being incapable of saying those words, oh, I got this one wrong. Isn't that, by the way, what the science is supposed to be, that it's a process where we get more and more right over time and that requires us to be wrong and accept that we were wrong over time? So I've just been incredibly frustrated by just this deterioration of the debate. And because I love debate,

is one of my favorite things in the world is to engage with people about topics that really matter and go at it, bring my best arguments to the game, and then if the other side brings even better ones, go like, shit, that's good. I learned something. I am now smarter and wiser, and I will incorporate this into our world world. And this is how we improve. Like, otherwise, you're going to just sit on this stationary point where you accept a set of tenants that's handed to you from your team leaders. and like that's what you just keep playing over and over again. That's just an utterly uninteresting life to me, an unexplored life,

a life incompatible with first principle thinking. No, thank you. So I wanted sort of distinctly with this to set an example to the other side, particularly on this topic where I have been a ferocious critic of crypto and Bitcoin. Like if you search at DHH Bitcoin on Twitter, you'll just find like 10 years of me

alternating between shitting on the idea to fighting with the hoddle army to just all these other things and all the stages of it how much of that was just trying to tweak the community a little bit like just trying to like you know poke at them actually it wasn't i mean this is what i often get accused about because i have fairly strong opinions about a unreasonable wide array of topics that people think i don't have them in good faith that like enjoy being a troll i don't I enjoy debate. I enjoy learning and I also enjoy communicating my ideas and my conclusions once I've reached them. But like there are conclusions forever. It trains my mind that's so many stuff, so much stuff over the years. And if you've been on the internet for 20 years as I have and you

have not changed your mind about stuff, there's something wrong with you. You're simply not capable of computing and digesting new information and new data because there's no way that all the ideas and preconceptions you had 20 years ago or still accurate and spot on 20 years later? No way. Like right now, back to our half-life is more like six months, right? Like it seems like we keep getting things increasingly wrong. So that should come with some humility. And this is the other thing I've really gained from this pandemic thing is that like nobody knows anything on sort of a broad scale. Everyone is wrong about so much stuff all the time. And that should imbue us with some humility that when we think we're so right about something that we could be wrong.

And that's perhaps even likely that we are. And internalize that and use that as a method as a scientific process for learning and becoming better and wiser and updating our worldviews. And this is what I'm trying to do. Not even trying to do. I mean, I kind of feel like it was shoved out my throat with this Canadian business. It wasn't just like, oh, actually, Bitcoin. I've been shitting on it for 10 years. Let's just go back to the books here and study things again from first principles.

And maybe I'll arrive at a different conclusion. That's usually not how it happens, right? Like usually there's a catalyst. And I had a catalyst. It's just the question is whether you grab that catalyst and let it drive you somewhere new with your thinking. Or if you're just going to ignore it and say, that's a really inconvenient fact. It doesn't square with my worldview. Let me shut it out.

That's got to be some propaganda. The other side is lobbying at us. No, no, no, no, no, stay in my box. La, la, la, la, la, la. That's what's so fascinating about this story is reality forced you to consider crypto. And let's talk about that catalyst then. So what was it? And, you know, I think bankless listeners, David and I have been talking about the events in Canada over the last couple of weeks.

So broad strokes, they may be somewhat familiar with the story. But maybe you could go through the story as well. as you talk about kind of your wake up to crypto. So what was it about the Canadian trucker protests and subsequent government action that change your mind on crypto? So it starts with my conception of Canada as a stable Western democracy with solid, mainstream, perhaps even bland leadership that is polished and will play within sort of the overtone window and will stay within the the guardrails of what we establish democratic norms and due process and rule of law and so on to be with, right? So this is my idea. This is what Canadians are, right? Like, these really, again,

this is a stereotype, but polite people who apologize if they bump into you, or if you bump into them. And this is sort of just what I'm thinking. And then this trucker protest starts. And first I go, like, huh, interesting. It starts in Canada of all places. That's some gumption there that these truckers decide that like they've just had enough. Okay, first of all, I have sympathies to the fundamentals, but I tried right from the beginning and maybe this will seem like, well, you're just talking up their civil liberties case because you agree with them. But I try at least to adhere to principles that I can have some principles that apply to people, even the ones I don't like, or whose causes I don't like, like freedom of speech or freedom to transact, that that's not just rights

and principles for people I like. But anyway, in this case, which actually perhaps complicates the argument. I actually did have sympathies with it. And part of this was, I've been living in Denmark, and we essentially have what the Canadian truckers wanted. An end of restrictions, an open society, and acceptance that, like, we're going to carry on with life and we've made it through the hard times and da-da-da-da-da, right?

So first of all, there are some sympathies. Then this weird thing happens to me, which is, wow, they are remarkably, and I've learned my lesson now, I'm not going to say peaceful, remarkably non-violent. Like you look at a bunch of other protests that have been happening over the last few years. Like it takes about five minutes before shit is burning. Right?

And you go like, huh, it's not. It's not burning. Now, I know, because I've heard from literally hundreds of Canadians, that there is great dispute over peaceful, non-violent, where the bouncy castle is just a PR, this, that, and the other thing. But I think generally there is somewhat of a consensus. I hope that this was not. not breaking out in looting and rioting and burning buildings sort of five minutes into it, right?

Which ended up frustrating some of these motivations for dealing with it because that doesn't mean it wasn't a serious problem. I can recognize like shut bridges and cut trade and if I had an apartment downtown Ottawa that had been listening to honking horns for two weeks, I'd probably be out of my fucking mind too, right? So accepting all that, but here comes the sanctions. And first this thing with GoFundMe happens. They raised $10 million through GoFundMe. GoFundMe gets a request across borders, not even in their own jurisdiction that like, hey, could you like not give them the money? And GoFundMe goes like, yes, go fund me is an American company. Exactly.

American domiciled. Yes. GoFund me is in the U.S. Here's some fucking police in Ottawa saying to go fund me that they have no jurisdiction over, right? Hey, could you like not give them the money they raised? And they're like, sure. What else would you like? Would you like me to redonate that money to some other causes?

We can do that too. Whatever you want, boss. And just go like, wait, what the hell is? That's weird. Do we know why GoFundMe was just rolled over so easily? Because I think they agreed, essentially with the politics of it. That the politics was that these are essentially domestic terrorists of a sort. There may be some weird, happy terrorists that set up bouncy cancels and have cookouts and don't burn down buildings.

But domestic terrorists. nonetheless. So if you have that sympathy, you're obviously sort of likely to follow, which to some extent you can go like private company, their own terms of service. I guess they can interpret it how they want. I thought deeply problematic, but maybe someone else will do it, right? And someone did go send me or give send go, I think it was called or something. Another site then raised a bunch of money, refiled, hacked, and also these other things. And this was already troubling. But it was nothing compared to what came next, in my opinion. This is where things just went like, this can't be real.

When they introduced the Emergency Powers Act, first invoking it on the grounds they invoked it on, an act created for essentially sort of like mass casualty events, mass, terrorism, mass, the country is in serious disarray. We need wartime-like powers. An emergency. Emergency, right? And I go like, this is that?

The truck's annoying, cutting trade, serious, all these reasons, but emergency at this level, that is just bonkers bananas. And now you can just invoke this power on your own accord, that you have seven days to get it ratified by the parliament and so on. This is just crazy. But then the crazy thing is what this gives you power to do, or what they interpreted us giving you power to do. Hey, I can cancel your bank account with no due process, with no opportunity to defend yourself, on like I think you're involved with something and not only for the people who were involved with the protest

but for the people who supported the protest that was the one that really just exploded my brain you donated to one of these campaigns to raise money for the truckers and you could see your bank account canceled because of that that's an incredibly serious sort of sanction you have your bank account canceled like how are you going to pay rent how are you going to buy groceries how are you going to do anything in modern society without access to your bank account, right? And this was one of those moments

like, they're willing to do that for this? Oh my God. Just to be clear, this was a possibility, as in the emergency law that was invoked, enabled that to be true. But did we see any donators actually get their bank account frozen? We did. Over 200. Wow. There's some dispute about whether there were some sort of anecdotes of donators getting their bank accounts frozen. I think a bunch of this stuff is still murky. What is not murky is that several hundred people had their bank accounts frozen for perhaps participation or alleged participation without a due process. And then that in itself, like not only did they say these powers were going to be used, they used them. So that just really was like a break in the matrix where you just go like,

this is not supposed to happen. In this country, according to. to this thing. If this can happen, then I always go, this is one of the things inside of our company, right? Like, we have this minor thing and I go like, I'm really surprised that could happen. If that could happen, I think ABC and D could also happen. So I go like, if the Canadians are willing to cancel people's bank accounts without due process on the basis of this kind of protest, shit, I don't think I'm, okay, now we're outside the norms I thought governed Western democracies. And if the Canadians will do it, what will the French do? What would the, Austrians do. What will the Danish do? And I go like, I don't know anymore. I thought I knew. I thought I had this

idea of what it meant to live in a Western democracy. It's been undermined. And the ramifications of that must adjust. Well, it had to adjust my worldview. And that was the second order terror that I felt. With the number of people who looked at these acts and went like, yeah, what's the problem? I don't see a problem. These people are bad people. They fucking deserve that. And I go like, what? Didn't we spend hundreds of years, like since Magna Carta Ford to have due process, to have constitutions, to have charters of freedoms and rights? And you're willing to throw all that shit out over this? Oh, Jesus. This also blew my mind, you know, and I want to dwell on, we talk about it, freezing a bank account, like what that actually means for somebody, because likely,

everyone who's listening is, you know, many people who have listening have not been in that position. But it means no longer being able to access your assets. It's your life savings. A lot of it's in a bank account, unless you're going bankless, which hopefully you are if you're listening. The ability to strand your money. Cancel all your credit cards. Stopping mortgage applications. Like this is complete elimination from the economic system.

That's the power that centralized governments wield when they can do this sort of thing. And only maybe 200 were affected this time. But I think what you're saying is, yeah, this time, right? And this is such a troubling power that governments now have that I think when we were framing the Constitution, the U.S., and Charter of Rights, these sorts of things, in Western liberal democracies, we didn't have a concept of digital money, did we at those times? I mean, we're using, like, gold as a backing. And there was some element of paper money, but these were all bare instruments. They weren't generally custody anywhere. And they certainly couldn't be frozen with a mouse click by a central government en masse.

On mass. Arbitrarily. So we're living in a completely different world in this digital era. And I don't think people realize how much power centralized institutions have over their population. And I'm saying what you're saying is it's straight scary. And not only that, I think what you're also saying is, it's scary that other people don't see how scary it is. Yes. So I'm curious about some of the feedback from your post, DHS, because we wrote a few things.

We talked about on a bankless. We wrote a few posts on our newsletter, one entitled Canada Needs Crypto. And I got a lot of pushback from Canadians in particular, from other folks around the world, but in particular from Canadians. And just for the bankless audience who don't know this, I was actually born in Canada. I grew up in Canada. And I have many of my family in Canada. So I've been talking to them through this process. But what has some of the pushback been to what you've been saying about this?

That's perhaps the sort of third order scariness is how shallow that pushback is. The pushback essentially boils down to it was the other team. What do you mean? The other team doesn't deserve rights. don't deserve freedoms. They're bad people. And why wouldn't you want bad things to happen to bad people? Like, what's wrong with you? Are you one of them? Right. Essentially, that's the insinuation, and not even the assinuation several times, the actual accusation, that you are one of the bad people if you sympathize with this, which connects to this other point we're talking about, like the debate

breaking down, the tribalism that's forming. And now we're getting into the stage that that tribalism is powering essentially discarding these fundamental principles of Western democracies that we have due process, which is one of the just iron clad elements of this, right, that you don't just throw away

due process, you don't throw it away this lightly, and you certainly don't throw it away just because you don't like the accused of what they've been accused of. This is why we have due process because, A, sometimes you're wrong, happens all the time, people accused of things that they're not guilty of,

and they are not convicted. Second of all, if you don't have that process, you don't even have an opportunity as an individual accused to defend yourself. What am I being accused of? Was this actually me? All these other things, you think like, these are cornerstones. And the cornerstones is just, it's like they're made of sand for these people. So the fact that this is all just boiled down to like, do I like these people or not?

And if I don't like them, fuck him. that is where I've often found these comparisons to the former Yugoslavia or the Soviet bloc or these other genocides or any of the thing there's you've got to be quite careful making those comparisons because it very quickly becomes overwrought but you can see sort of the kernel the sparkles of that in it that once you demonize dehumanize the other side that they're essentially just irredeemable. and rights should not apply to them and freedoms should not apply to them. There aren't that many skips and hops before we're in a really, really dark place. The other thing that blew my mind is just a purely tactical one.

Are you so short-sighted that you can't see that these new norms that are being formed will be imposed upon you? That five minutes from now, when the other team is in power, they will now follow the roadmap you've laid out. and particularly when we go of some of the support that's come from the U.S., you go like,

we're about five minutes away from a major wave switch. It's going to be red come November. It seems like everyone is predicting that, right? Wouldn't you want to prepare for that eventuality? One of the ways to think about it is that you don't want to grant the people you love the power to hurt someone in a particular way. if you don't want the people you hate to hurt the people you love that way, too, right? That there's sort of a symmetry here. Do you want that if you show up for a protest and you get identified on a photo and that gets mapped somehow,

your bank account is canceled tomorrow and that's just it? Because you're guilty without any process without anything. Would you want that applied to you? This is what I really don't get when this argument comes from the left, which is like, Hey, have you seen a G20 meeting lately? Do you know what happens at those? Have you seen sort of a protest for Black Lives Matter or anything else? Like how often some of these protests devolve into something serious?

And would you want the repercussions of that expression of democratic basic freedoms to result in this? I don't think you do. I really don't think you want this to be a power that the other team has. and that's how we should set up the rules. So it's that when you're in power, you're constrained in this way. When they're in power, they're constrained in the same way. If you've removed the constraints, don't come crying when the other side then goes at it. Well, I'm already crying.

I think this is just terrible. And this is why I'm getting to this point of like, do you know what, we need some release valves here. We need some basic protections. And the way that cash used to be, because getting in someone's cash had a lot of friction. they could hide it. It couldn't be tracked easily when it was spent. It had all these properties where I was actually thinking of like, do you know what? If cash was a new app that came out tomorrow, it's like, wait, no one can track my purchases. I can just give it to other people without a record. I can hide it in a shoebugs as it feels. I'd be like, cash sounds pretty cool. We should use some cash.

But there's all these other reasons for why cash has issues in modern day and digital cash and crypto currencies solve a lot of those things. And I don't actually necessarily want the world where all currencies are crypto and everything is on track and everything. But I want the release valve because I've seen what can happen to people if it isn't there. And again, when I talk about this, some of the pushback I get is like, well, Bitcoin wouldn't have helped them. There's some truth to that. Like, there weren't set up and there aren't enough off-rams and all these other things. And if you go through an exchange that's still a single point of failure and it can still be shut down as it was in Canada when they expanded these powers to crypto exchanges and basically said like hey if you

transact with any of these people on the no-fly list then you're going to be in trouble so we need the ideals of something like decentralization to be actually true that you don't need to go through any of these exchanges any of these points of a pressure and that isn't fully true today So again, I'm speaking to the vision. I'm speaking to the ideals. I'm speaking to tomorrow to some extent. But like, I want to see that tomorrow come. The Gemini Exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto.

I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top defy and Metaverse tokens like Wi-Fi and Axi Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the G. U.S.D. Stablecoin. Using the Gemini credit card, you can earn crypto rewards on every purchase you make, and your crypto rewards immediately lands in your Gemini account the instant you swipe your Gemini credit card. Gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide.

So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up at Gemini with Gemini.com slash go bankless and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's jemini.com slash go bankless. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use Kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade, and that's why you should be using Macha. Masha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in Ethereum,

and is also operational on Polygon, Avalanche, finance, smart chain, and other chains. Trading on Macha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single easy-to-use platform and allows me to make limit on-chain orders so you can set and forget your defy trades and they will go through automatically while you're away. So when you're making a trade, head over to macha.xy-z slash bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices

and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets. Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of defy, creating the world's most powerful trading platform. Slinghot aggregates liquidity from all of defy in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets. Every token on Slinghot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into

the market's activity in real time. Slingshot is available on Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, saving you from the high gas feeds and low transaction speeds of the Ethereum L1. There are no fees to trade on Slinghot and any positive slippage is given to the users. Trading on Slinghot is a social experience. Chat with others online about trading, markets, and tokens via the platforms built-in global chatbox featuring Web3 sign-in. You can even set your chat avatar

to your favorite NFT or soon a Slingshot 2099 NFT avatar. Once you bridge your assets to Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism, go to app. com.com to share your trades with others and find other tokens to ape into.

A lot of what you're saying, I think we echo with similar words. One thing I'm concerned about is like this whole team trucker versus anti-team trucker, like the whole in-group out-group thing, we can extrapolate to almost what's seemingly like the rest of the world right now. Like both the left and the right in the United States rioted in 2020 for their own respective reasons.

Like the Democrats and the Republicans, it seems to be less a matter of governance these days than it does seem to be a game of chess. And it really just seems to be like, what move can I make that harms the other team the most? And people are not extrapolating to that where it goes to, it's the bottom of the barrel race, the race of the bottom. And you cited one of the reasons why some of these dynamics are playing out is because of Twitter and social media, which I think most of society is generally familiar about how things like Facebook and the algorithms behind Twitter promote rage. And so it seems to be like the social systems that we have are really doing a fantastic job of convincing people that it's okay to remove due process from the world. One thing I tweeted out recently is like, find me a better duo, which is anti-government protests and the 2020s. Like, pick your team because every team has, like, had a protest against the respective government at some point in time.

And we're watching even Russian citizens protest against the Russian government right now, also getting their Apple Pay, Google Pay, canceled at this very moment, which is a topic we might return to. But Dave, you talked about how, like, you are a fan of a release valve. Do you think some of the properties about crypto, the decentralization, the censorship resistance, is that the release valve that we need not just for the trucker? issue, but also just for a lot of the dynamics that we see in modern day society. Yes, but it is not as clear in other domains that there's something promising there, right? Like, this is one of the reasons I've actually been quite pessimistic about U.S. society for some time, is that I'm failing to identify even the promising future release valves for a lot of the ills that are currently plaking that society.

And that's what has me excited about Bitcoin and crypto more broadly is that, like, there's something here. It's not where I wanted to be to be this fully functioning release valve, but there's something at least. And it now has been validated over serious amounts of time with serious amounts of interest and money and so forth. So that gives it to credibility that other ideas don't have because they're just ideas. This is something real. It's not quite there yet. But the other thing that gives me hope is I've been living in a country where this broadly didn't happen.

Denmark is a Western democracy. and I don't know, sometimes it's just luck, right? Like the random permutations that run through societies. But for whatever reason, the Danish society ended up on the other side of pandemic with higher trust in the media, higher trust in each other, higher trust in government. You're like, that was not what happened in the U.S. It seems to be perhaps not what happened in Canada. I'm not quite sure I haven't looked at those polls.

But it gives me some hope. This is possible. I mean, Twitter exists. in Denmark, but it's not the same defining character as it is in the U.S. It doesn't set the political agenda on a daily basis. So it is possible somehow to survive this. I'm not sure what the secret trick is yet. I'm trying to diagnose it.

I'm trying to figure out like what is it that makes it different. And perhaps some of the sort of depressing conclusions could be like, well, these are complicated social systems that evolve over hundreds of years. Well, okay, great. I don't have a few hundred years. I'll be long dead by then. I'd like to see things be better in the U.S. before that. But maybe there are also other things, and we just haven't discovered them yet.

And Bitcoin and Crypto at least is a answer to a release valve on some of this stuff. In ways where, ironically, I'm not exactly a big gun fan either, but like the principles around the Second Amendment have that in them that like we want a release valve here. If tyranny rises above us, we will have something to defend ourselves. which, by the way, I mean, Q Ukraine and shouldn't get too far into that, but like a bunch of people were just suddenly handed weapons because there were invaders who showed up at their bedroom, more or less literally, right? That there is some sense of like, I need a defense when the state turns against me.

And Bitcoin and crypto offers the most credible defense when the state turns against me that I've yet seen. Now, that doesn't mean that defense is in penitone. ball and doesn't mean that defense is perfect, but it's better than anything else I've seen. And that seems compelling in much the same way that encryption is compelling. Huge fan of encrypted messaging, end-to-end encryption. I think the revelations that came out from Snowden's 2013 stuff again was one of those things. Actually, to me, it was very much like the Canadian trucker situation.

You're like, wait, are you telling me that the tinfoil hats who told me that the NSA was listening to every email in the world, they were right. That's crazy. But they were. They were right. That there was an agency that was ingesting essentially everything. And that our best defense against that was mass end-to-end encryption. That this is how we throw sand in those gears such that the automation and ease of surveilling an entire world just can't proceed. So signal to me is one of those, it has like a Bitcoinish quality to it. It's one of the most promising. Like here is an app that is very difficult to penetrate. Not impossible. A motivated state actor can do almost anything. But you can't do it at a mass scale, hopefully, I mean, until

the next revelations perhaps come up. But right now, best knowledge is you're not going to surveillance signal users at the tens of million scale, right? Could we get to the same thing with the Bitcoin thing, where a targeted operation against a single individual through great labor and effort could still happen? I mean, if you're physically inside the borders of Canada, eventually they're going to get you if they want to get you, right? But that's different than clicking a button or passing it on to someone. Hey, banks, could you just like shut off this list of 200 people? And I think societies need that level of friction. It's too tempting otherwise to go down extremely dark paths that are scarily effective very quickly.

Again, if you do those comparisons, which you always have to be careful with, but like the Stasi or whatever was going on in East Germany and so on, what they were trying to keep taps on people, if they had the powers that are currently available, where would they go? I mean, and the depressing thing is you don't even have to look back in history. Now we're looking in reality what's happening right now. What are people with these powers doing with these powers? shit, I don't like it. Yeah, I mean, there's such an element of how fast this all happened, right? And it's

one of those things. I think DHH, we haven't really had to think about very much in our adult lives over the past, you know, 50 to 70 years, right? So when we think about our civil liberties and how they're actually protected, we just take for granted that they're protected. But how are they actually protected? Well, we have kind of two mechanisms in place, don't we? We have the constitutions and the charter of rights and all of these things and kind of the law at the base layer. And then we also have like legitimacy and social norms to enforce those law. And what was striking to me about this whole Canadian Trucker incident is both of those things were revoked in a very short time frame. Okay. So like the, you know, the Charter Freedom,

bam, 30 days is gone. Now a centralized government can decide what to do. And so, social norms, which is kind of the backstop to protect that, the society saying, no, this is an unacceptable government, you can't do this, that completely collapsed as well. And it all happened in a hurry. So I guess the thing that we see in crypto, and I'm wondering if you see this, is we see not just Bitcoin, but in all of crypto, a set of credibly neutral protocols that can't make these types of decisions. They can't free your assets. They can't stop you from transacting. They can't censor you. You can always use them to trade and facilitate banking. And that's why I think it feels like a release valve that

Western democracies need, that classical liberalism needs, maybe, that we need going into the 20th century. Like, I don't know about you, but like I plan to teach my kids encryption, how to use crypto, how to use defy, not just as like geek skills, but like these are becoming 2020's life skills. You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, that's what, why I also went so forceful out. I was wrong because I had far more faith in the fact that those norms were going to hold and the fact that we had those constitution, those charters, that that couldn't just be trampled over that quickly for that little. And it really had to reorientate my, my beliefs in all sorts of other things and reorientate my priorities because I do think that the states, for example,

have a right and a duty, in fact, to collect taxes and the tax evasion is bad and there's all these other things, right? But then when they just, when what happens happened, you've got to go like, okay, I believe all those things still. But now I believe that there's higher values that if the charter of freedoms and rights won't protect Canadians and the Constitution won't protect Americans and our Constitution in Denmark might not protect Danes. We need something else. We need like a final line of defense. And as you say, the ideal version of crypto, and this is one of my criticism, how true is it actually in practice today? How decentralized are these things actually today? To which extent are the exchanges now, just the new modes of pressure points? But

let's just take the idealized view here that like you're holding your own Bitcoin and no one can really stop you until they physically get to you. That feels like when the FBI shows up at Apple's headquarters and say, hey, I have an iPhone. Can you just crypt it just that we can get at the messages? And they go like, even if we want it to, no, can't do it. Don't have the keys. The stuff on here is locked. Now, is that actually truly true in all the cases? I don't know. But there's a sort of an ideal here and also our reality for a lot of people in a lot of cases, where this is true, encryption does provide some of these fundamental last line of defense protections

against these things, and they will also protect people who are, quote, unquote, and not quote, unquote, bad. This is one of those fundamental trade-offs here, that freedoms allow bad people to do bad things, accused bad people to do good things, and vice versa and all of the above, right? But I think what we have not appreciated is some of the,

basic technology of society like cash, the friction it had, the privacy it offered. We just thought those were inconveniences. And we never stopped to think about like what purpose does this actually solve? What problems? What stability does this infuse? What sort of backstop does this offer? In the same way, at least in the original interpretation of the Second Amendment, when a single person with a gun was actually a credible threat to state oppression, provided a backstop there where you could say, that is a credible backstop here. If this turns into a full-on tyranny, they're going to have trouble with a bunch of people with muskets, right?

That part is perhaps not so true anymore. But I think it is true on some of these other factors. And we took it for granted. We didn't fully understand it. I read a wonderful thread here the other night about honor systems. That I hadn't even thought about honor systems in the sense, like do they serve a purpose? Like, what is the purpose of an honor system

where you go like some of these high honor systems? You insult someone. and all of a sudden you're in a duel. And I just think like, well, that's really stupid. That's really dumb. It doesn't have a purpose. And you dive into it and you realize, no, there actually is a purpose. That society evolves these norms and practice.

And in the other case, it's a way of essentially projecting that like, hey, we have a bunch of people here that are malevolent characters. And if they show up at your doorstep, they better damn well know that you'll just go to a duel over an offense because that means you can't just be easily cowed and oppressed. and so forth. That was anyway, the thrust of that threat. But that we don't understand all the working blocks of society. And when we start tinkering with them, like facing out cash and facing in digital payments that are fully surveilled and control about by the government, we haven't fully understand what we've lost. And these are some of the realizations the Canadian thing is bringing us like, oh, this would not have been possible if we were still cash-based. You just

couldn't have done that thing. Oh, I do think if you tried to propose cash in most parliament most Congresses in the world today, and you described what it would be, they'd never, it would never get approved. Right. You know, it would be derided as something for terrorist financing and, like, you know, child pornography and all of these things.

And states would never approve it. Which is happening right now with encryption. Every seemingly two years, some country around the world goes, like, encryption is really bad because child pornography and terrorists. Right? Like, these are the two recurring boogements we have. And you go like, yeah, but also no, right?

Like most freedoms to some extent have this freedom to be used for bad things. It does not mean we should not have freedom. The safest thing in the world was if we'd all just be in a rubber cell, right? Like we can't hurt ourselves. We can't hurt anyone else. Would you like that life? Would you like to live in a perfectly safe rubber cell? No, please.

David, you've definitely seemed to be pretty well convinced on the whole non-sovereign store of value, non-sovereign money outside of the hands of government. And that's like the first crypto rabbit hole that people go down. It's the rabbit hole that Bitcoin invented. Bitcoin came first. But since the crypto industry has developed, we've created a number of other rabbit holes as well. And I'm wondering since you've definitely gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and seemingly come out with a thumbs up, if you've also gone down like the Defy rabbit hole, for example, you've brought up the issue of, well, we have centralized exchanges as choke points. But in the crypto world, we kind of have an answer to that in DeFi.

But then there's also like the NFT rabbit hole and the Web 3 social media rabbit hole. I'm wondering if the fact that you've given Bitcoin the thumbs up, if you have since opened your mind to other areas of the crypto industry as well. Bitcoin's just the gateway drug, man. I know. I'll say that I'm not as far in that process. I'm still highly, in some cases, extremely skeptical about some of the things. But at the same time, I'm intrigued. So one of the defining moments for me was growing up with computers.

in the mid-90s with the demo scene. So particularly in Europe, there was a strong scene around the Amiga computer and the Commodore 64 where you had these demo groups that were competing with each other to produce cool digital art. And they all had avatars and they all had pseudonyms. And like, it was really cool. And then everyone, it kind of rolled into the web, right? And then the web got all business. Now we were all with our formal names and our one identity and our very serious jobs and our commerce and so on.

NFTs, to just take one example, feels a little bit like that early demo scene in ways that are just like interesting. Even though I still have grave misgivings about like, yeah, but you're buying a URL that points to a thing that could change and it's not the actual thing and all of that stuff. But this is also one of those, I quoted this thing and I'll probably butcher the quote, but it was essentially something like, Dissland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real. What is not bullshit about like traditional art and paying $200 million for Picasso or something? Like how different is that actually,

I understand that there's a physical piece and there's only one piece and so on, but you can also just get a poster of it. Getting a poster of Monet is basically like right-click save. It's not that different from right-click save. yet a bunch of people who like art goes like, those idiots with NFTs like right cliff save, gotcha.

And you go like, yeah, that's what a poster is, more or less too, right? Yet there's some value to holding the actual fucking money on your wall, right? Like it has some social cachet. And like that's mostly a social convention in many ways. The poster's better. It's more durable and it can be replaced and all these other things. So there's some of that. I'm still highly conflicted.

I still have these issues of like you're just buying a URL that points to something that could disappear. And also, by the way, that so much of that space actually is centralized and now the API is about OpenC and so forth. If that goes down and the whole thing goes down where the fuck is the decentralization, all these other things. And then, of course, you also have the endless scams and the juicing and the pumping and the dumping and all these other stuff that just really muddles the water. But I've gained some clarity to at least like squint and see. kernels of interestingness and also like do you know what I don't have to buy an nfti if I don't like an npti or if I don't even like the concepts of it I don't have to do it I could also just not like no one is forcing me to buy an nfti right so I'm also

pretty happy with the idea of consenting adults I've been this way in drugs for a long time like hey I actually haven't done a lot of drugs but I totally respect people people who want to do that within some limits and you find there's certain things where it tips over and so on. But I'm also curious. Yeah, I'd like an LSD trip, please. Can I get a totally safe one where I'm assured that's going to be 100% LSD and I'm laying on this couch in a padded room where I won't jump out the window? That sounds great. So I'm at like that stage, perhaps somewhat with some of these things. on the Web 3 thing, perhaps, is the one where I have the most trouble. And perhaps that's part because I have worked in the web world and done a bunch of things with web replication setups.

And when I look at a bunch of the problems that are supposed to be solved, I once saved this ad that I saw on Twitter from IBM bragging about how they were using the blockchain to, I don't know, pass apples around or something. And I just thought, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. just use a goddamn relational database. What the hell is the blockchain going to do for you in the tracking of apples or whatever, right? And I just, there's so much of that. But what this experience have given me and what this Canadian situation and this revised view and Bitcoin has, like, hey, bet on optimism, bet on tomorrow, bet on the fact that I may be wrong.

And maybe I just like maybe one day NFTs will click for me in a lot. different way and I'll totally shed my ideas of it and like hey this is just a another make-believe like everything is fucking make-believe and all these social conventions we build up about things um and and it'll work I'm not there uh one step at a time right like one one uh one foot inside one rabbit hole uh once first and then we'll see where we go one next rabbit hole maybe that probably david and I recommend that you journey down is the decentralized finance rabbit hole because you mentioned a few about like exchanges, centralized exchanges being a vector of control for governments and third parties. And of course they are in the case of Canada. I believe Canadian authorities blacklisted

whole bunch of Bitcoin addresses and told their Canadian exchanges do not allow withdrawals or deposits from these addresses. One solution to that, and I think the most exciting solution, the bankless solution, is to centralize finance, where over time, we need less of these centralized custodial services to actually do our banking service. So one thing for you to check out when you have some time is something called Uniswap, for example, which is a leading decentralized exchange automated market maker. You can grab your own crypto assets and then exchange them one to one for something else and you don't need a third party bank.

It's a credibly neutral protocol can't be stopped. The user interfaces can be. but the guts of the contract cannot be. And it's super exciting. Anyway, some more for you to explore there. But I've got another question for you. And this is, this gets into maybe some more current events as well, because right on the back of the Canadian, you know, count freezing and everything that's going on, the world has now come down and started freezing accounts in Russia. So we've got swift sanctions, cutting off the Russian banking system. We've got the U.S. and the EU freezing Russia. central bank assets. We've got like Apple Pay and Google and all of the fintechs. They're cutting off support for Russian citizens. And of course, a lot of this affects individual Russian citizens who have nothing to do with, you know, what's going on in Putin's war and that sort of thing. Nor do they support. But also at the same time, like this is kind of a united front against

Putin and Russians' actions in the Ukraine that a lot of people would say, hey, this is a good thing. And if we had crypto, if the world was on crypto rails, then we couldn't impose these sorts of sanctions. And so isn't this a good thing and therefore isn't crypto bad? Why should we want a crypto-enabled world? I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what's just transpired in the last few days in Russia and some of these sanctions. Yeah. We're tackling all the easy topics today. I think that, first of all, I haven't fully made up my mind.

And I don't think anyone should make up their mind fully about what things mean on the long scale in terms of the philosophic on opinions when you're in the heat of the moment. This was one of the problems, too, with the Canadian situation. And it was actually one of the reasons why, I mean, maybe this is self-serving. But I think it was easier for someone detached from the situation and weren't on the grounds next to the trucks hunking to have an analysis of this that was a little bit more dispassioned. And right now, I'll be fair to say that the situation in Europe is not very dispassioned. It is very high passion for very good reason. So we're probably not in the best state of mind of like, what should this fully mean for everything? But I'll portray my sort of fundamental thesis here, which is one of the reasons why I called this in release valve.

I'm not sure I want a world entirely run on crypto. I'm not sure that that is better. I think this idea of the release valve that it is a way when kind of like the, again, we go back to the Second Amendment, and I really should stress that I've never owned a gun in my life. I fired a few and that's surprisingly fun and I do that again. But owning a gun and having a society full of guns, generally not my speed. But this idea that like the Second Amendment was a release valve for tyranny, right? Like it wasn't that we were all supposed to carry a musket around everywhere

because what if the government jumped us, right? Like, no, it was supposed to be there at home and then we could organize into a militia. We could oppose the tyranny if it came. I think a little bit, at least that my initial take of this is the same with crypto. Like, I'd like to have some crypto around if like shit happened. Like in some ways, like prepping, like I live in California for many years. Like, eh, not a bad idea to have a little extra water to have a backpacked in case the big quick comes. Or in case the fires come, right?

I don't know if I want to organize like every moment of my day around that concept. that's, I'm not there. Who knows? Maybe you get there some way. Maybe this is even like you can't do one without the other, although I'm not so sure about that. Like we've historically had all sorts of stores of value that we're not the only one.

We never transacted primarily or only in gold, even though that was there. And that was an important part. And it was a release valve and it was a credibility check and all these other things. But it was there. And it was one component of it. I'd like to see a strong cryptocurrency like Bitcoin be one of those. alternatives that's like fully solid, but I don't know, do I want the Russian state to be able to move 650 billion dollars around in it? You get a little squirmish, right? Which is often the case with

these fundamental rights that they can be used for bad things, right? The freedom of speech. You can start saying some nasty shit where I'm like, and I'm really getting uncomfortable here. But I'd like to err on the side of the principles and the fact that the reason we have these things and protection against these things is more important than the fact that they will occasionally be abused. Again, what does that mean? Does that mean I want Putin and Kim Jong-N-il to be trading their billions in crypto back and forth?

I don't know if I've made up my mind about that yet. But I do think this idea of collective punishment is a seriously troublesome idea. The fact that every Russian everywhere now gets this on them, and you could say, you're like, well, they what? They voted for the guy? Fuck, no, they didn't. Right? This is the thing. This is trouble with collective punishment of all sorts. Yeah. And this is the interesting thing about living in the world, that there are very few clear-cut answers that are just universally applicable when it comes to the big dangerous questions of both our time and any time. Right now, yeah, I'm happy that there are sanctions that hopefully do work. I'm sad that there are individual Russians who don't support this

at all that are getting hurt and hit by it. I don't have a unified theory about how it all plays together and the role crypto should play for all eternity in it. That is a serious bunch of hedges that I usually don't like to make. But I think this is the other thing about getting, injecting some humility in it and in the moment. Like when can you make a recent assessment about this? Maybe when war is a little further than, I don't know how far it is to Ukraine from here, but not far enough. If I could add my take on that before I ask my next question, And it's generally the pattern that we see in crypto, no matter if it's about Bitcoin and self-sovereign bank accounts, or if it's about defy and self-sovereign finance or NFTs. It's like they all seemingly provide an escape hatch.

And that escape hatch is the easiest to use the closer you are to the individual. Like the escape hatch itself, that tool that it provides is most conducive to individuals more than it is institutions. And the larger the institution it is, the harder it is for that institution to fit through the crypto escape hatch because it's really meant for individuals. And so we're watching the volume pair between the Russian ruble and Bitcoin be at all-time highs in this present moment. And that's not the Russian government. That's the Russian citizens using Bitcoin as an escape hatch.

And certainly Russia has just as much ability to use the Bitcoin network just as any other institution out there. but it's a lot harder for Russia to move $640 billion in secret using Bitcoin or defy. Like it's easier to find these institutions the larger they are. And so while there's a bunch of just unpacking we need to do as a global society as to like how do we do these sanctions on rogue states in the way that basically everyone approves of is like the most consensus I've ever seen nations have is that we need to sanction Russia. How do we express those abilities while also allowing individual?

to seep through the cracks because they're innocent. And I do think that there's a path forward on that. And so, David, my next question for you is, you know, Ryan and I, we try to be stewards of this crypto industry. We try to promote the best of what it has to offer. The bankless nation is not a nation of laser-eyed crypto army people. I like to think that I'm a little bit more pragmatic and a little bit more realist. But when I see people hating on Bitcoin, hating on crypto, and then changing their mind later,

I consider that a failure because we should have. gotten to you sooner. And so how could we have improved? What could we have done better as promoters of this industry to help convince you about the merits of this industry before it actually came down to the freezing of bank accounts in Canada? What were our failures that you would have liked to have seen us execute on better? It's a good question. Sometimes I think you can make the best argument in the world. If someone's brain isn't open, it's just going to bounce off. And I think I was probably a little bit in that space that like if the door is closed it just it's closed um like i'd like to have higher standards for myself i'd like to think higher of myself that like if the perfect argument

came along before there was an opening it would have opened the door in a way that the crypto community could have done but this is i don't know if that's possible i the my theory of sort of human behavior and human responses has taught me that a lot of the times you simply have to wait for your moment. Like we talked about remote. I thought I made some very, very good argument for remote in a whole book about it

and I tried to evangelize it and tried to talk it up. I provided an example, happy people, this, and the other thing and just like bounce, bounce, bounce. It didn't really make a big impact. Then 2020 happens. And then suddenly, door wide open everywhere.

Oh, let's learn how to do it. Oh, it's actually great. You can do it, right? So sometimes you can just kind of bide your time and wait your moment. And I think that this is the best thing, the thing that sells Bitcoin the best and crypto in general, is these kind of events that questioned the fundamentals. Where before, again, 2013, there's before Snowden and there's after Snowden.

There are people who think before Snowden, you're a tin-foiled loon if you believe these things that there's the NSA listening to everything, right? And then there's the undeniable reality. Once given proof that this is actually happening, you cannot exist in the old reality anymore. This is what happened with remote. There's not the old reality anymore. You'd be laughed out of the room if you started to say, well, you can't actually start a business today remote unless you have the whiteboard and the water cooler. It's all going to fail and no creativity can be unleashed and blah, blah, blah.

blah, blah, blah. All the bullshit people were speweding like five minutes before the pandemic. It's just over forever. Those arguments don't get to be reintroduced. And I think, at least for me, this is what that Canadian situation have introduced. It's one of those defining moments, like 13, 2020, and you go like, do you know what? I will remember this. This is when I changed my mind fundamentally on something. Now the door is open. Let me hear what you have to say. Yeah, it's funny about remote, by the way, DHH, I feel like the entire crypto industry is built on remote workers. Like these decentralized autonomous organizations that we've set up, complete remote workers. These new style of digital contractors that are coming to the space, it's all remote.

David and I have never met in person, despite running a podcast at Bankless for the last two years to give an example of that. And we started in COVID. So I do think that timing is, and catalyst, event-driven catalyst is such a factor in which, you're saying. This has been so fun and such a pleasure to hear from you. I'm curious as we kind of draw to a close, what else are you going to do in crypto? So like, are you going to go further down the rabbit hole? You plan to explore a bit more. Are you planning to buy some? Are you, going to spend some time learning about it, develop some products? What are your plans? Now that you have been, I don't want to use the word, converted, because we started talking about this as a cult.

But now that you've seen the value that crypto can bring to society, what are your plans? Well, I want to experiment firsthand with the cold storage. I want to get the most idealized version of the decentralized setup, buy some Bitcoin, use it, actually try to transact and see, like, where are we still short? One of the main piece of feedback I got, too, about slowness of transactions and high fees was the Lightning Network. Love to check into that. How did that change things?

just get some real life experience with it because this is one of the things that otherwise breeds, I don't know, ignorance. If you haven't just actually done anything with it, right? Who knows? Maybe I'll buy an end of tea or something else like that just to get the experience and actually use it firsthand. So I think that would be step one. The thing is, though, the price of being a 10-year skeptic is that, like, you're obviously behind the game by the time it flips. So I'm not in any position to build anything of interest in the crypto space right now

because I'm totally ignorant in many ways about all the fundamentals of how things work. But I'm curious now. In a way, I wasn't before. I'm curious about how some of these things work. And I've seen other people like go down the curiosity hole and come out on the other side and not be convinced. That's a possibility. But I think that's still better, right? Like at least you go through it and at least you can observe some of these things.

So, date one, buy some Bitcoin. I mean, as everyone, wouldn't have been fun that when I posted my first tweet, I think it was maybe 13 or something, and I was laughing at Bitcoin's price at $20 or something, saying like, who the hell would want to buy this? That was really dumb. Hey, we don't get every call right. I also thought that Facebook wasn't exactly going to be a big stock, and it turned out at least pretty well for them over that time horizon.

So you don't get every call right. you recognize hopefully when you get them wrong and then you like integrate that experience. So I want to integrate that experience. I want to read up anymore. I had downloaded the original white paper on Bitcoin to understand just sort of the fundamentals of the network and what's being proposed and already there suspending my disbelief a little bit when I think on like paragraph three talks about the most, or they talk about the most important thing being irreversible transactions.

And I go like, do you know what? I've sent money to the wrong address before. the regular bank world. I'm pretty happy that these things were reversible. I'm also happy that I can dispute charges on my credit card and so on. But I'm suspending some disbelieve here and part of it integrating with this idea that is a release valve. I don't have to see it as a binary world, where it's either all Bitcoin or no Bitcoin. I could see it as like, hey, I could be Fiat most of the time with my musket in the closet, my Bitcoin on cold storage for a dark day when I say the wrong thing on the internet

and the freaking Canadian state reaches out to the Danish states and try to cancel my bank account. Well, let's hope that doesn't happen. And definitely hope you come on again on bankless and tell us a bit more about your crypto journey. We will send you some resources to you, DHA, in case they're helpful about, you know,

kind of where to get started. But this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. And if you want to follow that story, I write about all this stuff. DHH.D.D.K.

has links to my hey, newsletter where I try to process these world events and what it all means. And I am sure I will be writing more about crypto in the future, certainly commemorating when I buy my first, I was about to say my first Bitcoin, but I don't know if I have 35K, I want to plop down on a coin, a whole coin right now. So we'll see where that goes. You got a dollar cost average in. Bankless Nation, some resources for you and some action items. We will include a link to DHS's website where you can find his writings in the show notes that's going to be at dhh.dk. Also, a direct link to his article. I was wrong. We need crypto that we were talking about so much in this article. You know what? We'll also do,

David Hoffman, we should include a list of resources for people who are new to crypto who want to go on the same journey that DHH is going down on how they can start taking custody of their assets and start their bankless journey. So we'll do that as well. Episode 55, I think it's going to be on that list. That'll be one of them. And of course, guys, like, subscribe, review, wherever you get this podcast, helps us get it to the top of the charts. Thanks as always. And of course, none of this has been financial advice. Bitcoin is risky.

So is Ethereum. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.