BTC Sessions - "Privacy Is NOT a Right" – But It Is Your Best Defense | Molyneux & Hillebrand

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 070: Why “Nothing to Hide” Is the Most Dangerous Lie Ever Sold, Why Privacy Is NOT a Right But Your Only Real Defense, and How Tech Can Crush Free-Range Serfdom | Molyneux & Hillebrand Privacy is a consequence of property rights — and the government is racing to destroy both. Stefan Molyneux and Max Hillebrand join BTC Sessions for a rare, unfiltered debate on why surrendering your financial data to CBDCs is the endgame of totalitarian control, and how Bitcoin privacy tools like Coinjoin and zero-knowledge proofs are the last line of defense.You'll learn why the 'nothing to hide' argument is one of the most dangerous lies ever sold to the public, how social credit scores are already being constructed through blockchain surveillance, and why Max Hillebrand's work on Wasabi Wallet — funded entirely by a 0.3% fee — paid 40 engineers without a single government grant. You'll also see Stefan and Max debate intellectual property from first principles, explore whether privacy is an outcome or a prerequisite of a free society, and understand why the OODA loop from military strategy explains exactly why financial privacy keeps you safe.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro1:02 - Introducing Stefan Molyneux and Max Hillebrand1:42 - Online Age Verification and Privacy Trade-Offs2:14 - Dangers of the Nothing-to-Hide Argument4:59 - Child Protection Versus State Surveillance7:12 - When Privacy Violations Are Morally Justified9:00 - Max Hillebrand Defines Privacy10:03 - Privacy as a Property Right11:10 - Free Market Age Verification Solutions12:44 - Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Private Age Checks13:42 - Social Credit Scores and Reputation Attacks17:30 - Anonymity as Defense Against Reputation Harm18:39 - Ostracism Versus State Enforcement21:35 - AI Removing Limits on Totalitarianism25:35 - Financial Privacy for Sound Money30:35 - Privacy as OODA Loop Military Defense33:09 - Bitcoin's Built-In Privacy Shortcomings34:16 - CoinJoin for Obfuscating Bitcoin Transactions39:08 - Privacy as Prerequisite or Outcome of Freedom47:48 - Your Data as Sellable Property58:43 - Intellectual Property as Contract or Theft1:22:59 - Streaming Sats and Lightning Payments1:24:42 - Wasabi Wallet's 0.3 Percent Revenue Model1:29:17 - Where to Follow Stefan and Max🔗 Links & Resources:→ Stefan Molyneux: https://www.freedomain.com →https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@freedomain1⁩ → Max Hillebrand: https://towardsliberty.com→ Sovereign Sessions: https://www.youtube.com/@SovereignSessions→ Bitcoin + Privacy + Security: https://btcmentor.io/untouchable-bitcoiner/→ Bitcoin Survival Workshop: https://btcmentor.io/bitcoin-survival-workshop-2026/📌 Previous Episodes: Doomberg & James Lavish → https://youtu.be/H3ZXBl-tXR0⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #BitcoinPrivacy #Cypherpunk #StefanMolyneux #MaxHillebrand #WasabiWallet #FinancialFreedom #CBDC #Freedomain #privacy #surveillancestate #surveillance

Privacy is essential for physical security and security of your property rights. They're desperate to, A, get you to give up as much information as possible, and B, turn cryptocurrency to a tool of evil and downright Satanism, get you on some central bank digital currency so that people can look and see your reputation every time you do a transaction. AI unfortunately removes the ceiling of the human requirement to be totalitarian. It's free-range serfdom. Privacy is not a right.

A right has to be universalizable and defensible. Privacy is a consequence of property rights. All virtues plus power equals evil. And of course, the government wants to sell you the virtues, keep the power so they can do the evil. We have the ability to use privacy preserving and security preserving technologies that even the government cannot spy on you. Quickly, guys, I'm not going to ask you to like or subscribe. But if you do want to help the show continue at no cost to you, just share it with one person you think will gain value from it. All right.

So for today, we have Stefan Mollinew, the philosopher with over a billion views in down. that was such a threat to the existing system, they tried everything they could to cancel this guy. And Max Hillebrand, the privacy mastermind, as well as a contributor to Wasabi wallet, one of my favorite Bitcoin privacy tools. Max and Steph have an amazing fiery debate on intellectual property with Max calling it outright theft. And we kick off the conversation with a deep dive into the ethics of privacy in the digital age of AI, which honestly has me questioning some of my previously held positions.

All right. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited to have this conversation. I got two my favorite philosophical minds together. So to kind of kick things off, Steph, Max, you know, all the time I used to hear that I'm not a criminal, that I have nothing to hide, that why should I care about privacy? But even these days, I'm finding more and more everyday people are growing a little bit concerned. We're seeing a push for online age verification, both at like the, what you say, like the app level, as well as the operating system, warrantless surveillance programs, chat control in the EU. Even now in Canada, they're talking about getting rid of

the Bitcoin ATMs because of scams. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you can get no KYC Bitcoin under $1,000. So, Steph, starting with you, why is the nothing to hide argument one of the most dangerous lies that we've ever been sold? And why does privacy matter more than ever for personal freedom? So there's two layers. One I would disagree with, one I would agree with, just my particular perspective. The one is that advertising has become more focused and helpful to people.

I can't tell you the amount of years I lost when I was younger looking at ads. for things I had no interest in. You know, like on sort of mainstream broadcast TV, you know, those things where you're sick home for the day as a kid, and you're like daytime TV sucks. And the ads are for all things like, you know, those whisper ads at the end, you know, may cause iceblosion, incontinence, head rotation, you know, that kind of stuff.

So the fact that people are giving up sort of privacy in a way to get better advertisements, more targeted advertisements, things that might actually be of help to them, most people are doing fairly innocuous stuff. And if they get targeted ads, so for most people giving that stuff, up to get ads make sense. I also think that, you know, one of the big issues in the modern world is underage access to infinite pornography. And so we kind of don't want that. I think as a whole,

I've had lots of listeners call in, so, you know, they got exposed at 10 or 11 or 12. It kind of warps their sexual development. It gives them a very unrealistic view of human relationships. So I'm fine with some age verification and I'm fine if people want to give up their data, the ATM thing. Yeah, I mean, the government has an easy relationship with business. Bitcoin. It is kind of a necessary evil. Bitcoin, there's an old argument from economics, which says supply creates its own demand. In other words, you didn't know you needed an iPad until someone handed you an iPad or something like that. And the supply of debt is creating the demand for something other than fiat currency. And traditionally, that was things like real

estate and fixed assets, maybe a basket of commodities or gold in particular. But now governments can seize gold. Gold is expensive to store and maintain. And you can't really move it very easily. there's just a demand, and governments have this uneasy relationship. If they ban Bitcoin, they're reminding everyone that Fiat is going to zero, because Fiat always, always, always goes to zero. So they can't ban it. But at the same time, they can't embrace it because if they embrace it, then they lose their deficit spending, which is the way that governments pretend they add value to an economy by borrowing your future children's productivity. So, you know,

some of it, in terms of people giving up their privacy for better ads, some age verification stuff, there's some heinous stuff out there on the internet. And when I was a kid, you know, you'd see Playboys would be covered up in brown paper bags on the other side of the CD confectionist store. And now you can dial up just about anything at a whim's notice. And that's not particularly great for society as a whole. So to me, it's a mixed bag, if that makes sense. No, it does.

It's an interesting point that anything that we're necessarily going to go to. So on that note, then before I even go to Max, with regards to if you want to do, like, because the worst, I'd say the worst elements of what the government's usually try to push is under the guise of protecting the children. So how do we draw that line in the dirt if we want to, say, for example, restrict access to adult content for kids, but not open up to basically complete invasion of privacy, which I think is more of a surveillance state, want to know who exactly is online and where? How do we make that division? Can we? Is the risk of child exposure to adult content something that we maybe need to deal with and at the realm of the parents, not the realm of the state?

I agree with all of that, and one of the problems is that a lot of parents aren't parenting. A lot of parents just like, here's a device, and, you know, there's no particular education. They don't put content filters on. They don't put restrictions at the router level or anything like that. Or maybe they don't know how to because maybe it takes a bit of technology or expertise to do that. But one of the big problems have been, of course, governments have raised taxes to the point where both parties have to work, which means you don't have much time for parenting and coaching, which means that your children are doing some pretty untowardable. stuff online. And listen, when I was a kid, I was relatively unparented. My mom was working

and my dad was away. So I was kind of unparented. And we could only get up to so much trouble. The online stuff is just a whole different category of mind-waping imagery and arguments and perspectives and so on. And again, it would be one thing if children were educated in how to critically assess arguments and reason and assess facts from a rational perspective, but they're not, right? the government schools aren't teaching them any of that. So you've got massive amounts of propaganda swarming into children's brain without the rational defense tools, without good parenting. So, yeah, governments displaced parents and then say,

oh, well, you know, we got to do all of this stuff to take care of your children. It's like, well, how about you lower taxes so one party can stay home and monitor what the children are doing and give them some proper education? And how about the government schools teach you some critical thinking skills so that you're not just going to be rolled over by some tsunami of propaganda like a little sandcastle? No, fair enough. One more, and then I'll pass it to Max then. So in your view then, if there are particular situations where violations of privacy are potentially warranted for a collective good, which I've missed framing that, please correct me. But is privacy a moral right?

Do you have a moral right to privacy? And would that maybe only extend to adults in your example? I wouldn't say that children have a moral right to privacy. And we already have these kinds of age verification things when it comes to, I don't know, driving a car. And I actually think it's quite good that five-year-olds are driving cars. We have it with regards to voting. We have it with regards to the draft or selective service. We have it with regards to drinking. We have it with regards to renting cars. I think you've got to be a 25-year-old if you're male to be able to rent cars. So we've already have a ton of age verification stuff. I'm not a big fan of political action at all, but given that we have a political state, having age verification to restrict access to pornography

I mean, there are obviously the Pee Wee-Herman Peep shows that used to be on in the world. I mean, you wouldn't be able to get a kid into one of those pornography theaters back of the day. You had to show your ID, and now, of course, you can dial up anything you want, and there's no ID verification for the most part. I think South Park parodied this at some point where they're just clicking through a whole bunch of German prompts to get what they want. And so age verification extending to hardcore pornography or pornography of any kind.

Yeah, I absolutely remember that. I mean, I remember when I was a kid. There was a TV station in Toronto called City TV. They ran these things called Baby Blues, which was like midnight. If you stayed up past midnight, I hear, of course, I never did this myself as being an angelic quiet boy and nothing but. But I hear that if you stayed out past midnight, rumor had it throughout the school. If you stayed up past midnight and tuned into City TV, you might see a boob. And of course, that's what motivates men for the most part.

So, yeah, that was like you had to stay out past midnight and your parents had to let you have it and all of that. And now it's just dial up mayhem and it's really bad. So, yeah, extending that kind of stuff doesn't seem to be unreasonable. Excellent, excellent. We're going right to some edge cages, which is wonderful. Max, I'd love to get your response, your thoughts on that. No, edge cases are totally worth considering because that's where you really see the principles if they consistently apply or do some caveats.

And I think to start this out with just to definitionally, it's important because that question of you have nothing to hide is a definitional judicious. judo trick to trick you ultimately into giving up your freedoms. And so what is privacy? Privacy is the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. It's a choice of what you say to whom and when. And that is at the very fundamental structure of action, right? Humans have privacy because you can formulate your own thoughts before you speak them.

You can carefully choose your words before you let them go. And that is, therefore privacy is just inherent to human action. Privacy is not a right. A right has to be universalizable and defensible. And privacy is not that. Privacy is a consequence of property rights. You own your body ultimately, and that's why you can choose what to say to whom. And you control your diary, the paper, book, and you choose what to write in there,

and you control the safe deposit box where you keep it so you can prevent others from reading your diary. So property rights properly defended in a society, will give us a very private society because that coercive aspect is simply removed. And then, of course, still, there are many good reasons why people choose to work with someone or not. And this can include reasons of age. Maybe you don't want to hire a five-year-old to drive your car because he would probably crash it. Maybe you don't want to lend your vehicle to a 21-year-old because he might crash it, etc. And inherently, there is nothing wrong with you choosing with whom you're going to do business.

business with. I think the problem comes in when there is a top-down state enforcement that makes a blanket judgment that in all cases this shall not be allowed. I think it would be much more reasonable to let these things like, okay, at what age can I rent a car be up to car rental providers and insurance providers who would simply price age as a premium and at some point maybe even an infinite premium that yes, you cannot get in car under a certain age. But then if there is competition, other rental providers, other insurance providers who might have a different judgment on this will of course still provide the service. And if they're good entrepreneurs, they'll make a bunch of profit because they've solved some problems that others didn't. And if they're not,

they'll go bankrupt. So the market pressure is a quite natural thing on how we can regulate these. And I guess then finally, if, so one of the other cyphepunk ideals is that minimize the amount of information that you need to collect in order to provide a service. And so let's stay with the age verification. Because currently how it is, if you want to rent a car and need to show your age, you need to give your full ID. So this has your birthday. It has your address most likely.

It has some ID and so on. It has a picture. And all of these things are not strictly necessary. What you need to know is, is this person over 21? And that's different to what is the birthday of this person. And thankfully, as cyphopunks came up with some beautiful cryptography, where we can exactly prove these types of statements without revealing unnecessary information. These are zero knowledge proofs.

Massive amount of progress has been made in the last couple years on that front. And there is numerous proof systems where you can totally verify your age, verify that you're older than a certain age, without revealing your exact birthday. You can use the NFC chip in your passport and just tap it to your phone and your phone will generate that proof. And now you can give that to a third party and prove that you are of age without revealing anything extra. And I think that's ultimately the future that I would like to see, right? To give entrepreneurs and parents the tools that they can protect themselves and their loved ones without having to surveil them ultimately. And I think this might not be possible for all the different aspects of human lives.

But for many examples, we can have a privacy preserving secure access right control management system. I have a couple of thoughts on that, but I don't want to interrupt the. Yeah, I mean, I think certainly the proof stuff, the binary proof, are you over 21? That's all people need to know. I think that it's pretty clear what the government wants with this information gathering. So it's kind of frustrating for the totalitarians among us, particularly on the left, that people can ignore insults, that people can ignore having their reputation assaulted in damage, right?

I've had like almost a 20-year campaign against my reputation from hard leftists because I'm anti-communist and anti-collectivist and anti-rationality and so on. And it really is frustrating when people can just walk through these web of words and continue to function productively in the world, right? I mean, I'm a friendly guy, I'm a nice guy. I always want to pursue the truth. And it must be really, really frustrating when you work so hard to destroy someone's reputation and they don't care.

Like, oh my gosh, that's so annoying. It's like, you know, it's like some guy shooting at Superman. But the bullets bounce off and all of that. I want to rip my shirt off here. I don't want to oversaturate the whitewash here. But so it's really, really frustrating. We would have to put an age gate on that. And give everybody.

welding goggles from my blinding nipple landscape. But it's really frustrating. Like if you look at my say Wikipedia page versus Grogapedia, Gropropaglia is accurate and Wikipedia page is a political hit job. And so when you throw all of your verbal arrows and slings of people and it just kind of bounces off them, I'm going to say they haven't been negative consequences. It's like I got canceled and all that kind of stuff. But you know, I'm still a happy, functioning, positive, productive member of society and so on. It's really, really annoying. Because, In the past, when everyone lived in like small towns or villages or local communities, if you trashed someone's reputation, you kind of ruined their life.

But now you can do, I can just go meet new people. I could just go talk to new people. I could just go do new things. Really, really frustrating. And so what they want to do, of course, is they want to develop a social credit score and they want to say, oh, this guy's been branded, you know, whatever nasty words you want to throw at someone. the annoying thing is that that is not available yet to places you want to go do business with,

to places you want to go and get a membership app, to places you want to subscribe to. Those people don't know the immense effort that totalitarians are put into destroying your reputation and they're just going to judge you by just you. Like I can go into a store and I can just go buy something and nobody knows about all of this reputational damage. And I don't particularly care because that's just the price of telling the truth. being attacked by those who profit from lies. So, yeah, the social credit score, they're desperate to, A, get you to give up as much information as possible, and B, to turn cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to a tool of evil

and downright Satanism, which is to get you on some central bank digital currency so that people can look and see your reputation. Every time you do a transaction, this person has been branded as an X or Y or Z or their social credit score is minus X, Y, or Z, and then finally, finally, they can get their power where reputational damage really does eradicate your ability to function in society, and then the verbal abuse reaches its pinnacle, and then they can take over. But that's, I think, the goal of this information gathering and consolidation into a centralized economic data.

Max, your thoughts? Yeah, no, this is really interesting. how you put together that reputational aspect and how cyberspace and anonymity to some extent can protect you against reputational damage. You can just start over. You can find your new circle of friends. And that ultimately these systems of control

like central bank digital currencies or full permissioned operating systems and internet usage, that this can reintroduce that immense harm of reputation. And also interesting though is that For some people, we do want to have the ability to ostracize them. If someone is a murderer, I don't want to have them in my village, for sure. So I think everyone, to a large extent, agrees that ostracization is an important aspect.

There's huge disagreements for which people should be ostracized, obviously. So this is an interesting question of how can we reintroduce these principles of, again, selectively choosing with whom you engage, such that it is peaceful and results in more peace, rather than continued conflict. And how can we reintroduce this to technologies and cyberspace? Because the Internet is a wonderful place, but it can be made better in this aspect for sure. Well, and it's funny because I wrote about this like 20 years ago.

I had two books Everday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy because I'm an anarcho-capitalist, like no state, free market, private property, non-aggression principle kind of guy. And I talked about ostracism as the foundational method of social control. Now, of course, ostracism requires that people experience shame, which is not particularly equally distributed across the countries and cultures around the world, but even if you can't experience shame, economic ostracism is a very powerful tool. Most human beings, when you ostracize

them, the same pain centers light up in their brains that are associated with physical torture. So they really, really don't like it, and it's uncomfortable and so on. So I think ostracism is a very peaceful way of enforcing social rules. Every rule plus the state makes things bad, right? Every rule plus political power makes them bad. You know, it's like there's a big difference between lovemaking and rape, the big difference being the initiation of the use of force. And there's a big difference between rational, restrained rules in a free market economy where ostracism is for the most egregious acts and ostracism, or at least having a contract. rating I used to call it. So it's like a credit rating, but how well do you keep your contracts?

And if you don't keep your contracts, then it's going to be much more expensive to do business with you, but people can still do business with you. But outright ostracism would be reserved really for violations of, you know, rape, theft, assault, and murder, the sort of big four horsemen of the evil apocalypse. So you take a system like ostracism and sharing information about people's past crimes or evils or even their unwillingness to keep any kind of contract in any reasonable way. that can be very helpful for society because it punishes people who lie and use violence and break their contracts. And it rewards people who resolve things peacefully and keep their contracts and tell the truth. So you want those incentives.

But you take anything and add power to it. It's the difference between, hey, it's a really, really nice hug. And then someone's crushing you so you can't breathe. That's a bit of a different thing. So all virtues plus power equals evil. And of course, the government wants to sell you the virtues. keep the power so they can do the evil. Yeah, along this line, this is this interesting aspect that you, you,

some things can only be enforced with a lot of power, right? And if we introduce better technologies, that's less and less the case. Right. So I do think that we will live in a much more peaceful world if we have the technologies that allow for more peaceful human decision-making and collaboration. And, you know, things like Bitcoin is a perfect example. Like we can have digital money. that does not require enforcement and centralized power as fiat currencies did in the past, right, the original form of digital money.

And we can do that technologically without falling back to the upuse of power. Every time I think of Fiatist digital currency, I think of these two digits myself forever and ever. Amen, that's Fiatist, these middle finger digital. Sorry, visual joke for those just listening to the podcast, there is two index fingers anyway. So, no, I think that's right. I definitely, what's going to happen, I think, if I sort of have to, well, I don't have to. I choose to put a prediction out there. So what's going to happen is governments are going to rank up social credit scores

because they want that kind of control. And they've got AI now. See, in the past, totalitarianism was limited by the human element. You needed human beings to review stuff, to read letters, to go over communications, to listen in, to spy. And so you were limited in your totalitarianism by the human. human requirement, human labor requirement, AI, of course, so we can see this happening on YouTube these days, people get abandoned, demonetized through AI algorithms, it seems.

So AI unfortunately removes the ceiling of the human requirement for labor to be totalitarian, and it can scan social media, it can provide recommendations, and even if there's a human element near the end, the massive amount of data gathering that would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive to have human beings to it can now be done in an automated fashion. And so what's going to happen is the social credit stuff is going to ramp up. The appeals process is going to be endlessly slow. And by the, you know, the punishment is the process. By the time you clear your name, you're already living in a van down by the river on a steady diet of government cheese.

So what is going to happen, though, and this has happened all the time through history, this is why I'm not a black pillar, is that as the nooses of control tighten around the throats of humanity, supply creates its own demand. So there will be a demand for a free country. or a free continent. Maybe it'll be Australia. Who knows, right? Or these days, it looks like it's heading towards Argentina,

or it could be under El Salvador, under Buckely. So people who are just, so as the news tightens, and this happened, of course, in Europe, as the religious news and the political news and the tax news and the surf news tightened around people, they fled to America, and they created the new world and so on. So as the news tightens,

there will be like a, demand for a place to go that's free. And this always happens in society. Everyone thinks that the net is going to close around everyone at the same time. It's like, nope, the net, you can see it coming down and you're looking to get to a place of safety. So there will be a country or a set of countries that will rule the next century by providing safe heaven for the persecuted in formerly free societies. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed. The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering,

are my keys safe? Did I do this right? That experience is why I started BTC sessions. For over a decade, this channel has helped millions of people like you learn how to use and secure Bitcoin. But I realized something. For many people, videos aren't enough.

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Real experts, real answers, personalized hands-on guidance tailored to your exact situation. Whether you're brand new or building a complex, like setup, we meet you where you're at and walk with you step by step. By the end, you don't just hope your Bitcoin is safe. You know it is. If you're ready for that level of confidence, then head to btcmentor.io and book a call with us today. No, I completely agree and funny enough stuff.

I'm not sure about you, but I'm not really feeling super comfortable in Canada right now and keep scouting the exits and saying if there might be a better place that I might want to go at some point in time. I do want to dive into the idea of the supply crate and the demand for tools and things as well with you, Max, in a second. Before I get there, I kind of want to tease apart a little bit specifically on privacy with regards to financial transactions. If we're looking at something as if we're talking about like an ideal kind of money, if we're looking at functions and properties of money, is the ability to transact privately a requirement of a good money. And this is something, for example, that we would need in order for Bitcoin to succeed. Steph, I'll start with you.

Well, certainly I would trust a company that published its data more than a company that kept it hidden. On the other side, I can completely understand, let's say something silly like you're going to buy an engagement ring for your girlfriend. You might want to keep that hidden and so on. So I'm generally a big fan of transparency because human beings are innately prone to corruption and lying in falsehood and misleading. I mean, it's a very powerful evolutionary strategy, which is, you know, societies have functioned fundamentally on an inverted pyramid of absolute lies throughout almost all human history. You know, our God is the best. Our king is divine. Our priests are accurate. The world is turtles all the way down. And, you know, your ancestors were gods. So societies have just functioned on falsehoods. And the inability to tell falsehoods has been a huge detriment throughout most of society. And it still is to some degree in the present. And so human beings have adapted on a steady diet of lies is what we live on.

It's what we feed on and it's what formally allowed us to survive. Now, science, of course, and reason and free market and so on have revealed the limitations of those lies and said that, you know, telling the truth and being curious, being empirical, and being rational actually gives you more power in the long run than lying. So human beings have adapted to lies in the same way that cuckus have adapted by dropping their eggs into some other birds' nest and letting them raise it because there's a whole lot easier. also known as the bird daycare. So I would say that generally transparency and openness is good

because it rewards people who tell the truth and it punishes people who lie. But at the same time, it would be nice to have a layer of abstraction that allowed you to keep private. So one example I could think of other than buying a ring for your girlfriend would be if you were starting a company, like back in the 90s I co-founded a software company, We raised a bunch of money.

Now, I don't want that to be on the blockchain before we go and start our business. You know, so you will need some privacy, some secrecy, some secrecy and some security for transactions that are, that lose their value if they're open. So I think that there would have to be an abstract layer. And I know that there are technical ways of obscuring what is going on on the blockchain, even on the Bitcoin, blockchain and so on. And it's a perfectly natural thing to hide something. If a company is investing in some new product,

they obviously don't want, ah, all of these millions or billions of dollars is going to burn a rocket-hardt, air-hard head who's going to make some fantastic new rocket to compete with SpaceX. You don't want that out on the blockchain. You want to develop the products and then ship it out and so on. So I can understand the secrecy stuff

for reasons of surprise and genuine legitimate reasons to keep things secret. As a whole, though, I'm a little bit more comfortable with companies having things open. Another thing, of course, you might want to keep paychecks and bonuses in a company quiet on the down low because there can be a lot of resentment and frustration and are not understanding because, hey, how come he gets paid more than me? We have the same experience. It's like, then you have to sit down and say, well, you know, he does twice the code that you do. He's willing to travel. He stays late.

He's available on weekends. So there'd be some reasons for legitimate secrecy and security. I think for most private people, again, unless they want to have more targeted ads. And targeted ads do save, you know, months and months of your life from staring at things you're never going to buy. So people might want to trade that. Hey, say, I'll give up my information in order to have effective and efficient ads. So, but I think, yeah, I think for companies, so, public companies, particularly, I would like a lot more

And of course, for public companies, that stuff's available anyway. Like you see all of the finances and so on. Imagine what it would be like, though, to see finances in real time as an investor. I mean, wouldn't that be incredible in terms of like companies just couldn't? I mean, Theranos wouldn't have lasted five minutes. Sorry, that's a bit of obscure reference from a couple of years ago. Yeah, go ahead. Max, I would absolutely love to get your response to the idea of financial privacy as a requirement

for money and everything that stuff just laid out with regards to public companies. Yes, Steph just made a lot of good arguments for why private transactions are interesting or necessary for certain use cases, and I agree with all of them. I would add in addition that there is a very fundamental aspect of your money should be secure. The money should be difficult to steal. Or in other words, a money that is difficult to steal is a better money than a money that is easy to steal. And for this aspect, privacy is a defense. there's this concept out of the military called the UDA loop like O-O-O-D-A and it stands

it is about two actors who are in a conflict and at war how do what kind of decision loop do they have and the loop is that first you have to observe what the adversary is doing second you have to orient yourself in relation to that adversary to put it in context basically third you have to decide on what you're going to do next you know swive left start shooting

now or start shooting later. And finally, you have to act and do the thing that you do. And with your action comes new information that you can then observe, orient, decide, and act again. And basically, Boyle came up with this idea that whoever cycles faster through this Uda loop will in the end win, right? He's just a faster decision maker. It takes an information faster and reacts faster to his enemy's decision.

And so then the question is, how can you prevent the adversary from continue, continuing to loop through this loop. And, you know, the most obvious or straightforward answer is break it at the most earliest possible opportunity. And that is the observation. If the adversary does not observe you, he cannot put himself in relation to you. He cannot decide on what to do with you and he cannot actually do anything with you because he doesn't even know that you exist.

So privacy is essential for physical security and security of your property rights. because if the adversary doesn't know how much money you have, then he doesn't know if you're a juicy target. That adds the uncertainty if the attack will be profitable in the first place. Because there is a proxiology to violence, right? Criminals are entrepreneurs too, and they need to judge the uncertain future and speculate if their investment in all the tools, machinery and time

in order to pull off the heist will in the end be smaller than the revenue that they will gain by the loot that they will carry away. And if there is uncertainty on how much loot there is, then they will be much less likely to actually act upon this. And then in terms of Bitcoin, this becomes quite interesting because the other way that we defend our Bitcoin is to make sure that nobody else is printing more money. We want to be sure that there's 21 million Bitcoin.

And in order to make this happen, you have to verify every transaction of everyone else. At least that was, you know, in 2008, the only way to do it since then we've learned a thing or two. But ultimately, the way Bitcoin works is you validate every transaction of everyone else. else. And that is, that does not scale, right, because it is not private. You do have to reveal all of your transaction histories to everyone else in order to use the system. You, in this sense, cannot use

Bitcoin privately without telling anyone about your transactions because they are required for the double spending protection and the global consensus. And verifiability is a massive important aspect of a money. You need to make sure that the gold coin that you receive is actual gold and not fools gold. And the same with Bitcoin. You need to make sure that the coins that you're receiving is actual Bitcoin. And in order to do that, you need to verify everything. And so to this aspect, Bitcoin is in this weird limbo where it is extremely verifiable, but therefore it is not really private. And it would be better if we can be verifiable while still being private. And so there's a couple ways that you can do this. So Coin Join is one obvious technique that you can do on Bitcoin right now

to still keep the exact same verification guarantee, but obfuscate your transactions from the public observers. But then, as we said earlier, there are zero knowledge proofs where you could, in theory, have a blockchain with millions of transactions. But in order to verify the blockchain, all you need to download is a small couple kilobytes of cryptographic proof, and that will give you assurance that every transaction was valid.

So nowadays, you don't have to see every transaction in order to make sure that they're valid. that comes with a whole bunch of other trade-offs and complexities, so that's why it's not yet in Bitcoin. But ultimately, a money that is verifiable is better than a money that's not verifiable, and a money that is more secure is better than a money that is less secure.

And therefore, I'd argue that a money that is more private is more secure and potentially also more verifiable. Well, and of course there's going to be an ecosystem of privacy coins that people will transact in that will simply dip in and out a Bitcoin as needed, right? So if you want to keep something totally private, you could go with a privacy coin like Monero or something like that. You could do your transactions that way. And then when you want to dip into the mainstream, you will then go to Bitcoin and to complete things and so on. So I think there's tons of options. That's sort of a free market thing.

And the other thing, too, is that, I mean, there's no privacy now anywhere. It's just limited to the government. I mean, the government can read everything that you do. They can scan everything that you do. I've never believed in privacy. I mean, geez, even prior to the Snowden revelations and the WikiLeaks revelations, I conduct myself on the internet as if I'm in a courtroom having to defend something. It may make me a little jumpy at times, but it seems to be a pretty important good way to do it, right? Compose every email like a judge is looking over your shoulder because I assume that they are to some degree or another. So given that you have no privacy as a whole and given that the government, I mean, as you know,

up here in Canada, I mean, when there was legitimate peaceful protest, the government violated the entire constitution and shut people's bank accounts. I think it was adjudicated as not legal. Of course, there's no consequences. Break a law. You're in real trouble. Break the entire law, and you get to date Katie Perry. So I don't know. Well, maybe that's punishment enough. I don't know. But so we move to a free society. We move to a stateless society. There's going to be privacy, complexity, but right now you'd be eliminating the biggest invader of privacy, which is the state. And I can't help consider that just a mass advantage. You know, I agree ultimately with your strategy of it.

It makes sense to presume that anything you say is being hurt by everyone and will be used against you because that keeps you on your toes, right? It prevents you from lying and just being nasty. So generally, I agree. That's a good strategy and I do similar. But I wouldn't be so quick to be defeatist about the power of the government. I think they're actually quite incompetent in many things. And on the other hand, we have a free market of researchers that have come up with actually

unbreakable tools. Now, security is a multi-layered affair, and you really need to have defense in depth. And it's not enough to be perfectly secure in 99% of the cases. And then you leave the backdoor open where ultimately compromise happens. But I do believe that we have it in our ability and empower to create fully secure and fully private systems. I mean, end-to-end encryption is a perfect example. Like, it works. It actually works. It's incredibly cheap to do, and it is unbreakable. Now, yes, they might hack into your phone and then read the decrypted messages, but also here, we have secure operating systems.

We have graphene OS for the phone. We have Cubes OS for your laptop. These are operating systems that I believe are not really crackable without massive amounts of investments. They're for sure not crackable against drag net surveillance and so on. So I do think that we have the ability to use privacy preserving and security preserving technologies that even the government cannot spy on you. Now, if they throw millions of dollars at the problem, you know, that changes the calculus. But a huge amount of attacks and the large percentage of general attacks can absolutely be prevented with good operational security. No, I certainly agree that the government is not confident, but they're competent, but they're

make up for the lack of competence with near infinite power. It's like if I'm going into a boxing ring and somebody says, hey man, that boxer isn't really skilled, I'm like, yeah, but he can call in an airstrike. So I don't in fact want a box. So infinite power, infinite money makes up for a lot of incompetence. You know, if you're running a bad business, but daddy can, is a counterfeiter, you can keep that business going for quite a long time, even if you're completely incompetence. So, yeah, I agree with the incompetence, but the incompetence plus power sort of balances out the equation as Mitch. Question for you, stuff. I'm curious. if you view that privacy would be an outcome of a free society or is it a prerequisite to actually

getting to a free society. So from my view, what I'm kind of thinking of is that your behavior changes when you're being observed. And that surveillance state, it prevents potentially even just the sharing of ideas, the coordination, going back to that ostracism, like I'm sure as you may have felt from time to time, but myself being an anarchist kind of come across as a little bit of the black sheep and it's hard to maybe find other fellow travelers and try to make some things happen to move us in the right direction. So privacy is something that you just have to pay for. That's all.

So if I go and try and get a job and they say, do you have some criminal history, let's say not me, I don't have a criminal history, but let's say Bob goes to get a job and they say, do you have any criminal history? And he says, I'm not going to tell you. Well, you just have to pay for that privacy. Whereas if he says confidently no and I got this letter from the police and all of that, then that's fine. So privacy, it's like your credit score, right?

If you say to somebody, I want to borrow money, but I'm not going to tell you my credit score, well, you've kept your privacy, but you're going to have to pay more points on your loan because they can't verify. So if you want to keep things private, that's totally fine. Absolutely fine. You're just going to have to pay for it because other people are going to have to make information on, they're going to have to make decisions on less information. And if other people have to make decisions on you based on less information, they have to charge you more of a premium because there's higher risk.

If I've paid every single one of my loans off and I'm 50 years old, well, you know, you can be probably pretty sure that I'm going to pay my loans off so you can give me a lower rate. If I refuse to tell you any of that for privacy, again, totally fine. You're just going to have to pay more. Finding that balance is a free market thing. If you give everyone every piece of information about you, then I just think that's a bit weird. It's like having a glass outhouse in the front yard. It's like, hey, man, I'm allowed to poop. It's like, yeah, but you know, a little privacy can go a long way with this kind of.

of stuff, especially you have Indian food, you fog up the whole mirror. So I would say that privacy is something that people can totally have. If they want to pay for it, that's great. If they don't want to pay for it and reveal more, that's just going to be each individual's preference, but we don't really have that as much because, again, we've got these big overarching political systems that dictate these things for everyone. If I drill in for just a second, if I make it a little bit more specific before you jump in there, Max, would the option to selectively reveal, particularly in terms of communication be necessary to move for free society? Well, sure.

And I really like Max's point about like the least amount of information possible. So rather than giving you a credit score, you could say, has this person, let's say somebody wants to borrow 10 grand, then you would ping some central server that said, would say, has this person ever failed to pay back a loan of 10 grand or less, as opposed to give me their entire credit history, including their house, their car, their sex robot from Korea or whatever it is, right? Sorry, she's not in the frame right now. Okay, good. So I think the least amount of information possible is really, really good for those kinds of decisions. You know, does this person have felonies on their history? Yes, no. All right, that's it. Now, yes, maybe you want more information.

Maybe it's something not related to the field. So I really like Max's point that you would want to get the least amount of information possible in order to make the best decision. More information would, well, I mean, it would be expensive in terms of processing and overhead and bandwidth and someone, although those things, of course, are coming down a lot in price. But I like Max's point, really, really good point about, you know, you just want to see just enough to make your rational decision, but not more. You know, I want a woman showing up with a low-cut top, not no top. I just want enough information to make my decision, not so much that I'm a little freaked out

and can't concentrate. Sorry, Max, I don't know if you're able to concentrate through that. want to just, anyway, that's the hard part, right? It's too funny. No,

and I agree that with a lot of what you said, stuff. And ultimately, in a private society, we will have such a plethora of different entrepreneurs and goods and services

that will be traded. And there will be absolutely services where the entrepreneur requires near full transparency of someone, right? I don't know.

You know, marriage, for example, is one of these things where you do, want to have a huge amount of trust and information shared. And it would be really weird to marry someone whom you don't know, their name, their age, where they were born, et cetera. So, and the thing.

Could be any number of verifications that could occur that you might need, including gynecological history. But anyway, go on. Exactly. And the thing, though, is that in a free society, if you have a very strong preference for privacy or anonymity more precisely, and you really do not. want to reveal this information at all, then most likely there will be an entrepreneur who provides you this service, given the price. And insurance might charge you a substantial premium to not

reveal you entirely, but they will probably still do it for the right amount of money. And if you think that their amount of money that they charge is too high, nobody can stop you. There's no monopoly for you entering the market of providing that service with the very high privacy guarantees and anonymity guarantees that you would like to see. And most likely, if you're, you're a lot of if you have that preference of strong privacy, then there will be enough other people to justify making that a good business. And again, this is the entrepreneurial speculation

of will there be enough clients to want to acquire this future product and will they pay you enough to justify the investment and give you a good return? So again, a free society is one where choices are everywhere. And that doesn't mean that the choices are always the same, and it doesn't mean that everyone has to choose the same aspect. But ultimately it does means that if you have a strong preference and a strong

choice, then in some way, shape or form, you will be able to satisfy that preference and get the things that you want in the manner that you want. Of course, not for free, but for a price that will be competitive in the market. Well, and like most things where there are no binary solutions like good and evil, they're simply tradeoffs. Giving up some of your data can save you time and money. Keeping onto your data will cost you some time and money. And so wherever we have these tradeoffs, you can't have a government because the government is a one-size-fits-all solution. And younger people are more likely to want to give up their data. They have less of it. And older people, and they need savings because they have less money. Older people have more

data and more money, so they probably want to hang on to their data and be willing to pay more for it. These things are going to change over the course of your life. If you're some single guy living downtown, you probably don't particularly care if people find out where you live. You know, if you're some crypto zillionaire living in the backwood somewhere with eight children, you'd probably be a little bit more concerned about that. So again, where it's just a matter of there are no solutions in a sense only tradeoffs, you need the free market to continually probe and alter things based upon people's localized preferences. Coin kite has been in the game for years creating hands down the best,

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I'm trying to tease out an idea, and I can't quite put my finger on it. So stuff, maybe you could help me out and I could be going a little bit of a stray. But the words universal and preferable both came up in there. And I'm playing around with this idea that it almost feels to me like,

I might be able to make a case that it's universally preferable that people would like the choice to reveal what they want to or not. And it does feel like an extension of property rights, but maybe you can expand a little bit more or maybe I'm going in the wrong direction. Well, your data, I think as Max pointed out,

your data is your property. And you can sell your property for profit if you want or you can keep it. If you don't want, right? I mean, people who retire are no longer selling their labor. They're consuming the savings. Well, unfortunately, they're consuming the futures of the next generation in our vampiric social security or retirement system.

But your data is your property. And you can have a garage sale. You can sell your house, your car. You can sell blood, I suppose, in the States. So your data is your property. You can sell it if you want. And if that's a value to you, fine. It's a free market transaction.

Both people end up better off. You don't have to sell it. You can hoard it if you want. So if people want to sell their data in return for some savings in time or money, hey, it's their data. They can sell it. Of course, you can't generally take it back, but that's sort of another issue. But, yeah, I mean, it's just a commodity like anything else. And you can keep it or you can sell it depending on your preferences.

I don't think you could really do that on behalf of your children as much. But then without politics, we wouldn't really face that nearly as much. So, yeah, I just view people's data as something that they've generated, that they own. they can hoard it, they can sell it, they can do whatever they want with it, because it's their property as long as they're not doing any force or fraud. Maxim Ciers, you have any thoughts on that? And you know, Nathan, I'm not sure if the choice really is a universalizable aspect. Because, I mean, one simple example, you go to a restaurant and you order your five-course meal. You don't want to have the choice of, okay, what is exactly in these courses, what are the ingredients, how are they prepared?

you outsource that choice to an expert and you just say, give me the plates as you think is best. And other people might want to choose la carte and exactly put their courses together. And so ultimately, the choice to not make a choice, okay, that's probably a very meta point. But like it also comes down to this quite philosophical question

of is it permissible to sell yourself into slavery? Can you give up your future choices for a problem? price. I mean, that's quite contested even in Austrian economic or libertarian theory. I think you're going to have to go a little more than buffet versus Alicard. Because you make that choice by which restaurant you choose, right? If you want to go to some restaurant that's Alicart, you go to that restaurant, and if you want to go to a restaurant. So you're not being enslaved in that way. But of course, you know, you can sell your data. And if the contracts, you read through the contracts or have AI summarize the contracts or whatever

you're going to do, you sell your data. I don't know how that's enslaving you. I mean, I'm certainly happy to, but if I sell, let's say some guy, you can have a regret, right? You sell your computer and then it turns out that there was some Bitcoin on it and you like chase the guy down the street. Oh my God. My wife sold that. She thought it was an old gaming console or something like that. So, I mean, you can have bias remorse and all of that, but I don't know that selling your data for savings in time and money is the same as enslavement,

but I'm certainly happy to hear the case. It just has to be something other than I get to pick my own food versus I pick a restaurant that picks the food for me. No, I wasn't insinuating this, that selling your data or, you know, trading under certain privacy conditions is equivalent to slavery. I'm basically just saying that there are, like, choices go deep and all the way down, and they will continue to exist. Just even the extreme case of can you sell yourself into slavery, right?

Can you make that ultimate final choice of giving up your future choices? Even that argument is quite contested. And so then the gradient that comes before naturally is as well, where there just are different preferences that will be played out at full. And those preference change for yourself across time and across scenarios. And so a little bit similar to time. You may regret it in the future, right? Selling your data when you're 20, you might regret it when you're 40. Absolutely.

Yep. Yep. But ultimately humans are. You make 50 bucks a month do an only fan now, which I can only dream off with my only fans account. Actually, people just pay me to put clothes on. But, yeah, so you might regret things down the road. Now, the good news, of course, is in a free society, you will have companies that want to sell you privacy.

And what are they going to do? Well, they're going to advertise and inform you like crazy of all the dangers of selling your data when you're 20. And they say, oh, down the road, it's going to cause all these problems. And there'll be all of this information. They'll sponsor podcasts and do ads and buy ad space and all of that. So the great thing with the free market, is that all of the dangers of every decision are all outlined for you by the people who want you

to not make that decision because they're going to profit or there's some ideological reason or whatever. So the most informed decision, I think, is the best. Of course, with the government and with what's going on right now, we really don't have much of an informed decision about anything because I assume they're hoovering everything up at the back end. So it could be, of course, that you're going to regret things, but there'll be people blowing trumpets in your ear.

Danger, danger, Daniel, Will Robinson. You can't do this. Look at this guy. He's head exploded because he sold his data when he was 20. And with regards to the selling himself into slavery, I mean, I think it's interesting, I think it's an interesting theoretical. But it doesn't really matter what you do.

It matters what society will enforce. I can't imagine any rational or free society would go to the wall to enforce a slave contract. So if you can't ever enforce it and nobody would want to bother enforcing it. And if some company that enforced contracts did enforce a slave contract, every one of their competitors would seize upon that and say they're bringing back the slave trade and they're violent and people would just boycott them. And so I don't think you'd ever enforce that kind of contract in any rational society. I mean, slavery, of course, was just a big giant government program.

I mean, it was taking money from people who didn't own slaves and giving it to the 5% of people who did own slaves. And in fact, people in the South in America were forced to be slave catchers. And so it was a giant government program. I'm not too concerned about slavery in the free money. market because nobody would want to enforce that and anyone who tried would just get ostracized and any business that tried would be boycotted into bankruptcy. And I mean, of course, right now, even the tax rates that are right now or exceed how much

slaves were taxed in the past. So we're not at all in a free society. And it does get enforced. Tax laws are extremely heavily enforced and a huge part of society agrees with them. And what snitch you out if they know that you're somehow not paying your fair share in heavy quotes. Yeah, because everyone says, well, why do you know, why don't you just change countries? It's like, have you ever heard of an exit tax? You've basically got to buy your freedom for to the tune of staggering amounts of money

just to be given permission to leave this. It's free-range serfdom these days. Like, they don't want to choose your job and force you to work something because that doesn't make you very productive because you get kind of depressed. So it's just free-range serfdom. Like, you get to choose your own job.

They'll just take the fruits of it. And then, of course, they use the fruits of that as collateral in order to enslave your children. It's, you know, at least at least a slave could buy his way to freedom. You can't really do that in the modern world because your children are already enslaved by the time they drop from the womb. Hey, I said it wasn't blackbilled, but there's just a little one. No one to keep in your cheek for later.

I was going to say this is the one, yes, a little bit of that. Sorry, the thing that I can't get out of my mind is I did not expect to have a conversation about the beauty and power of ads to direct us to the choices that we actually want to make. I'm sorry, I just absolutely love that. Max, did you have any thoughts or response to what Stefan just said? And then if not, I do want to, I want to take a quick pivot because I see an opportunity here with you both. I mean, it's kind of boring to have a podcast with three anarcho-capitalists, right?

We just agree on everything. But maybe just to also support his point on ads, because advertisement is a totally legit business. You have a product. you want to sell it and delivering the attention of the customer and bringing to his light the information that the product exists and how it works and what the conditions are, which is ultimately what advertisement is, is a fundamental part of free society. And we will continue to see advertisements in the future, probably indefinitely, right? I mean, just look at these

hats, right? I mean, that's why I do the hat. I don't care about the ball, but it's nice for the hat. And sorry, Max, I'll just interrupt briefly. I mean, my the background. I was a director of marketing at a top level software company for a while. So marketing is trying not to waste people's time by giving them helpful information so you don't market the wrong thing to the wrong people. So it is very helpful. People need information about products that make their life better. You just don't want to waste their time selling croon juice to an eight-year-old. Sorry, go ahead. That's absolutely true. And I guess the Cypherpunk answer or take on this question then is, can we provide a high-quality targeted advertisement service?

without having to surveil the user fully and getting all the raw data out of which we can gleam his preferences. To be honest, I'm not aware of like a very privacy preserving advertisement algorithm. I'm sure it can exist. It's probably actually going to be a fantastic business model if someone figures this out. I mean, there's a lot of like self-hosted and privacy respecting, you know, website statistics. Like how many user visited? Where did they click? How long did they stay on these pages? you can get this type of information without having to explicitly de-anonymize any specific user.

There's a lot of differential privacy algorithms where you don't get true information from any one user because they all have a little bit of randomness. But in aggregate, they do reveal correct and trend lines, etc. So there's a little bit of this already. And I would definitely see that in the future this continues to be used, advertisement in general. and I would hope as a cypherpun that we will find more privacy preserving advertisement systems that still provide you with that matchmaking of the right customer to the right product.

No, 100%. I have to say, by the way, I absolutely love, how do you phrase this, I really look forward to a free society because the amount of ideas and stuff that we're going to build out of is just absolutely incredible. People start thinking and trying to solve these problems. You just get amazing, incredible workative entrepreneurs. But I'm going to take a weird little right turn, not too weird, but a little bit. We talked a lot about data.

and there's actually one aspect of even just like Mississippi and Rothbardian economics and property rights that I still struggle with. So Max, I'll start with you and then Steph, I want to get your response to it as well. Intellectual property, I still can't necessarily figure that one out if you can actually have property rights over more or less ideas or words.

Yeah, this is a topic that I love. And ultimately, the TLDR is I very much support Stefan Kinsella's argument on this. that property rights are a solution to a problem. The problem is that we have a conflict over how to allocate scarce resources. So humans act, which means we have problems and we have things around us, which we can apply so that we solve our problems. But the problem is that the things, the goods, are scarce, meaning we can only solve one

problem at a time with this one specific resource. So if I use a piece of wood to build a debt. I cannot use that same piece of woods to build a house. So there's scarcity for your own goods on how you apply them. But then, of course, that extends to others. If I eat the steak, then Steph cannot eat the steak. And so that is a conflict, right? Who gets to use those resources?

And there is a couple solution to this problem. Nobody owns anything, which means we all starve. That's communism for you. Then the bureaucrats get to decide what you get to use. That's our current state architecture ultimately. And then ultimately, we have the homesteading principles, right? If you've made it, it's yours, and you can consume it, you can store it, you can gift it, you can sell it. Those are your options ultimately.

And whoever created the good has the right to decide on how it gets allocated. So how does this relate to ideas? And the key concept here is that ideas are non-rivalrous. They are non-scarce. The words that I speak to you right now, I don't just give them up as I would if I give you the stake. I still retain the exact pattern of information that I'm speaking and I can use it later. And we can copy it.

And now I don't know how many millions of people are listening to this show, hopefully. And they all get this information and there is no conflict because anyone who would like to use this information in their actions can do so without diminishing or taking them away from anyone else. And so this means that with ideas, the beautiful gift of God is that we don't have scarcity, right? We can use this information as much as we would like whenever we would like. Information that was discovered a thousand years ago can still be used today. And that's a miracle. That's incredible. And we should leverage that and be thankful for it.

But what this idea of intellectual property right does is it takes this beautiful abundance and it shoves it back into scarcity, where all of a sudden we reintroduce right. If you write the same words on a piece of paper, then you've stolen my ideas and now I get to put you in jail. That's ridiculous. Not just does it put back this beautiful abundance of non-scarce information into that box of scarcity. In addition, it violates the other person's scarce property rights. If I hit you on the head because you took your paper and your pen and your ink to write these patterns on the page, and I tell you that's copyright infringement,

then you haven't violated my property because ideas are non-scarce, property is not necessary. But on the contrary, I'm stealing your paper, your pen, your ink, and I tell you how you have to apply your own scarce resources in order to be just. And so intellectual property rights is by definition theft. It steals the actual scarce property rights of other people. and on top of that, it limits the beautiful abundance that we have with ideas.

So it's complete nonsense. Well, okay. Okay. I'm finally going to disagree. It could be a good debate here. Yeah, it could be a good debate here. Let's do it. So first of all, look, if something's copyrighted and I write it down on my piece of paper,

I'm not going to jail. That's not going to happen, right? I mean, nobody cares if I go to a movie and I write down, a line of dialogue or a bunch of dialogue and then take it home and put it in my drawer. So nobody's controlling what anybody else does with their, you know, you can go and sing a song at home and the songwriter doesn't come in, Douglas Fairbank style through the window, tackle you and then take out your spleen as payment, right? That's just not how things work.

The problem is, and I'm not saying there's an easy solution, and maybe yours is fine, and I do understand the arguments from Stefan Kinsella, And Jeff Tucker also makes good arguments, particularly around the rise of classical music. The classical music flourished in a place without copyright because nobody was terrified of adapting and moving on other people's. But here's the problem. And I say this as an annoying guy who spent time in the art world. I was an actor, playwright, an author, and so on. And so the problem is when you have any field where 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people, you have an incentive problem.

So in the arts, as in sports and so on, the vast majority of the money goes to a tiny percentage of the people. It's the ultimate praetors principle. Like if you're looking at waiters, I mean, there are waiters who might make, you know, double the other person's waiter money or whatever, right? But it's not like most waiters are starving and a few waiters get $10 million a year. So if you look at acting, the vast majority of the money goes to a tiny percentage of the people. Same thing with music and so on. So when you have lopsided incentives, this way, if artists can't be assured of some reasonable recompense for the risks that they're taking, so it's not just the work, it's the risk. The higher the risk, the higher the reward needs

to be. If you take away people's payments, the incentive, then it's basically saying, play the lottery, but there's no big prize. Well, if there's no big price, nobody's going to play the lottery. So you end up without culture unless people have some way of making their money back from the work that they're doing. So let me ask you this, Max. Let's say that I write a great novel and I put it out there and there's no intellectual property and then nobody has to pay me for the movie adaptation. Is that right? Yeah. Correct. Okay. So I just, and anybody can copy it and make it cheaper. Anybody can record the audiobook. Anybody can put it online on a PDF. So all of the work that I've put in, it takes about two years to write a book and all of that work that I've put in,

and it takes 20 years until you become good at it, so tens of thousands of hours, all of that work, how is the author paid? And again, I'm just asking, and I'm sure there's good answers, but I've never had a chance to cross-examine someone on this. So how am I as an author paid if anybody can copy and adapt and read and repurpose my book? I mean, ultimately, and you know this, right, any way that you can consensually get someone else's money is totally legit. Right. So it could be that you sell, you know, the access to the PDF on your website, for example. It can be that you sell access to the physical book and so on.

It can be pure donations. Other people can give it away for free. Yeah. Right? Yes. So how am I going to get paid? How am I going to compete with free? because people want to support you and they want to see future work.

I mean, I think Patreon, you know, the recurring payment subscription for many artists is the perfect example of that, right? And patronage, literally, not just the brand name, is how art was financed forever, right? People want to see beautiful things, including non-scarce things like new songs being created. And so they have an incentive to pay those who have that creative spark to create new ideas. Obviously, you can create new ideas and come up with something that's delightful and beautiful. And that in it of itself is, to some extent, the scarce aspect because it's your labor. If you focus on something else, then you don't write the book. So that is an aspect that absolutely continues to be paid for.

But ultimately... Hang on, hang on. But that's not how other professions work. So an accountant doesn't just do free accounting and then set up a Patreon and hope that people like his account. He doesn't just do free accounting and then take a donation from his boss afterwards. And also, I mean, it's one thing to talk about writing a book. But accounting is labor. I mean, what about a hundred million dollar movie?

Can you Patreon your way to a hundred million dollar movie? Accounting just to highlight, it's accounting is not an idea. Accounting is labor, right? You need to apply your knowledge to the specific books of one specific company. And if you do that, you can't do that with someone else. So regular salary makes absolute sense. And then to the question of can you make a $100 million movie without stealing from others, without enforcing IP, well, maybe $100 million is a misallocation of capital.

Maybe we should not spend so much money on entertainment. Maybe $10 million, maybe $1 million is enough. And if you need to sustain your business by stealing from others, by harming them when they reproduce ideas ultimately, then maybe it's not the right business to say. And then in a free market, that business would not be satisfied ultimately. I would be fine with that. Well, look, if people want to give away their work for free, obviously that's my business model. I take my business model from the famous Harvard MBA graduate Socrates, who just went

to talk to people about philosophy and said, hey, maybe you could buy me a lunch. So I've never done ads. I don't do product placements and give away almost all my books for free. Steph, if I wanted to donate, where would I go? Free domain.com slash donate. Okay, cool. Okay. Okay.

So I have no problem with that. However, Max, I'm sure that you're fine with contract. So if I write a book and release it saying I do not give anyone permission to copy this book, this book is released with no permission, it's not released creative comments. If you buy this book, you agree that you're not going to copy it. Do you accept that that is a valid contract? I absolutely do accept it as a valid contract, but if you break it, you did not steal the ideas, you stole the money.

And I think that's a very, very crucial difference because it is a contingental payment, a contract that depends on its validity if both parties perform as a specified in the contract. And if I go ahead and tell your company secrets, if I'm your accountant and I signed a contract that I will not publish your cash flow, the full version of it,

and you pay me in this contract, and I turn around and publish it, then I've stolen your money, right? Because you've given me something under the condition of a certain way of action. So this doesn't mean that the ideas are scarce or our property. It just means that, again, I stole your actual property. And I think that it's really crucial. And I think it's true that you cannot steal ideas, right?

If as soon as we allow this narrative to come in, praxeology doesn't make sense anymore, right? Theft is strictly limited to scarce properties. and many bad things that are related to ideas and how they get distributed, ultimately are bad because they violate property, not because they steal the ideas. Well, but copyright in general has to do with particular manifestations of complex topics. So you can't copyright a note, be flat, you can't copyright a note,

you can't copyright the word the, right? you can't copyright a plot as a whole. You know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. You can't copyright any of that. And again, I'm not an expert on copyright law, but you can't copyright, for instance, Christopher Nolan's got this appalling race-swalling Odysseus. Is it coming out or whatever it's going to be?

And he can't copyright that story, but he can copyright his instantiation or his telling of that story. So he's not copyrighting ideas. He's copywriting a particular manifestation, which he needs to do. And again, we can argue with the business proposition or business value of all of this, but he needs to be able to raise however much money, $100 million, $200 million. Because, you know, you need to make the movie. You need to, you know, you make a $50 million movie.

You need to spend $50 million on advertising it. And then half the money has to go to the theater. So you actually have to make $200 million. plus before you see a penny back. So what again, we can argue about the pluses minus that this, a lot of this has to do with government control of unions, really driving up the price of movies and so on. But he's not able to copyright a general story or an idea. He's only able to copyright a specific manifestation of that idea that he needs to have a return on investment on in order to make it worthwhile. In other words, if he couldn't get some guarantee of copyright protection for

the movie, the movie will not be made. And you have a problem with funding high risk, high reward ventures. And, you know, most garbage men make about the same. And most nurses make, you know, more or less the same. But artists and sports position, musicians and so on, writers, oh, it's crazy. The Prater principle is nuts in that, you know, in some places, 99% of the money goes to like 1% of the people. But you still need people. But you still need people. to go into that field. And the only way, I think that people are going to go into that field is if they are going to get some massive reward at the other end, or at least potentially, get some massive reward at the other end. And if we can't give them the massive reward, I think you're going to end up

with a much less cultural society. And, you know, again, if we are looking at it not as a government law, but as a, and of course, even in a government law, you can release things, creative comments, and then you can't take copyright action against people as far as they understand it. But it's a contract that says, look, if you buy my book, you can't copy it. And if some, if there is a copy out there, it's illegitimate by definition because it's a contract violation. So we can take that down. And again, nobody's going to get thrown in jail as far as I understand it. Copyright stuff. You know, if there are contract disputes, or sorry, if there are copyright disputes as there was over that song, it'll come back to me, but it was an old Marvin Gaye song that was

redone by Alan Thick and all of that. And they had the big copyright thing, then it just ends up being a share of the revenues. Or I think Stuart Copeland and the guitarist, Andy Summers, are suing Sting because they said they did the intro to every breath you take. So they're trying to get money back from nobody's going to jail. It's just a matter of getting a revenue stream, if that makes sense.

Well, I mean, if you would not pay the fine, you would absolutely go to jail, right? That's the ultimate end point of any. government action is if you disobey, you will sooner ultimately be killed, right? If you refuse to go to the jail, they will apply deadly force up until that point. You know, of course, in the extreme, and that doesn't often happen. And then, you know, to your point of, okay, if I sell you the book under the condition that you cannot create copies of that book, again, if I would violate that, I didn't steal the ideas, I stole your money. And then, however, if now I sell the, I sell

the book to the next person, right, and he does not agree to the, yeah, to this copyright, then is that person bound by a contract that he's never signed? So it would have to be a quite substantial aspect that even allows me not to resell the book under the condition that, or without continuing the obligation that the next person is not allowed to sell the book, right? But we have that already. Like, I mean, if I sell stolen property, then the person who gets a stolen property doesn't have the right to that property. It still has to go back to its original owner.

So if you simply include in the contract, this book is not for resale or if somebody buys this book, they're bound by the same contract. And by buying the book, they accept that. I mean, you just, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, but you would word it such that the person would be covered by the new contract and so on. I mean. But then let's say I uploaded to the internet, right? And sure, I would be the bad guy. I would have broken the contract, but now 8 billion people have access to that information, which never did it.

So can they just re-upload it properly? Well, I mean, if you break a contract and you go against that contract, you'd be liable for damages. Did they break it? I'm sorry? So you sell me the book, right? I agree that if I publish it or reprint it, that I will violate the contract, pay you $100,000, whatever, right? Now I go upload it to the internet. you clearly have a claim against me for $100,000,

but what about the next guy who downloaded off the internet? Does he owe you $100,000 too? Well, I think that I would go after you for more than $100,000 because I would look at the revenue that you've cost me by giving away the book that I worked on 10 years away for free, which goes against the contract, and it would be like anything that you have broken a contract that has cost me a million dollars.

I would go after the value of the contract. So with that I agree, right? I broke the contract that's bad. But the other person who just by happens chance receives this PDF and sends it to a friend or uploads it to the internet again. He's never agreed with you on any such contract. So is he still obligated in your mind

to be pursued for punishment? No, but he's the receiver of stolen goods. So the receiver of stolen goods is still bound by the original property rights, even though they haven't signed any contract, even though they may have bought the property with the belief that it was legally acquired and owned. They didn't buy it at all. If you are in received a stolen property, you're still liable.

Yeah. We found something to disagree on. That's great. No, no, I don't think we're disagreeing at all. I don't think we're disagreeing at all. We are saying that the free market should deal with it. Yeah, the free market has a problem in that when you have a high risk, high reward situation like culture and the arts and sports. If you take away the high reward, you get much lower productivity.

If you maintain the higher reward, we don't want to be throwing people in jail for reading a PDF they didn't know was illegal. Maybe somebody stripped the contract off it or something like that. Who knows, right? So the free market needs to solve this. I don't think that banning any kind of copyright on a material that would require a centralized state. The free market will work this stuff out. And maybe you're right, Max. Maybe the way to do it all is saying, look, this copyright stuff is too complicated.

It doesn't work. It's too far reaching. And what if somebody just alters the story by 20% or something like that? Right. So I get all of that that the free market may look at copyright and say, it's just not worth it. And that's what I've done. I mean, I wouldn't want to go after people for, I'm here to share philosophy. I want to go after people for sharing philosophy.

So you could be entirely right. I don't think it's a foundationally moral issue. I think it's a contractual issue. And if people want to sell their stuff on the condition that it's not copied, or if people want to sell their stuff and say, look, if there's going to be a movie made from this book, it's got to come through me because I'm the one who spent 10 years writing it. And if there's going to be a move made from the book, I want it to come through me, I think that's fine.

I think that's perfectly valid. And if people want to do that, again, how you enforce that. And again, that's a matter for the free market. And who knows what technology will be around by the time the free market. society comes around in a generation or two. But I don't view it as something like, you know, raid theft, assault and murder, which are all just evil no matter what. I think it is a contractual issue. If people want to release their work with conditions, I think they can. And if people don't want to release their work with conditions, I think they can. And how that gets implemented with the

cascading effects, obviously, who knows, right? The best minds on the planet will try and solve that. And they may find that it's unsolvable. But I don't view it as a foundational moral issue. I don't view it as, I think it's a rhetorical flair that poisons the well a little to say, but people are just stealing. You know, it's like, well, because stealing is kind of a black and white moral issue. The products of my brain and how I profit from them, you know, if you take away, there's a kind of socialistic thing. I don't want to insult you because I know you're not a socialist, but there's a kind of, no, it's a kind of socialistic thing here, which is I want the reward of other people's labor without having to pay for it. It's like a welfare state for people consuming art. And it's the same thing that kind of happens with advertising.

You know, people get really annoyed at advertising, not you guys, but people get annoyed at advertising because they're lazy and cheap. And they say, well, I just want this show for free. And it's like, well, then pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, then you've got to watch ads for the most part, right? And so, you know, people just want stuff for free. I personally would not want to read a book from a hungry writer without giving them some financial consideration if that was reasonable and possible.

But of course, we've already seen what happened to the music industry when Napster came out that a lot of people just want to grab stuff. And, you know, I get it. You know, the Beatles, do they need more money? You know, probably not. Two of them are gone and so on. The other two are in their 80s. So I don't have, obviously, any big answer. I don't think it's a black and white moral issue like rape, theft, assault, and murder.

I think it's a contractual issue, and it may be enforceable. It may be not. Inforcible. Who knows? But I don't know. For me, it's just not in the category of theft. Do you want to just interject there for a second because I have a bit, I have an idea. And perhaps I'm just naive and a little bit too optimistic too.

But at least my outlook, it was wonderful listening to you guys go back and forth there is like, like, Steph, if I were to say to you in a free society, would you anticipate there'd be a lot of like drug use and periscuous behavior if we have peaceful parenting and sound money and everyone's living free? Right. And so at least my hope is even on an edge case kind of as complicated as this one that I suspect under ideal conditions that people, want to see beauty in the world. And for that reason, it probably would just be a social norm that we don't do that. It wouldn't even necessarily be under contract or... Sorry, you mean don't copy and paste people's work everywhere?

Exactly. It's that we'd want to see a return to beauty and value that, that we kind of almost voluntarily go like, no, you're not going to take that and make a movie out of it. It was his. Don't be a dick. Or we're going to socially ostracize you because we think it's bad behavior. It doesn't... Even if it doesn't, if we came down to a fundamental decision that it didn't violate property

rights in the same way that drug use doesn't necessarily violate property rights. We might collectively kind of go like, yeah, but we're not necessarily a big fan of this. Or you've got mind-reading drones that charge you by the word you read. I'm just kidding. One Satoshi per word and it follows your eye tracking. Back to the privacy thing. No, it could be something as simple as, you know, you wave at the screen and, you know, a 50 cents gets deposited into the author's account.

Like, it could be that easy and that simple because Lord knows we've got this crazy overhead with regards to publishing or printing or making more. movies and so on. So the authors get like a couple of pennies sometimes per book. I think all that the artists want the government to run the streaming stuff and now the streaming stuff is like it's an absolute pittance for people as a whole. So yeah, if we make the ideal technology to me would be that just make it as easy as possible to give the author 50 cents because there's probably all they're going to get anyway. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Go for it, Max. I was going to say speaking of technology in that sort of sense, I'd love to get, before he round out the comment,

conversation, Max, we hit on a ton of things here. Even the idea of streaming, Sats, you might have some thoughts or comments on as well, too. I wanted to make sure they at least include some of the privacy tech that you're working on and what people should be looking at and considering going forward. Just to that previous point, I do think that technology is ultimately the solution to this, right? Because it is important that creators get paid. I think it's even more important that they get paid without theft. And we might have to clarify again, like what the theft of, what?

property means if we enforce IP. But I think IP was started to, yeah, because of a lack of technical solutions. And if we do have better technological solutions, then this is no longer that much of an issue and will naturally just go away, I think. And so streaming stats is one obvious thing. I do think you're probably on the value for value system. So people are probably streaming stats for every minute that we were speaking. And so this is one of the numerous ways that it can be done, right? I think what's so important is to decrease the both mental and actual transaction costs of payments.

If we can decrease that to a substantial level, or not a substantial, to a minuscule level, then we have the ability to transfer money much better where even a fraction of a SAT gets sent by everyone who's listening and it still sums up to something. And the reason why that never worked in the past this because it was too expensive, right? Moving money. But if we can engineer

the moving of money, then we can do exactly what Stefan says, right? Everyone just drains a little bit of his money, nothing that they would notice or be, you know, bothered by, and ultimately it will pay for a huge amount of people. And I think that's,

to turn this a bit to your question on, you know, the tech that I'm working on, and that's exactly what we did with wasabi wallet. Wasabi wallet from the first day, both the wallet as well as the server was free in open source, MIT license. If you would have copied one for one our code, change the logo to mustard wallet, and do your thing, we couldn't have done anything and we didn't want to do anything because it's not our code, right? This is just code that works. It's useful

and you can use it. We also added that if you use the software as we publish it, then you're going to pay 0.3% of your wallet balance to us ultimately. That's the gist of it, technically. That's the gist of technically a bit different, but ultimately nobody cares about 0.3%. Nobody actually complained about this seriously. And the few people who complained were still using it because they saved way more money than the 0.3% that they spent. Because any other privacy technique was way more risky and more expensive in terms of block space usage.

And again, the amount of money that you can save with privacy is crazy. So it wasn't an obvious win-win-win situation for everyone here. And so out of this, we could pay like 40. engineers to work on the wallet from the meager 0.3%. And nobody ever successfully copied our thing. So I was never that afraid that anyone comes and you know, or like it might have been an

issue if someone comes, takes the code, puts it out there, earns revenue and instead of putting their revenue into code as we put like 90% our revenue to engineers, they would put 99% on marketing. And and that would maybe have resulted in a much better, much more successful business than ours, because obviously marketing is important.

And if your idea and your product doesn't get to users, then you will not have users or customers. But that never happened. And so this just combines that. I think this fear of, I will lose out if other people use my ideas in quotes, or not using quotes, yeah. If they use my ideas, I will somehow lose out.

It's such a common fear. And in my lived experience, and that's obviously very limited, I've never really got any reason to justify that whatsoever. Like, you know, I've put out my book, the first editions of it, for free online as a PDF. You know, public comments, like public license or, what's it called? Public domain. And I encourage people to print it. You know, please, this is cool ideas. I want more people to read it.

If you print it and sell it, that's great. Nobody did. Right. And so now three editions later, it's going to be me who's going to send the things to the printer because I care about these ideas the most. And everyone else doesn't really that much. So I don't think that we will have an issue of not enough ideas being produced if we don't have things like IP. We see that with open source software. Open source software is the most stellar declaration that IP is nonsense and not necessary and harmful in fact because we see the beautiful things that can be done with free and open source software.

The entire world runs on free and open source software. Like Microsoft is, you know, withering. Windows is barely used anymore. More and more people are switching away from it because it sucks. And so having better things. will ultimately come from free people. And free people make better choices than people who constantly get stolen from and constantly steal from others. So I'm extremely bullish on this on the long run.

The tech is here. I would also say, Max, that as one or entrepreneur to another, what you should probably be doing in my mind, given that you are streaming from a forest using bandwidth, not seen since 1890, is you should sell your services as a time traveler. Because I assume that you've just gone back in time to when data was the Pony Express is delivering your bits to some shack where it's being beamed off the moon into the future. So I haven't seen this kind of bandwidth since dial-up modem time.

And I think it's actually very impressive that you're able to travel through time like that. It's very impressive. Yeah, yeah. I should sell it and give price predictions. Would get rich. It goes up, guys. It goes up. Bitcoin.

I'm back to mine in the first Bitcoin. Oh, my God. gentlemen, that was absolutely beautiful, wonderful. I love the back and forth. We got into there on intellectual property. Stefan, where can everybody go to follow you, find your work, support your work? Freedom.com and freedomain.com slash donate. I really appreciate everyone's support.

It's all ad-free all the time, and I'm a great voice to fall asleep to you. Max, where can everybody go to check out your work, sir? First of all, more important. Thanks, Stefan, for doing this. I really enjoyed our conversation. This was great. Thanks, thanks, Nathan, for putting us together finally. Yeah, my side is towards liberty.com.

Basically just links to all of my Noster posts. Check out Noster. It's really cool stuff. And as I mentioned, I'm writing the book on the Proxiology of Privacy. So I drew a lot from what I was saying in this session is basically in that book. So if you want to read the first or second edition, you can get the PDFs already. The third edition is about to come out in like a couple weeks. And that will also be in print.

If you want to print them and sell them, please do. If you want to make a movie, hell yes. I would love to see it. And no, keep building awesome stuff. If you want to have secure encrypted messaging, check out white noise. We've already spoke about that, Nathan, last time on the show. But that's a cool one. If you want to stay up to date on Noster, check out Nostercompass.org.

It's a weekly newsletter on all the technical happenings of like 750 Noster projects every week. Keeps me quite informed just writing this. and keep building awesome stuff. Subscribe to the Sovereign session if that's already out there. It is. If you enjoy this episode of Max and Steph, share it with somebody you know

and check out the previous episode with Duneberg and James Lavish or the recent live stream.