BTC Sessions - STOP Saying Money Must Be Stable: Bitcoin Reveals Lies | Nathan vs Knut Svanholm

Starting point is 00:00:00 Bitcoin is this fantastic set of truth goggles that you can put on and see the world for what it really is. The whole notion of money having a stable value over time is the great lie. It is the great illusion. A lower time preference is all of a sudden worth it. And the day that the nodes aren't in charge anymore is the day Bitcoin dies. I do believe that Bitcoin will win these battles. Bitcoin is not just about saving it a better money. It's a middle finger to the corrupt system. and by using it, our actions speak louder than words. Here's the thing. What if everything you knew about its power was only half the story?

Starting point is 00:00:33 What if the real revolution wasn't just digital scarcity, but the way it rewires our brains to think about value, freedom, and who's really in charge? Today I'm joined by Canood's Fondholm, Bitcoin philosopher and prolific author of books such as Everything Divided by 21 million in Praxeology. I'm playing devil's advocate, hitting Canoeut with some hard questions and classic fud. Is Bitcoin's value just some collective hallucination? Can it actually survive a full-on government crackdown? and of course in a Bitcoin future, who will build the roads?

Starting point is 00:01:00 Knew is here to unpack everything and help you navigate those all too familiar conversations with friends still plugged into the Fiat matrix. Going beyond Bitcoin to give you the skills and insights you need to escape the Fiat matrix, this is Mentor Sessions. Awesome. Well, Knoot, thank you so much for joining me today. You know, I was thinking that I really haven't gotten to a good row in a long time as well, too, so I figured maybe we could have a little bit of fun going back and forth.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Maybe I'll play devil's advocate on some of the ideas from Praxiology and some of the, maybe the big fud around. round Bitcoin. I mean, we could sit here all day doing bits versus sats, but the answer is obviously sat. So there's no point there. And you only need look at the success of like in the popularity of corn in the late 90s to know that a name doesn't matter. Like you can just be whatever it needs to be and people will adopt it. So there's my. Oh, you mean the band corn. Yeah, exactly. The fact that they were as big as they were. The vegetable corn also had a bit of a peak in the 90s. So to get into it, I kind of wanted to just maybe, you know, try and try and play devil's advocate, challenge you a little bit

Starting point is 00:02:04 on a few things. And we'll kind of see where it goes from there. So even just to kick things off, I mean, you know, Keneyad, I was thinking about this. And isn't it, isn't it true that, you know, Bitcoin's value is just a shared hallucination between people, right? This is a greater fool's thing. That there's, there's nothing intrinsic, right? There's nothing anchoring the price. No, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Value is subjective and a Bitcoin is worth different things to different people. It has different use cases to different people. And this is true for not only Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:02:38 but for every good and service out there. Prices do not measure value. They signal value. So a monetary unit can never be a ruler. But it is a tool for signaling how much you appreciate something or how much you will accept for giving something up or so on and so forth. So a big misconception about money in general is we think that it's an objective unit of measure. Like even the term unit of account sort of alludes to that.

Starting point is 00:03:15 I don't really like the term. I don't like the term store of value either. We can go into that later. But what money really does is signal value, not measure it. That's very interesting. Okay, well, what issues do you have with store of value? Because, I mean, you could clearly see that Bitcoin's been an amazing store of value, but maybe that's not the case. I prefer the term meeting when we exchange over time to a store of value.

Starting point is 00:03:42 And the reason for that is that store of value, first of all, valuations are subjective and dynamic. So each person evaluates everything in their life. They make one decision over another and prioritize one thing over another all the time. So value is not something you really can store because you may value the thing differently at a later date. Also, it is subjective and other people may value it differently. So the price you see, the ticker price you see on the screen, that's just what the latest Bitcoin. sell and the latest Bitcoin purchase was made for in dollar terms. It is not a constant of nature or anything like that.

Starting point is 00:04:36 And also, the term store of value creates this false dichotomy between medium exchange over time and space. I think a much clearer way of seeing this is that you need both. like a money cannot be just a medium exchange over time and it cannot not just be a medium exchange over space. So gold, for instance, was a very good medium of exchange over time because it didn't change and it was costly to produce more gold, therefore had a high stock to flow ratio, meaning that it was good at keeping its perceived value over time. In other words, it was a good medium exchange over time. Paper money or fiat money and even more so digital money in euros and dollars in bank accounts are a very good medium of exchange over space.

Starting point is 00:05:36 But they lack the time aspect since they can be diluted at will by bankers and central bankers, around the world who can manipulate its value down by printing more of it. And this is not possible with Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is the first time that we have something that can be used as a medium exchange over time and space making it finally a good form of money, which is arguably something that humanity never had before. Okay, okay, but let me just back up for one second here. So you said that there were other possible, like people can value Bitcoin different.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Would it be fair to categorize that in the ways, because there's no intrinsic value, apparently, there's no intrinsic value to Bitcoin, are all the ways that it's being, we'll say, valued subjectively, are all those within the realm of a monetary medium, or is there other use cases for Bitcoin that I'm not thinking of? No, no. Introducing other use cases is very dangerous because just as real estate becomes a worse form of housing for people, when it's used as a medium exchange over time, that is a store of value, then it's use case as housing goes down. So if right now in all the rich areas of the world, the billionaires own all the beachfront property and regular people can't afford it anymore. And the reason for that is that the asset holds its value better through time, or at least that the billion. perceives it will. In reality, a house, a building is not a producer good, it's a consumer

Starting point is 00:07:21 good. It deteriorates over time and should actually lose its value. And if you measure the world through Bitcoin, or if you view the world through the Bitcoin lens, just as I said before, you can't measure value. But if you see it through a Bitcoin lens, you can actually see that it is losing value. A house that costs 400 Bitcoin's five years. ago is around five bitcoins today. So like it is losing value. It's just that you're using the wrong denominator. And if money has other use cases than money, for instance, if you clog the time chain with JPECs and stupid idiotic tokens that have nothing to do with the internal valuation system of the network, then it becomes a worse medium exchange. Just as the house becomes a worth

Starting point is 00:08:12 habitat for human beings if you use it for the monetary use case, which is hold it over a long time and use it as an asset, basically. So these are two sides of the same coin, pun intended. And therefore, I think the debates around this would be much simpler if we just drop the term store value altogether. But this is my personal opinion. It's a very interesting opinion, but okay, okay, okay. So, but let me just, yeah, I got to get this right. If Bitcoin is a medium of exchange and there's no intrinsic value, so it's purely just a monetary, uh, subjective value that we're ascribing to it, wouldn't that mean because of it's,

Starting point is 00:08:56 you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a good money. If it's only a money and has no other value. Yeah, that, that is a good question. Um, I would say that, uh, the, the whole, the whole notion of money having a quote unquote stable value over time is the great lie. It is the great illusion. The prices are not supposed to be stable. Prices ought to go down.

Starting point is 00:09:29 And so let me ask you this. If you practice doing something or if any human being practices doing something, do they usually get better or worse at the thing they're practicing? You just pin me down on that one. They tend to get better unless they're training in a terrible way. So why aren't all prices going down forever? Well, the reason that they're not going down forever is because we need to have stable prices. Because if we didn't have stable prices, our producers would not be able to project into the future, their future revenue and cost.

Starting point is 00:10:05 No, that's simply not true. They still would be able to do that because they could still predict the future. What I'm saying is that all tools and technologies are inherently deflationary. Everything on the free market trends towards its marginal cost of production, meaning that all prices do go down forever. And Bitcoin is the first time we've had. a tool to actually see that happening because we never measured anything. Like, if we measured the world in Mona Lisa's, we would see it too. But to me, that's first and foremost with Bitcoin is this fantastic set of truth goggles

Starting point is 00:10:55 that you can put on and see the world for what it really is. Very interesting. Very interesting. Well, you know, I was reading through some just brilliant, brilliant takes on Twitter. And it seems to me that like, you know, at the Bitcoin conference and with the SBR, it's like clear that, you know, governments and nation states are getting into, getting into Bitcoin. They're having to take a position on it. So couldn't this mean that ultimately Bitcoin is going to be captured, right?

Starting point is 00:11:20 Like all the governments, all the whales, they're not going to let their money printer be destroyed. They're not going to allow for that to happen, for that power to be sucked away from them. And so, I mean, realistically, Bitcoin, it couldn't possibly win with all these giant players taking positions. Well, I disagree. As long as we run our nodes and we like the point is you decide what Bitcoin is to you by running whatever software you want in in your own home and accept the Bitcoin if the Bitcoin abides to whatever rules you think are okay. So in this sense, the shitcoins actually have a purpose. because in this sense they do provide an alternative to Bitcoin. But what I hope will happen and what has happened in the past,

Starting point is 00:12:10 whenever bad ideas are introduced to Bitcoin, it's just that people will not adopt them because they understand the value of Bitcoin as a medium exchange over space and time. And they also understand that if it's anything else, then it will suffer the same fate as all the other chip coins. So sooner or later, malicious miners and malicious actors will be thrown off the network. It's as simple as that because the other people do not want their damn near perfect money to be destroyed by bad ideas.

Starting point is 00:12:48 And this is why it's so hard. Like, why Bitcoin discussions in Bitcoin may seem chaotic to outsize. because we don't have leaders. That's the whole point. It's supposed to be chaotic. This is how Bitcoin becomes more resilient. So yeah, I do believe that Bitcoin will win these battles. However, I do admit that there's a tiny risk that it doesn't and that we're fucked

Starting point is 00:13:18 because it will be taken over by whoever the bad actor is. And in a sense, I think events like the Bitcoin, I mean like the Bitcoin conference is confusing people. And that's not a good thing. They should focus on educating people about the right things. And having, you know, Justin's son and Peter Schiff and various politicians there doesn't really help Bitcoin. All it does is confuse people and then they fall into shitcoin traps. and then they don't touch any quote unquote crypto for 10 years with a 10-foot pole, when they could have been hyper-bictorian,

Starting point is 00:14:01 when they could have been orange-filled instead. So I prefer conferences with a higher signal-to-noise ratio. That's not a bad way to go. And even just aside, like the, I think it's human, it's maybe something to do with our high-time preference culture at this point in time as well, too. But like, I think Bitcoin is supposed to be. be boring. Even though it's this major transformation, it's supposed to be boring and people attempting to do more, add more, add the JPEGs. It feels to me like an attack on underlying fungibility.

Starting point is 00:14:33 Like, money is not supposed to be the exciting thing. The exciting thing is maybe the job or the business that you start in order to pursue it. But in and of itself should be like, yes, it works and we're moving on to other things at some point. Yeah, well, discovering that just by not diluting number you can make purchasing power go up, what people call number go up, when it's really purchasing power go up. And that's super exciting, I think. Of course it is. So it doesn't necessarily have to be boring. To be fair, to comment on this current debate in Bitcoin, I think almost everyone except the spammers themselves don't like the JPEGs and don't like arbitrary data on the chain. Both sides are trying to stop that somehow.

Starting point is 00:15:23 It's just that one side is predominantly made up of people who know computers, and the other side is made up of people who know money. And we need to talk to one another because both skill sets are absolutely necessary for the survival of the network. Then again, people can be bribed, people can be corrupt, manipulated, whatever. and in my opinion, the only thing that makes Bitcoin different than other quote-unquote cryptos is that nodes do matter and nodes are in charge.

Starting point is 00:16:01 And the day that the nodes aren't in charge anymore is the day Bitcoin dies. So I don't understand why anyone would ever try to cater to minors, why minor interests are important at all. miners are just our employees. They are the slaves of the network, not the masters. And people just need to understand that. I think one of the biggest points of confusion is that we've been told for many years that minors create Bitcoin. They don't.

Starting point is 00:16:35 They create blocks, and therefore they create block space. And they get paid by the network for doing so in the form of a subsidy and a bunch of fees. per block. And the subsidy is Bitcoin that they, we allow them to give to themselves. It's not they who find them. We allow them to do that whenever they find a block. So that framing is super important. I agree. I completely agree. And it's it reminds me of, um, like when they talk about miners not being profitable or the network will lose its security budget and these things. I'm immediately reminded of kind of like the protectionism on like the automotive industry or something as well too. It's like, no guys. even miners are businesses that potentially will fail, right?

Starting point is 00:17:19 And if the hash rate goes down, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That could be fine. No, the difficulty adjustment algorithm works both ways. And this is what the system was designed to do and throw bad businesses off the network. Mining is super competitive and it's supposed to be. Some of these companies are supposed to die. And furthermore, I think more miners, should be actual miners and not just hash salesmen,

Starting point is 00:17:50 which they are now because they sell their hashing power to a pool and they don't even know what kind of block their mining on. And I think that's super dangerous too. Completely agree. I feel like these are just some of the, like it almost, it's the anti-fragile kind of argument. Like we make these mistakes and pools get centralized and we have a whole bunch of hashing.

Starting point is 00:18:10 And we unfortunately have to learn that lesson for people to go, okay, there's a reason for me to, I need to make sure that I'm hooked up to my own node construction. through my own blog template and I'm going to mine on top of that. Yeah. We have to kind of go through the bad times to get to the good times on the other side. Let me break this down for my fellow bitcoins. In just eight weeks, I've seen a serious shift.

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Starting point is 00:19:32 or simply click the link in the description down below to find out how Ben and the entire expert team at Bitcoin Mentor can help you accelerate your Bitcoin journey. Use promo code BTC sessions for 10% off. All right. So another one, I know that we recently had some updates to your book, Praxiology, as well, too. And so in my mock sort of set up, I have the favorite libertarian acts to grind. So, Knude, I realized in reading Praxiology, you even outright said it that like with Bitcoin and sound money that like forms of coercion would not be possible, which would mean that we'd have no taxation. We'd have no taxation, right? How on earth could we possibly have roads? Yeah, I added the, what about the roads is now the title of the final chapter of the new book. So Praxiology has had a big overhaul. I mean, look behind me here, all my books have had an overhaul. We have redesigned the covers and re-edited the books for better readability.

Starting point is 00:20:35 It's still the same content. But Praxiology, we did a bit of when I say we, I mean Luke the Wolf and Me, we did a bit of a, We did a bit of a deeper edit. So first, I re-edited it and added a couple of chapters and put in subheadings and bullet point lists and stuff. It's more of a textbook now, to be honest. But I think it's the best it can be because it was like first written and then edited and then re-edited and then re-edited. And then once again re-edited by Luke and me after I re-edited it and added the chapter. So now it's the best it can be.

Starting point is 00:21:11 It's like a beef stock that has been meticulously boiled down to its absolute best essence. Two years later. So now I have this 200 page books, 200 page book with beautiful illustrations and stuff, and I'm super proud of it. I don't have a copy yet because it's so new. I have a copy of the old version. It looked like this. The new one has Lady Justice on the cover holding this scale with the apple and the orange.

Starting point is 00:21:41 The orange is a certain type of orange. I think you can guess which type of orange has the same orange color as another famous logo. Anyway, the What About the Rhodes thing? The thesis in that chapter is that what anyone posing the question, what about the roads is not really posing you with, it's not really asking a question, but admitting, a Stockholm syndrome. Because the assumption is that roads are a commodity that

Starting point is 00:22:18 human beings could not manage without coercion. And I think that's super untrue. Ask yourself, what about the roads now? Do you think the traffic situation in most major cities in the world is a good situation? Don't you think this could have been managed better? by organically than centrally planned as it often is. And I think I think it's obvious that roads are a commodity like everything else that would be better off if it had more competition on the free market and less coercion involved,

Starting point is 00:22:57 less central planning. Well, Knoot, I mean, like currently right now, we're speaking on computers and great distances away from incredibly complex devices that were manufactured by voluntary actors doing different specialized things. How could we possibly figure out how to put pavement on dirt? I'm not sure how it can work out. No. And the amazingness of us being able to have this call,

Starting point is 00:23:22 like across continents without lag and with video and good audio and video quality, it's just mind-blowing to me still. And the free market did all that. State intervention is just retardant. the process. By retarded, I mean, slow down and slowed it down and made it more stupid. So retarded it in both of the senses of the word. Like, no one can construct even a pencil, as Milton Freeman pointed out, on their own.

Starting point is 00:23:59 You need materials from all over the world. And there is no coordination mechanism except the price signals. So the less distorted the price signals, the better functioning the free market. And yeah, that's one of the reasons I love Bitcoin. And that's one of the reasons why I love to try to educate people about Austrian economics and human action. Beautiful. It's funny. I remember, was it a video or was it an article?

Starting point is 00:24:27 I read something or saw something on a gentleman who tried to pursue making a toaster from scratch. Oh, yeah. There's a TED talk. Is that what it was? Yeah. He couldn't even get past. He had to give up on trying to refine the minerals. That wasn't going to happen.

Starting point is 00:24:40 Refine the ore. And ultimately, I think when he was done, the thing blew up in like 10 seconds. Yeah. No. So it's impossible for one person to make a toaster. So this is also another thing that people think about libertarians that we are against collaboration. Like, it's the opposite. Like, we want to remove the barriers to collaboration everywhere.

Starting point is 00:25:02 Like, and I say we, I mean. I do because it's individualistic, right? So the fact that we believe in or believers in the free market, you don't really need to be a believer. That's what I'm trying to say here. So you just need to understand a couple of undeniable facts about human action. And the reason that they are undeniable is because. trying to refute them proves them.

Starting point is 00:25:39 So if I tell you that you own your own body, in arguing against that, you have to prove to me that you prove to me that you do own your own body, or at least that you're in control of it, which is what owning it means in this sense. So you cannot argue against that you control your faculties. it's impossible. It's a logical contradiction. And the entire branch of science that we call praxeology is built around these irrefutable axioms. And when I first encountered that, I was so

Starting point is 00:26:16 fascinated by it because all of a sudden the social sciences, like we were talked in school, they were taught like maths and physics. And that all made sense. None of the social sciences made any sense. It was like, wait, but why every single lesson. And then school bell rang and you came back the next day with even more questions. But Praxiology made as much sense as mathematics from the first time I encountered it, because this is pure logic. There's no denying that these things are true. And that's a point to emphasize, too.

Starting point is 00:26:55 This is not opinion. Not at all. You can prove by deductive, you can use deductive reason, reasoning to come to conclusions about the state and other things that are simply undeniable if you follow the thought all the way back to human action is purposeful behavior. Yeah, so I'm in love with that type of thinking, first principles thinking. I think it's the best way to understand how the world works. I almost feel like it's like, at least for early Bitcoin adopters, like that first,

Starting point is 00:27:36 that would you call it? It's like an unsatisfying itch if you can't get down to first principles when you're talking to somebody. I feel like that's almost like a personality cork of Bitcoin or so at least in the initial kind of core. Absolutely. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:48 And it's funny to talk about like mathematics and praxeology. They're very much have the same underpinnings, right? The basis of mathematics is just logic. It's the same thing for praxeology. It's axiomatic. That's what it is. The axioms are different. Like saying that two lines never, two parallel lines never cross is, it's not true for the same reason that you always measure utility at the margin is true.

Starting point is 00:28:13 Like the, the axioms are different, but they have the same type of logical foundation. So then if I play devil's advocate. So humans act. And we need to, we can, we only have three possibilities. actions, if I'm not mistaken, in the sense that there's speculation, gambling, and engineering, right? Oh, you've done your homework. Of course. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:38 I've got, oh, where is it? It's on a shelf somewhere over there. I've got my, my mises and my Rothbard, and I was listening to Praxiology in preparation. And you got a drum kit, too. I do. Yeah, I got that one high there. Yes. And more cowbell.

Starting point is 00:28:49 Well, you only have one cowbell. We want more cowbell. I've only got the one. You want the floor pedal as well, too. All right. Great. So, if Praxiology is deductive reasoning, but it has no predictive power. and we can only engineer, gamble, or speculate,

Starting point is 00:29:04 what value does it have to us if we can't use it for modeling out the future? Now, this is a very good question. The word economics, in my opinion, the word has been misunderstood for so long because we have had these schools, quote unquote, schools of economics that think it has something to do with predictive power. like praxeology very thoroughly sets the limits for what tells you the limits for what you can and what you cannot know so it's a framework for understanding human action and that's what it is and that includes all of economics but it does not make predictions about anything and that's not what the tool is for the tool is for understanding for instance that if you increase the supply of a monetary good, then that monetary good will have a corresponding decrease in purchasing power eventually.

Starting point is 00:30:09 Like, there's no way around that. And also that if you and I decide to exchange two things, but like I give you one thing and you give me another thing or a service or whatever, like we're doing now, we're in a trade right now, like you find it valuable to talk to me and I find it valuable to talk to you. Because if we didn't, this wouldn't have happened. So, like, every human interaction that is consensual requires both parties to think that they have something to gain from doing it. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. Now, this is not true for coercive or violent.

Starting point is 00:30:48 If there's coercive things or violent things in the equation, then I can, for instance, when I pay taxes, I don't do so because I like to do so. I do so because someone is putting a gun at my head and threatening to take away my liberties if I don't. And you can deductively reason yourself to the position that coercive interactions, a set of coercive interactions can, they can theoretically yield the same result as the voluntary one, but the chances that they do are infinitesimally small. Like the perceived value someone gets out of a transaction is, of course, higher when people do it voluntarily. And the power of that is very underestimated. One of my favorite examples is an apple tree farmer who has one apple tree.

Starting point is 00:31:46 And he can feed so many customers with his apples that he can afford to use the profits to buy another tree next year and sell the double amount of apples and then buy two more trees the year after that year after that thereby increasing his business exponentially year by year so two four eight 16 32 64 and so on and so forth this exponential growth cannot happen if he's taxed to 50 percent he never gets to the second tree if the taxes are if his tax burden is 50 percent he never gets to the second tree So we have all of these exponential growth scenarios that we never see. We live in a world where taxes are everywhere and inflation is everywhere. So we don't see how we don't see the timeline we don't live in.

Starting point is 00:32:44 And that is a tragedy because we could have had it so much better. But Canute, I hear them screaming off in. distance. If we had a sound money and we didn't have the ability to tax, right, how could we possibly ever deal with emergency situations? I mean, even in an anarchist society, there would still be hierarchies, there would still be voluntary authority given to some people. Wouldn't we need to give those people the authority to act in the collective will in order to deal with emergencies with war? What about war, Kanoop? And why wouldn't we be able to do that voluntarily? People do buy insurance policies, don't they?

Starting point is 00:33:24 So why should insurance policies be collectivized? The emergencies we've had over the last decade, for instance a couple of weeks ago here in Spain, we had a blackout. Not locally, the entire

Starting point is 00:33:41 peninsula, Spain and Portugal were out of power for 12 hours. So that could not happen in a world. where we had more responsibility for our own power usage and like our own power supply. And go back further, like the lockdowns.

Starting point is 00:34:04 So instead of everyone having their own responsibility to learn about this virus and take whatever protective measures they thought was appropriate, we politicians decided to decide, for people that this set of rules was what we're going to do here and this set of rules is what we're going to do here. So you have different rules in different countries,

Starting point is 00:34:36 even different rules within different districts of different countries. And this impossible matrix and enormous resource waste with all the masks and all the vaccines and all the bullshit and people not working and everyone printing money, everywhere to make up for it.

Starting point is 00:34:54 And what we're seeing now in the aftermath is rising prices everywhere. People seem to be oblivious to the connection between the two. Of course, if you print an enormous amount of money, you're going to have all the prices go up. And who's to say, who's to decide over another man whether it was worth it or not? That's the question, like, fair according to who. and we ought to, who are we? Like, if it's not with the individual, you, if you, what's the word, if you delegate that decision to someone who has a monopoly of violence over you,

Starting point is 00:35:39 then you get the results that you can predict by knowing about human action, I'd say. And I don't like that kind of world. I don't like other people framing the problem for me. In a libertarian utopia, I would decide what constitutes a problem or not. And I would be responsible for my reaction to it. Whenever you outsource responsibility, you get less responsible people. I mean, you get what you pay for. If you pay for people to be unproductive and not work,

Starting point is 00:36:17 and go on sick leave, then you get sick and unproductive people. If you instead let people reap the rewards and reap the fruits of what they sow and let them keep what they earn, then you incentivize people to be profitable. And base question here is, why should anyone decide for anyone else at all? Like, wouldn't we all be better off if we decided for ourselves? and I think the answer is an obvious yes. I think governments are a net bad for society, not a net good, and therefore we'd be better off without them.

Starting point is 00:36:54 However, I do admit that that's probably utopian, but the correct fight is always to try to make the government's influence over your life a little smaller. That is directionally correct always, like the vector is pointing in that direction. try to reduce the influence of of bad people on your life no matter if it's you know petty crime organized crime mafia stuff government or or any other corrupt institution like try to avoid it build tools around it reclaim your freedom now obviously it would stand that if you couldn't possibly envision or imagine every satisfying outcome in a world without government that somehow I've then destroyed the argument. But we'll throw at least another one that I've heard out there at you before too.

Starting point is 00:37:48 It's like, okay, okay. So if I grant you that, you know, governments don't really help with war or poverty or health or education or any of these things as well. They do help with war. They start wars. They are behind all the wars. Correct. If we're looking at the affirmative position on war, they're incredibly good at it.

Starting point is 00:38:04 It seems to be the health of them or something. the what about okay we we we make it there right where we're bitcoin and capistan things are going a little bit better everyone is blissful and peaceful uh you've got a wonderful piece of property it's got a beautiful beautiful river on it canute and i've got a oil refinery downstream from you oh how could we possibly deal with pollution in this sort of scenario we're going to need bring the government back no you you are going to need someone to to settle the dispute about who's right and who's wrong. And this is another fallacy of statist fallacy that we think human beings need coercive measures to make the legal system work.

Starting point is 00:38:48 But this is not true. You can have legal firms, private legal firms, resolving conflict for people. You can employ a third party to resolve the conflict for you if you have a conflict with another a human being about where the limits of your property really are. In this case, between you and the oil rig downstream of you, like who's violating whose property. And if you have different competing legal firms, they get a reputation and therefore they are on the free market

Starting point is 00:39:26 and the one with the best reputation for resolving the conflict most fairly will win in the end. And therefore, you get a fairer world. as a result. Right now, I mean, try to sue the government to see what happens. Like, courts are biased in every single country. It's better in some countries where they separate like the juridical stuff from the legal stuff from the politics stuff and from the other stuff. But still, there is no perfect system today. And as I said, I think a world with no world with no governments in it is sort of utopian. But even today, you can bypass the state sanctioned

Starting point is 00:40:12 law and employ a libertarian law firm. There are plenty of those around already. And they will resolve the conflict without resorting to government violence. And I think that's a better solution. I completely agree. It's funny whenever I get into these conversations, too, the, anything that comes up, it's like, just step back for a second. There is no such thing as a government. That's just a category that we're putting on basically people that we've given monopoly on violence. Like, they're just people. Like, who will build the roads?

Starting point is 00:40:37 People. Who will settle disputes? People. And if you think that the court system is the best way to go about dealing with disputes, it tells me that you've never used the court system. No. And, but it's this, the question who would do this and who would do that, that is not, it's not a question.

Starting point is 00:40:58 It's an admittance. It is an admittance that you are in love with your capture. Like you are suffering from Stockholm syndrome. You are in love with your kidnapper. Because for some odd reason, you believe that there's a need for people to be forced into behaviors for human society to work. And it's the opposite. We humans have two means of resolving conflict. One is violence and the other is speech.

Starting point is 00:41:28 One of them are barbaric and the other is civilized. So the very word civilization comes from not doing the barbaric stuff, which is the non-aggression principle. The more voluntary an interaction is, the more civilizational it is, the more civilization building it is. This is what builds civilizations. So it's uncivilized to think that you need a course and force of monopoly of violence someone to meddle with your affairs in order for stuff to work. It is the lion in the cage being afraid of the savannah and thinking that the meal, the three meals per day they get in the cage is what life is all about. And it's not.

Starting point is 00:42:23 You're in love with the prison guards. The analogy in the new version of Praxiology, by the way, is the Shawshank Redemption. and how that is a story about low-time preference and how it's a story about hope and hope as a rational act because you have the protagonist who is quietly digging a hole behind a poster in his cell

Starting point is 00:42:48 over the span of like 15 years or whatever I don't remember how long it is in the movie and then you have this old prisoner who gets released who hangs himself because he cannot take the chaos of the freedom outside. He cannot adapt to that. He's used to being the lion in the cage with three free meals.

Starting point is 00:43:08 And you have the main character's best friend Redd, who warns the main character Andy about hope, and that hope is a dangerous thing. But Andy realizes that hope is a rational choice because you're going to die anyway. So you might as well live as a, free man and as a free thinker and not let's fear dictate your actions. And that's what I try to live by.

Starting point is 00:43:37 And I think it's a beautiful movie, a beautiful metaphor for why freedom is always the better choice. Because as soon as we admit that we're in a prison, we are in a prison. It's only when we admit to ourselves that we cannot do anything about it, that we actually can't. This is the story of the Soviet Union. and existed for 70 years of basically just a continent-wide prison, and then it disappeared overnight.

Starting point is 00:44:07 Because people had hope. People in despair don't emancipate themselves. I'd never thought of the Shawshank Redemption with that sort of an angle, and that is kind of a wonderful, it's a wonderful illustration to that point, and I completely agree. And funny enough, I'm much more utopian, the new. I definitely think that is within the realm because for my position, if it's the case, if it's the case that Bitcoin cannot be seized, then it's the case that people using Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:44:41 cannot be taxed, right? It has to be a voluntary transfer. Yep. And if there is no tax, I don't see any difference between the organizations offering other services as any sort of business. I think government does cease to exist if transactions are voluntary. Yeah. Yeah. Then again, I don't believe all transactions will be Bitcoin transactions. I think this will be, look, you can hyper-Bitcoinize yourself, but you cannot, Bitcoin is for anyone, not for everyone. And there are many issues still to solve. Like if you divide 8 billion people by 21 million coins, we get 232,000 sets each.

Starting point is 00:45:19 And two transactions per lifetime, if the average lifetime is 80 years, because that's what we have block space for. So we need to solve loads of other. issues. Yeah, layer two's lightning network and stuff solves them to a certain extent and just people being less consumers solves other stuff. So it's definitely a better world. To me, the easiest way to grasp what it means is that it reduces the incentive for aggression because I can point a gun into your head and say, give me all your bitcoins and you can give me a tiny fraction of them and I have no way of verifying how many you actually had, which means

Starting point is 00:46:00 for me as the attacker, it's probably better to befriend you and be nice and play nice and consensually interact with you than to try to extort stuff from you. And this simple shift in the incentive structure of violent behavior, I think that's why Bitcoin is peace. That's why Bitcoin is hope. that's what it changes it changes everything i'm wondering i'm curious your thoughts and i have some some ideas about it but with everything we talked about about freedom and hope and bitcoin and not only i think is it is it like a better personal way to live like i think it's a much more meaningful way to

Starting point is 00:46:41 live as well too but it seems to have like i know that since i've adopted these kind of these values that my life has improved right um why is it that you think that it still seems like the vast majority have Stockholm syndrome, that they're still trapped in that mindset. Wouldn't the incentives lead them to discover that they've been bamboozled? I mean, if you have state subsidized media, and if state subsidized schooling for 12 years in every country, all of that stuff, it's the, the machine, the brainwashing machine is big. and none of us have ever lived in a libertarian utopia. We've always lived with specific geographical monopolies and violence.

Starting point is 00:47:32 As long as civilization has existed, there's always been a mixture of violent interactions and consensual voluntary interactions. So we don't know better. Most people think that this is just, the fact of nature that we have to live in this zero-sum game type of thing. And it takes a lot to finally drop all of those illusions and accept that non-aggression is better than aggression always and provably so. And most people just aren't there yet because most people don't think

Starting point is 00:48:20 about things like this all day. They have like, you know, yeah, that's interesting. So the game last night, like most people are like that, you know. So I think that's been true for all ages. People were busy doing whatever they were doing, making money and providing for their families. They don't have time to do philosophical bullshit. It's only us professional international village idiots that have the luxury to do that.

Starting point is 00:48:48 See, and I would even make the case that the incentives, were skewed towards basically adhering or trying to play the status game could be very profitable for you. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And I think that there is that Bitcoin really wasn't orange pill in the sense that like it was the first time that your, your Austrian values in beliefs could be hugely profitable for you when applied.

Starting point is 00:49:09 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't necessarily call them Austrian values. It's more like, yeah, a lower time preference is all of a sudden worth it. And it was always worth it. It was just that that bit of information was only available to the people who figured it out. And those were a few. And we have been incentivized to do what the government says, because of subsidies and taxes and all of this stuff. Like we've been incentivized.

Starting point is 00:49:40 People show me the incentives and I show you the outcome. So people are incentivized. people who are incentivized to not know something. Like what's what's the quote? The upstance Sinclair quote like it's very hard to convince a man of an idea if his livelihood depends on. On not knowing and having that belief. So yeah. So that explains a lot, I think.

Starting point is 00:50:05 No, I completely agree. And the other one too is even just the like the entire education system, both from like high school, even through university, is all a compliance. Indoctrination system. Yes. Yeah. That's it. It teaches you to be obedient more than anything else and not to question, which is the opposite of the scientific method, where you ought to question everything. I mean, science has gotten a bad name now because of the science, which is avoid the science and do actual science.

Starting point is 00:50:37 It's super simple. No, absolutely. Education is not free. It's tax funded and it also, like, imagine how aliens would see humanity. Like, why are they giving their kids away for five hours a day to a kidnapper for 12 years and doing it seemingly voluntarily? And when they come out of it, they have no economic value, right? So they're like a reward at the end of it.

Starting point is 00:51:06 No. No, it's super strange when you see it like that. But it's hard to deprogram people when it's something that everyone does. Like most people don't like to be the black sheep or the flock or the orange sheep like stand out too much. They like to keep their opinions and ideas about the world confined into this whatever normalcy box there is. They want to be normal, perceived as normal by others.

Starting point is 00:51:40 We're dogs, not cats. And for most people stepping out and even going back to the compliance training too, right? we've we've almost elevated obedience right in social approval as like a higher value rather than like leadership or creativity and even even one of the things if I'm most frustrating is entrepreneurs are not venerated anymore right like these people are literally serving you but we look at them as evil capitalists or something yeah yeah yeah and it's all skewed it's sad I mean Daniel Prince put a sentence in one of my books or I stole it from him because I thought it was so great If you were straight A student, you excelled at being average. I love that. I completely agree. Speaking of the books, too, okay, so I've gone through the previous iteration of Praxiology. I know we had the end chapter on who will build the roads, but what else did you add to the new book?

Starting point is 00:52:33 I added two more chapters, and one is called natural law, and the other is called punishment. So they follow on to the argumentation chapter. So it's argumentation, which is now chapter 18. This was the last but one chapter in the previous edition. And then it's natural law, punishment. What about the roads? And then the conclusion chapter. So yeah, I tried to talk about other things than economics that the science of human action can also,

Starting point is 00:53:09 understanding of human action can also help you with. And natural law is one of those that I like a lot, like the difference between legal and lawful. Like legal is imposed from above and lawful is just what natural law tells you is okay and not respecting property rights. So there's a lot to explore there. Essentially, I don't know in the book. I would say in the natural law,

Starting point is 00:53:37 we basically starting from the premise that like humans, Act, I have control over my body, therefore I have ownership of my body, and then just kind of building out a framework from there. Yeah, building a framework around the understanding that we have two means of resolving conflict. And if we want to avoid the violent one, we should use the communication one. And like everything derived from there, basically. And in my opinion, argumentation ethics and natural law is as close as a science will ever get to derive an ought from an is. Arguably, you can't derive an ought from an is, but I think you can derive an ought not. Okay, interesting, yeah, because I was going to say, for me, where I get hung up on that one or where I think there's some value is along the lines of, there's an axiomatic presupposition that, you ought to be correct, therefore you can get an ought from it is. Like it's like it's like that.

Starting point is 00:54:33 That is not necessary because argumentation ethics say that like the it's it's from the premise of we own our own body. And the very act of arguing with someone else presupposes that you, if you start arguing about something, you show the other person that you believe argumentation to be a suitable conflict resolving tool. So as soon as you stop arguing and you do, you do something against the, whatever consensus there is in the argument.

Starting point is 00:55:12 So if you're arguing about the legality of a tax with the taxman, and the taxman, you can agree and you can make irrefutable arguments and blah, blah, blah, and he can even agree with you. but as soon as a resorts to violence anyway, it's not an argument anymore. It's just bullying the other person. So it's mockery. It goes from argumentation to mockery.

Starting point is 00:55:37 So it's really just setting the boundaries for what argumentation is. And we come to different truths about, like truth in the praxeological sense or truthfulness is consensual. So it doesn't matter how objectively true something is from the argument. Ethics perspective, if we agree that this is the way to go forward, then that becomes the most truthful alternative. Any violent way of trying to stop that is simply less truthful from the angle of the argumentation as a conflict-resolving tool. This is a hard, convoluted way to say simple things. But even if a society agrees, all agrees that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then that is the way they have chosen to operate in nature. And their survivability will depend on that truth conclusion they came to.

Starting point is 00:56:46 Just as another society who decides this or that or about climate change, for instance. Maybe the society that decides it's not a problem all die, and maybe the society that does all survive. Or it's the other way around. It doesn't really matter to the ethics of argumentation what the actual validity of a statement is. What matters is that we must use consensual interactions, argumentation, to get to the point of the truth.

Starting point is 00:57:19 but the actual validity is not a part of this argument about argumentation at all. Okay. Yes. Okay. So stepping back from the argumentation ethics, man, I'm going out in like the philosophy curve here. Let's see how I can pull this off. It's something along the lines of and I'll see if I can articulate it correctly. So when you were, if you're to make an argument about, you know, like self-ownership,

Starting point is 00:57:44 you are presupposing because you're the one actually speaking, right? in the sense that if I'm going to even try to argue against self-ownership, I can't because the act of doing so is having control over my own body. Yep. Right. So if I was going to argue with you with regards to say that you cannot get an ought from it is, the presupposition is that I ought to, that you ought to be accurate in your statements and that you were wrong.

Starting point is 00:58:14 So the act of me arguing with you that you cannot get an. an aught from it is, is based on an ought to begin with. Does that make sense? Oh, I love that. That's beautiful. Okay. I'm going to watch this again and like repeat that and and ponder. It's almost like I want to because that's that's fantastic. I love it. It's the um, it's almost like if I remember was it Jeff Booth? I remember someone talking about AI and they were referring to that like one of the hardest things to do is that it can't the AI systems can't look at everything. It has to pick what to choose. Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder if there's

Starting point is 00:58:50 something even like, and it kind of speaks to humans act, right? But in order to act, we have to filter, which meant there have to be an underlying choice or framework for choosing to begin with. Yes, utility at the margin. Right. So then there has to be a fundamental, like, preferred value. I mean like there ought to be like a direction. Like you can't do it without direction, which means there's

Starting point is 00:59:13 some things in the base of acting. The direction is. presupposed, I guess. And it has to be. But I think maybe what we're fishing for is that we can scientifically

Starting point is 00:59:30 deductively reason ourselves to the position that there ought to be an ought. But we cannot say what the ought is. That's actually a very good way of phrasing it. They're ought to be an ought. Yeah. Beautiful. I love it. I got to say, Knoot, the only thing that would make this, this has been

Starting point is 00:59:46 absolutely fun for me, by the way. The only thing that would make this better is if we were in a pub for a couple pints and go for a good long time here. Before we wrap things up, too, so I really appreciate you humoring me and having fun with those conversations, but we barely touched on everything that you're else that you're working on right now. So we have the Praxiology, we have the new chapters coming out. What else are you and Lou doing? What's exciting? What's on the Horizon, pal? No, we keep on doing the Bitcoin Infinity show, formerly the Freedom Show. And we have also the Bitcoin Infinity Academy, which is a huge project. I decided to release all my books for free, which I think anyone hating intellectual property and the concept of it should do, like in open source, all the books.

Starting point is 01:00:30 But I wanted to do it slightly differently. So this is how the academy started. During Bitcoin Atlantis on a fancy cocktail party on top of a fancy hotel, I ran into Miljian from Primal. And he said, you're Knut, right? Yeah, you broke my Noster client. I broke Noster? What was that? And that was me because I had posted the entirety of sovereignty through mathematics, my first book, as a single note which their service couldn't take.

Starting point is 01:01:02 So I broke Primal for a while. So achievement unlocked. But then I thought about that. Maybe there's a better way of doing this and still utilizing Noster because I love that Noster exists. Noster is a bit of a cluster fuck, but it still loved the idea. So why don't I release all the books chapter by chapter on Noster? And then we had a couple of conversations with a couple of other people about how to do best do this. And I got the suggestion that, yeah, release it all for free, but try to monetize it somehow.

Starting point is 01:01:31 Some people will want to fund this. So we realize that, okay, we're going to do it like this. We're going to turn every chapter. You're going to post one a week from all of the books, one by one, and turn each book into a course where Luke and I talk about a specific chapter for an hour once a week. And also, there's a membership thing. So you can join a telegram group where you can post questions and get a monthly call with me and Luke and talk to us and participate in the making of this thing. So there's a participatory aspect to it. So that's what it becomes.

Starting point is 01:02:14 That's the Bitcoin Infinity Academy. We will release a chapter per week with some breaks, like there's a small summer break and probably a break over Christmas or something. But right now we're nearing the end of Sovereignty to mathematics, my first book. On Infinity Day, 21st of August, we'll start the middle one there, Bitcoin Independence Reimagined, which has a new cover. newly edited and we'll do that one. Who did the artwork, by the way?

Starting point is 01:02:44 The revised artwork. Well, me and Luke did. Oh, beautiful. Yeah. So we're, do it, do it yourself type of people. So we're doing everything ourselves here.

Starting point is 01:02:54 And I'm so happy I found him because it's the perfect match. Like he's the Sharon to my Aussie. And it's organized and industrious where I'm creative and, you know, you kind of like, kind of like to tell me Iommi or something too. at the minute Sharon. Yeah, or the

Starting point is 01:03:11 I should say the Tony to Myosie because that's more of a compliment, I think. Or people don't realize how much of a compliment that Sharon Zumaiosi really is. She's under it. Anyway, so we're doing this. And the show is sponsored by Plan B and Bitpogs. The Academy is.

Starting point is 01:03:33 The other show is sponsored by the Bitcoin Advisor and Stampseed and Bitbox. But the academy is the main sponsor is Plan B. So we're planning on. That's also one of the reasons why I made the Praxiology book a bit more ambitious because I'm going to Logano now in June and also in July to give lectures about praxeology for the Plan B network and turning the whole thing into a proper online course via the Plan B network.

Starting point is 01:03:59 So I'm super happy to be finally collaborating with one of my dearest friends and idols in Bitcoin. in Giacomo Soko, I just love. So very excited to be on board that particular train. When you started riding when you were still on ships, did you ever think you'd get here? Absolutely not. I'm still pinching myself. We have a saying, like, the surreal doesn't end,

Starting point is 01:04:29 and that's definitely true for everything that's happened here. Like the journey I've been on here for the last decade. It's just been simply mind-blowing stuff I never expected out of life. And now I'm making a living, writing books and talking about them. And I couldn't I couldn't ask for more, really. It's insane. So very happy. I got two more things.

Starting point is 01:04:53 I got to slip in there quick then. Yeah. First and foremost, I'm just going to direct people to the guys. So you join the academy by going to geyser. Dot fund slash projects slash infinity. That's where you find. all the info about the academy and you can get signed books and whatnot and join the different tiers of membership. So please check it out. Beautiful. One more. Obviously, you're such a

Starting point is 01:05:20 prolific writer. There's going to be another book that's hiding out somewhere in the back of your head. Has anything been started? Do we have any ideas? Yes, I do have ideas. And there is a project that I do not really want to talk about. Like, I want to keep it a secret. Totally fine. Totally fine. We'll leave that one for surprise for later. I think so. Yeah. Right now we're just taking off all the boxes and doing all the things. There's so much that needed to be done.

Starting point is 01:05:51 Yeah. And all the books are the best they can be, and I'm super proud of them. And especially now I have a recency bias, but the new Praxiology book, I think you're going to love it. It's thicker. It's more readable. It's just better in every single way. And I think the cover is the best one we're done. so far too with the Lady Justice.

Starting point is 01:06:11 So check that out. Bitcoinfinity.com or Bitcoinfinitystore.com. They find all the books if you want to buy them for sets. Otherwise, they're available on Amazon. We've also got the Bitcoin Infinity Story, the Bitcoin Academy, which is on Geiser, and where else can people follow you if they want to get more of your work and see what you're up to? My main platform is still X or Twitter. So that's at Knutzwonom is my handle there.

Starting point is 01:06:34 And that's where I post basically everything. Yeah, you can also follow Bitcoin Infinity Show. We have a social media manager now doing fantastic work and great posts from there. There's a Mises Mondays thing, for instance, where you can learn some Missessian knowledge every Monday. So looking forward to continuing with that and doing all of this. Like, Bitcoiners are incentivized to help one another, right? We all win if we collaborate because we all want number go up. And the success of a Bitcoiner is the success of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:07:17 And we're trying to lean into that as much as possible and just do as many collaborations with the people we align with as absolutely humanly possible. The main reason I'm doing the show is that I really want to keep these people as friends because I love having these conversations with these fantastic people. So I don't really care about viewer numbers or anything. I just want to have honest conversations with the most interesting people on the planet. That's why I'm in this. If you enjoy this conversation with Knut Zvahn Home,

Starting point is 01:07:52 that means you're also a libertarian nerd. So please do like, share, and subscribe and check out the previous conversation with Gary Cardone.

BTC Sessions - STOP Saying Money Must Be Stable: Bitcoin Reveals Lies | Nathan vs Knut Svanholm

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