SKZ - Episode 3 - A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin Review

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

This is my review of C. Jason Maier's A Progressive Case for Bitcoin. I start with generalities, then I give my thoughts on each chapter, and I close by giving some critiques and final thoughts. Overall, I think this book 1) has the potential for orange-pilling progressive readers and 2) will be invaluable for non-progressive audiences who will find a surprising amount of common ground with Jason.

Hey everybody, this is Joe, and this is the SKZ podcast. Today, I wanted to do a book review of a progressives case for Bitcoin. A little background about how I heard of the book, and maybe some of you have heard of the book. Jason Meyer, the author, was on what Bitcoin did, Peter McCormack's podcast. And Peter McCormack has said multiple times since then that this is the most important book for conservatives that are into Bitcoin. And he says that in the foreword, too, of this and just explains that, you know, it's really important for Bitcoin not to become a partisan issue. And it's great to have someone like Jason writing a book that he calls a progressives for Bitcoin, right? Because people could have different perspectives and still identify as a progressive and, you know, have different viewpoints or different opinions. But basically to have that perspective out there to explain and maybe orange pills and people who are, more on the liberal, democratic, progressive side of things, at least in the United States context. So I loved the premise of the book, and I got myself on some kind of email list through Jason Meyer's website to get notified when the book was out.

And I think I got that notification this Monday. And by the time I ordered it on Amazon and it came, I got it on Wednesday. It's a pretty short book. It's a good length. It's a good link. Not too short. It's about 200 pages. and it took me at the last chapter he says you know this is your first 10 hours of learning 100

hours about bitcoin and encourages people to try to you know do 100 hours of research i think that's probably accurate is that it probably took me around 10 hours to read um read it a few hours each day finished it on friday got it on wednesday so you know just three days of a few hours of reading it really wasn't uh too long but at the same time it was a good length it wasn't too short. And it's split into 10 chapters. Starts with kind of an introduction, just explaining how he found out about Bitcoin and kind of his conversations with people who are more on the progressive side of things and kind of explaining why he was inspired to write this book. And then I would say that each chapter kind of gives, well, the second chapter is really

explaining kind of what Bitcoin is and what money is. And from there, it's really different answers to like why Bitcoin, I would say. And just to compare to another book that I read recently, I read Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos. I'm not going to say I understood everything in that book. I kind of skipped some sections that were kind of talking about specific coding things and, you know, the equations of how, you know, different parts of Bitcoin work kind of on the fundamental side. And I would say that's more, that book is answering more like the how questions. It's like, okay, how does this work?

How does, you know, the decentralization of nodes work and how do they communicate? How does mining actually really work? This book isn't answering those questions. It's not really explaining any formulas or anything like that. But this is really the why of Bitcoin, right? And not the, you know, number go up why, but the, like, why is Bitcoin good for the world, right? in a spicy sense, why is Bitcoin the most ESG thing you can invest in? That's actually good for the environment, good for, you know, society, good for governance.

He doesn't really put it in that exact framing. I think he mentions ESG, but yeah, I would say that is really why you would want to read this book, is if you want to either just for yourself kind of get that perspective or if you want to give that to someone else who you think might be receptive to more a progressive viewpoint of, okay, why are you actually interested in this Bitcoin thing. This would be a great book to read for yourself or to give to someone. And yeah, just to go through kind of chapter by chapter a little bit of my thoughts on the book. Again, I would say generally, I really highly recommend this book. I enjoyed reading it. I will say overall, I wouldn't say that I learned a ton of new content, but that's as someone

who's already done my, you know, 100 hours of research into Bitcoin. I've listened to what Bitcoin did every episode for the last couple years and just other podcasts and books, things like that. So, like, I'm coming from a perspective of someone who's already learned a lot about Bitcoin. But I definitely did learn some things. For example, I'll get to it when I'm going chapter by chapter, but there's a section about Saudi Arabia and its relationship with the United States. I definitely learned a lot about that.

I mean, I already knew some just people talking. about the Petro Dollar, but I think he really puts it really well in that chapter and explained a lot of things about that relationship and how corrupt it is. So anyways, there's some things that I learned, but it's not like I'm like, oh my gosh, I learned so much in this 10 hours of reading as someone who's already done my, you know, 100 plus hours of research into Bitcoin. But I do think that a lot of this is exactly how I would want to explain it to someone if I was, you know, on my best behavior, not getting upset in the conversation if they were, you know, saying something negative about Bitcoin or whatever, that kind of thing. Like, it's kind of the best case way I would argue

for a for the why of Bitcoin in a lot of different situations. And one more kind of caveat before we go chapter by chapter is that I think this does, you know, work as a book to give to someone that even if they're not progressive, or if you're listening to this and you're a Bitcoiner and you're more conservative or liberal or liberal or I'm sorry, conservative or libertarian or you know, Republican voter or however you would identify. I know those are all different things, right? Not necessarily the same thing. But if you would identify as someone who basically, you know, is not excited about it being

called a progressives case for Bitcoin, I would say this is still a valuable book for you to read because I would say you're going to agree with like 99% of what's in here. You know, a lot of it is just the very, you know, same things you would hear from someone like maybe Robert Reedlove that is very much more of a libertarian, you know, would argue that anything the government does is bad. I'm sure there's things that him and Jason would disagree with, like, maybe in their ideal situation, would they want to live in a society, government, you know, Citadel, whatever you want to call it in the future. but like if they wanted to live in a place that provided certain things for people versus you know there's no safety net i don't know i'm sure there's things they would disagree with right about what's the ideal form of you know i don't know know if we want to say government because i think robert prelove would say there shouldn't be a government but then he would say there should be you know a citadel with people who you know uh pay to have certain

services done or whatever and in a sense that's very similar to a government so anyways i'm getting off track a little bit here. But basically what I'm trying to say is that like as you're reading through, there might be a couple things you're like, oh, this seems a little more so something a progressive would say about like, oh, it's so important to provide these rights to people or whatever. But like in general, you're going to agree, even if you're libertarian, conservative, whatever, you're going to agree with like 90 plus percent of what's in this book. And that just goes to show that like a lot of these issues that are maybe considered like a conservative issue or a liberal issue, right, or things that those two groups disagree about,

or they're really important to one or both of those groups. I would say those are things that are all like, if we say that money is like a layer one, right? Those are all things that are like layer two to money. And we can all agree that like, well, maybe we disagree about some of those layer two issues about how we should, you know, do governance or construct society. But like at the layer one, we agree that like money and the corruption of money and the mixing of money in politics is causing all these problems downstream of that. So let's fix the layer one problem first. And if that gets fixed, then we can disagree and hash out, you know, the layer two stuff.

And I would say I don't know exactly where I would fall between someone like Breedlove and someone like Jason Meyer, right? Because I listen to both of them and I enjoy their content. I think they're really interesting. So anyways, if you're someone who maybe. doesn't identify as a liberal, progressive, whatever, still a good book for you. That's kind of the summary of what I'm trying to say here. So yeah, I might have some final thoughts after this, but let's go just chapter by chapter.

I'm looking right now at the end of chapter one. They have like basically a little paragraph about each of the chapters. I'm just going to go through and kind of give my thoughts about what I learned about each chapter. So chapter two, like I mentioned, is kind of the what is money, what is Bitcoin chapter. It's an important chapter to read if you're someone who is really like not knowledgeable about Bitcoin and or you're giving this to a friend. You know, it would be a really helpful chapter to just give that foundation of like that what is money question. How is Bitcoin similar to gold and fiat and how is it unique? things like that. Chapter three, which he says is possibly the most important chapter in the book,

is the Bitcoin's relationship to the environment. I think he does a really great job summing up the way that basically Bitcoin doesn't use as much energy as people, you know, often advertiser say in the media and how Bitcoin can help build out renewables. and how Bitcoins kind of drive towards more and more efficient use of energy will help continue kind of that build out of renewables. And here I would say is the first point that I noticed this, but it continued throughout each chapter. He does a really great job at the end of the chapter, basically having like a couple paragraphs of summary that like if those paragraph, if that paragraph say was at the beginning of the chapter, you might be like, oh, what's the evidence for this, this and this point? But by the time you get at the end, you're like, okay, yeah, that's really obvious that Bitcoin doesn't use as much energy as I advertised. It's really obvious that Bitcoin goes through efficiency or moves towards more efficient, you know, use of energy because of all he argued.

So he does a really great job to summing things out at the end of the chapter. And if you, like, read those paragraphs or, you know, after you read the book, want to look back at those paragraphs to really remember, you know, what you might have learned from that chapter. I think, you know, the end of each chapter is basically really, really effective. So I think that's a really great chapter, chapter three. And I will say again, as someone who's done my research on Bitcoin, it wasn't a chapter where I like learned a lot, but it perfectly summed up what I would say about someone, what I would like to say to someone who says like, oh, isn't Bitcoin destroying the environment? You know, I would say, just read this chapter.

You know, I think it's really great for that. And again, there's people who maybe don't identify as a hardcore liberal progressive who are concerned about that. So again, I think this is a great book for someone like that who's maybe even just a moderate, right? So next, chapter four is talking about Bitcoin versus banks, right? And I think this kind of especially talks about things like the 2008 financial crisis and how banks contributed to that and just the requirement that we trust banks in our current system versus Bitcoin being more decentralized trustless. So really contrasting those two things.

Again, I think this is a really useful, helpful chapter. Next, we have Bitcoin in Chapter 5, how Bitcoin can help poor and marginalize people in the world. And there's a couple chapters. Yeah, I'm forgetting exactly what's in each chapter versus, you know, an adjacent chapter because there's some overlap. But, I mean, I think this is something that, again,

it might be more looking through it in a progressive scope, right? But I think anyone can agree that like, okay, people with all the wealth and equality that exists right now are totally getting screwed over at the bottom and they don't have any opportunity or any safety net or whatever is important to you, right, about how we take care of people that are marginalized and basically like how Bitcoin can actually help fix this broken system. and again with that kind of flat structure of Bitcoin, which I know he emphasizes throughout the book,

no, it's not a hierarchy where one person's on top and you get to listen to them. Just how it can help people throughout the world. I think it's a really effective chapter. Nexus chapter 6, which examines surprising ways that inflation has contributed to wealth inequality. This is one of the aspects of Bitcoin that kind of orange-pilled me, and I think it does a really effective job of explaining kind of why inflation is so bad for people at the bottom.

It mentions free ops research, which I know has been talked about on what Bitcoin did. And there's plenty of other kind of data in there to just demonstrate how inflation kind of helps rich people right by prices on hard assets. Or I don't know if we want to say hard, but, you know, scarce assets like homes and stocks, you know, go up versus poor people who might have a thousand bucks in their savings account or something like that, that value is just deteriorating over time. So that's a really great chapter. Chapter 7 offers a fairly comprehensive examination of what is wrong with our current system from a global monetary perspective. This is where he talks about the petro dollar and about the U.S. and Saudi Arabia relationship. I'd say, as I mentioned before, this is the chapter that I would say as a

coiner I learned the most in there's a lot about kind of the history of that relationship that I hadn't really read anywhere else or heard in any other podcast or anything like that and it's really interesting to me how you know there's been multiple times in recent history where uh Congress has sometimes even unanimously voted to do something that would you know uh reduce our our dependence on or the strength of our relationship with Saudi Arabia with the United States and Saudi Arabia. But the executive branch, whether it be a Republican or Democrat president, has vetoed it almost every single time. And there's one that actually passed because it was so unanimous that even with the veto, it still passed. And I'd like to look at more about kind of what the effects of that are.

But it's really interesting that, like, our elected officials say what you will about Congress. and the corruption there, right? But at least they're recognizing, hey, this Saudi Arabia relationship is sketchy and, like, not necessarily good for normal Americans, and we're turning a blind eye to a lot of corruption and, you know, basically a genocide and Yemen going on, supported by Saudi Arabia. But the executive branch has often vetoed these bills kind of limiting that relationship, probably because they know how dependent the U.S. dollar is on kind of this petroval. dollar system in the relationship there.

So that's a really helpful chapter to read for anyone, basically. I learned a lot there. Chapter 8, I think this is something I've been thinking about for a long time, and I really love that he wrote this chapter, is about Bitcoin and War. I haven't heard enough about this or enough talk about this, but I really love this chapter. I don't think it's very long. I think it's kind of a shorter chapter, but basically, it's talking about basically, and this is something I've thought. Okay, this isn't something he said in the book. But one thing that I've

thought is Bitcoin encourages just war theory, right? That's something that is sometimes talked about in terms of like in political science as like you should only go to war if it's just, if there's a reason. And maybe, you know, you can always start with a different starting point, right, of why a war happened. But let's say there is a Hitler in the world at the time of World War two. Maybe you could say it's a just war because like we need to stop this person. He's so evil. This is a just war. But a lot of people would argue Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, a lot of United States military conflicts since then were not just wars. There wasn't a really compelling reason for us to go there to say this is good. Even though people are going to die, it's good

to go to war in this situation. So I would say Bitcoin encourages just war theory. And then Fiat encourages just war theory, is in like only war all the time. It's just war, right? So that's my thought is just war versus just war. But that's kind of the idea of this chapter, right, is that Bitcoin can help make war less common and less deadly because basically now we can go to war on a whim and the United States can print a bunch of money to basically fund the military to do an invasion in Iraq or Afghanistan, something like that. A really interesting element of this chapter is that Congress is basically supposed to vote for us to go into war or declare war with another country. But the last time that's happened was in World War II with Japan, which at this point is almost 100 years ago.

It's like 80 years ago. And since then, we've been in plenty of conflicts. I don't know if they're officially called wars or whatever. I think the history books would say war, you know, Vietnam War, Korean War, things like that, but none of those were even voted on in Congress. And it goes to show that just even in a gold standard system, which is what we had kind of before the current Fiat standard system, it was, since gold is pretty centralized, the government could just print money and debase, you know, its currency as compared to gold, but without it being so obvious for a long time. And a lot of times, you know, later on it would come back to Byton, a big devaluation would occur compared to gold, things like that. But like,

that happened a lot in World War I with basically every country involved in World War I debased their currency to be able to fund the war. And that would be a lot less available in the Bitcoin system because it's so much more transparent, whether you have Bitcoin or you don't have Bitcoin. And sure, you could take a loan and, you know, take a loan out and get some Bitcoin. And, you know, but you'd have to pay that back, right? You couldn't just print money to create more. You couldn't print Bitcoin, basically. So that was a really helpful chapter.

Just to summarize some of my thoughts on basically, first of all, how war is terrible for the economy. And this is something, you know, he doesn't go into specifically. And I kind of wish that he or someone else did is how a lot of times war is perceived as like a good thing for the economy, right? of like, oh yeah, there's so much more production happening. But really, that's a lot of it is just inflation with more money printing and more things being bought for the war.

But ultimately, if there's a tank being built, that's going to go destroy things. It's not actually like helping the world become a more productive place, right? Versus like if that same capital was invested in a factory that creates something that's actually productive and helps out society, that would be a lot better. So basically, Bitcoin prevents money printing that exacerbates war and makes war so much more prevalent and easy to fund for governments. So I think, you know, chapter 7 and chapter A I'm talking about a lot. These are the chapters that I would say, like, even as a hardcore Bitcoiner, it's not like some of the early chapters, you might know all the facts already. These are chapters where it's like, they really make you think and give you a really interesting perspective.

and again, if you're libertarian, conservative, progressive, moderate, wherever you are on the political spectrum, most people don't like war just in general, right? You might agree or disagree about which wars were just wars or whatever, but basically like either way you're going to agree with this. You're going to agree. I'm sure, you know, Robert Reedlove agrees that United States and Saudi Arabia have a very corrupt relationship, right? So chapter seven, chapter eight are great for anyone on the political spectrum to learn. a lot and you'll probably agree with basically everything there. And then chapter nine explains kind of what the vision of the world would look like with Bitcoin. And it talks about kind of the importance of Bitcoin's stable government structure and, you know, its inability to just be

changed easily and compares that to the U.S. Constitution, which I think is really interesting. And then the last chapter is kind of concluding and a call to action. So anyway, that's my kind of chapter by chapter analysis of what I thought was really valuable with the book. And again, I would say some of those later on chapters really useful, even if you're someone who is already a hardcore bitcoiner. The other chapters are really great to like give someone and explain, hey, these are the really pressing reasons that for either, you know, Bitcoin is really valuable and maybe you don't notice it because we don't talk enough about inflation for, you know, when they talk about inflation, the banks, things like that, or to give someone to say, hey,

I know you've heard a lot of negative things about Bitcoin and the environment. Here's a chapter that it's not too long, you know, 30 pages, something like that. And just this explains why Bitcoin is actually, if anything, it's good for the environment, right? There's a lot of ways where it can help build out renewables, things like that. So, yeah, overall, I think all the chapters are really useful. It's not too long. but at the same time it's not too short. It's a good length where you feel like you're learning

and it develops the argument really well for each chapter. But at the same time, it's not such a long book that is really a burden to give someone, right? Because a 200-page book, if you give someone, it's not, you know, a huge burden to ask them to read that or to kind of encourage them to read that. So those are my overall thoughts on the book. A couple just last things to mention.

I don't really have any criticisms or anything like that. The main thing I would say is that there are just kind of like some typos that I noticed throughout the book. Not like anything really egregious, but if you're reading it closely, then you'll definitely notice some. But again, this is like the book just came out. So I bet at some point in the next couple years there will probably be some kind of reprint and, you know, a lot of those will be fixed. I will say, just to kind of troll Peter McCormack, who I'm a big fan of. But, I mean, his foreword is only like five pages long, and I noticed like three typos in it. So, I mean, come on, man.

The rest of the book had way fewer typos per page than the forward. Hey, this is Joe from the future splicing in here. I just wanted to mention one other kind of minor critique of the book. But I will say every once in a while throughout the book, you might notice that there could be a couple facts that might be kind of conflicting data, if you will. Usually it's the point is the same right, so it's not a huge deal. But there were a few of these that I noticed. One was that on page 24, it says 70% of people live under autocratic rule. And then on page 122, it says that 54% of the world's population lives under authoritarian rule. So again, the point is pretty similar,

right that more than half the world is living under, you know, an oppressive regime. And again, maybe there is some kind of distinction between authoritarian and an autocratic rule that I'm not really familiar with or something like that. It does come from, at least there's two different citations and not 100% sure it's like a different data source. But anyways, you might notice a couple of those. So just watch out for that. But usually it's not anything egregious or anything that would kind of change the point. It's just something that maybe on a second print or something like that, they might make sure the numbers are consistent throughout. So anyways, those are my thoughts on the book.

I would say it's a really valuable read. It's a great perspective. And even if you're someone who maybe would disagree about Jason Meyer and a lot of things, it might be really interesting to read and say, hey, here are kind of what a progressive would really value about the world and how can Bitcoin be argued through that lens. And I think this book, you know, if it is to say, disseminated widely. I think it can really help Bitcoin not be just a partisan issue. So I think it is a really important book. And again, with any book, you might not agree with 100% of the things that

the author says. And he even says that in the last chapter. So like, even if there's certain specific things that I would disagree with with Jason, it, I would still say this is a super valuable book to read. And even that, I mean, it's really focused again on that layer one issue of the money. mixing of money in politics, right, and how that corruption has caused all these downstream problems. And a lot of times, honestly, we agree about the layer one problem. We agree that there are these downstream problems. And a lot of times the political differences end up being basically how should we fix those downstream problems.

And maybe some arguments about what the downstream problems even are, how we should define those, right? But anyways, I think everyone would agree. that that layer one of money, once you read this book especially, that layer one of money is really what's causing a lot of the problems in the world. And yeah, I think it's a really helpful book for anyone, for a Bitcoin expert or for someone who's just, you know, learning about Bitcoin, you want to give it to them. So yeah, I hope that you enjoyed this book review. And again, this should be available wherever you get your podcast. But if you listen on Fountain, feel free leave a boost and I will read any kind of boostagram or message that you put in there in the next

podcast. There is someone who streamed me some sats and I really appreciate that. That's basically you can choose an amount to send and basically send, you know, one sat per minute, five sats per minute, whatever you want to send to a podcaster. And hey, you even earn Bitcoin for listening on Fountain. So if you're not listening on Fountain, you're a Bitcoiner, I would encourage you to try it out. It's a really good app. The interface is really great. So yeah, hope you enjoyed this. And if you found this helpful, feel free to leave me some kind of boost. I'd really appreciate it.

And if not, I just hope you enjoyed, no pressure to, you know, do anything financial. This is just kind of for fun. And again, just hope that this can be helpful for someone kind of considering the book and looking for some kind of summary about what it's about. Have a great rest of your day. And if you're interested, you can go back and listen to some more episodes of the SKZ podcast and hope to keep making this. going forward thanks