TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #135: Leigh Cuen

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Leigh Cuen, Senior Reporter at CoinDesk, to discuss: - Leigh's journey to covering this beat - Competing narratives in the cryptocurrency world - Bitcoin v. Ethereum - How people are using each - How each project is approaching adoption - The state of media - VC funded media incentives - Independent content creation - much more Follow Leigh on Twitter Check out Leigh's reporting on CoinDesk Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. A bit delayed this week. Had some personal stuff going on in my life that I had to take care of before getting this podcast out. But very happy to do so. Had the pleasure of sitting down with Lee Quinn from Coindesk for almost three hours. We hit on a lot, everything from the narratives going on of Bitcoin and Ethereum to how Bitcoin is being used to journalism covering the space, the concept of new media versus old media, independent content creators, and a bunch of other stuff. I've really enjoyed this conversation with Lee, even though we disagreed on a lot, which is what I'd like for you freaks to get out of this conversation, is the fact that we were able to disagree, yet be civil with each other. It was a very fun conversation that I think is important to have, to see the other side, to see another side, not the other side, another side of what we're doing here and other perspectives. and I thought this was an incredible episode. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App.

You freaks already know all about them. They're helping us do many things. They're helping us stack sats, send sats, receive sats. They're helping us stack slivers of stonks, if you want to. And they're helping us save money with their boost program. We'll start with the stonks. Cash App investing has hit the market. If you have a favorite stock out there that you'd like to invest in

but it's a little bit too expensive to buy a whole share of that stock, cash app investing is now letting you buy as little as one dollar all right so you can you can uh stack slivers of stocks all right on top of that you're still able to buy sell send receive bitcoin on the app and then the boost program uh allows you to save money at merchants i used my coffee boost today uh saved a dollar at the coffee shop um and then so cash up investing is a square subsidiary member sipc remember you don't have to wait four to five days to start investing because cash app is directly connected to your bank account you can start investing stacking sats using the boost program today and when you go to download the cash app make sure you use the

code stacking sats that's one word s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars is going to go to our good friends at Owl's Lacrosse, Owl's Lacrosse, alright, go download the cash app today, Stacking Sets, hope you guys enjoy this episode with Lee, I know I certainly did, what is up freaks, welcome back to Tales from the Crypt, it's your boy Marty Bent here, on a beautiful, it was a beautiful day, it's got a little bit more gray out on a wednesday afternoon very excited for this conversation uh second reporter we've had in in the studio before uh up to this point excuse me i'd like to introduce you freaks the senior reporter from coindesk lee quinn lee welcome to the podcast hi thanks for having me

thanks for coming by this is uh what's it been when did we first meet here in brooklyn was that like six months ago seven months ago yeah it was a while ago yeah had drinks shooting the shit that was a great conversation chicken we ate some fried chicken if you freaks haven't been to the commodore in williamsburg they got some really good good fried chicken good dive part two um we're gonna dive into a bunch of stuff here but as is the uh script here tales from the crypt uh what was your life like before bitcoin how did you get to coindesk covering this beat particularly yeah so i've been a journalist for a really long time long before I heard about cryptocurrency. I got my first newspaper, print newspaper internship when

I was 16 in high school. I've been working in the industry in some ways ever since. When I was 22, I moved to Israel and I worked in the Middle East for five years, mostly covering politics and culture. I came back to the U.S., to New York specifically, around three years ago to be a sex writer. And I focused a little bit on the porn industry, reproductive rights, things related to gender issues. And from there, I got offered a position to help Newsweek Media Group at the time spearhead their new beat for blockchain technology. And I knew very, very little about Bitcoin, but was willing to help them by doing a lot of research. And I found it so challenging that I kept wanting to do it. And three years later, here I am. So you've been writing for many publications

about bitcoin until you've settled at coindesk correct so i wrote for newsweek japan international business times and racked which is was a subsidiary of vox uh but mostly those yeah so what's it like getting thrown into this beat and trying to understand uh the technology the quote-unquote space the ecosystem and the people involved it's really hard i will never forget the first time i tried to write a story about ethereum i had maybe like an hour and a half and my editor was trying to get me to write like what is ethereum i remember i had maybe four phone calls to different people and by the end of them i still didn't know what i was going to tell my editor what is ethereum i didn't know there were all kinds of things people were throwing at me words i'd never heard before

for things that didn't make sense in the concrete world that i understood uh so i'd say it's really really challenging to come into this with no computer science background and try and figure out how to write about it yeah i don't even think ethereans know what ethereum is yet no ethereans do know what ethereum is it is a platform for executing computer functions that they think can change the world yeah that's very vague it is very vague exactly that was why it was hard to explain to my editor um but the more that i work with that community i understand how what they're thinking is a an approach a mentality a philosophy that they want to apply to all things while Bitcoin is very clear on what it is.

Bitcoin is money. That's what it is. I thought ETH is money too, though. To some people, ETH is money. See? So what is ETH, right? But we're not here to dive into ETH. Maybe we can eventually.

I think you'd find Ethereum has a lot more in common with Bitcoin than most Bitcoiners admit. What do you think there is in common? So there's definitely a shared cultural ethos between the two communities, and it's a lot of people that overlap. I mean, a lot of people that overlap. Even some of the people that on Twitter

are the loudest hardliners. In private, they own Ethereum, are interested in it, might have invested in something, might be using something. So I think in terms of the cultural ethos, like we have a community that's defined by these rules and ways we behave. That's very common between both Bitcoin and Ethereum

and they talk about each other in very similar ways. What do you mean like a defined community? Because that's the thing, Bitcoiners. Like I say, there isn't really no community. There's just Bitcoiners, right? So there's like 30 Bitcoin Core developers on the planet? No. Regular contributors to the project,

routine contributors to the project, people that have had more than a few PRs. I mean, like consistent. I think there was, I think last year it was like over 1,000 contributing to the Core repository. Yeah, sure. So if you go to any of the Bitcoin Core meetups

that they usually have around the world around things like breaking Bitcoin or scaling Bitcoin, it's not a thousand people there. It's generally maybe 30 to 40 guys that have been doing this for a very long time. That doesn't mean Bitcoin definitely does have more robust contribution. You could have like up to a thousand people that are, you know, like doing a little bit here, a little bit there. Ethereum has the same of that. I don't think that Bitcoin is quite as diverse in its main contribution as people think it is but that isn't it is certainly the most decentralized cryptocurrency that we have in existence today and no one's disputing that but i definitely do think that bitcoin is still at a place where it is a small group of people

who generally know each other um we we do have a concept of tribes and communities that are bigger than 50 people like we know what that looks like right so that's what bitcoin is right now it's a tribe yeah it's a tribe well what the people using bitcoin may be a tribe but what is bitcoin right yeah that is true what is bitcoin i think most of us see it as money most of us see it as digital money but you're right that the way that it manifests in the world and the kinds of things it attracts around it and the way that people behave around it can be so many things yeah it's a multifaceted tool and that's where I think Bitcoiners

and Ethereans diverge I think it's from first principles right I think from a first principles standpoint Ethereum is not I don't want to say pure

but is off the mark a bit with a pre-sale a virtue signal out of the box that they're going to be the energy efficient blockchain as they transition to proof of stake which is proven to be pretty uh pretty hard for them over time um and yeah from first principles that's so that's me as a bitcoiner um my bias my bias is out there i'm a bitcoin uh bull i think bitcoin is uh is one of the most important

technologies in the world right now and i agree with that from an economic perspective if it is to be money i do think it will be a winner take most to all and bitcoin has the best chance of doing that and that is because from a first principles perspective its launch uh the way its development community has uh evolved over time uh is more pure so i would definitely agree with the idea of a first principles difference i think that bitcoin because it wants to be money is very focused on simplicity is very focused on the process as opposed to the end result making sure that process is correct well for ethereum they want to do all different kinds of things in all different kinds of ways because what they're trying to get at is changing the world

right so when you're trying to do that that means that all different kinds of things can apply sometimes the ends might justify the means in some respects i don't think that it's necessarily that you don't think bitcoin wants to change the world i think some bitcoiners want to change the world and i very much believe that bitcoin bitcoin can and hopefully will but that you don't think that bitcoin could change the world no i think it can i just don't think it will change the world in the way that most bitcoiners believe it will and that's precisely because they'll get too um distracted by what they want that change to be as opposed to watching the the change that is actually happening.

All right, so let's dissect this. What do you mean by that? So, let's even start with some of the things that we heard and saw at the World Economic Forum. For example, lots and lots of countries are very interested in issuing their own cryptocurrency, digitizing their economies so that all of our transactions are digitized and, from a Bitcoin perspective, monitored.

From a compliance perspective, they can encourage certain behaviors discourage other kinds of behaviors. That is something. So when Bitcoiners imagine themselves being able to exist outside of the system, they will only be able to do so as long as they're not doing anything interesting enough to attract attention in that kind of system, because that kind of system is all encompassing. Like if the state of Iran or the state of Russia can't get around certain laws neither can you so Bitcoin is not necessarily a way to fight against the government as much as it might be useful for people who want

to do some small things on their own which can be completely lawful things but I don't think that the public how do I describe this the bravado of the idea that we can be our own bank and resist authorities is realistic because we don't think about all the ways that banks and authorities impact aspects of our lives beyond the transaction itself. Bitcoin is decentralized but all of you can still go to jail. So you think it's neutered out of the box? I think that hmm I think if a nation-state wanted to attack Bitcoin it could and it would win So the goal is to keep it from doing that.

How would it do that? There's a million ways it could do that. Let's go through them. So I'm really not great at the technical aspects, but I'm pretty sure that if someone were to do the kind of scale of mining that, say, the U.S. military does when it comes to other kinds of programs, like if you have a force of several million people doing anything, you can override a network that's bootstrapped, just in general.

Well, you have to think of the mechanics of how they would do that, right? They have to tap into the supply chain and get miners and plug them in to energy sources that Americans may be aware of. And more particularly, the overarching mining community would be aware that miners are drying up, right? and so so let's even take mining aside and imagine that i mean the u.s government could certainly if it wanted to spin up plenty of companies that didn't necessarily look like the u.s government and did things that maybe weren't need to be subject to public appeal and just think about the channel through which we learn about bitcoin and trade bitcoin they are either heavily monitored and regulated or they are subject to manipulation from propaganda

and we understand like everyone knows that propaganda is out there and that it's a real issue but everyone thinks it's only for the side they don't like and don't realize that actually world leaders have for the past decade been looking at social media platforms and the platforms that we believe to be democratized and thinking about how to use them to influence people's behavior and drown out true noises of signal um in all the noise right so if you were to go on to the platform where you usually trade and learn about bitcoin and it just became unusable then if you didn't have you need to have an in-person human network for which to trade and that's great like that's a thing that you can do you can buy a ticket out you can get food to get

out would you be able to sustain your life in that way probably not it seems to me you're highlighting like the the pressing need for bitcoin certainly i believe it's one of the most important technologies that we've ever invented and i believe that it could have an immense impact on the world But I don't think we're going to enter into this Bitcoin-induced utopia in which governments are suddenly going to start playing nice because they will be stripped of the power of fiat. Yeah, no, I don't think government's going to play nice at all. I think it's going to be a battle, a war of the minds, if you will.

I just think Bitcoin will inevitably win out because of its nature. What nature is that? It's decentralized, distributed. Anybody can download a copy of the blockchain. and run it if they have a computer that can download the software. That's all that matters. Yeah, that's a really cool aspect.

That's, I think, one of my favorite things. I don't know. Every time I get really, I go through phases, right? It's only been three years and yet I've gone through many phases. And every time I get really excited about Bitcoin and I think this is a really good solution

for this problem, I end up spending a lot of time with people who I think would be in that user group and they end up coming back to me with like, Lee, that's great, but so I'm going to be responsible now for my entire family's finances because there's no way in hell

I'm going to get my mom to open up a terminal like we all know that user experience will get better and that these tools will evolve that right now we're in the worst stage bitcoin will be and that it only gets better from here so I'm not saying that that argument is this is how it will always be what I'm saying is that it's maybe important to like they're they know that too they understand that technology evolves too so when they come back to me with this of Lee I need my electricity from the government and the government easily shuts off my entire neighborhood in East Jerusalem that I take that seriously and I need to think about like okay what is Bitcoin built on Bitcoin is software software runs with electricity if you turn off the electricity very very difficult to

use Bitcoin and that's true for all the things and surely we'll all be in the streets fighting for beans but what if that becomes your norm what if that becomes decade upon decade of how your community lives. Well, that's the beauty of Bitcoin, right? Like if one government decides to do that, another can say, hey, we're not going to do that. And we're actually going to be open to it. And that's not to say that the people under the oppressive government won't have access to Bitcoin. It is to say that it will survive, though. I genuinely think that Bitcoin will survive. It could survive. Who knows? It's still 10 years old and there's a lot to go there. But let's go with that. So some governments will say no, while others will say yes. What governments

so far have been saying yes to Bitcoin? And I don't only mean that in a public persona. I mean that in also leaders of that government probably owning or dealing in Bitcoin. Or I mean making rules that they know are easy to get around for certain reasons. You don't have to openly endorse Bitcoin in order to have that be a part of the de facto behind the scenes way your government operates I don't think so far we we have seen you know the when I was in the World Economic Forum some world leaders were curious the French economic minister for example gave me really smart answers when I asked him about the future of Bitcoin in his country but nine times out of 10 most people told me that they don't want secret bank accounts so anyone who is known to have

bitcoin will be is considered high risk in their mind which means that you're automatically going to be watched what kind of future is that so like that i think that's that's the beauty of bitcoin too is that it forces this conversation on the globe like do we want to get cattle herded into a digital panopticon? Or do we want to give Bitcoin a fighting chance? And individually, I think more and more people are starting to decide Bitcoin is the only way forward if we don't want to be cattle herded into this digital panopticon. Yeah, no, I definitely think that Bitcoin is a really promising technology and it's really exciting. I just think that when we're thinking about creating money, the problem is sometimes are slightly technical, but are

more often social we need enough people to value bitcoin and to know how to use bitcoin in order to use it without surveillance systems yeah and hasn't uh the history of bitcoin's price appreciation proven that more and more people are liking it and valuing it i think there are definitely more and more people today that are that value bitcoin i wouldn't say that there are more people that use bitcoin it's really difficult because the data sets that we have are skewed right like you'll see on local bitcoins like this amount of transactions skyrocket in this certain emerging market but then you'll talk to the people on the ground and people be like we have no idea who's buying these we don't have exchanges in our country so we're all otc and

usually when that happens that means that there was one whale or a person who had access to a lot of local fiat who bought in and it makes it look like everyone in that country was buying in but really there's one person, we have no idea who they are, and they were able to move a market by themselves. So if you're the person who controls the printing of fiat in your country, you can influence the Bitcoin market in ways that other people don't understand. That's not to negate Bitcoin. That doesn't mean that Bitcoin is not important. It just means that we have this image of Bitcoin as this rogue technology only being used by the little guys when so far a lot of the evidence suggests that there's all different kinds of people using bitcoin and they don't all

necessarily adhere to the idea of privacy and freedom for other people they might they might like it for themselves uh but they may not support policies that allow other people access to that same market no i've talked about on this podcast a lot like venezuelan government is definitely buying bitcoin that's what they're sending people local bitcoins uh um i think it's an educated guess i would say that's a very educated guess that's um god damn it why is his name slipping my mind right now um yeah so uh i had mauricio deeper i always butcher his last name deeper total d bartolomo uh on the podcast from leonardo and he um he was a miner in venezuela and

obviously the venezuelan government confiscated a lot of mining equipment um and used it with their free oil um so i would with a high degree of certainty say that uh or high degree of confidence excuse me that the venezuelan government owns bitcoin is using bitcoin um and uh is yeah like there's despotic governments that are using uh bitcoin i'd say that's an educated guess and i would even venture as far to say that they're probably not the only ones no i wouldn't be surprised if russia has it um other countries north korea even china with a bunch of uh a bunch of their uh with a bunch of mining in the country i just think uh the pboc isn't paying attention or at least hoarding some themselves again this is all speculation but

those are the countries on my list that i believe would be holding bitcoin and that yes so you were mentioning venezuela and a lot of these countries are despotic and spy on all their citizens and they they uh probably would like to hinder them from using bitcoin as well but that is just the nature of the beast right i think bitcoin is really promising and i hope that by paying attention early to the way that things play out maybe in a way that we didn't want or or didn't expect that we can design something that is resilient who how do it how did anybody like want this to play out out of the box right they just wanted it to exist right and the fact that it exists means that anybody can use it yeah so i think that um certainly i don't think this is

Satoshi Nakamoto's idea but that there's a popular idea in the Bitcoin community that it's going to lead to the collapse of governments and those governments will stop printing money because Bitcoin exists or they will at least have to cater to the whims of Bitcoiners because that form of value will be superior and that Bitcoin will continue to be regulated somewhat similarly to what it is today meaning that it's lawful to own and transact personally but we've already seen for example in Iran when it became more popular the government was like oh then you can't do local commerce in it and sure you can take that risk by doing it yourself but there's a lot of reasons that people don't do things that are easy to do but technically unlawful because they don't

want to get caught so the governments around the world certainly certainly can react to bitcoin by making it more difficult and risky for people to use it. I think being aware of how governments and other kinds of bodies that make decisions view Bitcoin can help us prevent those kinds of laws by showing that really the thing we need to fear is not terrorism at all. There are probably things that we need to fear with Bitcoin, but I'm just not thinking terrorism is one of them. Yeah, I was looking at your Twitter account. You had a tweet about that, a joke about terror star wearing pants yeah that's it it's true though it's like when i was drinking water should we should we start banning water yeah so i mean starting when i was 19 was the first time i

started studying terror networks and i specialized in it for several years so and i remember bitcoin from that i mean when i back in 2015 when i was looking into isis in particular and the way that they use digital media and the way that they recruit and the way that they plan attacks and the way that they network and things and bitcoin was not very useful for them because they were just in areas where it was very hard for them to liquidate and still today i would say that there are some terror groups that use bitcoin but so so so much less than they use a million other things like telegram for example or the u.s dollar or of course the u.s dollar osama bin laden was wearing what was it like a watch like a Rolodex watch or something when he when he died like

even people who want to bring the collapse of the American government are happy to accept our dollars yeah now that and uh Mexican drug lords had teller windows at HSBC form fitted for their suitcases full of U.S. dollars that they were laundering and so that yeah and that gets back to the point where like so I think we're talking a lot about that's what I think personally uh people's fear of governments shutting this down is overblown because i think governments are doing a very good job at making themselves look terrible uh over time especially and uh it's obviously uh different for people under different governments around the world but make fun of our own government here in the u.s like i think the u.s and the central banking

system here is leading itself to a path where people are going to demand another option and if we truly live in a free country it's going to it's not going to be it's not going to be like a the bitcoin starving the government it's going to be people losing faith in the government's ability to govern and bitcoin that losing faith in the government's ability to govern number one And then number two, the Federal Reserve and the government in concert with each other being able to control the economy and the monetary system, which is becoming more and more apparent. Actually, what I wrote about in the newsletter this morning is we are headed towards a insane demographic shift here in the States. And the monetary policy that's been applied over the last five decades is untenable. So the lengths that the Federal Reserve and the government are going to have to go to

to just keep everything in stasis, let alone explosive growth, is going to fuck up the money. And that's what I think is just going to be a market decision that people are like, all right, Bitcoin and alternatives like gold are better than what we have now. I would agree that our current economy is in dire straits. I would agree that people are losing faith in governance. I've never seen a dog backed into a corner that didn't bite.

So I'm not exactly sure that that's a situation in which the Fed will play nice with alternative forms of currency. However, that all being said, I want to really emphasize one of the big things I think that we get wrong when we think about Bitcoin is that we have seen functional, moderately functional nation states or empires before that had multiple forms of currency, including ones that were not controlled by the state, and everything got along regular. I mean, it did not lead to some kind of collapse or social reformation. Throughout history, there were people that used gold, there were people that used silver, there were people that used textiles, like silk. There are all different kinds of commodities that have shifted between a currency as a medium of exchange or a store of

value and something that you would use for its practicality, grain even. And it happened when there were kings who were also stamping their faces and issuing currencies. And that didn't seem to upset the national order. They found other ways to quell the populace and people would just behind closed doors be trading in these commodities. Yeah, I mean, that was Rome, right? Give them grain towards the end of the Roman Empire. And that's something that definitely I think we can be inspired by. We can believe that we don't need to hope for disaster

in order for Bitcoin to succeed. What Bitcoin does need to succeed is a robust and diverse network of people that will continue contributing to it and valuing it. Yeah, see, that's where I think a lot of people have misconceptions about Bitcoiners. And again, this is something Pierre Richard and Michael Goldstein like to say a lot, like Bitcoin is descriptive. We're not prescribing that Bitcoin is the antidote to the problems of the world. and we're describing that the world is in such a bad place that naturally the market is going to seek an alternative

and Bitcoin is likely to be one of the alternatives that is chosen, right? It totally could be. So you're describing that the world is the way it is and if you project forward, it's staying on this path. It's just going to be inevitable that people seek alternatives. It's not that we're prescribing that the world needs to go to shit for bitcoin to succeed it's just hey the world is going to shit what are people going to do once it hits a certain tipping point so as you pointed out though there's no one bitcoiner

right unlike ethereum where we have a certain set of leadership in bitcoin there are lots of contributors people who are very very influential but outside of that there are also other people who have their own narratives and are certainly bitcoiners and are promoting a bitcoin narrative and there are definitely people who think uh they they imagine themselves as anarchists So you think Ethereum has a concise narrative? I think Ethereum... More concise than Bitcoin? That's a good question.

I think Ethereum has... Is it a world computer? Is it an unstoppable virtual machine? Is it Turing complete? Is it environmentally friendly? For sure. But it has a group of people that define the narrative. Who are those people?

I don't think we even need to ask the question of who are the people that define the Ethereum narrative. Who are they? Is it the DeFi plumpers of the world? Is it Vitalik and Joe Lubin? I would say, I don't know. Let's talk about how Ethereum has succeeded where Bitcoin is failing so far.

Every single banker in World Economic Forum is curious about Ethereum. They scoff and want you to go away the minute you say the word Bitcoin. And you might argue, well, that's because bitcoin is here to steal the power of the bankers they're not afraid of bitcoin okay what they do want is a way to streamline the work that they already do and although ethereum may not be a solution for that they believe that there could be potential in the technology and that is not

a kind of curiosity bitcoin has been able to um to inspire on the other hand ethereum the ethereum founders and leaders have been able to change the way digital assets are regulated bitcoiners have been struggling to get very basic tax reforms so that people can actually spend and use their bitcoin and that's going to be locked up in congress for forever i mean i guess two things there it depends on how you define success and what your goals are and yeah bitcoiners run away from regulation like then they do as if they're going to be able to avoid the fact that it will continue to exist so i'm not a big believer in the nation-state as a concept we've seen empires we've seen different kinds of tribal leaderships like i'm not saying that the nation-state will

always exist and so we have to mold ourselves to it i am saying that if you want to have if you want to change the world and you were saying bitcoin is also want to change the world it is probably easier to do that i'm not even saying it's the right approach i'm just saying it's an effective approach uh top down as opposed to bottom up bottom up feels better bottom up might have more ethical results i i really can't say i've never successfully overthrown a dictatorship but i can say that i see i see people with power to make decisions decisions about who gets to go to jail and who gets to stay free decisions about how people can access their assets and you can't really buy bitcoin if you can't get your fiat or you can't get your value right like so people who

make decisions about banks or transactions you could and that is my favorite way to earn bitcoin this is true this is very true but i would very much like it if the people who are in charge of making sure who goes to jail and who stays free didn't see bitcoin as a sign of criminal activity and ethereum has done a much better job of that than the bitcoin community has it's always such a relief to go to bitcoin it's so bullish for bitcoin in my mind yeah it's not like every time i go to a meeting of bitcoin core developers it's such a relief it's so unusual for me because everyone is talking very pragmatically about a software and that's what they're doing they are making a software there is no um crazy lights display

there's no one telling me that there's like a queen from some african tribe that's here to tell me how she's been empowered by some token like they're just dudes building a software and they can very pragmatically discuss what are the downsides and what are the possibilities but that's not the broader discussion of what people see when they look at bitcoin so we have this issue in which we have a technology that is very useful and has so much potential, but only the people that spend a ton of time can see that. Well, we have another technology that, I'm not going to debate the technical merits of Ethereum, but is not presented or discussed or dealt with in the same way. When I go to meetings with core developers from the Ethereum community,

even if they're talking about software, the approach is extremely different. it's a little less academic it's a little more um pragmatic no no for the ethereum community it's more esoteric it's like we could be doing this or we could be doing that or theoretically this thing could happen and while in bitcoin we're talking about like here is a thing that is happening we could make it like this to be faster but that would mean this trade-off like very very clear um so we have a much more esoteric development process but the messaging is so clear to so many people and a lot of people can't tell the difference between these two things that are being built messaging's clear where i think uh the ethereum messaging while

it shifts is much more oriented towards um human rights bitcoiners also care very deeply about human rights but a lot of times that concern gets drowned out and a lot of the frustration that they're expressing with the current system that they live in and so it takes you a while before you hear that message about this potential for the technology to be used for human rights does that make sense like no one in the wef was like even had even been familiar with that concept i know i i think uh i think ethereum uses human rights as a virtue signal i went to a consensus meetup a few years ago um where people were talking about spinning up tokens to help women in africa which hey i would love to help women in africa but it's it's again it's no doubt

in my mind that there are certainly strong virtue signaling that happens across the space and it drives me insane. Yeah. No. And then going back to your point about top down versus bottom up, like I would completely disagree with that. Like I, I think we need to pull the Buckminster Fuller quote out.

Like I didn't say that was the right way to do it. I didn't say that it's a, that's a going to have a results that we want to have. I'm just saying that these are two communities that are clearly taking a very different approach. Yeah. And I guess like, how do you define success what are the goals like are the goals to get all the banks to adopt your

cryptocurrency so in the short term the goal is to stay out of jail and ethereum people have done that not virgil ouch i will say in virgil's defense that he is somebody who is widely admired within the community he worked in he was always um seen as a father figure seen as someone who was helpful to people i don't really want to discuss his trial but i'll say as his character that Virgil was very beloved and he was beloved because of the way that he was seen as a leader.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know too much about him. Can you say this? I mean, what Bitcoiners are going to jail or trying to go to jail? Charlie Shearn. Charlie Shrem.

Yeah, Shrem. Yeah. So? We could list off the top of our heads several people who have gone to jail for using Bitcoin and I'm not saying

that they're right or wrong. I'm saying that like I would prefer that we be much more, that we not be viewed the way that we are viewed amongst the people that have the power to make decisions. I don't think that we need to lick boots. I do think that we can emphasize the way that technology can be used for things other than terrorism and drugs because everyone seems to know that narrative

and I'm so tired of it. There are actually a thousand other ways that people use Bitcoin in a thousand different situations that I think people would be very sympathetic to and curious about and even want to uh promote or to learn from if only people were discussing those aspects of bitcoin let's jump in on cool so um but you know so we talk a lot about empowering people in emerging markets right and it's very true that as a hedge against inflation in all different kinds of countries i hear from people all all the time that they are holding their asset their wealth in bitcoin to be able to transact internationally to do business internationally and to be able to store their wealth for their offspring.

Great use case. But thinking about here in the U.S., where the vast majority of people aren't as concerned about banking issues, but they might be concerned with their freedom in other ways. Like, for example, gosh, I don't remember. It's like 90% of women who are domestic abuse victims are also victims of something called financial abuse. That's when somebody controls your access to bank accounts, to jobs, to money,

And that's why women don't leave. I've actually heard of women who, in a domestic abuse shelter, shared Bitcoin with each other, were able to get lawyers, were able to get jobs because they took like a class to then get better employment, able to earn their own freedom in the ways that like Cardi B, who was like famously saying, yeah. So Cardi B got out of an abusive relationship because she was stripping and would save cash and hide it. That was.

Oh, I thought you were going to go into her, her, her rant on taxes. I did not know this. I did not know this story. Yeah. I mean, she definitely does have a good rant on taxes. But that's her story. That's how she became a star. That's how she became independent.

She was actually a domestic abuse victim. So Bitcoin can do that, and it's easier to hide than a bunch of cash. Right. Yeah. That's what I wrote a piece for Dig yesterday. Bitcoin is better for moving money across borders, even if it's out the door of your house, right? Yeah.

and so there are a lot of countries especially for example in africa where normal e-commerce platforms won't serve them because there's like a high amount of fraud credit card fraud from this country so even if you're a perfectly upstanding citizen who just wants to buy yourself a speaker for your guitar you a lot of commerce companies won't work with a credit card from your country but they'll accept your bitcoin like you can get something shipped there you just can't use a local credit card so there's all different kinds of ways that people are gaining access to financial power to markets to different kinds of opportunities people that are freelancing around the world who locally don't have good employment opportunities but they're smart and

they can figure stuff out and they can work online and accept payments I mean they're just like all different kinds of ways that I think people would be really excited about that have really less to do with number go up and screw the bankers and more to do with like the ability to make your own financial choices regardless of the physical context you're living in yeah so you think we need to shift the narrative i think number go up is important particularly i think number go up enables everything else so that's like it's true but it's frustrating because on one hand number goes up is what gets people excited and keeps people devoted on the other hand number goes up is why every single person i ask in the world economic forum what is bitcoin tell me it's for

speculation there's nothing else it can be used for but that speculation leads to liquidity which leads to making it easier for people to move that money it's led to this really annoying narrative that what we need to do is invent a cryptocurrency that is quote-unquote stable nothing's ever stable don't fall exactly there's no concept of stability currencies by definition are defined by the value of what people are willing to value them as do you value the u.s government and think that is stable do you value this other thing and think that is stable that is where the stability comes from it's not from some mechanism built into the computer so I do think the volatility the number go up is first off inevitable it's not something that I either you nor me can roll back and number two is

in some ways productive but I also think that if that's all we focus on it can be extremely counterproductive and that's what people think the use case is the use cases number go up and the use case is not number go up like if what you're looking for is a wildly risky investment there are other investment options um bitcoin is about self-ownership yeah self-sovereignty and the liberty in the digital age that's the idea that's the hope right and that's why i like to harp i don't talk about number go up too much in the newsletter or on the podcast that's really good yeah um and that's but that's the thing like how and that's a big gripe of mine on this podcast is a lot of people want all this stuff out of the box and it's just untenable it's gonna take time

it's gonna take of course it's gonna take a changing of minds like we are like at the very very early days of this stuff and i do believe that we were born you're a millennial too right yeah i'm millennial i'm like i'm not gonna dox your age i'm a 90s child and i actually don't know your age i'm a 90s child um and i believe any like particularly around the time i was born we were just born at like one of the weirdest times in history to ever be born because things are changing at such a pace and nobody can keep up nobody knows what's going on and as much as uh and that's why i think bitcoin's inevitable and from a from a market choice perspective is because things are going to keep changing drastically and i think they're

going to affect nation states and governments definitely already affecting nation states and governments bitcoin is a part of global politics not even bitcoin like twitter social media like Yes. The internet. Yes, these things too. And Bitcoin's just another layer of that stuff. That's the scary part, right? That sort of adds another arrow in the quiver of our tools

against these state governments. It's another layer in terms of how we communicate and interact with other humans. That's for sure. But I don't think we even remotely understand how it is that digital media, I'm including Bitcoin in that, but also things like Twitter, have impacted the way we view ourselves, the things we want, and the things that we do, even offline. Yeah.

It's a lot easier to manipulate people these days. Something I used to do when I was working in the Middle East. But it's also a lot easier to get very good information. it's just how it's it's uh it's developing the uh the way and developing a way to think critically and how to filter this information right it's just a onslaught of more information than we've ever been uh ever been fed that's no no this is very true it's easier to it's cheaper to get good information the problem is it requires media literacy in order to know what is the good information because now you're just there's so much of it that if you don't come to it already

knowing how to think critically it'll be very easy to lean into something that speaks to your own biases and fears yeah no i mean hand up i fell into it's a coronavirus like i had like i had a bunch of reflection like the last two days particularly like fuck man they got me yeah yeah you're more likely to die from the flu the regular flu oh yeah i mean that's that's the thing it's uh i've decided not to comment anymore on it other than the conversation right now because i'm confused i don't know what to believe like is that true or are like the uh is the ratio of infections to deaths what we should be looking at which some people are saying and then i talk i've talked with people who live in china and around china and i've been in china the last

couple months and they're like yeah it's probably just the chinese government local governments overreacting um and it's just weird i don't know i don't know i think that's the really important thing that we need to remind ourself constantly it's okay to not know and it's very important to admit to yourself when you don't know like i have zero idea how it would be that a nation state would attack the mining infrastructure of bitcoin i don't what i do know is that there are definitely people that would be interested in knowing that people that have a lot of resources and probably could figure it out much faster than me. So do I think it's impossible?

No. Do I know how it is they would do it? Also no. Does it necessarily, is it inevitable? Also no, it is not. But for sure, we've been saying for a while that governments are just now starting to take an interest in Bitcoin.

And this is just objectively not true. Several years ago, when I was focusing on the terror beat and ISIS was trying to raise funds with Bitcoin, governments were very, very aware of it. And they were already trying to allocate resources to figure out how it is they would combat or contradict Bitcoin usage that they did want to discourage. So that was like 2015-ish. I'm sure if by then a lowly journalist with no security clearance could figure out the governments were thinking about that, then by now, five years later, what we're seeing is, oh, governments are taking more of an interest in Bitcoin.

is actually just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is possible. It can be anything from exchanges to mining to wallets. We think our wallets are safe, and they're a starting point, but certainly not a finished endpoint that could resist a nation-state attack. I'm not saying that any of this negates Bitcoin. All I'm saying is that Bitcoin exists in a broader context, and the more attractive your honeypot is right the more challenging adversaries it will attract and as bitcoin becomes more and more attractive we definitely need to be thinking about like okay

who are the people that are interested in this what do they want and does that contradict with my use case which is self-sovereignty um how do i protect the self-sovereignty use case for myself because that is something that will continue to be under attack as more and more people are interested in it. Yeah, right. And that's the beauty of Bitcoin's conservative development nature and then tribalistic users, right? The development is conservative

because it wants to ensure that people can remain sovereign, that they can download the software and run it on their own personal devices. If that's ever bastardized, then Bitcoin's value prop gets thrown out the window. And then you see that protected by loud people on the internet and even in person sometimes. Yeah, I mean, the tribal nature of humanity

is so fascinating. And I think one of the things that is the most interesting part of the Bitcoin experiment is can we cooperate at scale without being forced? That's the beauty of Bitcoin. right social scalability the less that's why i think ethereum's doomed to fail right they've created such a social attack vector i think it depends on what your goal is right like i'm not sure that ethereum will fail if what their goal is to change the world and they've already had

significant impact on world leaders their impact may not be what they expected it to be is that who you want to have an impact on i don't want anything lee just wants to be able to hold her own asset and learn cool things about computers what is success if governments are adopting ethereum um because they think they can control it that's that's like i don't think they're doing it because i think they can control it i think they think they can make a customized version that does what they want it to do and the ethereum is not necessarily so they can control it threat to their um yeah they're not a threat they're not really a threat to their sovereignty that's why they like it so but bitcoin has so much so much of a harder

goal to achieve to be money yeah it already is money it is money right now it is money but no okay i i disagree respectfully disagree um i think bitcoin has a better shot of success because it only wants to be money um unstoppable peer-to-peer distributed cash uh ethereum wants be money a world computer uh plumbing for the fun uh for any app you want to build in the future that's a lot harder than just focusing on producing blocks every 10 minutes that enable peer-to-peer distributed transactions okay okay so first off i'm sorry that i uh have been so harping on ethereum but ethereum doesn't want to be money in the world computer and all these things ethereum wants to change the world by creating a more open financial system than exists

today whether or not it can accomplish that goal is still yet to be seen they've certainly made inroads in terms of impacting how laws are implemented bitcoin wants to be sustainable money it wants to be not only money today which it is it is money but it wants to be money 30 years from now thousands of years from now you understand how we're gonna be taking bitcoin into space bitcoin is intergalactic money if you wanted to have money such a lofty goal yeah why live if you don't have lofty goals? I'm definitely into the lofty goals and I think that they're admirable.

What I'm saying is that that is an incredible challenge because money... You're saying how is changing the world not an incredible challenge? It's a very incredible challenge. It is. And I am not saying whether or not

Ethereum will actually succeed in that, just that they've made significant process. Bitcoin has also made progress. It is money today. And its development, I'm just like not even worried about it there are people that want to argue about the technicalities of bitcoin I think that it's something that we can take comfort from is we've seen the development process work in such a way that conservative choices are made with the user's best interest

in mind consistently and I just no longer worry about the technical challenges of bitcoin I worry very much about the social challenges of bitcoin because that is something that not ethereum not russia that no one has figured out yet what do you mean like it doesn't so if you're not worried about the technical and it just works that makes it socially scalable right anybody can use it i think and a big enough group over a long enough period of time most social systems create a kind of hierarchy that functions in a way that isn't how the system was originally designed to function corruption right how would bitcoin become corrupted i don't know that's what i think a lot about how can so bitcoin uh-huh has a goal just wants upgrades want to be backwards compatible

hopefully it gets to a point i'll never ossify completely again the simple beauty and the simplicity and that's what makes simplicity is good that's what makes it socially scalable like I don't see how you could see Bitcoin have troubles scaling socially, but Ethereum won't. So there are definitely times in which, for example, the silver market had manipulation in it, but silver as a concept is solid as a precious metal. It was globally distributed. And that doesn't mean that silver failed in the long run, because the silver market eventually recovered from that.

but i'm saying that bitcoin offers us the yeah yeah how are these markets manipulated so you're like you're like gold price fixing that that was a scandal that happened eight years ago at this point where um that's when i was still working uh in finance when that was going on but that that manipulation was caused because you just had people in gchat deciding what the price of gold was that day exactly um you think that could happen with bitcoin not today you think how would that happen in the future though i've just learned not to underestimate when an entity with billions of dollars and millions of people to deploy decides to do a thing you don't even need that i mean you can have tiny nation states like israel or switzerland that have

a huge impact on the global economy that's vastly disproportionate to the amount of resources they have to deploy so if you have an organized structure with resources to deploy and desire to do a thing that thing should be strongly guarded against yeah and they i mean they could wage these attacks against any cryptocurrency they could and i really don't mind like i don't i'm not worried about bitcoin i guess in the terms of its concept of existence i'm not worried about bitcoin in terms of um if it would recover from such an attack it probably could maybe even if people were devoted to helping it recover i'm worried about i want i want to be able to use bitcoin and so when i have to think about to myself like what are the ways in which the value

that i personally get from it could come under threat and how are the ways that i could prepare myself for different situations and still have my bitcoin be usable because like we've saw for example in lebanon you need to think about bitcoin before the limited access hits otherwise what you're stuck with is a really cool usb card like in order to turn your bitcoin into food and shelter or a plane ticket you need to think ahead in terms of what are the resources i have accessible to me what is the use case I see for this and what are the ways in which that could be thwarted I need to build protections against that just like you would for anything just like you have insurance on your house you know yeah that's uh Eric Boskell's favorite saying bitcoin only succeeds

if it is black market money and I could see that easily happening especially with the open source software is being deployed to enable uh most importantly the the uh receiving of bitcoin So something like BTC Pay Server, you can imagine a future in which bodegas, even though Bitcoin may be illegal, those people that own the bodegas may want to own Bitcoin, may be at risk to take it, like selling loosies as well. and if they trust that they find customers that are willing to pay in Bitcoin and they trust them, they pull out a little QR code that's hidden behind the cash register,

present it, paid in Bitcoin. Technically, this is not a problem. Technically, this is very easy to foresee. And the question is, will there be customers that are willing to pay in Bitcoin and will that asset be liquid in that context? And I think there's a very high probability it could be but just thinking about liquidity liquidity meaning how do i turn this tiny amount

of data into value um value for the tangible things i need to survive that's the question and that that requires that that's a social issue that that's a that's a problem of getting enough people to value the thing in order for it to have liquidity even beyond a small circle of cool tribes yeah i think we're getting there i think it's possible i think it's going to happen i'm again i'm very bullish i think it's inevitable i think uh uh again the world has a choice right and when you just extrapolate into the future what individuals will choose yeah there's no way to know the digital panopticon or the free liberty enhancing money i think i mean when push comes to shove i do think there will be a time of civil disobedience and uh i don't want to say riots but

the revolution of the mind i very much hope that there are more widespread freedoms and there's for example today we have i believe more widespread freedom of expression than we had 30 years ago and that's largely due to digital media most definitely so it is possible to imagine that there would be a period of greater freedoms that is in part enabled by Bitcoin. But there's a lot of other factors at play in terms of whether we see that kind of future, or whether we see a more, it doesn't have to even be dystopian, it can just be mundane. You know, the, the USSR, for example, had all kinds of computer oriented economic experiments that in some ways sound very similar to blockchain projects going on in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s 30 years and it still

died and it's considered a failure something can exist for more than five years it doesn't make it a bubble and still fail yeah that's the other interesting thing too how do we know we're not already in the dystopia and will living in a dystopia only be recognized in retrospect i think in a lot of ways it it will be actually so if you talk to people that are holocaust survivors for example and you ask them why did you stay why did you get in line why did you get on the train a lot of them will be like we didn't believe our neighbors would do that we were just living our lives and every little step you take along the way doesn't feel as if you're going towards doom it feels as if you're doing the regular thing you've been doing the context is

just slightly scarier or slightly more tense but you feel that you're prepared you know you sewed gold into your sweater and so you're ready for that and then you show up in a camp and the gold in your sweater is not useful you know so i think that there is something certainly to be said for the idea that we aren't good at recognizing crisis when we're in it i think we're in it tsa social credit scores are here um yeah credit scores i had somebody uh on the podcast last last weekend and he said uh he went and bought mountain climbing gear for a friend for a birthday gift using his credit card and his life insurance got canceled because they thought he was doing something too risky when he was just buying a gift i think i think we're living in dystopia

i think we have the dystopia around us again the digital panopticon is being fortified right now it's already built out it's pretty easy they just have to flip a switch and that's why i think bitcoin is imperative and that i guess that's what i'm trying to get to this whole conversation like the technology is here it exists it works it does work it's good how do we get i mean how do we get what how do we change minds how do we change how do we shake people so going back to the holocaust survivors um speaking on their experiences like uh do you know have any did any of them say what they wish they would have done a lot of the ones that are still alive today were very very young children at the time so they don't they didn't really have as much agency

to do anything different but I will say so something that even from when I was in journalism school I've been studying for a long time is how people receive information and how do you change someone's mind so one of my graduate theses when I was in college was a study where I had a bunch of people read the same article and tell me what it was they learned from it and some people were very knowledgeable about the subject some people were not not a single person actually told me what was in the article generally they would tell me an opinion that they had but maybe peppered with a fact or two from the article but they missed the entire point of the article like they weren't focusing on the article they were seeing what they wanted to see and this is something that we see

across media content like even books tv like when you consume something what you're looking for is actually to confirm your own biases you're like grasping for it as quick as you can and something that really reaffirmed this idea for me when i was working in the middle east was dealing a lot with both soldiers and people who had been convicted of terrorism they would often describe their experiences in the exact same words and they would describe the enemy in the exact same words so they can't both be right like they can't both be doing the same thing but the other person is doing a very different thing something that i learned and this is also something that's been proven by psychologists that study conflict in in general is that most people believe they are

doing the right thing and a lot of times you'll find they have the similar goals you know the reason that so many world leaders want to track all of these transactions and and these profiles is because they want to keep people safe and they want do they really i think they just want to control people i think that they don't give a fuck about us i don't think they give a fuck about us individually no they don't give a fuck about us as a whole they despise us it's very rare to meet a psychopath as somebody who's met them they're pretty rare not in the government not in politics you have to be a psychopath to get into it so like every time um someone would it's a sociopath's game it's politics are definitely uh not for the faint of heart and attract like not for normal

people like like the creation of money it attracts a lot of characters with nefarious motives very true but I think most people when you present them with hey like I would tell one person who helps banks and other financial institutions with software and she was describing blockchain as something that could be really dangerous to institutions that they might unknowingly be working with North Korea or whatever and I gave her the example of what if I'm someone in Saudi Arabia or Iran and I need to get an abortion and that's do you believe it's my right and she goes of course I do and I was like so how would I pay for that and she was like I understand your point that we need to be able to make choices without the big brother's approval and that those choices

can sometimes be relevant to human rights and not only to tariffs or other kinds of illegal activities when you bring up specific use cases people are extremely receptive and they think about like okay she was like how would I make a regulatory framework that would allow my institutions to feel safe working with this crypto without the risk that she's concerned about so I think most people like the way you change hearts and minds is by thinking that they're not against you trying to figure out what is it you want like if what you want is to stop terrorism like that's a goal that I think a lot of people can get on the same board with like let's figure out where we have something in common as opposed to trying to only focus on where we think see things very

differently which sees these things as primarily surveillance can is a tool for good and i see it not that same way but if that was all we focused on we never would have gotten to a point of oh well how can i get my clients to fill out the paperwork they need to fill out without negating a specific use case if that makes sense no i agree i mean i understand what you're saying um and yeah it's the surveillance i think it's uh i think it's definitely uh nefarious right especially i'm speaking again for our own country for america since the patriot act patriot act was signed and they said they were only going to use the metadata to track terrorists and today fast forward 19 years they're using the metadata on social media to flag people who own guns so they

can go confiscate their guns like that is beginning to happen and so you you open up the door to the surveillance state a little bit and they punch it open and start using against their populace which is happening it's happening so that's the other thing humans are strange creatures on one hand they have a tendency to justify whatever it is they're doing they have a tendency to see what they want to see they also have a tendency to when they don't have a check and balance to overuse power and it's just something that's consistent it doesn't make them evil necessarily most people when they are given a situation which they will not have consequences take more leniency than they should yeah and this gets back to politicians being evil like i think that that when the patriot

act was a way to push forward their nefarious intentions patriarch was not great in my personal opinion but do you like going through the scanner i do not no i definitely do not enjoy do you think the scanner helps no i don't think the scanner helps but it's good conditioning though so when it comes to trying to change someone's mind um so far the studies that we have shows that the best way to change someone's mind is to find the things that you agree on and show them how the places where you disagree are complicated i like that strategy a lot so surveillance in some senses has some benefits i think that those benefits are outweighed by the negatives but trying to figure out like what are those benefits and could we give those benefits another

way like are there other ways to detect attacks before they happen or to find people that are trying to harm others like i think the most important way that we can help um improve the image of people who want to protect privacy is by trying to think about goals that are not necessarily evil that other people have because they want to sleep at night too they're not going home thinking to themselves like i'm taking over the world pinky i don't really like that you said that too because so that's right so it comes to a how do you solve these problems i think do you solve terrorism with surveillance or do you try to figure out why people are committing terrorism yeah going to the root of the problem right and i think the root of the problem is

money and the control of money and the ability to print money to pay militaries to go bomb foreign lands for their oil is not good that might be the root of the problem right there and uh yeah would you agree with that at all yeah i would definitely agree that the concept of money which includes private property is a root of many many conflicts so i used to be really obsessed with archaeology like ancient archaeology like like early man we were just figuring out how to speak and make fire things like that and most historians and archaeologists today believe that the big distinctions that we have now of gendered work you know we're like probably you take out the trash and your wife does dishes or something where we believe that certain kinds of work are associated

with certain kinds of social roles came when we started having property when we started farming instead of hunting and gathering and that doesn't mean that having property is wrong there were still roles during hunter and gather there are still roles there are still groups of people that hunt and gather um no no it wasn't humans or almost whatever we were neanderthals were hunter gatherers i mean there's still roles there like the men who caught the mammoths and the women there were still social roles but they weren't treated differently in terms of value like we didn't have the same at least as far as we can tell there's not a lot of written records from those days we don't seem to have records of uh women being considered property the way they

were considered property like for example the middle the medieval ages middle ages whatever those ages were um medieval times medieval times thank you um and it's not only related to women it could be someone with a disability or it could be elderly versus youth there wasn't the same distinction of like you like a child is my property until they are adults or there wasn't the same distinction in terms of uh this role is better than that role it was more as far as we can tell based on capability like if you were a really fierce hunter and you were just 14 people would be happy to have you with their troop regardless of whether or not you're seen as a child we do see stark evidence of a distinction like you were born this way so you have this value and

should behave this way when we start settling down and having like a church that doesn't or the temple at the time designate like we own this you get this based on that and when you have a central power that is controlling the distribution of wealth then we start to see this um disparity yeah between how it's distributed basically so i guess the short answer to your question is money is certainly at the root of many of the evils we see but it's not necessarily fiat it's like the idea of someone else defining what you can own and that is the definition of fiat decree defining what you can decreeing what you cannot yeah i'm agreeing with you like in my favorite example is the reformation era like when the church held the held was decreeing who and who

could not get into heaven and yes yeah they were basically sucking value out of the populace by making them pay alms to get into heaven yeah but the issue is that like since the sumerian times like before the pharaohs okay we've had this concept of fiat and private money it was maybe a little different uh like the persian empire was one of the first people to have like a registry of silver and how it was that it was distributed and valued but the concept of at the time it was like temples and priests um a central body deciding the value of certain things and that time would usually be grain um that's the thing that we've had for so long that i think a desire to reverse that is at best wildly ambitious but we can maybe identify some of the ways that that

has harmed us and try and problem solve for those because we're just like not going to convince eight billion people to give up centralized control of wealth right i don't think we're going to convince people to do i think they're going to just naturally come to the conclusion that it's uh not advantageous to have people central centrally controlling this stuff i think while the ethereum community has a goal of changing the world that as bitcoiners bitcoin succeeds if it's still useful 20 years from now 30 years from now bitcoin succeeded already in my mind so whether bitcoin is succeeding is whether or not it fails right going forward and that's fair i'll get behind that bitcoin has succeeded by becoming money the question of whether it

continues to be money and can be used by individuals who do not have the powers of a nation state in the future like that is all it needs it doesn't need to you know hyper bitcoinization and everything is in bitcoin and everyone uses bitcoin for everything like if one person if a few people can use bitcoin when they need to use it that's a cool thing yeah it's got to be black market money first and foremost but going back to like the centrally controlled fiat currencies like why have they always taken over right and i think it's because the technology like bitcoin hasn't existed and like gold had a good run there for quite a while but we found out during the 1930s that centralizing gold and vaults sort of bastardizes the whole the whole system um and

since then we've had we've lived in this this fiat decreed world of this is the money and there really hasn't been quality monetary competition uh outside of uh government and central bank currencies and until bitcoin right like so bitcoin in my mind provides that opportunity to to break that cycle in a material way. I think Bitcoin provides the opportunity in a digital world to return to the norms

of the pre-modern world in which grain or rice or silk or gold or silver or the silver stamped with your leader's face on it could all be used depending on your context. Bitcoin is like reintroducing the fact

that there can be wealth that is not defined by a nation state even if nation states continue to manage the economy through fiat yeah both can exist yeah definitely and i actually think i'm partial towards how finney and like bitcoin banking in the future we'll go back to like actually i don't know if how said this particularly and so i believe we will see like you know a free banking system like canada had in the 18th century where banks have reserves of bitcoin and then they're able to issue their own current not currency their own yeah their own currencies to their constituents or customers and not constituents their private banks could be a government bank doing that

ideally you do hold the reserve currency on yourself at the end of the day but i do think it is inevitable that it will be used as reserves in a in a quasi free banking system it could be so um i was recently reading some studies about linux adoption in different communities around the world bless you and across the different studies um one of the things that was very consistent is that you needed to have local champions who were able to explain and represent that technology is something advantageous as opposed to it being like a downgrade from like the paid software options.

And basically also to help people adapt, localize solutions that they would need because the different use case had different needs, right? Yeah, but also Linux went out in the long run. Excuse me, I'm burping now. Because it was a better technology. Microsoft- That's just not true.

Yes, it is. Things don't win because they are better technologies. Is things win because more people use them? Linux won because it's a better technology. Like Microsoft bent the knee. Their biggest competitor is now sending their hardware out with Linux in it. Linux might be great and Microsoft may have bent the knee. But if we think about the fact, if your view of the government is true

and it's just a complete shit show, then we can't also believe that things succeed because they are better that's a good point like things succeed because more people subscribe to them i think technologies uh to be more specific technologies will succeed in the long run yeah no because beta beta uh what was it uh what's the vhs competitor that was supposedly better yeah uh-huh i don't even remember but see that's exactly the point yeah like blu-ray didn't catch on it was better like so many things don't catch on that are better it's just about like external circumstances blu-ray got torpedoed by streaming yeah for sure yeah which is better than blu-ray yeah it's interesting

are we gonna solve all the world's problems today like i feel like i've done nothing but rant about things that make me anxious um i mean why do these things make you anxious um they're so they're fun to talk about they're very very big problems are fun to talk you get anxious are you like are you worried that under the trajectory of humanity or i think anybody that publicly puts their face talking about bitcoin puts himself at risk and i think i do that a lot me too yeah you do too so i mean when i talk about the anxiety i feel that people like us are necessary because without us bitcoin seems scary and and evil

and wrong and when you openly talk about bitcoin and you show that you're not ashamed of it as a matter of fact there are all kinds of ways that you use it that believe can be uplifting that people shift the way that they view bitcoin and that's really important like for the linux examples you need to have local champions that understand local needs on the other hand when we talk about the world going down in fire it does make me very anxious to think that um but where would i be in that right no i think about that a lot that's why i want to get out in new york city go out in the countryside get yourself some dogs no it's it's something i toil with a lot too in my mind like i like to have faith that most people are very good people

they are but when shit hits the fan how are people going to act i don't know um hopefully maybe uh the internet and so that's actually again with bitcoin being descriptive uh i see it as a safety net like if things do hit shit does hit the fan and it's like thank god we have bitcoin as at least a somewhat serviceable alternative in a chaotic transitionary period right it could be that it could be used for that and inshallah that we'll never have to use it that way but it could theoretically be no i know i agree great and it's stress inducing sometimes but yeah in the meantime it can be a really cool tool for people who want to shop people want to save people who want to hire people outside of their immediate social circle that's something i don't

think we talk about enough in terms of employment opportunities everyone likes to complain about unemployment and especially in emerging economies talk about how jobs are what they need jobs are what they need jobs are what they need where do you think jobs come from and the ability to pay anyone anywhere in the world based on their skill set alone i think is a huge game changer when it comes to bitcoin yeah it's massive right but none of these things are mutually exclusive right they all they all play into they do the beauty of bitcoin right like it acts as a safety net it acts as a network that allows people to get paid anywhere in the world it acts as a good savings technology it acts as good black market money it acts as a good speculation vehicle all these

use cases combined or what leads to it acts as a terrible privacy mechanism for right now that's something that we can improve and certainly people are focused on but in the meantime so we talk about a lot on this podcast so we talk about a lot not only on the privacy on a technical level but on a social level we need to change the way that people view bitcoin so that you're not automatically subject to scrutiny just because you own some no i agree i agree again that's takes time and again changing of minds individually one by one um yeah it's uh it's again it's a big problem that's why i with our with our necks out there right it's like if not if not you then who yeah like so like that's like it's even though it's stressful sometimes like it's like you said

it's very important. It's rewarding in a way. I think my favorite thing about what I do is that a lot of the stuff I write, a lot of the information that I find, I find it because it didn't exist. Some of the research I'm doing right now, I'm doing research in like three different countries related to different Bitcoin use cases. We'll see how many of them I can land to actually do stories. For one of them, I mean, every door I knock on, nobody has heard of in this particular region, people being able to use Bitcoin for a wide range of reasons. And people always come back to me with, huh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. It was like, yeah, it doesn't exist. How in this context would someone use Bitcoin? And it's fun to think

that once I write it, that this information exists that before didn't exist. And I hope that people will be able to use that to find use cases that work for them, to find ways that Bitcoin can fit into their own lives as opposed to only viewing it as a way to have number go up no no i agree but that uh that um what you just said immediately made me go to the like 90s today show clip they're like what's that the the a sign the a with the circle around like talking about email and internet like yeah yeah that was in the early 90s that was not that long ago and i think that's how people view bitcoin now like what is what is a private key like what is all this and again like over time i think uh number one i think bitcoin is uh on the conscious of of society at whole now

like it's it's i think we overestimate how much people think about bitcoin and how i don't think they think about it all the time i just think they they're aware of it right like there's a There's a ticker on CNBC. But they think of it wrong. That's, hey, that's, that's just a, that's not, that's, is that, is that Bitcoin's fault or is that? No, no, no, it's not Bitcoin's fault, but it's certainly something that I hope that those of us who have a face can change.

Katie Carrick and Brian Gumbel thought about the internet and the email wrong. Paul Krugman thought the internet was not going to have any, was going to be, was not going to have any impact larger than the fax machine. That's true. A lot of these takes will not age well, that's for sure. Right. And so, like, with that in mind, like, how do we approach this? That's what I think about a lot.

Like, you're just going to have to, in my mind, I concede that people are going to misunderstand this drastically. People misunderstand everything. So that's not Bitcoin's fault at all. People read the same article and take away different pieces of information. But what we can do is try and provide the best information possible in speaking to the issues and in the language that we see people want and understand right like we can't force someone to think bitcoin is a good idea we shouldn't want to um but when they

come back and they say bitcoin is a terrible idea because it enables terrorism it is only for gambling you can say oh well look at xyz and this other use case and this situation and then go oh so it's a tool and then it's however i use it the problem is getting people to think like we know casinos are for gambling right there's no one that's going to come up to and be like there's an alternative use case for casinos we want people to understand that bitcoin is an engine and not a casino like it can be used to go different places it can be used to do different things right that's what i think about a lot um when i've actually haven't been doing this that much more recently because it's just such a a task explaining bitcoin to people

thinking of your audience and how they would uh what would click with them yeah right and so for for my friends that are worried about the climate i talk about how bitcoin mining particularly incentivizes us to be more efficient with our energy to go seek out cleaner renewable energies to it could cap it does it does i've seen it um to cap vented natural gas that would otherwise be very bad for the atmosphere but the fact that it's capped and used to mine bitcoin is a net positive right um uh when you're talking to finance types and money money types and digital gold really resonates with them um the fact that there's no fed that can make uh that can change an interest rate that's connected to bitcoin on a whim uh that connects

with them there is no interest rate connected to bitcoin but uh that's the beauty of it um so yeah thinking of your audience and that's like as like people and creating content in the space and reporting on the space are we speaking to specific audiences right um depends on who's paying us what do you mean by that i mean exactly that people talk about the media as if it's a basketball team or one dude in an ivory tower who's deciding where to go and that's not it at all. It's an industry. And there are so many different people in the industry, and they are doing a bunch of different things. And who is it that I'm speaking to in an article? Depends on who paid me. Then I find out who their audience is, and I talk to them. I don't try and speak

to all people at all times. No one could. So what's Coindesk's audience in your mind? I think Coindesk's audience are global investors. And by investors, I mean anybody who purchases or might purchase or might be interested in um an asset a digital asset interesting i could agree with that but i don't think coin s audience is your audience right your audience is hardcore bitcoiners yeah my audience yeah definitely hardcore bitcoiners and then people i when i started the newsletter i never thought and i don't think this is what i have going here is like big in any imagination but i didn't ever think it would get as big as it is now uh i just was writing the newsletter for friends and family so that's how my audience was originally the first newsletter

i ever sent out went to 10 people it was friends and family and they were like all texting me and emailing me about bitcoin in the spring of 2017 oh my gosh i remember that time i was like this is uh this is too much i'm gonna write a newsletter you can all subscribe to it and i'll teach you one thing a day and so originally it was my family and friends and i like to think that's how when i'm writing the bent that's still who i'm speaking to trying to connect to my family and friends that wanted to learn about bitcoin and why it's important that's why i like to talk about a lot of the stuff that happens outside of bitcoin that really highlights why you should think bitcoin's important why you should pay attention to it yeah so we don't really understand

yet how digital media has changed us in a lot of ways like the simplest things you'll go to restaurants for example and they'll find that people are ordering more of a certain dish than they used to because it looks better on camera has nothing to do with that dish actually tasting any better or people wanting to eat it more but people pay for it more because of the the appeal right and that applies to all different aspects of our lives we all understand the content that then we're being watched we change our behavior but we've forgotten about the fact that we are subjecting ourselves to being watched by our family friends and social media followers as a way of connecting with the world

because we now live in very individualistic lives. I mean, just connecting that to the idea of our audiences, whether you're an outlet or whether you're a podcaster or whether you are a journalist, right now we don't really understand how it is that we're supposed to authentically stay ourselves and yet scale that kind of relationship because I think you've done a really good job

when it comes to building your brand and staying authentic to yourself as you've scaled beyond your family and friends. But for most media organizations right now, what they're just trying to do because they're thirsty for ad dollars that continue to flee as people realize that online ads don't pay the same as print ads used to 100 years ago, is they just want scale, scale, scale, scale. So they just want as many eyeballs as they can get onto their website,

regardless of whether or not those eyeballs are actually gaining any kind of valuable information from the site. Yeah, it's a tough battle. yeah gotta it's a i mean i'm very very particular about what i cover and more importantly who i take money from yeah it's important and now it is i mean it is easy i've had many many companies approach me to throw money at the stuff and it's just it's hard turning away money but i do think it's important um uh but it again like it is at the end and that's also i think uh something i actually have an

advantage over some media companies too as i'm completely bootstrapped i don't have any investors looking at me like yo where's the money coming from the quality of content when you're not chasing ad dollars is always higher yes just point blank um that's not it's a weird chicken an egg problem like you want to be successful uh and sometimes if you're at a media company backed by investors who are only uh after money which i don't think coindesk is i think no definitely not um uh but they're definitely a plethora of media companies that are yeah um it's easy to and it's not wrong to be that like that is what companies generally do companies generally want money that's that's an okay goal for the company to have the question is

what kind of scale and how will that affect the product that you're making right so a lot of people think today that all journalism is terrible and all journalists are terrible and that there is no good media out there today and that's just objectively not true the problem is that it gets buried in the slush like we were talking earlier about signal to noise and how to be very easy for nation state to drown out proper signal related to Bitcoin. We've already seen that today when it comes to real information. It is hard to stay well informed about a particular topic because you're just flooded with so much poor quality content that is proliferating because people want scale, right? So when you have just like everyone is fighting for audiences and no one

is fighting for sustainability with those audiences, it gets really hard to find the good reporters and good outlets that are still producing content it's not that there's no good journalism today is that there's so much journalism that it's harder to find the good stuff no i agree and i think again talking about like living at this weird inflection point yeah um i've been a believer i mean i worked at barstool sports which is uh they just got valued at half a billion dollars and they not everybody loves them uh i've been i've been reading barstool since i was in high school but i i respect the hell out of dave portnoy uh the ceo just from a work ethic perspective showing up every day producing

content growing a brand slowly over time and uh basically monetizing it off authenticity over time which is what i aim to do here is show up every day slowly but surely start from 10 10 people reading to to the subscribership i have now um that's but the reason i'm following that um trajectory or that roadmap if you will because i think that is the future right like people who individuals who uh have a sort of good grasp on the subjects they're covering building an audience slowly over time and then i would hope so i think that model produces it's better for the readers it's better for the producer it's really better for everyone involved what it doesn't provide though is quick returns for shareholders and so we need to i'm not saying

that the shareholder model is wrong but we definitely shouldn't think of that as bad incentives yeah exactly it creates very bad incentives and i think the bitcoin mentality When we think about simple design, conservative execution, and extremely narrow focus can be applied to also media companies. And I think my personal opinion, Lee's personal opinion, is that's a very productive way to build a media company and a product. But like we've seen in the crypto space, there is one Bitcoin and all others have taken different approaches, maybe with the exception of Monero in terms of conservative decision-making. Hard forking every six months is a conservative.

Okay, that's exactly my point. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. So we don't have other ones. We have Bitcoin. It is not a popular, attractive model to say, hey, wait for rewards, guys. Right? No, that's Alex Bosworth.

Actually, let me pull this up. He just tweeted out something that I shared right before we got on here. And I think it's a very good point. bitcoin strategy defeat its competition is to wage a long war of attrition centralized governances will eventually die due to succession issues and corruption people will give into temptations to hyper inflate marketing funds will run dry bitcoin will still be there all right so let's dissect that tweet because there are so many layers to that okay let's start line

one bitcoin strategy to defeat its competition is a wage a long war of attrition just survives survive that is what we all hope that is a great goal slow and steady wins the race that is where the social scalability is is key sustainability we need the next generation of people to be valuing this thing and we need the next generation of lawmakers to not be throwing those people in jail so that is definitely an approach i admire but one that for me speaks very strongly to the need to education right agreed um i do think more people are going to go to jail similar to the civil rights movement yes it's gonna be like that i think uh we're gonna need strong people to stand up and fight for not be afraid to fight in public for this stuff and maybe do some jail time i hope

i don't go to jail please don't send me to jail yeah marty let's let's put like no if we're being honest here like again like we said like we've been talking about this whole episode the state is not not going to fight back all right on to the next sentence before i get thrown in the clinker centralized governances will eventually die due to the secession issues and corruption uh i think ethereum is very susceptible to this people will give in to temptations to hyper inflate marketing funds will run dry so i think all those points in the middle of this tweet uh you can check these boxes off for Ethereum. And I'll explain why.

So the evolution of the USSR to what is modern Russia definitely did not eliminate corruption. When we think about systems that fail based on corruption and what they become, they very rarely become something that is perfect. Or not even perfect, something that is free of corruption. They might become something that is slightly better. Like I think the Italian government today

could be argued to be slightly better than the fascist government of a few decades ago i don't think anyone would argue it is free of corruption anyone who believes that a group of people that is bigger than 50 will be free of corruption is very idealistic and i would love to know where they meet people all right so i'm confused here yeah yeah what uh so he's saying bitcoin is corrupt no no he's saying that centralized governments will fail because of corruption no centralized governances ah governances governances that's my fault that's my filling accent not pronunciating it perfectly enough so centralized governance is within these blockchains oh within blockchains i don't think

we have an argument that most of them will fail what do you mean i mean the vast majority of projects today that still exist and there's already many that have failed will fail that's how technology works that's how experiments work but let's talk about governance in particular right like like the governance structures of these blockchains need to be designed in a way that disincentivizes or i don't know if you can disincentivize barclays has a very centralized governance mechanism and barclays has been existing for quite some time it does not yeah but it's not a blockchain we're talking specifically about blockchains here it doesn't challenge the status quo but whether they do it with blockchain or whether they do it with some

other kind of database is kind of irrelevant like you could totally have a company that exists today as a cryptocurrency project that evolves and becomes like a traditional corporation but the benefit of maybe some people some places are able to use it without kyc that's the thing that could happen it could happen but bitcoin would be a better alternative in the case and that's that's the point alex is trying to make here yeah i don't think alex is wrong in that i think that if what your goal is is self-sovereign money then bitcoin would be a better alternative than any kind of centralized governance. Agreed.

But the idea that they will fail because they are centralized when the vast majority of corporations today are centralized. We're talking about blockchains here. So the failure of these chains would be... Blockchain is database. Replace it with database.

I'm talking about public blockchains particularly. So cryptocurrencies that are not... He's talking about Bitcoin against other cryptocurrencies. Yeah, I think that is a very strong argument he has. Yes, and I think I think we're seeing evidence of this Play out already for sure We've seen token projects that are suffering from leadership issues as if they could reinvent

Governance and people haven't been trying to figure out that since you know, we came out of caves Governance should be rough consensus and running code got it Governance is dictated by the software you download on your node in my opinion All right next sentence people will give in to the temptation to hyper inflate check It's already happened with Ethereum. They pushed back the difficulty bomb many times. They just pushed it back 4 billion bucks.

I don't want to harp specifically on Ethereum as if what they're doing is different than what anyone else is doing. We can talk about any token project and the temptation to give yourself more money is always there and usually wins. Okay, let's pick on Zcash. Zcash are putting in another dev reward.

They voted that in. Okay, so devil's advocate for Zcash. I think that the people involved with Zcash community and i mean that the leaders of that community have done more for the further study of privacy research and of cryptocurrency research in general than most other projects around they they have been very very good about finding people who are doing good work and funding them regardless of whether or not that work turned into money for their shareholders that's admirable maybe admirable but i don't think it's the best way to make a cryptocurrency i don't really know how to

make a cryptocurrency the fact that bitcoin works blows my mind every day and i'm so glad that i was not given the task of designing it right isn't that right that's i mean can you can can bitcoin's design be improved upon like i think it's perfect i think again going back to its simplicity i think simplicity is good incentives uh that align the stakeholders i don't know if it could be designed any better um just from an incentive design system systems as incentive design i don't know i guess we'll see right it's it's too hard to say how that incentive system is is panning out it's it's so far it's money and so far it is continuing to be money and that in itself is an accomplishment let's subtract the money away from it too like its goal is to produce blocks roughly every 10

minutes in a distributed fashion using proof of work uh shot to shot 256 uh hashing algorithm yeah so far so far that seems to be working great it's like so far you need to so you need to be able to hash or create blocks via proof of work and then transactions need to be propagated throughout the network through the nodes and so far uh that's been pretty much non-stop pretty much not non-stop there's been up time is 99.999 something percent um but uh it's pretty dependable doing what it's set out to do yeah yeah the bitcoin network so far works that's a that's an accomplishment that is a success that cannot be taken lightly because it's a crazy idea the fact that it works i love crazy ideas okay here's another one so like picking on zcash again

with their dev fund so 25% of the block is it still 25% I'm not sure exactly what I don't remember exactly either but marketing funds will run dry we're seeing consensus said recent layoffs another round of layoffs marketing funds eventually run dry

that is not specific to cryptocurrencies and it will probably turn out to be just as true in this sector is marketing even important or the tool market itself that's the big how many surrealist painters can you name surrealist what is surrealism again um so that's like when you have things that are painted in a

very fantastical way that kind of plays with reality like stretches it turns it's dali is one of my favorites exactly you know dali you want to know why you know dali because he used to walk around doing the most ridiculous things there were so many other painters at the time that were probably a little bit better than him technically and were doing the same kinds of experiments but dali knew how to sell he was a genius he knew how to get away without having any money he was a diva and the reason we all remember him today is because people talked about him so much when he was alive same with andy worrell like i don't think andy worrell shit's that good but people he became bigger than his art exactly so then we return to the question of

do we need marketing i don't think that we need to prioritize marketing and i don't even think we do marketing very well we um but i do think that the sustainability of a perspective or an art form is very much defined by how many people carry it on because a lot of people won't a lot of people will fade off and they won't care so the bigger breadth of people that you have committed to a thing the more likely it is that thing will continue to exist agreed agreed would uh picasso be a surrealist too? Burkhouse is also a surrealist. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. And so in the long war of attrition, Bitcoin will still be there at the end. I think that technically speaking, Bitcoin definitely has considerable sustainability. I think it is very, very likely that it will also be sustainable

in terms of a public narrative. That is a very strong likelihood, but we'll have to see. All right. That's why number go up. Digital gold. Yeah, but there's so many times. fixes this die that we no one remembers today that we're very good technologies so it's all

about i think it's all about how people use it why they use it and who uses it yeah yeah i think uh i'm optimistic i'm optimistic um but i'm an eternally optimistic person even though we talk about a lot of depressing stuff on this podcast the newsletter believe it or not freaks i am optimistic yeah i mean i think that alex has a really good point in terms of marketing budgets eventually running dry and centralized governance being an inherent inherently problematic this is the couch it's not me farting it sounds like i'm farting in here i'm just moving rubbing up against the leather couch here um no i agree and that's well that's why i'm still baffled like how you think ethereum's having more success when i would argue their governance is

vastly more centralized they have already uh basically changed like that and that's the thing these things are to be successful in a perpetuity you have to be able to uh they have to be dependable you have to be able to to know that they are going to be what they said they were one day into the next and i don't think uh what ethereum was marketed as two years ago is even close to what it is today yes i don't think ethereum is more successful than bitcoin if a man fell into a coma three years ago and woke up they'd be like how did they change the narrative this much like how did they and yet people are still on board that is a great question that person would have to think to themselves maybe the value that ethereum is giving people has less to

do with the technology itself and more to do with the belief system it's selling and you can sell a belief are there really that many more people i mean it's not it's very far away from all-time it's very far away from all the time look this is not me saying that ethereum is better than bitcoin i'm not saying that it's going to be more successful in the long run i'm not even saying it's as successful as it was in 2017 when it was on everyone's tongue but i am saying that in some areas where bitcoin has struggled it has not and it's worth thinking about why and how and And if that impacts Bitcoin even. So areas being making it more palatable in a lot of people's minds.

Areas being making it more palatable and getting people who are already at the table to not dismiss it. When perhaps they could and should, yet they do not. and instead are invited to a seat at the table. People, it was surprising to me how people still can't describe Ethereum if you ask them, but they'll tell you that they're curious about it and you'll ask them about Bitcoin and they'll tell you they're not curious about it.

That's fascinating. And that's, I mean, is that greater fool fallacy coming? Or not fallacy, greater fool, like just getting bamboozled by buzzwords? Because I saw, you had a tweet, Like, you said you would do a lot of research trying to understand these things, and then you'd get bamboozled with buzzwords, and you'd be like, why do you need a blockchain for this? No, it's not even bamboozled.

It's like, I don't understand computer science as well as I could. And so someone will tell me something, and I'll be like, I don't believe that's how computer science works. And they'll be like, yes, and they'll use very fancy words. And then I'll have to go in back and learn the definitions of fancy words, and then return to them and be like, actually, what you just said is this sentence, and that sentence is objectively false. so can we return to my original question without thinking that like you can talk you know over my head in terms of terminology that won't be difficult to do but the fundamental point that i'm trying to get at if you can't answer that question probably you should hire a different cto like right yeah and keep it simple stupid that's a mantra to live by yeah yeah for sure um

merma's two hours in here i'm sorry i've just done nothing but ramble no this is what this podcast is for it's incredible i love these conversations uh um what's something that you've been curious about that maybe i could help you think through when it comes to bitcoin um what am i curious about i think we need to change the mining narrative because i do think it's a bad narrative uh that bitcoin mining is boiling the oceans and it's bad for the environment i think the exact opposite is true i think i wholeheartedly believe uh based off of things i've seen with my own eyes that bitcoin is actually good for the environment in the long run um and uh again the uh false equivalencies that are thrown at bitcoin just

because bitcoin miners consume a lot of energy uh is is something we need to combat uh pretty quickly so like if you're talking about a government attacking bitcoin that actually might be uh the number one thing we'll use as a virtue signal that's destroying the environment and try to shut down miners uh not fully understanding that it is actually good yeah i agree that that is a way that people generally try and marginalize the industry and make it seem as if it's doing more harm than making pants fast fashion is it makes all kinds of waste and you don't hear people being like that's it h and m we should shut them down that's the thing that pisses me off the most about the climate debate is that it's it's just completely it's just bad framing you just get

everything it's framed terribly um yeah context matters we need nine trillion dollars and we're gonna fix the the climate it's a green new deal um how about like you said don't uh don't incentivize fast fashion like i have two pairs of pants i buy a pair of bands maybe twice a year maybe every eight months i'll buy a pair of bands and those are my shoes yeah like people with climate particularly it pisses me off because nobody wants to take personal responsibility and change their life yeah it's and if we're going to fix the pollution and the the waste in the world it's going to take a collection of individual actions and big brother's not going to say that do it for us and that's what makes me and i think bitcoin is a perfect bitcoin mining particularly

is a perfect uh thing that exists and presents an actionable thing you can take to be more efficient with energy waste uh particularly natural gas that's that's number one and then number two it also provides an incentive to go experiment with renewables stranded renewables particularly like these are uh energy sources that up to the point of bitcoin were untapped because there was no incentive to go use them now that these stranded renewables are some of the cheapest some of the cheap that provides some of the cheapest energy in the world there's finally incentive to go experiment with them and maybe maybe that's how incentives will play out definitely that's what's happening it's what's happening now yeah geothermal hydraulic

hydroelectric or i just remember people were saying the same kinds of things about thermal energy maybe five years ago and they didn't become the hot new thing that everyone thought they were what do you mean um gosh so right back when i first moved to middle east i did a little bit of environmental reporting not very much i wouldn't say that i focused on it as a beat but i very much remember people being like in 10 years from now everything will be green energy and look at all of these like look at how good how effective it is how efficient it is like those are the incentives and then people actually didn't do those things because those incentives didn't play out the way that people expected well yeah it's uh that's when renewables are forced on a

market i think of germany in particular which tried to move like 25 of their economy to wind and solar and they come to find that the clouds block the sun every once in a while uh the wind doesn't always blow and it actually takes a lot of energy to mine the iron ore and other resources that are needed to actually build these technologies and then they get phased out pretty quickly but like with the experimenting with renewables that i'm talking about it's you're not forcing it on the market the market is going out and just hey these energy sources are cheaper than the energy on the grid so i'm gonna go use them because i want cheap power so i get more profit with my bitcoin it's like a market incentive driving the innovation

not the innovation being forced on the market so not to derail too much but i think it's really important we talk about the market just like when we talk about the media we remember that the concept of free market doesn't exist markets are defined by definition by who can trade in them what do you mean trade so there's just never been any kind of free market that's not a thing that's ever existed i i would argue yeah i would argue we don't live in a truly capitalistic society but the free market does exist like people people trade freely throughout the world yes there are some trades freely around the world how do they trade certainly if you're living in iran you're not trading very freely and if you that's that's the case in iran just

Just because Iran doesn't have free trade doesn't mean free markets don't exist outside of Iran. So the people that have access to some of these renewable energy resources, their activities will be defined by the local regulators, right? Like if you're in Canada, for example, and you're wanting to use geothermal energy...

Screw you, Hydro-Quebec. So the government will decide who can use a resource and when, and what is the acceptable ways to sell that resource. And even if we think back to ancient Greece, for example, like the very term market from Agora, that was what they called the market, It was literally the place in which the rulers decided that is where people trade and you

were not allowed to trade objects outside of the agora. And when you're in the agora, there was set prices. So like the concept of a market is by definition, when we fence something off and be like, you can have an activity within here and we define how that activity works. You could not trade natural gas or whatever kind of energy for babies. You know, like we all, we all decide, you know, that's not a thing that people could do. There are always rules in terms of how it is you can sell a thing,

where you can sell a thing, who you can sell it to, and how it is you can abstract a thing. So the market will be determined by people. They will define how it is the market is structured. And so with that being said, I very much hope that the Bitcoin mining industry will continue to move towards renewable energy and that they will be permitted to do so by the market conditions.

But we're not sure what market conditions will be in the future. So we can't say for sure that will happen, only that that's what we want. Black markets exist. own their free markets just by their nature right they are they are they're definitely free markets they route around the regulation say fuck you we're gonna trade freely it might be illegally marginalized and free are not the same thing they could not walk out into the street and sell heroin the fact that people do that all the time people do people do but just the very fact that

you have to um be aware of being caught defines a black market defines who it is they'll sell to what price it is they'll sell and how it is they'll sell. Yeah, and it just comes down to how much risk you're willing to take on, and that's free for anybody to decide for themselves. So there are aspects of the black market that are freer than the hospital, if we're thinking about the specific instance of morphine.

But I would not define a black market as free because there are severe risks and costs to operating in that market. Well, how would you define a free market? A free market would be, which we have not seen, in which all participants are consensually choosing to participate and how they participate. I don't think anyone would like to be a drug dealer. They would very much prefer to have a cute shop in San Francisco. The fact that we have black markets is because the market is not free.

But the black markets are free markets. I can text a plethora of drug dealers to send me pot right now and they will do it and I will give them money. I actually stopped smoking pot so this is hypothetical now. Hypothetically.

If you were in Broad City, you could do this. Yeah. That's what a free market is. Just two individuals define a free market at its simplest form. Two individuals meeting and conducting commerce

in the way they want to. Okay, so fair. I think that but that's so that I guess also highlights the point that you're making earlier about Bitcoin and that you don't necessarily need a government to condone an activity in order for it to be relatively safe and mainstream. But on the other hand, it is very important to know who will be subject to the regulation. Right. Because like you can do that because we're both white. if we were black having this conversation it would be much scarier to think about um going out in the street and buying drugs because you know the laws will be enforced on you in a different way i agree with that but yet it still happens it does still happen i mean it's it's not as if

only white people smoke weed like definitely people take risks but it's not to say that this needs to be changed because i don't know if it can be changed it's not to say that this is wrong it's just to acknowledge the fact that the free market is not equally free to all people of the same ability um circumstance matters i would agree that um some people uh with a certain profile are profiled and treated differently than others within the system i got a free market like if they yeah i mean i'm thinking of eric gardner up in the bronx right now just getting choked out for for a fucking lucy right like that's crazy that's insane it can happen to anybody but that was like he he ended up in that situation because he's engaging in a free market activity buying a

lucy from a bodega which is fucked he was completely unjustified those cops are in jail know right i don't know yeah but we're getting like we're getting the technicals of free verse on free markets but the reason i feel like that's relevant is because bitcoin is not really accessible to all people in the same ways that's not bitcoin's fault that's not our responsibility but it is important to acknowledge that we can um first off focus on areas in which there might be greater restriction or difficulty. But second off, in order to acknowledge the value of different solutions and use cases, there may be solutions that are not just straight Bitcoin that are very relevant to someone's context, if they're having a hard time accessing Bitcoin. I'm not shilling

any particular crypto project as that solution. But I am saying that because the people that operate within a free market are them will be treated differently based on social circumstances based on culture we will need a wide variety of solutions and we cannot pretend that bitcoin is uh the bitcoin negates politics like we always talk about like bitcoin is apolitical bitcoin itself is an inanimate object and the people that use it and create it have politics and so the expression of bitcoin like the reality of bitcoin will always have politics even if itself as an inanimate object the table is not political the bitcoin is not political but the people that made it had politics that influenced the making and the people that use it have politics that

influence how and where they use it right yep totally agree but bitcoin doesn't know right like so bitcoin's inanimate it has no feelings yeah and it doesn't know who's sending the messages and who's receiving them and that's also the beauty of the digital age talking about enabling free markets like pseudonyms uh you have no idea what they look like what their sex is how old they are um and if they provide you with an invoice and you uh want to get what they're providing i think there's very little other than the reputation of their pseudonym uh reputations reputations are important are very important they're important for free market engaging in free market activities they're easy to destroy and difficult to build yes they are something i

think about a lot yeah it's hard i mean yeah especially in this space yeah you know vicious people are oh my god i think that i've just tried a strategy of messing up so many times that i don't think i could ruin my reputation anymore no it's like they'll turn on you in a day yeah this is true like that um and that's not saying that i self-censor or do anything like that it's oh i certainly do at this point i think i don't think it's it's dishonest to realize if i volunteer a piece of information i will be crucified for it and so i will choose to avoid crucifixion right yeah i bet people are going to react to this podcast i'm so scared don't be i wish yeah that open conversation is important right like yeah we need to flesh out these ideas

we can't be afraid to do that i think it's important for us not to be ashamed to be wrong i'm wrong all the time most of us are wrong about most shit yeah and it doesn't make me or anyone else a bad person what makes what is the sign of character what is the sign of an admirable person is someone who can acknowledge when they are wrong and even try and do something about it right that's the uh yeah yeah just be honest with yourself that's that's it at the end of the day like don't try and please other people just be honest with yourself or you're actually going to be happy at the end of the day and have fulfillment you have to have the ability to be honest with yourself which means admitting that you were wrong at some point so this is really important

especially when you think as media creators right because people get outraged about any little thing that they perceive as incorrect and then they think this is a bad journalist or this is a bad pundit or podcaster, that this person is inherently bad because I saw something that does not align with my reality. First off, one of the most fun things about being a journalist for over a decade is that you'll see people that will have complaints about the same article, and they will argue that you got a fact wrong, and they'll both have very different arguments about whether it's the correct fact. And they both have evidence that is relative to the fact. And you start to realize that everyone has their own perception of what is truth.

and there are some ways there are some things that are easier to judge than others right like two plus two is four and that's fine but there are a lot of ways that can be interpreted and there's a lot of there's a lot of ambiguity and nobody thinks that their perspective is opinion they think it's fact and one of the most comforting things is just to realize that literally everyone thinks that and so even if you get outraged about something that you perceive is wrong like chances are there's someone else who is outraged over the same thing or who thinks it's wrong in the completely opposite direction and the best thing that i think a content creator can do is first off to hear everyone out as much as they can try and adhere to the most unbiased facts that

they humanly can knowing that that's an impossible goal just like decentralization is an impossible goal and then also we'll come back on that later perfect decentralization is impossible perfect accuracy is impossible and we need to like own up when we do something wrong and want to fix it the sign of a good journalist is not they never make a mistake it's that when the mistake gets made they pay attention to it right away yeah no and it's i completely agree and that's actually the beauty of my name is that uh i was able to name my newsletter marty's bent and bent bent being an inclination towards what i believe it's honest everyone has a perspective everyone has a bias yeah and this is like and that's and that's how i'll start like again going back to

friends and family like i'm not an expert here but this is uh based off what i've learned throughout years studying the space is my perspective on these topics and i try to be open with that too like it's called marty's bent it's my inclination towards how i view the space people ask me a lot about when i first came into the space and if it was really different than covering things in the middle east and i actually have to tell them it's not and that the the training that i got working specifically in the palestinian israeli conflict was so important to when i came into the space specifically because anytime something happens you know so you'll have an operation which is like an attack Israel attacks Gaza and the Gazans will say that this amount of people died the

Israeli army will say this amount of people died the Amnesty International will have a totally different number and people are going to yell at you no matter what it is you say that you got it wrong because they are going to believe one of these sources and they won't believe the other sources how do you try and report in the context in which literally everyone it's a very very small area imagine like the size of New Jersey everyone is involved in some way like whether it's your brother who's in the army or whether it's your um your boss who um was thrown in jail or whatever it is there is no person in this vicinity that has been there for more than five years that has not been impacted in some way by the conflict so they all have a bias about the conflict right

so just like i've discovered this is very very similar in the cryptocurrency space there is no objective source of truth even harder than in israel because you don't have dynasty international it's the blockchain it's the blockchain great so who can interpret the blockchain so this is exactly what i'm getting at what do you mean i can't read the blockchain can you macarello can i can i mean john newberry can i can read it i mean i understand good for you man i'm getting there but it's not there yet yeah i mean i mean i can't read all the code that make bitcoin but i understand how transactions how yeah the hexing works how i could like look for a specific transaction probably but like the blockchain is only transparent to people who

understand how to read it right so when you're reporting in the space and you're not super genius it takes a while to learn how to read this data no didn't take you a while it's taking me time no but i'm trying to get at whether that makes makes it not transparent or a source of objective truth it's a source of objective truth because there's very fundamental functions that are run it is and it isn't so so being objective objective truth being that transactions happened at a certain point of time yes and they remind us that's that's what the objective truth is that's all it is yes so you know what happened when that's the objective you know what all that happens when most people on planet earth don't most people on planet earth cannot read that data

even so it doesn't change the fact that it is it is it is objective truth it's so it's an objective truth but then there's a lot of whether or not people can understand that truth that's the that's what you're getting at yeah yeah so there's two different things i'm getting at here so one is um that not a lot of people can understand that understand that objective truth and it reminds me a lot of like i would go into press conferences for example i don't speak fluent arabic it's about people's understanding it's not about the truth yeah but you're not going to have everyone in the world to be a programmer they're just not a likely reality nor is that yeah and they don't need to be they don't need to be some people are always going to rely on translator to tell them

what that data means and some people will claim this data that says this transaction happened this specific time it happened because xyz that the blockchain does not say that the blockchain only said the transaction happens yeah that's all that matters so someone else who is interpreting this data for the public will say that the data says something it doesn't say and people who cannot read the data will not be able to this is not a fault of bitcoin what i'm not i'm not saying it's not that the data is impure data is impure it's that the people trying to describe it are yeah yeah yeah or don't understand it yes what i'm saying is is that when i came into this space having a background in trying to figure out with people with wildly different opinions and often

working with translators because i don't speak fluent arabic i very quickly recognized what i was dealing with was a problem of translation. Like, I would ask the same people to tell me what this data meant, and people would give me wildly different answers. Just like with the article, only this time they're looking at a blockchain. And I started to realize that, like, of course reporters are getting all this stuff wrong, because they're relying on faulty translation. And the reason they're relying on faulty translation is those translators have a particular bias that the reporter doesn't understand. Like, I can use an Arabic translator, and he'll be translating something for me, but if I know that he has a particular bias or a

particular leaning i'll ask him harder like he said this word this was a specific word and like let's look i know the alphabet a little bit now like that didn't sound like that to me and then he'll be like oh no he said it this way i'm like yeah but that's a different meaning and i understand that you interpreted it that way but if i don't know the motivation of the translator then i can't find flaw in the translation so a lot of people don't understand the motivations of their blockchain translators and so they can't understand why they're getting faulty information yeah yeah it's Again, that's a problem with the translators, not the blockchain. It's a problem with the translators.

It is something to think about because we need to assume that the vast majority of people will not speak blockchain. That's right now, right? I have faith in the younger generations that they'll learn. And they will be learning. And just thinking, like, the biggest cohort of our population is in the working force of millennials, but now we have a majority of...

Actually, I don't know the demographics off the top of my head. I think I can sit... No, it doesn't make sense that boomers would make up the biggest contingent, does it? No, no, Gen Z I think is bigger than us. Gen Z. It also depends on where you are, right? The vast majority of the population in Tunisia

is under 25. That's insane. Regardless of the demographics, I just think the more people grow up in a natively digital world, the better understanding we'll have. Of course. Yeah, and so that's, again,

it's a product of our point in time. Like we're in this weird fucked up... Why do you think they're going to be getting this blockchain education if they're not going to their Ethereum-sponsored classes? I mean, if you go to school... They tinker with it. They download the software and play with it themselves. That's all they learn.

And that's what's... So there's an element to that. There are some people that will be smart enough to learn a language themselves. Most of us go to school, right? Like, most of us are not smart enough to be dropped into a foreign environment and become fluent in that language.

Well, it depends. What about your native language? You didn't go to school to learn that. You just... You did. You went to school to learn how to speak pretty. Speak pretty. But before that, you knew how to communicate.

Because people did it back and forth with us. So what we're assuming then is people are going to back and forth blockchain data with them? No, it's just people are going to be interested, download it, and how the fuck does this work? And try to figure it out for themselves. And then obviously ask help along the way. But for it to be not a source of objective truth,

you'd have to again going back to i believe that most people are good you have to believe a lot of people are completely bullshitting right yeah i do think that the blockchain offers some semblance of objective truth but how people interpret that truth which is not the fault of bitcoiners and not the problem of anyone who's developing technology itself is not clear just because you give someone clear information doesn't mean that they'll actually receive that clear information no but It doesn't mean the information is faulty. It does not mean the information is faulty. I guess the original way that we transition onto this is I was saying that it felt really familiar to me in terms of translation issues.

And that's something that I see a lot. Like most people, they just don't understand Bitcoin. And it's not because they didn't read. It's not because they didn't go to the right place. And it's not because they are dumb. It's just because they didn't interpret the information properly. I think we're still discovering what Bitcoin is. It's this alien technology.

We have our eyes closed. and we're trying to figure out what the corners of the room are in there. Yeah, this is true. So Bitcoin is revealing itself to us as we're trying to learn it, right? Yeah, for sure. At the end of the day, it's binary.

It's not binary, but Bitcoin has properties that'll enable certain use cases maybe that we don't even understand. They exist, we just haven't found them yet. This is true, but it's also really important to remember that Bitcoin is not a rock. We invented Bitcoin. bitcoin continues to be invented was it us or was it an ai was it an alien exactly no it's an alien

but so like we can impact this alien today here now like in these early days in which we are figuring out what is bitcoin people can have a really big impact i mean individual people have a huge impact oh i mean we saw this with narratives in the beginning like roger ver bitcoins for fast instant private transactions that was the narrative for a while and again that's a translator doing a terrible job of translating what what the capabilities of that um that technology are and that translator years later and i'm i don't want to i've not i've not personally spoken to roger in a while and i do not believe that he he wasn't the only one pumping that i'm sure that was fed to him by faulty translator do you know who is pumping that

narrative now hamas hamas is promoting bitcoin as private that is their big argument keep going hopefully they keep going for it good luck but that's what i'm saying is that like years later this unrelated group that has no connection still is carrying that twisted translation yeah no no i agree i agree no we have a lot of work to do too and it's not that it's necessarily our individual responsibility it's to the contrary our privilege and opportunity in order to help something that could be really cool stay really cool and impact even more people in ways that today wouldn't even be fathomable no i agree no that's why that's why i believe we write and talk about this as much as we do yeah yeah like i don't think you'd be here unless you thought it was

important do you think like i mean i will say that cryptocurrency journalism in particular is very well paid compared to other types of journalism human rights like if you report on refugee issues you're gonna be poor for forever in this for the money league but i will say i wouldn't keep doing it if i wasn't super fascinated by it's actually an issue in my life like i was sitting down the other day and trying to think about stories i want to still write that have nothing to do with bitcoin i'm young and i have a long career ahead of me what else do i want to do i couldn't think of things like anything i would come up with it'd be like oh i could do that it's like but is that really more interesting than the future of money probably not right is there anything bigger right

now or more worthwhile i think there's a different many many different facets of the future money right like there's so many different aspects of it there are so many things that touches and affects things that before i got into bitcoin was super worried about yeah and again self-sovereignty and the power of the state over the individual. That's daunting when you try to figure out how to fix that through the political system. Bitcoin provides this tool to affect that outside of it. So I disagree with you pretty strongly here.

I do not think that Bitcoin can fix external systems. I do think Bitcoin could provide a tool that I could personally use in the way that I interact with that system. I don't think Bitcoin is going to stop governments from being corrupt. Not near to why, but again, it's all about the incentive system that basically just moves the market towards a system

where it's harder for them to be corrupt. So last time I'll mention Ethereum, I swear. You can mention them as much as you want. I don't care. I think the Ethereum community has really figured out something sharp when it comes to incentives. And they don't realize that they figured it out. What's that?

social ties are a very very strong incentive even stronger sometimes than a monetary incentive what do you mean a lot of people go to ethereum events because that's where their friends are they go to ethereum events because they can make friends very easily and you could argue that's because people who want to show to you are going to be nice that's a fair argument but it doesn't negate the fact that people go there sometimes a lot of times not because they think that they're going to get rich not everyone some people do but sometimes people go there just because they want to make friends that social incentive is very valuable to them and they will hold on to that token and they will participate in that event and they will contribute to that code base regardless

of whether or not they know how to code and they will do all these things based not on the incentive of money but on the incentive of social acceptance i'd push back on that charlie and say bitcoin certainly has that it's very pronounced bit devs in new york tonight like you'll see people non-coders who are just there because they want to meet other bitcoiners been to conferences where people show up just because they want to meet the people they've only interacted with on the internet uh in person i personally i meet with probably like two or three bitcoiners a week who hit me up in dms and just want to get drinks and talk because they like the newsletter like i agree with you i don't think that bitcoin has this in ethereum or that ethereum has and bitcoin doesn't

I do agree that Bitcoin has very strong social incentives, but Bitcoiners generally don't acknowledge that that's why they're going to a thing. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they say, no, no, no, I'm in this for the money. I'm in this to moon, to go to the moon. And a lot of times, to the contrary, in Ethereum events, people will look down on you if you're in this for the money, and they will very openly talk about the social incentives. It doesn't mean that it's a stronger social incentive than the bitcoin or social incentive i do think if you go to bit devs tonight there's not going to be one mention of the price um i go to bit devs all the time and it's one of my favorite things i think it's great i also understand 30 to 40 percent of what they

say and i think that's again but it doesn't mean that it's not bad that's an okay thing but it's not like but it's not like bitcoin meetups are all about like number go up number go up no no no not at all not at all um i'm not saying that bitcoin is bad in that sense i'm just saying that i will say as someone who has made many friends in the bitcoin community it was harder i like to think we're friends i think we're friends was it hard when we met it was not hard when we met was it we we had beers it's fried chicken it was pretty easy it was really good chicken i was into it no no and it's i do i mean i do think people extrapolate the the vitriol quote-unquote vitriol some people see the vitriol other people see it as

i think the vitriol only exists online if you go to bit devs it's the most welcoming and fun place and it's so nice there are not going to be any dances and the level of vegan like the level it's just a different it's a different thing like corral is a vegan jonah chanelli's vegan we do have bitcoin uh vegans that's match corral is the only person i'll go to a vegan restaurant for I think people really misconstrue what it is that people who like Bitcoin talk about other things, as that means that that thing is better than Bitcoin. And that's not the case. I think that Bitcoin is, at the moment, wildly the most successful, and it'd be very difficult to argue otherwise for other things. But that doesn't make me unable to acknowledge that some other things have interesting points.

And I don't think that I want Bitcoiners to be a dance. Sorry for finishing your sentence. No, no, exactly. I don't want Bitcoiners to lead a dance, you know? Like, I don't want them to become Ethereans, and I don't want Bitcoin to become Ethereum. I think Bitcoin has a distinct culture that I love and want to maintain.

I guess the point of that was just being that exactly that within the Bitcoin ecosystem, there are more incentives at play than just mining rewards or just number go up. There are actually a lot of incentives at play that maybe we don't talk about as openly. And it might be worthwhile to think about the social incentives, the reputation that is associated with certain people and like how it is that impacts how the technology evolves. Yeah.

And I think the subsect, subcultures within Bitcoin. There are many kinds of Bitcoin cultures. Yeah, they like to lean into it too. Like, especially if people lash out at them, like the carnivores versus the vegans. That's just online, honestly. nobody in person ever has the balls to talk like that no no that's that's the one thing being from philadelphia too it's like if you talk shit to me online it's like all right come say that to my fucking face i didn't know you were from philly yeah nice um that's i that's a big

like i don't tolerate people talking shit online because it's like you would never say this in person and if you did um they would not that is true there there would be physical consequences So let me provide a context, though, in which someone would. A lot of times, if something goes a little bit too far in person, it's because it's not as if the online conversation caused it. It created a context in which that person did not believe that the reputation would be damaged by doing it. You know, like if I go up and I hit someone randomly, I was going to think that's a crazy thing. Don't do that. But if I go up and I hit someone who is for the past 10 days, everyone online has been talking how much they hate them.

people believe that it's not an acceptable behavior right so it's not as if trolling is inherently bad and i think trolling can be really funny and it's not as if it's a right and a wrong way to do it yeah if you're creating a climate in which it becomes acceptable to dehumanize that person that will have consequences in real life yeah no and i'm i've been i've been actually too active on on twitter recently and i'm like making a conscious effort to step back because it's bad for your mental health it really is uh when you put the phone down you don't pay attention you're like why the fuck do i give a shit right oh my gosh but it's a double-edged sword though like you i get so much value i would not be where i am today without twitter we would not have met

up without twitter yeah no it's a double-edged sword and like we know it going in right like there's no way for us to connect with our audience without being perpetually online and there's no way for us to build our brand without being perpetually online and there's no way for us to also deal with the crazy fact-checking world that is bitcoin without having access to all of these people around the world on the other hand giving yourselves up to the audience like that is also opening us up to constant bombardment and dehumanization when people no longer see you as a person behind a phone but as like a digital product with which they can critique and project their own problems with the world no i agree and that's why i recommend liberally muting and

blocking people yeah for your mental health like seriously it's changes life no it really does like you don't once those people are out of your mentions it's like so your your mental state is better and people seem to have this idea that like oh look i i got blocked by this person and it just shows how great i am yeah it's a badge of honor it's like no you did something that makes that person feel either unsafe or just really annoyed yeah it's not something to be proud of but it's not something to be ashamed of if what you said is actually accurate or, or helpful,

but it's also not a badge of honor. Yeah. In a lot of cases, like, no, it's, uh, not,

I'd be a hypocrite. I've, I've used the block as a badge of honor before. Amen. I mean, that's the thing we've all done. Like, I can't think of a single dumb thing that I've made fun of someone else for

saying about a blockchain that I have not at one point thought about a blockchain. right yeah we all go through it it's hard not to be a hypocrite it's not that it's hard not to be a hypocrite you have to consciously not be a hypocrite right yeah so like the the thing that's really fun about recording conversations and then writing them and publishing them is that people remember their conversations very very differently and they will email you very angry or they'll call you really angry say i never said that i said this and you send them the recording and they come back in shock genuinely in shock because they remember the conversation very differently

and it just goes to show that I'm not any better than these people I am sure that the way I remember some things is very much tainted by the vision of myself I want to have and the vision of the other person that I want to have and I want to imagine that I was like the good guy in all these scenarios and so if someone is like really upset with you or if someone's like accusing you being a hypocrite at least for me i try and really think about like okay what would make them say that if they weren't wrong and sometimes they're wrong but sometimes i'm like oh you know what i was a little bit inconsistent there or whatever it is like all of us have these issues with the way we view ourselves versus the way that we exist and we are not a blockchain it's like the way we

interpret ourselves not yet we're not yeah exactly someday we will all be a blockchain and even then we will have to deal with the issue translation so you know like trying to constantly be humble is interoperability is right around the corner oh my gosh i just want to murder someone every time they're like across all the blockchains i'm like why why would i need all those blockchains i think just why do we need all those blocks like i don't think it's like physically possible i have all especially if this stuff scales to a certain point like i that's one thing i've been writing about more the last three months like i think people severely discount the amount of physical infrastructure that's needed to make

these blockchains succeed if they are to be adopted by the masses and so like we're talking about like hardware energy consumption um infrastructure revolution alongside the software and that's why i think like bitcoin wins out winner take most in the long run is because again you're fighting for resources in the physical world too once these things hit a certain level of success i mean they already are the level uh the level at which these networks operate right now hasn't made the the dash for physical infrastructure that obvious but it'll become more obvious in time if these networks succeed so that's the i can argument right like there have been so many different attempts over the years to make alternatives to i can it's not

as if this is something that's new or that we don't aren't aware about the fact that like dot org domains and dot com domains are basically facilitated by a governance structure and they're people that have always wanted to operate outside of that and in general they tend to die off pretty quickly because i can works so people go and they use what works and i'm not saying that that's how things will be with money i'm not a genius economist who can predict the future but i can say that in general a lot of times the reason that something is broken is not because no one has realized that and not because no one has thought of a better idea it's getting other people to buy into your idea that's the hard part and until you can do that the broken thing that a

lot of people agree with generally works better than the like optimized thing that only a few people agree with yeah i mean that yeah network effects that's like who can bootstrap the network effects quickly enough or the quickest uh not the quickest the most sustainably right very good point very good point um very good point uh i think there's yes uh efficiently and i think there is a time aspect to it too right yes you need to be at the right time in the right place which is another uh salvador dali thing um it's all about getting the right people to talk about you in the right timing and that's when you have a legacy that is created as opposed to a blip in someone's art history textbook i like that comparison and i they're talking about

bitcoin on capitol hill a lot they are right they are it's in like they're talking about it on cnbc a lot they're talking about it yeah but it's not that exactly the kind of people i want talking about it they're not talking about it in the way that i want them to talk about it if i ruled the world to be very different well that's uh they're talking about that so that's like that's good that's a starting point whether whether or not they're shitting on it or talking correctly about it they're talking about it and that's something i know why and i write in the newsletter all the time slowly but surely bitcoin seeps further into the mind of the masses the psyche of the masses yeah but i don't want us to overestimate the impact of that right because like if you study

the history of literature for example there are so many people that were huge writers in their day and everybody talked about them but we don't remember them at all and we don't really study them very much while shakespeare who at the time was a competitive writer but was certainly not the leading playwright of the time nor was he the most popular he wasn't the most sophisticated he wasn't even that original like if you look at a lot of the plots there are very similar plots from other plays at the time but we still talk about him a lot of it has to do with who is doing the talking when they're doing the talking a lot of circumstance around it that has nothing to do with the quality of the product right that's bitcoin launched in the the ashes of the last

financial crisis etching that headline into the genesis block launching as tarp was being deployed i hope so i hope that in 30 years from now it won't be that bitcoin is the one that is forgotten and there's another cryptocurrency that is widely used i don't think that's possible again i think it's unlikely but it's not impossible no i think it's impossible right the flippening narrative right why are these why do these technologies exist they exist bitcoin the first successful implementation of this technology uh came out of the gate and said we want to be uh money of the future store value into perpetuity you can bank on us that if you put your value into this system one bitcoin is going to equal one bitcoin it's going to produce blocks roughly every 10 minutes

that's the the value prop of cryptocurrencies the value prop of cryptocurrencies was defined when bitcoin was launched successfully in my mind if bitcoin is ever flippant right you immediately set a precedent that falsifies that narrative going forward like if bitcoin gets flippant why won't the one that takes it over get flippant and why won't the one that after that get flipped why not i don't know it could totally happen i mean it could totally happen if it does like you destroy the whole value prop like yes you do it's so i think again that's why i focus on bitcoin and bitcoin alone i do think it's a one shot at this i'm really interested in watching how it is people react to this idea of self-sovereign money precedence important precedence

important and i think that bitcoin is probably today the most successful example but i do think you you just feel a very different vibe when you go into a bit bitcoin events like bit devs which i love and i think everybody should try going at least once um versus some of the other events and i'm not saying it's better or worse i'm just saying it's different and so there are just all different kinds of people in the world and people do all different kinds of things and it's so fascinating to watch how people react to the same like they have the same goal or they think they have the same goal but they're going about it in completely different ways and they are leaning into different kinds of incentive models and changing narratives in ways that they even

may not recognize in themselves like I'm very fascinated by how it is that people are reacting to this concept and I'm not necessarily sure we know how it is people will act in the future I'll give an example that actually has nothing to do with Bitcoin so when I was working in at least a lot of some something I would do is I would scrape a bunch of websites I would look at API data from like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram for example and I would be looking for certain patterns for certain kinds of stories and something that was very clear is that the way that young people were talking about gender and sexuality was vastly different than the way that I talked about it or the way that my mother talked about it the words they used were different the things

that they attributed value or negative connotations to were very different. And there were just all these different kinds of descriptions that just didn't fit into the norms of what most people grew up with if you were a little bit older. And now, a lot of those norms are very mainstream. And it's actually considered very negative. considered it looked down upon to take a look at those norms and say like that's not normal like you should like that's become the new normal yeah i mean it's just generations coming and going right everybody creates their own slang their own way of so tiktok generate tiktok like it scares

the hell out of me tiktok is just snapchat don't even worry about it the point being there is that like you think that something is like biology right like man or woman is very simple if you're you know from my grandmother's generation and then by the like within one lifetime you can see that a lot of people in the mainstream have a totally different idea of gender and sexuality and that's okay and that there's nothing wrong with it it's just different and i think that's how people are talking about money today they're using a lot of terms and ideas that don't necessarily fit into the traditional norms and i have no idea what will be mainstream and acceptable in a few years from now i would push back on that like i mean i think there's still a debate i think

a controversial to say i think there's two genders um so when it comes to money uh again this comes down to like the money is a shared illusion trope that goes around and that's false in my opinion money monetary goods uh have uh certain properties that make them better monies over other alternatives and people tend to call less on the monies when it's provided in a free market and there is free and open competition on the monetary goods with the properties that make them better monies so i think that gender is a social construct that is definitely influenced by biology but it's not limited to it and impacts what role it is you play in society i'm a woman i have the biology woman i very much act like a woman but there are some people that have a similar

biology to me that behave very different in society and want to be perceived very different in society and have a very different function so like it doesn't change their chromosomes does not change their chromosomes but exactly it would very much change the way that you would be perceived or they would be perceived in public so money like i might have a certain view of money and i might have a certain view of how people use money and what people want from money but maybe some of the ideas that today i think are ridiculous or um inaccurate might become a norm that would be very controversial to push back against in a few years that i on i i see definitely an evolution of the way that we talk about money and i'm not sure what the end result will be how can the money change so

much though at one point don't we have to coalesce we still have the same chromosomes but we talk about gender different money it's not it's not that the physical property would be different It's about what would be considered ethical usage and what would be considered unethical usage. What would be considered appropriate and what would be considered inappropriate. That can change. And it doesn't have to change the money itself. Money is a tool to conduct commerce. And if we're changing the money all the time, it's inefficient, though, right?

Yeah, yeah. But what I'm saying is, like, it could, and I'm not saying this is a likely prospect. Just that it is in line with what we're talking about here. it's entirely possible that someday it will be considered unethical to have private transactions if it's the norm that everyone is having public transactions and everyone is being monitored then it would be maybe could be if we have a different narrative about what money is and how it should be used it could be seen as unethical to have your own personal money there are definitely cultures in which it is considered unethical to have private property it's communism not only

communism you can also have a certain hunter-gatherer societies for example that if you were to hoard your own food it's considered like it will get you expelled from the tribe yeah because there are like like who knows what it is that people will consider okay acceptable in terms of money usage in the future and that's why i think it's really important for us to talk about the wide range of ways that bitcoin is used because we want to preserve the freedom to use it in a wide variety of ways i think that opens up the floodgates to a terrible slippery slope though right like what there is objective truth in the world right there is the blockchain it's how you interpret it right but i got it like what is wrong what is right and one plus one equals two

yeah plus two equals four um these persons these uh these utxos moved between these blocks um i don't know but i do i think the argument that money is going to be changing as ephemerally as the cultural norms of like gender fluidity i don't um cultural norms around quote-unquote gender fluidity like i don't think that's advantageous or oh no one said it's good or makes sense or like we do so many things that don't make sense if you've ever like tried to describe things that you see as very mundane to someone from a very very different culture they will think you're insane like so many things we do like they just sound crazy yeah i mean i come from philadelphia we have the word john that can be referenced as a verb and adjective yeah right

a noun and nobody understands why but if you're in philly you know what a john is i'm talking to that john over there we're gonna go john out over there that's the thing that i think frustrates me the most when we talk about bitcoin is that people say well oh this is rational this is pragmatic this is efficient so clearly that's what people will do and it's like have you ever met a person we are not rational efficient creatures we are creatures of norms and habits yes and this gets into yes we are creatures of action right we act in certain ways when thrown into certain incentive systems and again that's why i argue bitcoin i think will be winner take most of the long runs because giving the environment of bitcoin existing it provides

a monetary tool that is superior to the alternatives that exist today and just again not even rational human beings just human beings acting in their own self-interest will coalesce around us human beings do a really terrible job of understanding what is in their self-interest we act against our own self-interest all the time what i mean in what ways like for example someone would it would be beneficial for someone to study something in college but they want to study drama instead and so they study drama instead of engineering or it would be beneficial for someone to marry someone that they have a really great friendship with and want to like have very similar life goals but there's a really hot person over there and so they're going

to try and go for the hot person all the time we act against our own self-interest in the long run for short-term gain the idea that we wouldn't do the same thing with money is hilarious of course we will doesn't mean we have to we should try and strive to do what's best for us in the long run but just because something is good for us in the long run doesn't mean it will be the most popular choice i agree but it comes down to individual actions right and collection of those individual actions and you're and not you but um the uh belief that uh most individuals don't act in their self-interest i don't know if i can get down with that i don't think it's that most individuals act in their self-interest i think it's sporadically people are unpredictable and

whether or not they will perceive what is actually in their best self-interest or not and whether they can perceive that is actually totally yes uh subjective like a lot of people thought going into college and going tens of thousands of dollars into debt uh was in their self-interest and are finding out pretty pretty abruptly that it was not so another really fun thing about humans is did you know that if you ask someone a question and you want them to write down the answer not to tell you verbally if you ask them to write it with their left hand and write it with their right hand you will probably get a different answer the same person the same question people like the way your biology works like well just off the top of my head i think

like i'm right-handed so i could write more clearly and more with my right hand than my left hand right yeah but it's more about like right brain left brain like if i were to stand on the opposite end of a person if someone's like being really difficult not giving me the answer i want an interview and i just like change the scenario of the interview like i just move around it's very likely that i can get a different answer just by changing which ear they're hearing me through right how are your you can go back to how you pitch bitcoin like pitching it to a certain personality type and connecting with them yeah where they will most likely react yeah and also our biology right like we are not um finite singular beings we're like this crazy connection

of all these neurons and and chemicals and like the way that we react to something in one context could be totally a different reaction if we were in a different context so like just the idea that we will always be able to make our own best choices is funny but we can strive to continually educate ourselves as we think about this idea of being our own bank and we can look for scenarios in which we set ourselves up for success the best that we can knowing that it is not going to enable some kind of utopia in which everyone makes great financial decisions i can get that with that i agree but i think the uh again like long trend of all of this is that it will given the choice most humans will will act in in their like maslow hierarchy needs exist i think if given the

choice in the right context a lot of people will act in their own self-interest and not mess that up yeah agreed damn we're almost three hours in here okay i'm sorry don't say sorry don't say sorry at all you're not wasting any time this is like i'm like my mouth's running dry here it's been fun yeah i've had a good time too what do you think that we should leave people with when we uh future bitcoin let's not even talk about bitcoin let's just talk about this conversation we disagreed on a lot we agreed on a lot yeah and here we are yeah not at each other's throats that's the thing you can talk to people you disagree with you can have civil conversations and you find out that you actually agree with them on a lot more than you disagree you just

maybe disagree about the best best method for it yeah and it's okay to disagree yeah it's okay i really hope that you're right in most cases except for like the world going on fire I very much hope that most people act in their own best interest and that Bitcoin continues to be the rampant success story that it's been so far. Lee, I don't want to scare you, but coming from the financial industry, the people running our monetary systems and financial industry

have no fucking idea what they're doing. I don't want to scare you, but coming from the media industry and people that control our information, they also don't have any idea what they're doing. So this is a call. and that again like uh know yourself right yeah be able to admit when you're wrong or know yourself and try to be truthful to yourself and i think that's again as we transition this

digital age that's going to be imperative right the sovereign individual know yourself and the way uh the best way uh that you can dissect information and think critically yep do you have any parting notes um we're going into what could be potentially another bull run and i would like to urge everyone to remember that there is bitcoin will still be around at least for the foreseeable future and that they should be making choices that are relevant to their needs and their own financial status and not be scared about missing out i think that the fun thing about bitcoin is investing in yourself long term and learning and and only engaging with the technology to the level that you are comfortable and skilled enough to do safely

i co-sign that very very uh hardly like do not rush into this learn about it we all talk about not your keys not your bitcoins practice making wallets know what you're doing it's so fun you guys even i'm the worst i'm really the worst when it comes to technology and i've almost pretty much i'm like pretty comfortable with my hardware wallet now like you can do it it just takes time takes practice practice makes perfect it like it just take the first step in practice create a wallet write down the seed phrase move a very minuscule amount of bitcoin to it wipe the wallet uh and recover it and start standing some a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger transactions then uh you will get more comfortable lee it's been incredible conversation

it's been the longest podcast we've had on here in months i think thank you it was really fun you freaks out there we disagree and agree on a lot civil conversations exist let's have more of them peace and love