TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #175: Preston Byrne

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Preston Byrne, Partner at Anderson Kill, to discuss: - Why the law is slow - Freedom of speech - Coordinated rioting - How scalable are societies? - Speech on social media platforms - Deplatforming - Bitcoin as free speech - Mining pools as an attack vector - much more Follow Preston on Twitter 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 when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Preston Byrne from Anderson Kill, partner at Anderson Kill, excuse me, to discuss the law. Why it's so slow, the First Amendment in the digital age, people's right to speech, specifically on platforms like Twitter and other social media companies. also got into the discussion of bitcoin and law is bitcoin free speech and a bunch of other stuff i think you guys are really going to like this this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by your good friends at the cash app cash app you freaks already know all about them but if you don't know about them let me tell you about them right they're helping us stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you need to unfortunate if you do need to uh they're also

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devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a hot friday afternoon about to talk about about a bunch of hot topics with partner at anderson kill preston burn preston welcome to the podcast what up marty how you doing chilling i'm happy we uh we could get this together i know we both had big weeks moving uh out of our apartments or houses i don't know if you moved out of apartment or house but i think that we have the uh the life experience of one of the worst life experiences in the world this week which is moving

from place to place? No, I actually live in a borough. So most people don't know, they think I'm an attorney. I'm actually a groundhog. And so I moved from one borough to the next. So it's underground. It's very cozy. There are some big advantages to living in a borough. Underground, the earth maintains a pretty consistent temperature of about 50 degrees year round. So it's really comfortable in the heat of summer and the cold winter. It's resistant to to nuclear strikes so there really is a lot to recommend living like a marmot and you can just pick anywhere or anywhere the grass is and and decide or yeah anywhere where there's reasonably compact soil where uh where it doesn't flood and there aren't too many coyotes and you should be

in good shape it's uh it's not a bad gig as long as you can dig you can get down to those uh stasis temperatures it seems the authorities have found you marty judging from the sirens in the background Yeah, I'm outside right now. The local town that I'm in, the volunteer firefighter alarm just went off, so it seems like they're responding to that call. Cool. They're not responding to this hot podcast, obviously. They're responding to something else.

No, no. But it's going to get hot here. Maybe they'll respond by the end of the conversation. Let's hop into it. I wanted to have you on the podcast. I really like your views. around bitcoin and cryptocurrencies but then also your views on civil liberties in the digital age and uh it's very tenacious time tenacious that's not a word it's very uh there's a lot of tension

in the air right now a woke culture is gaining ground in the world uh people are getting deplatformed people are censoring speech we just had california vote to take out a clause in their uh, constitution that basically says you can't discriminate based on race, sex, gender orientation. So as a lawyer sitting back or not even as a lawyer, as an individual sitting back and watching all this, what are, what's going on in the world in your mind and, and how do you perceive that through the lens of law? Um, the law is one of those weird things when in crazy times you can have a lot of confidence that, uh, that it's going to achieve the correct results. So So we have an expression, the wheels of justice grind slowly but exceedingly fine.

A lot of the time when we see this woke shit happens at light speed, right? So cancellation of someone because they wore an OAN t-shirt or because they said the wrong thing on Twitter is part of a high speed feedback cycle that most humans aren't really very well trained or accustomed to tolerate. So if you're some organization or some small business, and all of a sudden you're thrust into the limelight of having thousands and thousands and thousands of people piling in on you, that's extremely uncomfortable. And it's not something really which you can train anyone to address. So what we're seeing is that there are groups of people on the Internet, predominantly on Twitter, but also on other social networks, who will find something that's offensive, which is said by somebody else. They will then pile on vast amounts of pressure onto various people, employers, whatever. I even I had one person I retweeted something and a guy who I've known for probably six years went and contacted my law partner and said, you know, maybe you should stop doing business with a fascist. Like literally, I retweeted I retweeted a video of a guy getting pushed over at a police rally where someone was asking about what the nature was of the interaction between the victim and the police. And as a matter of intellectual inquiry, and this guy writes my law partner and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I wrote back to him and I said, listen, next time you next time you have an issue with something I say, I'll give you my mother's contact details so you can go bitch to her instead. And he didn't like that too much. He then responded with a very long email saying, and this goes the other way. People have contacted my law partner, Stephen Pally, who is fairly well known on Twitter as well. And he is, let's say, on the left side of the spectrum, and I'm on the right side of the spectrum. And we get along famously, and we're best friends. We've known each other for years. So we were at lunch today, and it occurred to us that we should mention that people contact each of us complaining about the other one, and we had a pretty good laugh about that. But when did it become appropriate? At what point did it become appropriate when someone disagrees with you about something to contact their employer and start to complain? Under any sensible, reasonable definition of appropriate human conduct, we would call that harassment. And it's creepy behavior. It's stalking. It's really, really weird. But yet somehow this has just become something which is acceptable in the last couple of months or years, where someone does something privately outside of the scope of their employment, nothing to do with the job, and other people think it's important to then flood the employer or whoever else with communications such that that person's employment is terminated. so that it's a really weird situation it's a really weird world we're living in i'm not sure how to make heads and tails of it but what i do know is that the judicial system is operates very very slowly and as a consequence it's kind of immune to these you know spur of the

moment things i think there are things we can do to make you know corporations and others more immune to these things but at least for the time being there's not too much over you know spill over into the area of law because the law just kind of sits there the stuff washes over it while it works through its you know procedural mechanisms yeah i mean it's getting to the point where people are going back decades and finding content or something somebody said and canceling them as i believe la galaxy soccer player he got fired for something his wife said on facebook it's complete insanity and i mean obviously tensions are high right now election year everybody hates donald trump uh but it seems like last few weeks particularly like the law

has really been brushed over like people pulling down statues on federal land nothing really happening uh all the rioting going on the cops standing back what what is happening there like are we at risk of of entering a lawless society if this goes on for too long like no no yeah no I mean, we're not communist China, right? So we're not a, we're not Burma, we're not Russia. So what our police don't do and, or what police generally in democracies do not do is shoot people to prevent them from committing property crime. So sometimes that means you're going to retreat and you're going to let someone topple the statute. But in terms of the sort of recriminations for what has happened. So for example, on the White House, you know, just out

in front of the White House, someone, a group of people tried to topple the statute of Andrew Jackson. Another group has threatened to topple the statue of Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation sculpture outside of Congress. Right. And so when people do this, great. Like if you want to go stand outside of this, one guy stood up, he stood next to the Emancipation statue. He took out a megaphone and he said to a bunch of people, we're going to come back here on Thursday. And Thursday didn't happen. I think it's supposed to happen today now. And we're going to come back here and we're going to tear down this statue. And everyone went, OK, everybody, OK, OK. All right, fine. What you've just done is you've committed conspiracy. I can't remember the exact provision

to commit property damage against the property of the United States. And you've committed conspiracy, which is itself a standalone crime. So conspiracy against the United States, which is you have an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime. That's a conspiracy. So congratulations. And you just did it on Twitter and TikTok. Similarly, what we're seeing is the FBI people are got really bent out of shape over a revelation today. Bob Barr, who's the attorney General said that the FBI was going to be redeploying the JTTFs, or Joint Terrorism Task Forces, in 35 states to address vandalism of statues. And people go, well, shouldn't they be addressing, you know, terrorism instead of tearing down

statues? Well, two things. First, tearing down a statue to intimidate a civilian population is terrorism under U.S. law. And second, these JTTFs don't investigate terrorism per se, because terrorism is not a crime in the United States, right? is a criminal act which has a terroristic purpose appended to it, right? So there's no crime of terrorism, like you didn't commit the terrorism. What you did is you committed arson, and it is

domestic terrorism because of the intention behind that particular act. So we don't, you know, in England, for example, as a prime example, they have a crime called encouragement of terrorism under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006. In the United States, encouragement of terrorism is known this free speech. So we don't ban that if it's indirect incitement. It has to be direct incitement under something called the Brandenburg test, which basically means that the statement is directed towards the production of imminent lawless action, i.e. like right here, right now, or within very short space of time, and is likely to result in or produce that action. So if you say to someone, let's go over there and beat up that guy right now because he's a Democrat, right, that is a

terroristic incitement, which would be legally punishable. If you said, that guy who lives in California, which is 4,000 miles from here, is a Democrat, and boy, if he were here, I'd like to knock him upside the head to teach him a lesson. If you do that, that's arguably you're encouraging or inciting, but what you're not doing is breaking the law. So we had similar cases. I don't want to recite the specific facts, because I don't want a recording of my boys saying the specific words.

Watts versus the United States is another similar example involving a threat to the life of the president of the United States, where it was found to have been not a threat, not a true threat, as it's known, but something less, a rhetorical flourish. So because we don't ban rhetorical flourishes in the United States, whenever we're talking about enforcement of this type, you're dealing with normal criminal enforcement procedures, but the terroristic aspect has to do with the motive of the perpetrator rather than the nature and character of the act. interesting you mentioned we're not communist china or russia but it seems like a lot of the people committing these acts would like us to be at some point that's what worries me is if people

like do you think the people tearing down these statues will be brought to to justice i think a lot of them i think a lot of them will i mean if we look at historical examples of other so this This phenomenon of internet driven rioting is actually pretty new. So historically if you look at riots, so let's look to the last big sort of spate of nationwide rioting when I think it was 68 probably. And then there was the LA riots, which were in 92. In 68, yes, you had a lot of arrests, right? But you're arresting someone at the scene, whatever, doing whatever.

It's very difficult after the fact to find out whether someone is rioting or looting something else because nobody was carrying around a tracking device with them 24 7 365 and posting the videos to tick tock with what we're seeing with the monuments it's actually pretty trivially easy to reconstruct uh the the locations of persons at the scene of a crime if you have access to for example cell phone location records which is something the government can get or if you have access to say twitter accounts right so what most of these people who are tearing down and there's There's actually an interesting, speaking of Twitter specifically, where this differs, this whole state of violence differs from, for example, the Charlottesville riots back

in 2017, is that the people who are perpetrating it tend to be on the hard left rather than the hard right. As a consequence, the big tech platforms, which tend to trend hard left, or tend to trend left rather than right, have exhibited a greater degree of tolerance for those groups than they would have for right-wing groups. So for example, the Proud Boys have been booted off of virtually every platform under the sun, and that's a right-wing sort of street brawler group, but Antifa has not. Antifa actively posts on Twitter, and they have accounts on Twitter, and their users

use Twitter, and they presumably use Twitter to coordinate and communicate with one another. And same with groups that advocate violent armed insurrection on the left. So for example, the John Brown Gun Club, they will have presences, whereas equivalent organizations with right-wing ideologies will not have presences on these big tech platforms. So although the big tech companies may have thought, or moderators, I don't know what they thought, but they may have thought that they were doing these people a favor by allowing them to organize and communicate on their social networks. The problem is that now the FBI has a treasure trove of data, so if they identify a user

they get probable cause for a warrant, they then serve that warrant on Twitter or Facebook or whomever else, what they will get is a copy of everything that user has ever done. I've seen those search warrants before in other settings, search warrants that are sent to communications data providers, and they are extensive. They ask for every login going back to the history of the account, which means every user agent string that you've got, every IP address that was ever used, any advertising tokens that are associated with the user, any IMEI and device data which is associated with the user, which can then sort of spider walk.

If you know someone used a Twitter account to post a video of a crime, and then they had the app on their phone, boom, you know who that person is. So even if they use ProtonMail to register their account and whatever else, sorry, you download an app on your phone, you're up shit creek at that point, and they're going to find out who you are. So there are huge pools of data available about the people who are organizing and orchestrating these protests. the tech companies may think that they're doing these people a favor by allowing them to coordinate and organize on their platforms. In reality, what has happened is there's kind of a very, very, very sloppy OPSEC among the people who are doing these riots. So you see anyone, I mean, the idea that you would post a TikTok video of any crime in progress, and particularly a TikTok video of yourself encouraging other people to commit a crime, like we saw during

the riots, it just boggles the mind. But that's what people are doing. So once you have a copy of that video and you know what the user account is, assuming the user had some sense of what they should or shouldn't be doing, like okay I'm going to use a fake email address and whatever else, the minute you know their IP address is the minute you know who they are. So I think we're going to see a lot of, so yes we aren't seeing arrests now, I suspect We will see arrests later, and they're just going to – they're not going to bring charges until they are absolutely certain that they've got them nailed to the wall.

They know who the person – yeah. Lost you. Yeah, they're not going to – so they're not – all right. Let's try this again. No video this time. So you're still there? Yeah, yeah. I can hear you loud and clear.

Yeah, they're not going to bring charges until... It'll take years for this to work its way through the system. That is slow. That is very slow. I think that scares people, right? Because people are at home watching all this stuff unravel. And that's, I guess, another point to bring up is how much is the social media

and traditional corporate media are really stoking things more than uh than they need to be stoked right now um that's just a rhetorical question but with what you did only as much as you let them right exactly exactly if you let these people get and without a doubt i think something that people don't talk about enough is that the this is all orchestrated and planned i do not think that spontaneous nationwide protests um you know emerged without at least a degree of planning from higher groups this is like remember the march for our lives protests a few years ago yep um you know within seven days of the event they had really slick branding a url and everything else like ready to

go like boom so there there are people who are who have their powerful political interests that have an interest in keeping people divided right and left um and those people are stoking a lot of anger and engagement on social media their conservative inc has their whole uh their whole shtick which is about getting people riled up and going to charlie kirk events um and there are groups on the left who i'm not overly familiar with but i'm sure there are political i know there are political organizations raising money off the back of this um so it's it's certainly something where if you don't want to engage you don't have to if you don't want to get riled up you don't have to let them do it to you and you can engage with

these issues in a sensible and level-headed way, much like we do and Pally and I do in our office. He's a Democrat. I'm a Republican. We get along famously. And when we talk about things, we don't raise our voices. And I think that's something which is missing from all levels of politics at this point. Right. There's no discussion. It's just people screaming at each other, which isn't productive when you're not able to create empathy and actually try to hear what the other side's saying yep they're screaming for engagement everyone wants internet points and the more internet points you get uh the wider your reach is that's the sort of that's where the battle is being fought for marginal votes and um is that particularly healthy for our society

i don't think so um you know it doesn't if you'll see it all the time with tweets one guy had a tweet up the other day and um it was after president trump fired uh jeff berman who is the U.S. attorney at the Southern District of New York and or U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. So he had a tweet and he read the statute and he goes, oh, my God, there's a there's an error in the statute. There's a conflict because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he interpreted the statute. Basically, there was a marginal, very weird interpretation that you could apply to the statute, which might, you know, potentially, if you had a judge with, you know with dementia uh result in someone uh you know think or someone who didn't speak english

thinking that there's a conflict in the statute i then retweeted it with a quote and i said listen no that's not the case you know here's here's the explanation it says that you know the president may fire any u.s attorney no matter who they are it doesn't matter who they're how they're appointed the statute's silent there's no conflict here and sure enough his tweet got i think 2 000 retweets and mine got 14 so so like you know the the old expression um which is that a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its trousers on uh remains true on social media and it's the things that people engage with the most which are you know becoming sort of the shared reality uh for large groups of people rather than what is actually true and correct

yeah it's like similar to uh the amount of effort needed to um needed to uh disprove bullshit as water's a magnitude harder than it is to put it out there um just and hey i myself i get dragged into it sometimes but it is there's something in our monkey brains that draws people to that drama and that division that's the sad part about it right is everybody's getting divided and the people who are fighting on Twitter probably have much more in common than the people who are trying to divide them. I think the people who are fighting

have more in common with each other than the people who are not fighting. I think that is a fair assessment to make. I live in a small town, and small town politics is very gentle and very uncontroversial. I mean, it's slightly controversial from time to time, but everyone has to deal with each other in the streets dealing with each other face to face and

so as a consequence it's not very vicious and then when we have this national politics which is I mean it doesn't matter like what your opinion is about Donald Trump it doesn't matter what your opinion is about Joe Biden you are one of 330 million people in the United States of which you know probably 120 million will actually vote in November maybe less and your opinions are irrelevant. Whatever is happening at the national level is so far abstracted, not only from what you think on a day-to-day basis, but from what power you actually have as a resident of a blue state. My vote is useless. It doesn't matter who I vote for. The outcome of that is predetermined. So for people to then turn around and hyper, you know, hyper politicize

what, you know, hyper politicize that one decision, despite the fact that it's totally irrelevant, and then assume huge amounts of, you know, bad things about people from the other side, simply because they've elected to make that decision, just shows a profound failure to understand or even effort to understand that, you know, people are capable of arriving at different answers to the same questions based on their experiences and values which is just you know the human story people are different we're not all the same what are you kidding me with all this woke capital out there no i'm like i think doesn't everybody have to think and act the same like if you don't think this way and act this way you're against the common man

I mean, I think that there's a lot of, there's always been a lot of value in having a monopoly on the definition of human freedom. And if you study any political ideology, all of them point to human freedom, right? But they have different ways of getting there. Marxism is about liberating people, right? It's about liberation, but we saw in practice that it didn't lead to liberation. thinking is also about liberation of a different kind but what we the marxist would critique us and i think i'm a libertarian full disclosure the marxist would critique us not unjustifiably

by saying that we have the illusion of choice and in fact the market makes a lot of the decisions that we would otherwise want to make and that the market dictates the terms of our lives and how we choose to live them in ways that might not be the case if we were living in some socialist utopia equally valid criticism although as between the two options i think think I know how I'd live my life. And I think a lot of the next generation of solutions that we could have that could make life really better without compromising on either thing. So the idea that, you know, we can increase, you know, welfare benefits without increasing taxation by realizing efficiencies through technology or various other things are difficult for people in power to

understand because they've been, Nancy Pelosi is 80 years old, Joe Biden's 80 years old, Trump's nearly 80 years old they're all there abouts so these people were born you know before the Second World War when computers didn't exist or barely existed and now we live in this hyper connected world where I don't think they really have any cognizance of what technology is capable of whether it be cryptocurrency and the sort of edgier stuff or just basic information technology that we use in the day-to-day setting so I think that there's probably And the disconnect probably arises in part from the fact that our leaders don't understand the societies they govern, and so they're not really capable of figuring out where the points of commonality are anymore.

So things seem like they're different, and it seems like we're pulling ourselves apart, but it's really because the leadership is just not in touch with the way the world actually works. And so as a consequence, they've drawn these artificial battle lines and they're leading their tribes into battle, you know, the red tribe and the blue tribe in ways that don't make political sense and just don't make technological or social sense either. yeah and that's something i've always or not always but have been wondering more since i've been paying attention to bitcoin over like the last seven years is thinking of the u.s government and the three branches of that government and how it works mechanically and like does it even make sense today like why do we have a president uh house of representatives congress and nine members of judiciary um specifically with congress and the house of reps like their mechanical operation when our republic was created was to meet in a centralized location and speak

on behalf of their constituents because you couldn't have everybody show up in a central place to do that and speak for themselves i'm not calling for like direct democracy or anything like that but yeah nothing's so dangerous gosh um no i mean i think the model still makes sense the problem is that we've been doing it for so long and we've gotten so fat on the fruits of our empire that that the government is now this federal government is this winner-take-all proposition with absolute power where you know the stakes for control are incredibly high when they don't necessarily need to be you know i don't have an issue with some representative speaking on my behalf, as long as I can fire that representative every two years.

And that representative approximates the views of millions of people. I think that having people who serve that function and perform that task is useful and valuable. And I don't have an issue with representative democracy. I think it works great. Where I do have an issue is the sort of issues that our representative democracy has decided or within its remit to decide, – chief among them the fact that they think that they can control up to 50 percent of GDP. And I think this year it will be north of 50 percent of GDP will be determined by government expenditure.

So if that weren't the case, maybe we could find more to agree on. But the fact is, control of government has become this crucial, absolutely critical life-or-death struggle because government controls half of everything at this point. This was not the case in 1900 when government was less than 5% of GDP. Now it's north of 50. And there are various theories for why that's happened. Some people say, well, it's because our governments are sophisticated and we're morally enlightened, so we think that you need to have vast armies of bureaucrats and vast quantities of funding

for social welfare systems. That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is the way that Joseph Tainter, who's a collapse theorist, at it. And he says that as societies get bigger, they get more complex. And so as a consequence, they become more expensive to administer. So a society which is relatively new and simple and small will have a simple set of rules and a low amount of overhead. Rather like in Civ IV, right, you get to choose your mode of government and the simpler your form of government, you know, the less gold you lose per turn. It's the same principle with a bureaucratic society

as opposed to, you know, an early bureaucratic and a late bureaucratic. There was a great illustration we had once in law school, so an English lawyer and an American lawyer. And in law school, they showed us all the laws that have been written up till 1997 in England and Wales, and it was like two volumes. And then after 1997, there were another 10 volumes of laws that had been written, or 15, that took up two shelves on this rolling bookshelf. And you have to ask yourself, well, what changed? What changed was you got the new labor government under Tony Blair, that decided they were going to vastly expand the administrative state, the number of entities that they were going to be that administered various aspects of everyday life.

They had new kinds of orders which were created called anti-social behavior orders, and they had these sort of diet police called police community support officers, or PCSOs, which would wander around and enforce those new rules. So they just decided at some point, the society went insane and decided that it made a lot of sense for there to be many, many, many more rules than there were before, and so we're going to pass all those rules now, and everyone had better get on board. Societies do this. After a certain point, they decide that they have not micromanaged themselves enough, so

they begin micromanaging every little aspect of social life, and I think that's what's happened in the U.S., is that we've got way too much government, way too much control, too much interference in sort of day-to-day decisions that people make about you know the smallest little things and and i don't see that changing anytime soon particularly postcovid where the government has basically kind of assumed control of all of society it's assumed control of whether you can go out and have dinner um and so what you know whether you can go to church all those kinds of decisions are now in the hands of the state and i i wonder and and suspect that but they won't be rolled back after this is complete they're never rolled back these things

are never temporary and this comment saris made me wonder is there's just like a natural entropy towards socialism or complete control of the purse uh via the government and in these democracy republics i have no idea i just practice law i'm not i don't see the future um so groundhogs see the future actually that's a good point because every february 2nd the groundhog comes out and tells us whether we're going to have six more weeks of winter um so that's one of their that's one of their powers uh which are many and considerable but um yeah i i don't know where i don't know where this ends um it's a problem that has hit every country in the world at the same time um i think the the western democracies are at a weird point in their development where

they're really not growing anymore. They're all starting to contract. They've expended most of their natural resources. There's not really anywhere for them to go at this point. And there are other people who are like the environmental collapse theorists. So guys like James Howard Kunstler, who look at this as sort of the beginning of a long 50 to 100 year crisis, where it will just be one crisis after another crisis after another crisis engendered by resource depletion and other things so oil right so the collapse of oil fields in places like syria and iraq and saudi arabia are imminent and when that happens what will happen to those regions right and how will that then affect our societies back home the u.s kind of got a reprieve

from that because we found vast quantities of shale oil and figured out how to get it out of the ground so we got we got a pass right so we we got to avoid that reckoning but the rest of of the world isn't going to be that lucky and that question is still you know looming around the corner what happens if you know people say well peak oil production and peak oil consumption have both passed and maybe that's true and maybe it isn't but we live in a finite world and um we are starting to see the limits of what human ingenuity can do when faced with nature and what happens when nature decides to push back and what that does to a human society so tbd what will will happen if nature starts to push back more throughout the 2100s or the 2000s sorry the

2000s not the 2100s it's 100 years from now but um you know over the course of the next century we're going to start seeing what happens when we start running out of resources global warming all that kind of stuff uh and it'll be really interesting to see what how our society has reacted that well what are we at eight billion people now uh north of that i think yeah i think it's even more that's pretty crazy to think of uh yeah and how hyper connected we are with all this technology and it seems like the technology is not slowing down at all so maybe that's cause for optimism maybe we'll figure things out with with technology but it's also led to a lot of problems but i want to circle back on what you said about like rolling back uh the laws and the

powers that have been given to the government because of COVID. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. Go back to 9-11. After that, we got the Patriot Act, which is supposed to be temporary and only target terrorists. That has turned into a system that gets renewed or an act that gets renewed continually and has been turned against American citizens. We mentioned how it's pretty easy to identify these protesters pulling down statues with metadata and IP and co-locating them with social media accounts. And now with all this COVID tracking, like are we moving towards a like Chinese social credit system? And how could we stop that if that seems inevitable? I think they're different questions. The U.S. is actually, I think, gives the most of

all of the countries with which I'm familiar. The U.S. gives me the most cause for optimism in terms of at least formal protections for civil liberties associated with tech. There is, of course, the renewed push at the moment to ban cryptography coming from the DOJ, which they do every 10 years and they fail every 10 years because it would make the internet broken and unusable um so that's that's one aspect um in terms of procedural protections in the u.s you still need a warrant or a subpoena to get a hold of this data right so if the government companies are not at liberty to to act as a fire hose to the state so people complain about facebook they're spying on me giving all the data the fbi no you're giving your data to facebook and if facebook if the fbi has

you know probable cause or reasonable suspicion to think that you're involved in a crime and there's evidence of that crime on your facebook account then then and only then um are you going to see a subpoena or process issued and that record disclosed to the government um so that that's an important point to make and i don't see that changing anytime soon in terms of social credit social credit's really a state and it's a state-enforced system of ostracism to punish people for wrong think. And so in China, of course, there is no procedural protection if you have data on Weibo or something, Weibo, excuse me, or WeChat or something like that. The state can just reach in and access it really with a modicum of process and not what you would expect,

you know, at least here in the United States. But social credit is a way that they punish people for transgressions. I've been contacted by people now who are complaining about private harassment, And I'm not going to go into details, but there are people who are being privately harassed by classmates, workmates, whatever else, for some inconvenient opinion in a manner that is essentially for retaliation for some other thing. But because they hold an inconvenient opinion, they are using that inconvenient opinion to achieve some other objective, to cause the person to get evicted, to cause the person to lose their job, lose their home, that kind of stuff. So people are starting to behave in a fashion, a mob-like fashion, against other people. They're denouncing them, right, just for fun. And in the U.S., the government is not free to act on that. The government can't ostracize people.

It would be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. You're not allowed to do it. But what people are doing is they're starting to do it on an individual basis and pressuring employers and landlords and universities and various other things just to get people, just to cause havoc in people's lives. So we saw today a kid named Jayden McNeil from University of Kansas posted a highly offensive tweet, which I'm not going to repeat. And the University of Kansas said, you know, we've been contacted and we're going to investigate

our options. Now the University of Kansas knows full well what its options are. options are precisely jack because it's a public university and public universities are bound by the first amendment but they're still going to gang up on this kid and make his life miserable and probably try to push him out of the school because he said something highly offensive online and a massively online mob decided that that wasn't wasn't going to be acceptable and that he his life should be ruined as a consequence so we're just seeing people get used to it they're assuming that this is kind of something which is now done uh and they're sitting at home bored

unable to go anywhere on their computers and they're just you know occupying their time by going after people on the internet with whom they disagree um so china's social credit is state enforced over here we've got the same thing the first but it's the first amendment which enforces it in the way government can't step in and stop this um it's not within its power to do that um really the only recourse you have as someone who is canceled is you can sue for defamation that's certainly an option or you can um or you can sue for harassment right or or you can report the people who are doing it for cyber stalking or something like that but again you know police it's very unlikely the police are going to have a lot of time to look into that especially if the

threats aren't credible so it's it's an interesting time it's they're two you know opposite sides of the same coin we're just trying to silence people who disagree with official you know official in quotation marks narratives and we're just seeing it just in all aspects of society you know i know personally more than one person um to you know to whom this has happened and i had someone who i knew in crypto for years um who turned around and tried to do it to me and i told him to go fuck himself pardon my french that's pretty much what i said um but i was like i said really is that is that what you're going to do that that's how you want to end on this note and as a courtesy to him because i won't stoop to that level i will i choose not to name that

individual um but you know it's just it's it's just stupid like why get people just get on with their own damn lives and mind their own damn business i just don't understand yeah i think more individuals need to tell others to go fuck themselves uh leave me the fuck alone um no no but with like the covid tracking though like could you see that as uh an attack vector to bring a state sanctioned social credit to the u.s stopping people from doing things because they've come into contact with someone that the app perceives is at a danger the people are already doing that they're doing it on it and it's and And it's illegal, I think, when people are doing this.

So, for example, the state of Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, initially states like Florida said, you know, people coming from Connecticut and Connecticut citizens who come to Florida, they have to be quarantined on arrival. And again, you can't do that because the Privileges and Immunities Clause says you can't discriminate against other U.S. citizens. So Governor Raimondo of Rhode Island figured this out after she gave her order that New Yorkers were to be quarantined on entry, which, you know, in principle and only when joking and strictly as a joke, I would support just to give people from New York a hard time. Or as we like

to call New York and Connecticut, we call it Greater Connecticut. It's really, it belongs to us. They just live there. So, I mean, Connecticut really is the center of the United States, conceptually, economically, you know, socially and culturally. But most people don't acknowledge this. So it's not New York City, but really, you know, New Haven, which is the center of the universe, in my opinion. So anyway, Governor Raimondo turned around and then corrected her order and said anyone coming into Rhode Island from outside, which is a potentially constitutionally valid order, at least from the perspective of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, because if you are from Rhode Island and you cross into Rhode Island and you are from Wyoming and you cross

into Rhode Island, you will receive the same treatment. What we're seeing now is states starting to single out other citizens of other states or travelers from other states. And I'm not sure you can do that legally, but they're doing it anyway, right? And so you have two options. Either you can disobey the order, get pulled over and get cited, or you can obey the order and challenge it, not challenge it and just wait your 10 day, 14 day quarantine. Or if you want you can bring a lawsuit and maybe it'll be granted cert by the supreme court five years from now right so those are those are your options and so most people when presented with those options are electing not to challenge those orders where we are seeing challenges succeed so for example

just earlier this afternoon um bill de blasio and governor cuomo can no longer uh ban religious gatherings because they were uh the the rulings were not generally applicable so they were targeting specific religious settings with their coronavirus regulations, and that is constitutionally prohibited. And also they were allowing certain things like protests when they weren't allowing religious services. So you can't do that under the Constitution. You can't discriminate against people, and you can't have targeted regulations that target religious gatherings and are not of general application. So I have a lot of hope that we're not going to see coronavirus back doors for civil liberties. But it's going to have to work. All of these

challenges are going to have to get worked out in the courts. And it'll just, again, circling back to something we said at the beginning, during times like this, this all looks very frightening from an outside perspective. And if you allow people with an agenda to rile you up, whether they're on the right or the left, based on incorrect information, then you're You're playing a game where you are the sucker and you are going to lose, and the only people who win are the people who are trying to rile you up. The other side doesn't win or lose, your side doesn't win or lose, the people who are looking for engagement and donations win, and you lose, because you lose your time.

So I think I just have a lot of confidence in the justice system that things are going to work out, sit back, let it happen, and let it run its course. It's not a very popular engagement-friendly way of doing things, and it doesn't respond to that sort of human desire to have a quick answer where, yeah, we think X, and we think it right now, and we think it very emphatically. But the fact is, that's the way our system works, is that we have to sit back and wait and watch things unfold. And the people who are tearing down the statues, they're innocent until proven guilty, and

entitled to a full trial and for a jury of their peers and to a robust and vigorous defense so you know there that's that's another principle of our system right so although you know we can get riled up about statutes the solution is not to take these people and throw them in jail forever right now no the solution is let law enforcement do its job let them prove that a crime was committed a crime may not have been committed they may have been standing there watching it and they might not have pulled the statute down or been encouraging they may have merely been present which is not in of itself a crime um and so we have to let these mechanisms play out in order to you know that's in order to ensure that due process is afforded to everybody on all sides i'm gaining some peace

of mind here in this conversation i think uh i've definitely let the corporate media and social media instigators get to me a little bit over the last couple months but feeling we all have we're all we all have done this we have all i've been guilty of it everyone's guilty of it but there's not a There needs to be some kind of techno-Zen movement, right? Where people just kind of assume they release all attachments and just kind of float through life, right? Some kind of like new Zen. I don't know what the hell it's going to be.

But there are a couple of possible responses to cancel culture. One of them is that everyone goes anonymous and behind 11 proxies or whatever the joke is. I think it's behind seven proxies was the original meme. So everyone goes anonymous behind a bunch of proxies and anyone producing original content hopes they'll never be outed. So that's one possibility, and I think that's a possibility which is becoming more present and real as every passing day occurs.

As we saw with Slate Star Codex, right? So people disagreed with Scott Alexander for a lot of things. The New York Times was going to dox him. Then the people said, well, that's unfair. You shouldn't dox him. And then the people who disagreed with him said, you know, dox him. he was an asshole and irredeemable and a fascist. And so yeah, that's a perfect example of what's going on. Another option might be that people just learn and our society adapts and suddenly you just kind of learn to roll with the punches and people who scream are into the void or viewed

as shrill and awful and that behavior becomes culturally unacceptable. So maybe we're going to move into a world where it is as unacceptable to screech like one of those you know like one of the pod people from um the body snatchers uh as you know as it is today to be on the receiving end of that right so or as it would be to walk up to someone in the street and screech at them right so maybe we adopt a digital you know version of that where that becomes a social norm i don't see this what we're doing now as being sustainable for very long because anyone who's had an even remotely interesting or maybe off-piste opinion uh is going to be at some point asked to answer for it and if the answer is anything other than you know gfy um you know that's which is my answer

to most people who disagree with me um it's not gfy but like it's you know reasonable people can disagree take people as you find them and don't discriminate like if you have a problem with that And then if you have a problem with any of those statements, then I have nothing to say to you. It's a really simple equation. So I don't know. It's a weird world we're living in. It's a weird time. The time is particularly weird because people are losing their jobs by the millions and they're locked inside and all of their usual outlets aren't available for them. um so i think there's some added weirdness which covid has brought about but like you know what can what can we do other than just sit and wait it out and hope that when it's over everything's still standing yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out um before we transition to like bitcoin and the law just one final thing on like social media platforms what like if any like so the whole debate of platform versus publishers coming up trump what was it

section 13 was the 230 230 um a dentist and niraj niraj agarwal called it a dentist's favorite law section 230 get it yes anyway sorry anyway continue um yeah so what like what are you what is your view on it like because obviously cancel culture comes on the social media people get banned milo got banned first it came from milo then they came for alex jones now they come for anybody else who who has wrong think um yep and the whole so their private companies that obviously but nick carter's made the case that uh developing a reputation on these platforms sort of gives you uh a claim on digital property if you will what are your views on all this? So there is a, we'll deal with the second thing rather than the first. You do, you do have

an ownership interest in what you produce for social media. Uh, that ownership interest is known as copyright. Um, so anything that you produce through a social media platform, you have copyright over and you have an exclusive right under the copyright act to display, use, produce, derive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, anything you want from it. Now, when you put it on a social media platform, you license all of that content to the social media platform so that they can go and redisplay it as they see fit so if you didn't give twitter a license to display your work when you posted it on twitter technically twitter would be infringing your copyright when it then posted your own tweet so you have property that property is

your content right the copyright and your content is and forever sorry about that that's my office is uh internet is horrible it's all good so where were we you have content so you have copyright to that copyright to that and then the the platform has you have access to the platform right and those are two different things the platform has the right to determine whether you have continued or continued right of access to it under something called section 230 of the communications decency act what that basically says is that well firstly you you give them that right in the contract that you agree to when you use it second yet we're still recording so second there's a thing called section

230 which creates two unique immunities for platforms the first section 230 c1 says that the platform is not liable for content that is produced by other information content providers nor any users so Twitter if Alice and Twitter are are using Twitter and Bob says something nasty about Carol on Twitter, Bob cannot sue, or he can sue but he'll lose, but in principle he cannot sue Twitter or Alice, or excuse me, Carol cannot sue Twitter or Alice for the stuff that Bob said.

So basically it means the person who's saying something is the person who's responsible for it. The second bit, 230c2, says that, again, let's use Alice as a user of the platform, Bob is a user, and Carol is also a user. Bob says something nasty about Carol and Twitter bans Bob. Bob can't then sue Twitter for either banning him or moderating his content off of the platform because there is an immunity for good faith moderation decisions which are designed to

limit access to objectionable material. So with those two things together, which is that the platforms aren't liable for what other people say on them, and the platforms aren't liable for removing content they find objectionable, you have a situation where the platform cannot be sued for allowing speech or removing speech. And so people object to that because they say, listen, that makes the platforms the arbiters of speech. And that shouldn't be the case. Well, you have options at this point. You can go to another platform. You won't have the equivalent reach on those other platforms, which are smaller, that permit a wider range of content or more objectionable content without being censored. But those platforms do exist. So that's the discussion, basically. It's not a question of platform or publisher. It just means that anyone who runs a website where there's user-generated content, whether it be the New York Times, whether it be Random House Penguin, whether it be Twitter, whether it be Facebook, whether it be the comments section on your blog, you have the right to allow all content without being liable for it if you didn't write it. And you have the right to remove content that you find objectionable.

And I think that's a totally fair and appropriate arrangement that, frankly, on balance, supports free speech rather than harms it. It rubs people the wrong way, myself included at times, like thinking like, hey, this is a public square. You should be able to stand up on your soapbox and have your voice heard no matter what you're saying. yeah but I mean that's that's the same fallacy that that companies make when they get too reliant on like an app store or the Facebook you know developer environment or something else right if you lose API access to if you build your product on top of someone else's product and that someone else decides to change their product or revoke your API access for whatever reason you're done right so like that's if you if you have that dependency you're finished so I think

a lot of people who are creating social media content because they're not devs, they don't understand that they're basically baking in a dependency for their business. And that dependency is their followings on various websites. So I freely admit, if my Twitter account got nuked, that wouldn't be great. I wouldn't like it. But it's ultimately not, I'm not an internet personality. I'm an attorney and people come to me not because I tweet, they come to me because practice law and happen to understand blockchains a little better than most people, I like to think. So that's the difference there. I think a lot of the internet personalities, the meme masters and people who are producing memes, who are political grifters, who rely on engagement

in a very direct sort of way in order to put food on the table, they're going to be more vulnerable to that. But it's really their own fault, which is that they allowed one company to be a dependency for their empire, their business, instead of investing in multiple platforms and multiple sets of different users. So there's no reason why, I mean, there are a bunch of different platforms out there now, MindsGab, Parlay, BitChute, Library,

or half a dozen of the bigger ones. And there's no reason why anyone who is an internet person or business should be focusing on, you know, I'm just going to rely on Twitter and YouTube. I know that there's this problem out there, and I'm just going to keep focusing on Twitter and YouTube. I think to do that would be now under the circumstances is totally foolhardy, but people are going to keep doing it because they're not going to think in terms of risk mitigation and that this can happen to them. So where we are is this weird position where people say it's censorship.

It is censorship, but it's not censorship which should be illegal because ultimately they should have made the decision way, way back to diversify and spread their eggs out among many baskets. instead of just saying, listen, this is my strategy. I'm going to go – it's like almost like the drug addicts, right? They know that they're going to get the most engagement by hitting this one platform, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, again and again. And so they ignore the rest of their lifestyle. And what happens is when they have the thing removed from them, all of a sudden there's nothing left. There's no part of their business because they've been juicing it constantly with the big platforms and ignoring the sort of safety net that they need in order to survive.

So people are learning that the hard way. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And that's why I like having a personal site on top of the newsletter. I mean, I don't plan on getting canceled or anything anytime soon, but it's nice. Like you said, safety net to have to know. It gives peace of mind to know that I have that property that I control. Even though it doesn't get much traffic, it's still there. Yep.

All right. So you segued into this pretty perfectly. You know blockchain law very well. And you're somebody I've been following on Twitter for years now because of this. So let's start with Amir Taki quoting you. I don't know if this has anything to do with law, but I think it does really show your understanding of cryptocurrency, at least in my eyes. that uh well um excuse me one second i'm on a call sorry the um so amir taki um amir taki is basically like the tech world's answer to ernest hemingway um so he's awesome so he's he's a crypto anarchist guy who um worked on a project called dark wallet a while back currently he's got another company that he's associated with but like he's he's super um he's super super badass he went to syria to go fight you know on behalf of the kurds who apparently are america's allies um and that's i mean i'm way way not that i would do that firstly i don't think it's you know legally a very smart idea um but also i'm a big wimp and so but amir's like he like

how many people right now on twitter are talking a whole bunch of trash about uh are talking a whole bunch of trash about oh yeah well we'll go in the streets and we'll fight the other side and we'll do this amir actually like went to syria and like picked up a weapon and like went and fought for freedom uh against isis like that that's you know whatever whatever you may think about amir taki um he did that and i don't know anyone else who who had the balls to do that so you know props to him uh he quoted me today so that made me sort of giggle uh which was which just wonderful because getting quoted by amir taki and it was a quote about stable coins trying to find it here basically the stable coins are rubbish um so my background in chains is that

back in 2013 14 i was in london where the whole ethereum thing was kicking off i've been following bitcoin back and forth for about a year since early 2013 um and then got really into it actually when dogecoin launched because then a penny dropped and i was like oh my god they're going to be millions of these things um but really that was it like when dogecoin was launched that was for me the moment when i was all in and i was like that's it i'm going in this is where it's it's it was over at that point i was just like like you're right cool my my old life is over i am a bitcoiner now um and so it was uh that was how it kicked off and what we did is a bunch of us um two other guys a guy named tyler jackson who's a quantum mathematician who currently works for deep mind

and Casey Coleman who currently runs the company we founded, it's now a legal tech company, it's pivoted a couple of times. We decided we were going to take this blockchain stuff and try to make it useful for enterprises. And we didn't know why we were doing it, right? We said, listen, we have a hunch that these, and that was really the pitch, right? It was, listen, we've got a hunch that this stuff that we're working with now is going to be increasingly relevant both for political reasons and for efficiency reasons. We think it's going to be more efficient to have two verifiable copies of the same file in two different places that are updating in tandem, but we also think that there are likely going to be some political

implications, and we're actually, the original paper we wrote, I can verify this, because it was up on H+, which is the sort of transhumanism website, the original paper we wrote, we were talking about the problems with centralized data stacks like Google and Amazon and others being basically single points of failure for companies that needed data processing. So that was what this permission blockchain thing started as. It was saying, listen, maybe there will be in the future some set of circumstances where some company or some person is going to be denied access, not to the financial system, but to data processing, to Amazon, to Google, to something like that. And they may want to communicate with other people.

And this is a way that we can do that. Now, of course, the early customers for this were predominantly banks because that's who was focusing on blockchain stuff at the time. So we went around and sold the stuff to banks and guys like Krista Rose were like, oh, it's a perpetual motion machine. Oh, it's an inefficient database. And at the time, we were like, you know what? You're absolutely right. It is 100% an inefficient database. But we think that there's a problem that these things solve and we're not quite sure what it is yet.

Now, as we start to go into – so there are two things. First, we've seen Facebook is now deploying one of these things in Libra, and they've apparently designed one which is very, very good and very, very performant. So the slow database criticism is falling away as you start to see improvements in the design of these systems, at which point you're just left with the replication issue, right? And whether having a replicated database makes more sense than not having a replicated database and using a master-slave model to communicate just like any other server. So that's the first thing. The second thing is we are now starting to see the denial of access to data processing facilities. So whereas in 2014 it was unheard of for someone to be deplatformed from Facebook, let alone Apple's infrastructure or Google's infrastructure.

With Alex Jones, we saw a deplatforming across a range of different platforms. With Gab.com, we saw a deplatforming across a range of infrastructure. But Laura Loomer, same thing. Payments, internet, email, Google, all of it. Milo Yiannopoulos, the same thing. And now what we're starting to see is gradually more and more deplatforming happening, and it's more and more centrist. So a guy named Carpe Donctum, who's a meme manufacturer, was booted off Twitter, apparently for DMCA violations. But I query – we're taking Twitter's word for it. I don't know what their internal process was for how many DMCA complaints or whether he'd been a repeat infringer or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So long story short, we are starting to see now this deep platforming phenomenon where data processing is being withdrawn for political reasons. And it's a weird world, and it's kind of a world that Bitcoin was built for.

But it's a world that in 2014, we didn't know. We kind of had like a dim, maybe a dim awareness that something like this could happen. but now that we're seeing it happen i think it really validates a lot of the thinking that people had around blockchain tech generally um and bitcoin specifically wait so you bullish on libra is this what i'm getting from that i'm bullish on i'm bullish on i don't i don't know how bullish i am on libra um i have heard very good things about their technology um does that mean i'm bullish about the project that's a very different question i think i'll hold you know hold my answer on that for another day um but i've heard the technology is good and so credit

words do yeah the tech could be good but i don't see any situation in which libra wouldn't censor and de-platform the way oh yeah from that from that standpoint i think libra will absolutely de-platform people at a whim um or on a whim and um yeah for sure i i don't libra is not going to be a force for freedom in the world what it might be is a way of delivering cryptographic primitives into financial institutions and other types of companies so that they can then have an infrastructure in place which they can use to interact with mainstream with mainstream financial systems or cryptocurrencies excuse me so if libra does it and then all of a sudden everyone gets accustomed to using pki like you know bitcoin style pki maybe that opens the door for bitcoin's

wider use um and you know if they figure out how to use a wallet maybe that opens the door for bitcoin wallet so i think that libra will wind up being a net positive simply because it's something which people will use and it's so similar to what already exists it's like a stepping stone if you will yeah um man that's fascinating stuff do you think do you think the u.s congress will let libra launch obviously that's been huge point of contention it's not congress's call it's not it's not congress's call and it's this is you know the financial regulations exist libra either complies with them or doesn't and if it doesn't it's going to have a you know problem with the department of justice um and if it does

or maybe and potentially maybe the sec um so it's not it's not like congress it's not congress's uh it's yeah it's not congress's call here the laws already exist and libra has to structure its affairs to operate yeah yeah they've tried to uh scare them up to this point it seems oh for sure yeah for sure and i guess you've been following ethereum for quite some time too and the ico boom of a few years ago and you mentioned the law is slow and grinding do you think we will see any um action against some of the ico i mean we already have seen for a few but you think we'll see larger action um in that space particularly i know the conversations i know some conversations are happening i'm not going to say which ones are how i know

um but i know that some conversations are happening around some of the larger projects TBD, what actually is done, that depends on the quality of the lawyers and how motivated the SEC or other financial regulatory enforcers decide they want to get. We haven't seen anything from FinCEN, for example, with regard to ICO issuance, even though arguably, and I'm pretty sure in FinCEN's view, launching an ICO is money transmission. we just haven't seen any enforcement from then on those TBD, whether there is such enforcement, I don't know.

We just haven't seen it. And so, yeah, the reason we haven't seen it, that was all in 2017. That was three years ago where all of this, the big boom happened three to four years ago. And we still haven't seen a whole,

a whole lot of enforcement. Yeah. No, I mean, it was pretty egregious at the time following it. And somebody writing about it too, summer of 2017 went to a consensus meetup and they were just openly, telling companies like hey you should launch this is a great way to raise money i was like i don't

know the reason i left my company is because my investors wanted to do an ico and um and that was in 2017 and i look i took one look at that and i was like nope not doing it um they wound up they wound up not doing it um but they they wound up doing something else instead but um they're basically right i took one look at that stuff and it was really hard to walk away from because everyone else was doing it and when everyone else is doing something and you say no i'm not going to do it because i think i'm right and everyone else is wrong how to put it uh vcs think you're an asshole so they think they think wow what an arrogant little twerp thinking that he you know knows the way uh that this is going to go and how this is going to end and we don't and tim draper

doesn't and andreessen harwoods doesn't barry silver doesn't blah blah blah blah so i i very much put my money where my mouth was when it came to ICOs in terms of, you know, someone said, listen, you know, you either are going to go along with this or not. And there's a large amount of money on the other side if you go along with it. I said, you know what, screw you. I'm going to go. And at that point, what I did is I left the company and went back to law school here in the U.S. so I could get my U.S. law degree sorted out because at the time I was only admitted in England. so that's um that's a the ico story is an interesting story it's not a story that's over it's a story where i very much put my money where my mouth was and it turns out i was right

so i hope that people uh think i will continue to be right about things that is kind of how i that's how you know that's that's kind of what that was all about people were like so why are you so anti-ico and i was like you know because when it all falls apart i want them to remember that i was the one who told them what was what they didn't want to hear uh and that no one else would had had the guts to do it um or very few other people i wasn't the only one there were several of us but i was one of the loudest and um yeah so that was that was my my play in the ico my investment was in betting that was all it was all going to go pear-shaped and uh and when it did that was that was uh i think a very positive result uh in terms of uh you know not being

embarrassed uh by by the yeah it was the revolution it was crazy how that was another mass psychosis people are relatively small mass psychosis let's be real there's not too many people in the space at this point but uh it was ridiculous watching it from the sidelines and and how quickly it imploded and how quickly Ethereum's narrative has changed now they're on the ETH 2.0 and whether or not that comes to fruition, I'm highly skeptical of.

But that has been very interesting watching the Ethereum pivots throughout the years. Ethereum's problem is that it writes checks that the code can't cache. And if you indicate that, it and then the investors don't care right so like that's the problem with criticizing ethereum is that it's like nobody gives a damn because everyone who believes in it has such conviction um and is really really good at selling it so their memes overpower your memes i remember when

ethereum was supposed to be the world computer i was going to process all the world's transactions of all kinds um you know large and small no matter you know no matter how trivial and that turned out to be wrong. And there was a, I remember back in 2016, I think in July or August, there was a zero hedge article that said, you know, soon Ethereum will, will, uh, surpass a million transactions per second and we'll be able to compete with AWS. It's a world computer. That's what you have to do. It's absurd. I mean, it's totally, totally absurd. So someone actually said this and And I questioned on my blog, and I continue to question, I ask, where did that come from?

Which jerk at which company fed that particular story to that particular blogger so that that particular piece of information would come out at that time? And I'd love to know the answer, I really would, but I suspect I will never find it. Because it's so wrong, it's so bogus. Because Ethereum is not a computer, right? a state machine that only responds when a user calls it so the blockchain isn't going to do anything unless some computer sitting somewhere else decides it's going to broadcast a transaction which initiates a state transition in a smart contract so it can't be the world computer it

is more like the world ledger which you can open and write in and it limits how you can write right just like bitcoin or anything else so those representations were so dishonest um that and that's a useful thing but it's not a world computer right so that was the thing that really got me about e is that they really oversold it uh early on but at the same time they've still managed to build something which worked which hasn't really broken in any material way which is on its own impressive they've got a very good community associated with it so however misguided some of the claims might be bitcoin i think suffers from the same problem so that's a it's an interesting project i query if 2.0 again is trying to be that

all singing all dancing everything to all men and it started with uh plasma so i remember the plasma white paper i think referred to like something stupid like trillions of transactions per second um and you look at that and you're just kind of like come on like trillion really like is that is that really where we're going with this um when most you know production blockchain systems are clocking in at like 10 000 max you say that this system you've architect and that never plasma never went anywhere so um you know tbd what what happens with eath i think it's a it's an interesting project um some of the people associated with the ethereum community are wonderful uh some of the people associated with the ethereum community are charlatans i'm not

not going to say which or which they know who they are and um it'll be uh it'll be interesting to see what the project does i have 2.0 will be an interest perfectly interesting project i don't like that it's proof of stake but you know it's that's their project it's their code not mine we'll see if they ever get to prove a stake it looks like joe loom and in consensus just invested in uh an amd gpu chip um so it seems like those money bags behind the projects i want pow to continue for at least uh one batch of chips at amd well i no comment i i do not i do not pay attention to joe lubin's well you mentioned that bitcoin suffers from the same shortcomings in that way i would uh

be very interested to hear that and then i have a bitcoin and law question that i've been dying to ask you because i think it's it's something yeah yeah so so bitcoin has the same problem in that it is oversold right so a friend of mine perry metzger he sometimes he's a smart guy he runs the cryptography mailing list so that's the mailing list that the bitcoin white paper first appeared on and he's a pretty he's a pretty clever guy so generally speaking he will he and i will sometimes jump on the phone and we will lament that and particularly during the boom it was especially bad where people would be like, yeah, like Bitcoin is going to replace all banks and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was just like, we would sit there and tell each other that we

were tearing each other's hair out because you're like, no, this is not how this works. It's not a bank. It is digital money. It is digital gold. It is, it is some kind of asset. It is not a bank. Like it's not going to replace the lending function of a bank. And so you have all of these promises being made. And those of us who've been around for a little while are a little more sober about it like i love bitcoin i think it's a great project um i love the people in it um it is not going to say it's not going to cure cancer though like it's it has limitations and i think if we're honest about what those limitations are we're much more likely to find uh to find receptive ears in places that matter than if we don't um there are people who you know it's going

to get there anyway and people who are smart enough will figure out what those limitations are on their own but it just drives me crazy when you have groups of people overselling tech which will invariably lead to people being disappointed when it doesn't live up to those vastly over-inflated expectations so that that's the problem that i think every cryptocurrency project shares i have yet to encounter a single project where the most dedicated and devoted acolytes uh have have not done this uh including projects like ripple uh just by way of comparison The XRP army on Twitter is saying, well, when one XRP is worth $20,000 a token, I swear I'm going to go buy a new Ferrari for everybody in the state of Georgia. And you're just like, okay, that's clearly not going to happen.

So why don't we try to maybe modulate our expectations to reality a little bit? So that's the only thing that's frustrating. We're back. We're back again. Cool. no i think you answered that question in whole um like expect yeah and i agree um and i'm probably somebody who's put overblown expectations out there in the past at times but i try to be more tempered with how uh i pitch bitcoin and its its capabilities these days especially after

having so many conversations with core developers and they'll be the first to really drive home those limitations yeah um but yeah i want to we should probably wrap up here almost an hour and a half in um the question i'm dying to ask about bitcoin is do you think we could ever get it um labeled in the eyes of the law as free speech like you mentioned it was a financial asset but at the end of the day it is a messaging protocol in which people give value to its scarce information space um me personally i think if bitcoin is to be successful and to be able to run wild as it should be able to i think we need to get it designated as free speech and it seems like there may be precedent in the past with pgp um but obviously i'm not a lawyer

and i don't know and i'd love to get your thoughts on this i think bitcoin to a certain extent already is free speech but not in the way that so what what people who say that often not always want so again we're speaking in generalizations here but when i've heard the bitcoin is free speech argument made before it's basically people saying listen we want bitcoin to be exempted from financial regulations because it's free speech i don't think that excuse me i don't think that uh that's gonna fly i don't think that dog's gonna hunt so what do i do think will fly I think running a Bitcoin node, I think that is free speech. I think the decision to run a Bitcoin node is probably free speech. So in my humble opinion, I think that the ability to put any message you want onto the Bitcoin network and not have the government tell you that that message needs to come down, subject to certain very, very limited exceptions, I think that is free speech. So I think you can put a political message on Bitcoin and the government can't prevent you from doing that.

Do I think that that that that would mean that, you know, buying a coffee is free speech or laundering money is free speech? No, because those things are regulated as financial transactions because they're not protected speech within the meaning of the First Amendment. It's not what the First Amendment was designed to protect. So it depends on what you say. Right. So Bitcoin, you know, the running a Bitcoin node as a political act is and should be considered as free speech. But all transactions in Bitcoin, that doesn't mean that all transacting in Bitcoin is now suddenly exempt. It means that that particular aspect of our engagement with Bitcoin is protected speech under the First Amendment. And certain things we do, like leaving messages in the Bitcoin blockchain, those will be protected by the First Amendment. It does not mean that we can walk away from financial regs because that's that financial regulations are not are not free speech.

There may be certain situations where they are. So maybe some if there were a federal law saying you can't donate to do it this year. No. So if there are federal laws saying you couldn't donate to a political candidate in Bitcoin, I think that might be something which would be challengeable. But, yeah, I think Bitcoin already has some First Amendment parts. There are aspects of the use of Bitcoin which are protected by the First Amendment, not all of it. And I think we should be content with that and we should deal with the rest in a legally compliant fashion. You know, what worries me the most from this perspective. so i on this outside of the podcast and newsletter i work for a company and we we mine bitcoin using waste gas on oil and gas fields and just through the nature of doing that we're in sort of industry

groups talking about uh bitcoin mining in the united states specifically moving forward and the topic of uh like white listed mining pools has come up where where some companies uh financial institutions funds that are uh running everything by the book and complying by the book here in the united states uh are a little bit apprehensive to point hash towards pools like slush pool and f2 pool because they can't be certain who else is mining within that pool and i i just think that creates a very bad gray area where if bitcoin isn't defined to speech that's a huge attack vector where people can partition the network and the mining pool specifically into these whitelisted and blacklisted pools because you don't yeah but that's a that's really a free

association thing i mean i don't see it's if you don't yeah i see the issue where maybe you don't want to i don't see really a legal problem if you're participating in a mining pool actually there no i see there might be okay sorry i'm thinking out loud here um yeah there might be some issues there but i don't see it as that i don't see it as that big a problem um you know if you can find a complaint it's an incentive for mining pools that want hash to turn around and get compliant and let everybody know who they're dealing with and start ky seeing their miners and i don't think that's altogether a bad thing um you know in the grand scheme of things if you're That defeats the permissionless nature, though.

It doesn't defeat it. It just says that there will still be a market for permissionless mining, and people will be able to choose that permissionless option if they want, and people will be able to choose the compliant option if they want. It's up to them. And so maybe Bitcoin will be pulled between those two forces, where the corporate America will be on the compliant side, and then you'll have a bunch of bootleg farms and mining farms in the middle of Iceland

that are administered by, I don't know, the Polar Bear Mafia or something that decided, or Puffins, actually, that's the main Icelandic critter. Maybe they'll say, you know, a bunch of Puffins secretly run a mining farm outside of Reykjavik that mines, you know, Bitcoin for the Puffins

in Iceland, I don't know. But I don't see that as that big an issue because people still have a choice. It's not like people are, they're hard-working the protocol and saying you must KYC before you use the protocol. It's just a, it's a competitive issue. yeah but then like so the kyc thing like

isn't there a good argument to be made that kyc aml aml laws do much more harm than good by forcing all these entities to collect all this data i mean this is something we say on this podcast a lot like you know all the all the leaks and hacks that have happened throughout the years it's becoming glaringly obvious to me at least that this stuff does way more harm than good to a vast majority of individuals and like at what point uh is a law unjust and like should you fight back against further regulation in that direction there are a lot of unjust laws having to identify yourself is is not high for financial transactions i don't really consider to be that high on the list um just personally i think there's a lot of there's a lot of unjust

stuff that happens and sort of KYC-ing with a bank and complying with the travel rule doesn't really top the list for me. So I'm sorry, I just don't have particularly strong feelings. Like I understand why people get bent out of shape over that. And I sympathize certainly, but for me, it's just not, I think I see the free speech and censorship issues that are about people getting pushed off of the internet, for example. Those problems to me are much more pressing and immediate than you know being unhappy that fidelity you know isn't going to mine uh with a pool that doesn't identify their users i think that's much more fidelity's problem or some other industrial miners problem than it would be a problem you know for ordinary bitcoin users who are still

free to use the system anonymously if they choose yeah that's a good point well that's why i brought you on to answer these these questions have been bubbling in my mind about bitcoin in the law because it is uh that's the other thing i get bitcoins defined as different types of things between different um entities whether it be the cftc the irs um fincen and that's that's confusing as well like will there ever be a consolidation of a definition of what bitcoin is across something's always something's always different in the eyes of different regulators because they regulate different a piece of land looks different to the irs than it does to uh to a local you know than it does for the purposes of property law um so that's something which is fairly common

different regulatory treatment for different types of transactions and so i don't think that's going to change at any time in the near future um but bitcoin it's property right that's it's property and as property it can be traded in different ways depending on how you use it um unfortunately i'd have to it's now coming on to the hour so i do have to jet but um but yeah cool anything else final questions no that's it um thank you for taking some time to do this sorry everything sorry crapped out a couple times there but i think i think it's my fault i think it's my fault rather than yours the uh the office's internet isn't very good but uh but awesome hey thank you so much for having me on i really appreciate it no i really appreciate it and uh enjoy the rest of

weekend. You too. Take care. See ya. Bye. Peace and love. Take care.