TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #184: Clark Moody

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Clark Moody, data don, to discuss: - The early days of bitcoin data - Making a dashboard of bitcoin data - What bitcoin data can tell you - The polarization in America - Secession - How easy money leads to more lawyers and laws - Will Marxism come to America? - An optimistic path forward - much more Follow Clark on Twitter Check out Clark's dashboard 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, the long-awaited episode with Clark Moody. It's here, freaks. Rejoice. Throw your hands in the air like you just don't care. Press play on this podcast. If you're listening, you already have press play. I don't know why I said that. A really great episode with Clark. Got into a lot of topics, particularly why he's so into data. This episode ebbs and flows. rollercoaster ride of emotions this episode is brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking

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too expensive out of your reach you can buy as little as one dollar you can stack a sliver of that stock with cash app investing cash app investing is a subsidiary square remember sipc as always remember to use the code stacking sats when you download the cash app if you haven't done so already that's stacking sats 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 great friends in chicago at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse what do you think of that marty's little bitch how enjoy this episode you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts

So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to 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. You probably should be. Welcome to Tales from the Crypt. This is Clark Moody, and you are entering the Purity Test lightning round.

Each contestant will complete the sentence You're not a real Bitcoiner If I'll kick it off You're not a real Bitcoiner if you don't run Your own full node You're not a real Bitcoiner If you don't spend Bitcoin in the streets

You're not a real Bitcoiner If you don't work in Bitcoin full time You're not a real Bitcoiner if you work for a KYC exchange you're not a real bitcoiner if you have a kyc exchange as an advertiser you're not a real bitcoiner if you work at a bitcoin mining company you're not a real bitcoiner if you eat vegetables you're not a real bitcoiner if you don't have any kids you're not a real bitcoiner if you've never used lightning and finally you're not a real bitcoiner if you care about marketing nobody's a bitcoiner nobody's a real bitcoiner thank you

for participating in the purity test lightning round ah the purity test get exhausting you're very exhausting i'm pretty everybody just chill yeah i'm pretty tired i'm pretty tired of the purity test bobby lee is not a real bitcoiner though there's a record show that is pretty ridiculous you've been pointing that out uh they have the passphrase included on the thing like they've produced the passphrase as well they pre-generate the private key and the passphrase it's a great bib 38 wallet to use i remember way back in the day way back in the day there was some way you could send them like a hash or something of your of your i don't know you there was a way that some company was generating these physical things in a cryptographically secure way

They were like, you had a piece of it. They had a piece of it, but only you could unlock it. That was a long time ago. Well, I think what it was, was you sent them the QR code, but not the passphrase, not the BIP38 passphrase. And then they printed it for you and sent it back to you. So you generate a script. Was this the web wallet creator?

So there was a physical wallet that looked like the ballet crypto, but you didn't give them the BIP-38 key. You didn't give them the BIP-38 passphrase. So if they wanted to compromise you, they would have to brute force your BIP-38. Obviously, there was a privacy risk was there, and you were relying solely on the strength of your passphrase that you chose, which most people probably weren't choosing strong passphrases. but it's still infinitely better than what bobby lee just came out with and a lot of big bitcoiners endorse that shit too craziness it's madness uh the lee brothers can't get away from them uh is charlie lee predicting that like when's gonna pump in price is he is he starting a front

run is he gonna dump at the top again i don't know the position of charlie's bags well clark i'm happy we're doing this it's been a long time coming obviously we've been shilling your your dashboard for quite some time here at tftc and as you alluded to you've been around for quite a while and uh i think a good place to start this conversation would be your your piece that you wrote a few weeks ago or maybe a month ago at this point on 10 years of bitcoin data and i thought that was a beautiful piece and just like a really good intro to your journey through bitcoin and why and how you got into it so what the hell has it been like being in the space for 10 years infinite refills of popcorn it just never ends uh

schadenfreude popcorn drama public lawsuits public you know people getting scammed and hacked and And, you know, yeah, it never ends. But like, like I said in my, so yeah, the piece, the piece was, you know, the other day I was talking about some market data and I remembered that like Mt. Gox's first trades were in 2010 in July sometime. And so I went back and actually found an old copy of the Mt. Gox trade data, like an old hard drive and pulled it up. And the first Bitcoin traded at 4.95 cents per coin.

and the first trade was 20 bitcoin so it's like a you know uh 100 170 000 x or whatever return if you'd held that very very first trade um so here we are 10k 11k whatever it is today and people are saying oh it'll never go to x x is 100 000 a million a billion whatever it'll never go there, but we've already seen it come six orders of magnitude. I'm not making any price predictions. That's another purity test. You're not a Bitcoiner if you think that stock-to-flow is real, or if you do think stock-to-flow is real, whatever. That's the piece of it. But I found out about Bitcoin shortly after it hit $1 in February of 2011. And I had my first real-time Mt. Gox website up in early June of 2011. And so I was able

to watch the big Mt. Gox hack live on my site. The hack where the hacker created a bunch of synthetic Bitcoin and then dumped it on the market. And so Mt. Gox was just dumping like 30 minutes and it went all the way down to a penny um but then they reversed they reversed all those trades how did they create synthetic bitcoin they just hacked the database and just had their their entry you know 500 000 coins to my account and then just like market sold it which is a way they could they could have put orders on the other side and then try to get get those filled i i don't know they credited their gox account with with bitcoin even though they didn't have it yeah because gox had like a terrible back-end php

infrastructure correct like it wasn't conducive for trading at all actually i think reading readings through the history of gox like i don't think it was ever actually solvent at all like at any moment that carpellus owned it so it's just kind of a tragic like huge amounts of success and then also just massive uh insolvency the whole time yeah what happened jed mccaleb handed it off to him correct right uh jed mccaleb for you freaks who are unaware is uh chronic shit coiner he's created ripple and and stellar and he's got a lot of ripple that he's allowed to market dump on on the market every month i believe with something like five million ripple or something like that every month

for 50 million it's like it's the reverse of stacking sats dumping ripples he's like dumping cost averaging because he's forced to uh yeah so clark why what about why are you so fascinated with data thank you for working hard to to grant bitcoiners access to data in a free free way like your your dashboard i have again it's one of my very I have a few bookmarks and your dashboard is up there. It's the best thing ever. It's fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I've always kind of been on the market data side of the shop here in Bitcoin.

And I guess, you know, right before I got into Bitcoin, I was kind of looking at automated trading type strategies and how to do that. But to get data feeds, you had to pay NASDAQ 5K a month or whatever to get a good data feed. And here comes this Mt. Gox thing, real-time data for free. Scrape the full history for free. And then all the other Bitcoin exchanges, for the most part, have followed suit with free data because getting liquidity is more important than trying to milk your data set for exchange. and so i just put together the problem i'm solving is each exchange has a terrible interface you know back in the day they're a little bit better now but they were terrible you know you had to like

manually hit f5 on the mount gox order book to like get a fresh book right so i said i need to i need to make this you know they've got a real-time feed i'll see if i can put together real-time book and did that it was like web sockets were still being finalized like the spec for web socket was still kind of up in the air and it's like you had spotty browser supported stuff um but then coming coming around to the dashboard 2017 rolls around four cores block size you're hitting like four or five different websites right you're on like coin dance you're on the uasf tracker like how many nodes are signaling uasf and the user agent you're on like a fee website like all these different things and i'm thinking you only need one data point from each

side like what's the mining signaling rate what's the block size average block size that's all you need so i just wanted to put you know every single data point from the entire bitcoin economy just on one screen and just the data points and like that's it and so that's that's what i set out to do yeah and it's incredible and i love how you just keep adding to it like last week you added uh the bitcoin price announces a gold and barrels of oil and the percentage of bitcoin's market cap compared to gold's market cap that's the number to watch man do you believe so that's the ultra ultra bull number right there the real flippening when it's when it surpasses that so beyond the data like what did you stumble into bitcoin because the free and open data and the trading

aspect of it and come to believe in it or did you sort of have a penchant for sound money or freedom in the digital age before before getting into bitcoin yeah i definitely got into the philosophy after after bitcoin prior to that i you know it's kind of like a constitutionalist kind of you know kind of guy never really thought about most of the libertarian message but i definitely came to that stuff after joining bitcoin and then the sound the sound money um austrian economics stuff just really made sense whenever i went down that down that rabbit hole i was like this this explains you know all the chaos and stuff you see in the world is this is this money stuff and government interference in markets that sort of thing so yeah definitely

after if i was ideological when i if i was aligned ideologically when i first discovered bitcoin i definitely wouldn't have sold any of it early on i would have been like load this up this is the thing that we've been looking for um you're not a real bitcoiner if you sold sold any bitcoin you're not a real bitcoiner yeah no what uh sounds good um like what what lessons like what were the hardest lessons that you've learned before getting to where you are now like in the early days like what is what is like some of the crazy shit you've seen well i mean for for my own website uh you know i i wrote the i learned how to do web development kind of on the fly to build these bitcoin sites you know i have an engineering background aerospace engineering so i was you know

doing space robotics and interesting you know sensors and stuff like that but never web tech and so i was you know pushing changes live to the site hacking it hacking it live testing in production you know like php backend real dirty uh you know really crazy javascript build systems so one day the site hits hacker news and it just gets pummeled and i'm just trying to you know i don't even know linux i'm on like windows but i'm like shelled into a linux server barely learning that is this zero block no this wasn't zero block this was kind of prior it was like let's say the crash from 77 or so it's kind of that that crash um but yeah you know just servers on fire i pushed i pushed some change that spikes the cpu and i get banned by my hosting provider and have to find

somebody else and shout out bit vps who hooked me up with a free vps back in the day i don't think they're still around but you know say thanks to your sponsors right uh yeah so those sort of war stories but then i never had the real i never had the real you know i threw away my laptop with my wallet on it or uh i had a you know a bunch of coins on an exchange i never really had that experience but i definitely got my popcorn bucket refilled by those experiences over the years and learned from others pain on the on that front yeah there's always enough popcorn to eat unexpected refill all the time um so one of the things i really like about your dashboard um and i think why other people

haven't really been able to compete with the level of substance and usefulness it has is because there is absolutely zero effort to monetize it um and that's usually where you see the friction you it's either ads which are annoying or it's like some kind of paywall so right now you have it completely as donation where i know you have a donation widget on your on your site linked on your site both on chain and lightning and a pain in my belief a samurai pain him uh do you want to tell us like how that experience is do you do you feel like you're not getting enough donations which is completely fine to admit because i assume you're not uh are you considering monetizing it in some way i i know it's kind of like a almost like a hobbyist

kind of thing right yeah the monetization i do have an ad module i don't know if you see it it's like right after the very first module there's a one line actually it says want to advertise here right now that's funny but it's just like a one line of text and this is my experiment like can i monetize one single line of text and it rotates out one of them is uh donate donate to the site you know um but yeah that's my experiment can i have an ultra tasteful ad uh but you know i don't server costs are so cheap it you know it's not it's not getting huge amounts of traffic that necessitates a big back end and so it's really efficient site to run it's like 10 bucks a month to run it you know it's it's just it's really my it's really my hobby right labor's covered

two and a half months for you i just i just sent a donation i've been i've been leeching off of it for too long thank you thank you uh let's plug the where's the donation oh it says donate on the bottom right hand yeah bitcoin.clarkmoody.com donate i also didn't notice that ad line that's that's i like that that's tasteful way of doing it it's it's the minimal amount the minimum viable ad i haven't had any hits on on people want to want to fill that line up with text and pay for it but you know we'll see um but yeah the monetization like i don't know i'm not doing charts right the ad the dashboard the dashboard is a moment in time and then the moment is gone like i'm not there's no time histories there's no spark lines there's

no charts i'm not building a charting website this is it it's it's a it's a it's a dashboard it's a view into the bitcoin ecosystem at this moment and then it's gone forever i don't want to i don't want to do any sort of data feed stuff where i've got contracts and uptime and oh i give you the inside track you delay it for the public site i don't want to do that stuff i don't know it's just just kind of a labor of love and like none of this stuff is none of this stuff is proprietary data either you know right i love that it's just like bitcoin in the moment and it's actually just as a tool really helped me gather context of where bitcoin is particularly for some reason i'm just like fascinated by uh the changes between difficulty adjustments like i love

knowing where we are between the last and the next difficulty adjustment how how quick blocks are coming in compared to the target in relation to the target and how hash rates changing on average between the adjustments. I think that really drives home like the nature of Bitcoin is just seeing that data visible in real time, knowing how many blocks away you are from the next retarget. I've been really careful to try to get my terminology correct as well, using the word subsidy and reward separately and correctly. And then kind of using this epoch, this epoch word uh you know reward epoch difficulty epoch um to kind of represent that that that period of blocks uh yeah it's i don't know it's it's interesting you know you gotta you've got

to name things naming things is one of the you know two or three hard things in computer science and so i have maybe 40 characters to label this this thing that i'm adding what do you label it so it's not confusing gets the point across and doesn't wrap you know doesn't wrap so that you mess up your layout that's that's kind of a challenge aesthetics are key you can't be wrapping on this layout one one line one line no wrap i love the aesthetics black all white green and red when things change either up or down um crushed it man thanks uh so what like outside of the site what what is exciting you now about bitcoin like what are you what are you paying attention to um do you think bitcoin has succeeded do you think it's success is

inevitable um are you a bitcoiner if you don't believe that you gotta believe no i'm excited about the i'm excited about the soft fork proposals i'm excited about uh the coin swap coin swap proposal i haven't i don't fully understand it but i am excited about confusing the, you know, casting doubt onto the UTXO ownership heuristics. Excited about, yeah, the soft forks. There's what, four or so, four kind of proposals right now. And they're all kind of cool. I did a teeny tiny bit of code review on core, you know, a couple months ago, which was an

interesting experience. um but mainly i'm working on the market data side uh at my day job so i'm working on the crypto watch product from from kraken and we're building a new desktop program so it'll be like market data on it like an actual desktop program that runs and it's not an electron it's not just an electron wrapper on a web page so i'm super excited about that building charts again for the first time in years um which is my original kind of gig and bitcoin so i'm really excited there so what's the uh target user for this for this product specifically traders or it's kind of yeah the trader target um if you want market like a bunch it's kind of that you can put one copy on

every one of your 10 monitors and have like 16 charts and every single one of them and your computer isn't brought to its knees kind of thing such as ultra efficient tons of data density it's like a bloomberg terminal yeah you're landing on the desktop with really high quality software so that's what i've been working on recently and i think it it hooks right into exchange accounts right like if you're a trader you can trade right through the right through the web app right now but i assume the desktop app trading trading not at launch but soon tm that's the goal obviously yeah yeah and that's a kraken that's a kraken asset now right crypto watch and that you know it's crypto watch is really like the very first kind of company that

i built yeah rt btc way back in the day it was like one interface plug in your api keys trade on any of your exchange accounts it's this you know it's it's like what i've been doing for since i i the day i got into bitcoin i drew a picture of that interface on a piece of paper and i said i'm going to build this and then like two years later i launched it and then it got acquired by blockchain you know so it's this is what i've been doing the whole time so you know it's kind of like back to my roots which is pretty cool well you're not a real bitcoiner if blockchain's ever acquired one of your companies so i've worked for blockchain i've worked for Bitcoin.com.

I've been all over. I've been all over. So what do you think is the most fascinating part about all this data? Again, like you mentioned that it's all open, particularly like the network data that you can pull for nodes. Is it just cool to look at? Or do you see it as something that provides actionable consequences for people? I think that doing the dashboard with a little bit of market stuff and a lot of chain stuff,

a lot of mining stuff, it just opens the door. Somebody who's first heard about Bitcoin may hit a couple of different sites, but if they make their way to the dashboard, then it's just like, boom, there's this whole huge thing with flashy lights and tons of stuff. I think kind of like cracks the book on how deep the rabbit hole is. And if you start to actually try to understand each item, eventually you'll get this really kind of holistic picture, you know, cause people say, oh, Bitcoin is slow or, oh, Bitcoin is expensive. Oh, Bitcoin is scarce. So what does that mean? Oh, Bitcoin is this and that. So I've got, you know, monetary inflation on here. And it's like 3.34% last year of monetary inflation. Fantastic. Okay. That's a

number that I can take and compare to, you know, US M2 that doubled this year with giant amounts of printing. Forward inflation. How does he know that? Et cetera, et cetera. Like economic indicators, fees. I don't have block size stuff on here yet. I should probably do that at some point. Fees. So I've got the fees three different ways. You know, right now we got some congestion because we have this market pump, but the average fee in dollars is $3.70 per transaction. Well, that sounds pretty high, but the next field is the average fee percentage. And it's 1.2 basis points on the output amount. Well, that's pretty cheap. And then 65 sats per byte. Okay. So kind of kind of puts it in context for your wallet you know that's so it's three it's fees three

different ways and you get the context are fees expensive or cheap i don't know if you send a hundred million dollars in one transaction and you paid three dollars seventy that's pretty cheap you know so it just gives context and like the rabbit hole is deep and you try to get some context on what this thing what this thing called bitcoin is doing you know This idea of like open data, I think like you really are onto something that it does trigger a rabbit hole kind of experience for especially traditional finance data types, right? Because if you've ever tried to build a site where you're looking up like historical stock prices or historical gold commodity prices, oil prices, it's ridiculously difficult to find good data sets on that stuff. and we kind of stumbled into it fortunately that all these exchanges followed the the gox model of these open apis right it's it's beautiful that that that exists but it's not enforced by the

protocol but the fact that you can pull all this chain data by just running a node is is absolutely crazy it's like mind-bending yeah and the other piece is anytime there's an official number out from some budget office or bureau or something there's always the number that launches on the on the date and it's like monthly or quarterly and then there's the revised number that comes out two weeks later after they got more survey data in and did seasonal corrections and blah blah blah we got it real time right here real time exact numbers on no hedonic adjustments no hedonic seasonal temporary workers blah blah blah no real time 100 accurate hopefully uh yeah utxo set size or any of that any of that

sort of stuff you can get it from a full node and it's accurate up to the second up to the latest block yeah and it really drives home the nature of bitcoin like complete truth like if you want to find complete truth about the network and the inner workings of the network you can do that it allows you to and this is a fundamental shift in the way people interact with these financial tools comparing it to the fed is like you just did is hilarious or it's it's a no-brainer once you understand the inner workings of the fed and how they try to project forward and then collect that data report it and then they have seasonal hedonic adjustments and then you figure uh the thing they're targeting for inflation particularly cpi is completely bastardized with the variables being

changed on the fly and when you compare that to bitcoin you just look at your dashboard and you can be like all right we know we're x amount of blocks in the next difficulty adjustment hash rate is around this area right now, because we don't know for certain what the exact hash rate is at any given point in time, how many fees miners are collecting, what fee level is getting accepted into a block. It's beautiful. And this is going to change the nature of how we humans interact with these financial tools. Yeah, that's, you know, that's the end of my, the very last couple paragraphs of my kind of 10 year retrospective on market data. I put in a little blurb about, you know, no matter, no matter the reason why people get in, there's this small set that goes down the rabbit hole and kind of understands the sound money side of things and the separation of money and state side of things. and that's the kind of remnant that's the building and and you know understands this

new world that we could have and then you start to understand why yeah let's dive into that the remnant the remnant it's a reference reference uh there's a mises.org has a piece on what was the story of job or isaiah isaiah yeah ron paul talked about the remnant you know that's like there's a small group that stayed true to the true to the cause you know um and it's this i tell to lab has the intolerant minority is it to lab yeah the intolerant minority i'd be aware you just need a very small percentage of the population to hold a belief unwaveringly and it'll eventually flip the whole the whole population so we're nowhere near that But we're building the core of that kind of group with people that say, if you can separate money and state, then you can cut to the heart of so many societal woes and so many things keeping us back as a species.

um yeah just like you know you look at corruption around the world and just the things that that governments are doing to hold back the economic prosperity of their populations and it's just criminal it's like there's there's billions of people that are that are being held back by self-interested local bureaucrat types you know taxed them three times a day. It's hard to start a business. There's no secure property rights. And then on top of that, the money's being managed as a personal piggy bank for the elites. And in certain places that leads to these hyperinflations regularly and destroys people's savings. You have no way to save up for the future and have long-term planning. So if you can't plan for the long-term,

you can't accumulate capital you can't increase productivity and you can't grow economically you have to be able to have this this ability to have secure property rights and be able to plan for the future thankfully we do have that in the us but the elites are still using the fed as their piggy bank so well that's actually maybe a good topic conversation we dive into right now like how long is that going to persist particularly in this climate where the fed's printing ungodly amounts of money the economy is forced to shut down and we're like it's never been this at least in my life i'm pretty sure i can say with some degree of confidence that most people's lives have never experienced anything as crazy as 2020

uh and like like you talked to mention hyperinflation other countries like is it here in the states like is it starting to creep in like looking at the price of precious metals the stock markets uh and considering the fact that tens of millions of people are out of work and they're just going to start air dropping money in people's bank accounts like like is are we close to the remnant being able the remnant bitcoiners being able to make a compelling case to to your average joe who's going to just be out in the street like what the is going on The money printer works until it doesn't, right? That is literally the thread that every central bank walks, is how much can we print while still maintaining confidence in the currency? All of them. That's their whole game. And so it's a confidence game, right? I mean, there's some pretty dystopian outcomes where if Bitcoin is seen as the enemy, you have this popular, you know, 6102 type situation where Bitcoin's your enemy.

Bitcoin's causing all the all the economic problems. So we need to confiscate Bitcoin from the Bitcoiners. Bitcoiners, depending on your culture, either send them to the gulag or execute them or just tax them a bunch, flog them in the square, break them on the wheel, whatever it is. There's that potential reality. Then there's the track where Bitcoin spreads fast enough that you have the intolerant minority, say 10% of the population says, yeah, I think Bitcoin is a solution to our problems and not the political process. In that case, you might have a flip where they're going to be super loud, they'll be

in the streets, they're going to be calling congressmen and all that. And you may try to be able to stave off kind of that ultimate democracy attack on Bitcoin, the ultimate 51% attack, right? So there's an optimistic, there's a dystopian and like a utopian kind of direction we could go here. this is this is i think part of the tension right there's this tension between hodl number go up and privacy and uh you need both right you need both damn right they're both they're both right i think there's a third path sort of revealing itself again throughout this crisis and the

fact that trump tweeted out yesterday like questioning whether or not they should delay the election yeah like so the third path is that like i i think it would be pretty hard for the government and the powers that be to convince people right now that bitcoin is the source of their problems it's simply just not big enough or popular enough yeah and so the third path would be like the government like just completely shitting the bed and getting into a chaotic situation before bitcoin even takes off which incites people to scramble for solutions and then the question flies under the radar while the system collapses yeah but the the way i see it is it would be there would be a broader wealth redistribution movement where like rich people

are targeted and as a subset of that movement if rich people are moving into bitcoin or bitcoiners are becoming increasingly rich people then there'll be an anti-bitcoin sentiment in terms of trying to redistribute that wealth but but it'll be part of like an overarching you know the bezos of the world or the problem rich if there's if there's a bitcoin pump like people are in the streets you know the cities are on fire uh don't have to look too far for that but it's like broad broad suffering instead of concentrated kind of protest if there's broad suffering and at the same time bitcoin is doing 20 a day for weeks and weeks and it's you know it's pumping and pumping and pumping that all of a sudden people are saying wait

these people are getting rich right now and look at me now the question is you know is the stock market also pumping at that time so we've seen this whole complete disconnection of the stock market probably right reality well that's you know that's why i was asking whether or not hyperinflation is starting to come here already and that might be the sign right because this is what happens in argentina and venezuela and other countries that have experienced hyperinflation, some other countries, their stock markets go crazy first. Our grocery cart is 50% more

expensive than it was at the beginning of the year. Really? Have you been tracking that? You just kind of have the rough number. We spend X per week on groceries. Well, it's X times 1.5 right now. That's massive inflation.

Clark has a private dashboard that's just his grocery cart. The internal household dashboard, real time. well like going back to like the cpi being manipulated yeah like the the index i like to look at is the chapwood index and if you look at that real inflation in the big cities top 10 largest cities on average like around 10 annually yeah which is pretty insane you compound that over years and years and that's the funny part is and i say this a lot in the newsletter like the the fed saying there's no inflation is basically pissing in your face and telling you it's raining

ironically it is raining right now so i'm sorry if there's rain drops in the background freaks we embrace irony here in the bitcoin space um it is like it's obvious that inflation is is pervasive society look at health care education real estate and if people just take what the fed and the government says at face value there is no inflation we actually need more the fed is coming out and saying we want to overshoot our inflation target now which is complete insanity to me but people know and can feel it and experience it in their everyday lives and again they just they just turn and and blame something else and hit the streets for something else i got massir's book this book will save you time got two copies and i've already given one to

a friend and he sent it you know he sent it back with with good good uh reviews super easy book to read and it it just tells you this whole when you when you waste someone's time you have taken something from them that has incalculable value like you never get your time back so if you're trading you're if you're trading the prime of your life working for a company in exchange for some some unit and then someone else makes that unit worth less value then they are literally taking the time that time of your life that you spent and they're taking it and they're throwing it away you know i don't really want to bring like i don't really want to dive into the schools thing

but if you have make work you know you have children and you say ah you need something to do for the next hour so do this that's pointless you're taking part of their childhood which is like a special part of your life that you never get back kind of double you know like take taking a child's childhood away from them is even worse but you know working working people you have the prime of your life you're dedicating to this stuff you're trying to save for later and then the government steals it from you through inflation um they're literally stealing away your life force that you that you dedicated to this thing that's why you need to sound money and and it and you know bitcoin standard goes into time preference and all about just shifting the way you think

about the world and that's that's the biggest thing that bitcoin can do for people i think is just shift the way you think about how you spend your time and what what you save your save your effort in no yeah no it's not even inflation where they steal your time it's taxing too like you said they tax you three times a day and you brought up education and schooling and that's like a huge debate going on right now with all these teachers unions protesting like we're not going back to teach with coronavirus and la teachers unions are attempting to have los angeles county enact socialist reforms uh or they won't go back and teach and uh that's driving a very interesting conversation which actually if you freaks haven't listened to it yet corey

deangelis was on this podcast arguing that if you don't open schools uh we are still paying taxes in the form of property taxes or income taxes that that go to these public schools the money should go directly to the parents to decide yeah it's too dangerous too dangerous to open the schools let's just shut them down and then refund everybody's property taxes and you know had a good run let's try something else it's too dangerous well that's not what they want to do they just want to keep taxing everybody. They want to keep the money. How are they going to print new bonds to build more school buildings for some reason? I don't know. Maybe they're reeducation camps now or something for those of us who aren't down with the program. Well, the reeducation camps have arrived

in Seattle, if you haven't noticed. Have you guys heard of that? Well, who's going to build them first are they going to be fema re-education camps or google re-education camps well they start it's funny because they're they're re-educating the adults first at least in seattle you have to go to and it's pretty crazy they've already got the children all the they're making all the quote-unquote white uh city workers like go to classes telling telling them how how bad they are and systemically racist they are and they have to like it is in the mandate by the city if they don't acknowledge certain things they are not allowed to continue working so that is in my mind definitely a re-education camp they are here but it isn't new

just the the scale is new right because we've seen like what like ethics all these different ethics courses and stuff you have to take right uh depending on your company or what government you're working yeah but it's usually just a like a webinar you click through and it's like all right you have to watch this you're not supposed to just i acknowledge my privilege check submit no i mean this is this is par for the course it's just kind of the first time it's really rearing its head in america you know you get mass slaughter of the uh in the wrong thinkers at various regular intervals throughout various countries so you know it's just coming here it's our turn

I don't want it to be our turn that's not good if it's our turn that's why we need the citadels man citadel theory I mean I think part of it is like we live in such a litigious society as well right at least on the private side

there's so much red tape that you have to deal with to cover your ass uh that just wastes all of our time you know specifically i'm thinking about like different ethics programs that like private companies have to do um that literally every single person who's there thinks it's a joke and is just doing the bare minimum including the administrators who are pushing the program because they have to cover their ass because they're afraid they're going to get hit by a class action lawsuit or just some lawsuit or something this is a problem

of the fed this is a problem like one of my favorite chart no well it's student loans right the the ability to get access to the free money to go get education one of my favorite charts to follow is the amount of lawyers that have been produced and the amount of laws that have been produced uh put those two lines next to each other and it's pretty obvious correlation that these people are getting uh money to go to school they're taking out loans that the government's backing. They're going to get their law degrees and then they're coming out and making life harder for everybody else. This is a direct consequence of easy money. So we have all these, we have the student loan program funneling money into academia. And then you have all these campus protests in the

past few years saying, I need my safe space. I need my, you know, whatever it is. And the response the universities is to create a new program office, right? To create more bureaucrats. And so you just have this building up of the university itself, which necessitates larger budgets, which makes the prices go up. The students are demanding a refund for like, hey, you gypped me out of my $100,000, $200,000 and I'm unemployable. I want my money back. No, No, no, no, it's, I want my loan forgiven. No, they're not mad at the university, but then the university the whole time

has been building up all these program offices and diversity offices and all these things that just leech off of the system. They're not teaching, they're just leeching. And it's all fueled by student loan, which is fueled by debt, just fueled by unsound money. There it is.

Yeah. Bitcoin fixes this. Bitcoin fixes this. Just drive it all back, drive it all back. you're not a real bitcoin or you don't believe bitcoin doesn't fix this but it it's almost hard to believe that it's that simple though all right the the root of the problem is the fact that we have easy money there's

nuance people don't want to believe it's that simple it's subtle it's and it's but it's that's because it's not that simple marty it is though like you can you can draw a direct line to this like access to student loans fueled by debt drives people to get these degrees the universities know they're gonna be able to get the money from the loans so they jack up the prices pay administration like we just described it's there is a course of action here yeah an order of operations if you will So are Bitcoiners going to be able to get the Citadels put together in time to stave off the democratic onslaught of the confiscation? The Citadels are already being built.

They're just not only being built by Bitcoiners right now. They're just being built by wealthy people all around the world. Are they going to let Bitcoiners in? I hope Kanye lets me in. I'm going to his Citadel. Well, I guess this is a good conversation to jump in. Number one, if there was a quasi-6102, executive order 6102 attempted against Bitcoiners, how successful or futile those efforts be? And then number two, as a defense, how will we construct these citadels and protect against this?

So this is where the privacy people get it right. one, you need Bitcoin that's not connected to your identity. Two, the cost of enforcement of that sort of thing, I haven't looked into it 100%, but I believe that the main confiscations in 6102 were at the banks, safe deposit boxes, things like that. I think I could be really wrong on this. I don't think they went door to door, right? So you could see major confiscations from centralized custodians well they had a big penalty if you if you didn't comply so i i assume they they did like some selective you're gonna make a few examples crack a few eggs yeah you know public executions whatever to scare the rest of the people into compliance but the cost of

enforcement of bitcoin confiscation is very very high you have to go get it right and they have to send it. It's push. You can't just grab the gold and stick it in your pocket and walk out. You have to say, either give me the thing that has the private keys and the password or send it to me. So the enforcement of that sort of action is much higher. The other piece, I don't know, someone made this point. If the government wants the Bitcoin so bad, like it's got to be pretty valuable i don't know it that's a validation of sorts that they want it i don't know if they're just going to liquidate it or if they actually want to use it um so they have to they have to also plan on hey if we if we try to confiscate this thing is the value just

going to go to zero on us in local terms and it's not going to be worth anything we're going to be wasting lots of effort putting lives at risk you know enforcement requires going to somebody's house which in america is a risky proposition right so i don't know there's a lot of there's a lot of interesting game theory around it and then i mean i think they would hold it because that's what they did with gold they they wanted it for themselves uh but and i think that it would probably be bullish on a macro sense i mean it would obviously suck for whichever government was doing it for those citizens um i would just add that like enforcement while it would be difficult to enforce on the specific seizing the bitcoin right because you

could throw someone in jail you can put all sorts of penalties on them it doesn't mean they're going to give you the private keys um and that becomes very difficult to do in a democratic society and in a relatively free society but what they could do is i mean i think a lot of bitcoiners have other assets besides bitcoin i mean you're not a real bitcoiner if you do but i think a lot of bitcoiners do so they could seize your house they could seize stocks seize money you have in a bank account you know according to how much bitcoin they think you have right they could seize different assets in bitcoin but what does that say about the will of the american spirit and the american ideals like at what point do people say what the fuck like this can't happen here like do you is

there a possibility that that happens or way too many people completely gone i think i think that we're seeing we're seeing a rift we're seeing a rift and and this is this is the precursor to civil war the only solution is going going separate ways i mean you think about it think about it people hate trump so much right they hate him so much we're going to have this election maybe and if trump gets re-elected is everyone going to say okay yeah you know that's the democratic process i accept the results of the election as legitimate or if trump loses are these people going to be like okay you know all you people who supported trump you're cool now he's gone we forgive you we love you now there's peace between our but you know

the political process has has created peace between us is that going to happen i think there's a small subset of people who would like to see the other side tortured and killed it's the way it is in every society it's just kind of rearing its head now you know so there there's no peace produced by the political process but voting is an important release valve on tension i just think the tension is too high that the election is not going to release the tension this time around what again after my conversation with whitney webb the other day and trump's tweet yesterday i would not be surprised if it doesn't happen so here's a headline from an article uh in reuters today exclusive republicans and democrats agree on one

thing uh doubt about fair election so like they're already like both sides already posturing like the results are going to be manipulated and they're not going to be you're not going to have any faith in the results of the election so like it is already being delegitimized before it even happens and this is where things get really weird and i mean that's the problem right because what clark just like i agree with clark that you know voting political a fair political process is a very effective release valve but the problem is is when both sides when most people do not think that the electoral process is fair anymore that they think it's corrupted then it's no longer a release valve then it's just like you know a trigger situation that just triggers that ends

up triggering one side when you when you mentioned something like secession or just separation you get called you know neo-confederate you just like slavery because you you know you want a peaceable solution to our problems you must be some sort of you know 1800s but i mean i think that's a framing thing right because if you told liberals that you could break off into your own you know that's why i think like citadel theory is more uh politically neutral right so it's it's you know it's both sides i think would prefer to be separated how about this how about this for a change hey wouldn't it be cool if you and your neighbors a few blocks around you shopped around and hired a police force to protect your neighborhood you just pooled your resources

and hired it for you know for my house five blocks that way five blocks that way and we decided what the police did rather than the police enforcing rules from washington on our neighborhood that we don't care about what's what's wrong with that right you know i mean hey wouldn't it be nice if the federal building wasn't down in downtown portland you don't have even have to kick them out you don't have to burn it down because it's not even there because washington doesn't matter in your daily life wouldn't that be nice that would be beautiful yeah i mean there are externalities though it's not that simple but yeah like my like the yeah if there ever is like a vacuum of power i believe before you get well i'm thinking like snow crash too right like snow

crash you would like drive through like 10 different like you're delivering pizza you drive through like 10 different police departments uh but local this is all it's localism it's localism we we have problems that we know about we have ways to we'd like those problems solved but when some other group through the political process or whatever imposes solutions on us that don't match our culture our experience then you have this giant tension and you have america tm tm and the bigger the government the easier it is to corrupt like local local government tends to uh you know people are held more accountable it's harder to fuck around in the grocery store yeah they don't have as much money to play with

yeah and then the federal government at some point just hits breakaway speed where it's gross at all costs consume as much power and attain as much power as possible which we've far surpassed some point long ago oh man is there going to be a civil war that's but that's the other like that there's always that nuclear option that sits in the like i did block digest with john seth uh he was part of the panel a few weeks ago and he brought up a really good point like like antifa and all these leftists extremists are going crazy right now and everybody's wondering like why uh civilians who who lean towards the right or more conservative don't react and he said because there's always this nuclear option in the back like they have all the guns and they

know they they want to use that as a last resort they don't want to use it at all but it is always there and so if like something like a civil war does break out like would it even last that long because when it's like all right push comes to shove we're doing this one side has most of the ammunition yeah you know if you saw if you saw the the looting and rioting head into the neighborhoods you're going to see a lot a lot a lot of conflict uh with armed residents and it's all going to be a live stream on twitter and i think that'll be a huge deterrent i got i i think i think that the the progressive force is to grab institutions of power to grab centralized institutions it's why they love the supreme court because you can jam something down everyone's

throats forever if you get five people to agree um that's why they want to control the center so you know yeah i think that's the main that's the main force behind it like taking it taking it like going to like commit violence against individuals i don't think that's what most of these people want to do and you're going to see a lot of pretty gristly live streams on twitter that starts going down and i don't think i don't think that's going to happen much i think it'll be a big kind of top down they want they want top down right oh you know now we're gonna we're gonna close all the churches or we're gonna do something else from the federal level and

and you're gonna have imposition from that direction a political officer a political officer in every police force soviet style so you've got like the police chief and the political officer you know the commissar or whatever and they've got a they got to both turn the turn the keys to launch the missiles or whatever hunt for october it's coming it's coming though again we've been warned about it a yuri bezmanov in the 80s said this it's going to happen slowly but surely over the course of a generation and it seems like it's happening right now and it's scary but here's so here's how here's where bitcoin comes in right you can

you can wash to shore on some other some other land of your little raft start naked right and if you've got 12 words in your head you have transported your value from the place you fled you know getting a getting you you can you can you can go away you can leave if you had to under the most extreme circumstance you could still transport your value with you and try to rebuild your life somewhere else um especially if your bitcoin like starts rocketing out of control and value compared to all your other assets then it's a lot easier to to exit um which we've never seen ever before in human history but where do you exit to like going back to yuri bezman off like he he warned like this is the last bastion like that you have to defend america like as after that

there's really nowhere to go where could men go in croatia yeah i don't know wyoming citadel fight them off yes so how do we make secession happen like peacefully like hey all right you guys up there you obviously want this have it just leave us the fuck alone please i don't know do you think do you think do you think that'll happen the word secession is 100 poison in everyone's mind through the government schools secession is 100 associated with slavery forever so you just have to use a different word like hey wouldn't it be nice states rights hey wouldn't it be nice if the federal government didn't impose its laws on you wouldn't that be nice wouldn't be nice if you know federal officers weren't throwing your people in

vans on the street that'd be cool why don't you just kick them out yeah i've uh i've had a change of tune with the federal officers in the last couple weeks if i if i have officers throwing me in a van i want them to be local uh no it's chaos out there man stay safe one stray rock flying through the air it hits you in the head it's over be careful guys but it's like all this is happening right now too and and generally like the progressives want to take over like the institutions federal institutions but everybody's losing faith in them like the like in the whole process like what happens you even if you do get control of it nobody like believes in it anymore like so is there well

this the so-called progressives aren't the only ones trying to take control over the major institutions everybody wants control right like the whole political establishment on both sides is trying to do that yes the that's a problem right there are centralized institutions to take control of that's the problem that's the problem so someone's going to try and it's just naturally incentivized for people to try and take control over them well there's another way too this is riffing on my conversation with jeff andrew most recent one like you have the political means of doing it and then the cultural means which is usually happens in the university system and there's no denying the fact that the university systems

become considerably more progressive and and in more like an indoctrination camp and has been co-opted to some degree. So you can attack it politically and then culturally as well. It's just something to keep into consideration. Human nature, man. It's the philosophy rabbit hole of the Bitcoin world. There's a lot of dark scenarios out there, but I don't know.

Hopefully we don't go down most of them. Hopefully we have some sort of peaceful resolution and all this stuff yeah what do you believe clark you're a god-fearing man like do you think humans are inherently evil inherently good what do you think i think i think we're fallen right like but i think that there's a large i think there's a large spectrum of internal beliefs you know everybody's got that kind of like you want to be vindictive but i don't think most people would say i want to see somebody tortured right but some people do you know so you have this big distribution of of the tolerance and then and then culture culture is kind of like where the

where the peak of the distribution is culture is like where the average acceptance of whatever it is you know like a pacifist would say i never condone violence ever for any reason and then some others are like violence is the only thing that solves problems you know starship troopers style right and then you have this big broad thing in the middle and that's you know i just don't like to see that window shifting i don't like to see the window shifting to where it's okay to say hey we need to send people to re-education camps you know don't get the chip don't get in the rail car right but in some ways it's gotten better right because like i mean i remember like post september 11th uh like us rah rah we had like 20 the show 24 was out and

it was just like he was torturing someone every episode you know like we literally had guantanamo where we were we were i mean i wouldn't even i don't even think they were re-education camps right they were just torture facilities i mean yeah like i think that that morality should come from an external standard like in my case the bible um fearing god i don't think morality can come from top down like human you know political institutions it's because that's a shifting that's a shifting target right so you've got to find it outside of these systems and you know some of the conservative writers are making the point that like the institutions of local like local institutions have been declining in importance and centralized institutions have been increasing in importance

and so that's where people are finding meaning and the finding their tribe is in like a ever more centralized way instead of like the local bowling club it's my membership in a political national political movement and that creates an increasing polarization you know so the The climate of the church is part of that. You know, stuff like that. Social media. I don't know about social media. It is a force that does centralize the conversation, in quotes.

Yeah, there's a center. Because you could post the same hashtag as someone who lives in Illinois. Yeah, there's a feedback loop that amplifies certain messages that you never would have heard prior. you know so yeah it could be a force for good black square thing go ahead i was gonna say like the black square phenomenon instagram that went on after the like you just have people who never thought about this stuff just posting and and going along with the herd and again it was a virtue signal like hey i believe in this

And as we talked about a lot, like the state is replacing God and the state is replacing the father in a lot of cases, too. And these cornerstone institutions of Western society, the nuclear family and God believing in the golden rule and the messages that Jesus and other religious leaders spread throughout the world. and it's being replaced with the state and i don't i don't like that trend personally i mean if you go back i don't i don't know if they still teach this but just like everything you learned on the playground in elementary school right like don't you know don't take people's stuff if they're already playing with it like treat others like you want to be treated the basics of human decency you just i don't know if there's just wistful thinking i don't even know if they teach that stuff anymore maybe it's now like if you have any problem run to an authority figure

you know rather than like uh try to solve your own problems but don't solve them with violence kind of thing i don't know let's end it on a hopeful note here speaking of children i have to go take care of mine in about 10 minutes here um where uh let's end on a hopeful note like yeah let's let's provide an optimistic route forward with bitcoin being integral in that i think because i do believe maybe it's just being in the bitcoin echo chamber or uh um sort of confirmation bias but i do believe there is a pull and a strong pull towards personal responsibility like and extreme ownership that's happening um whether it be the people listen to joe rogan they want to go hunting more and work out more or bitcoiners who want to take control

their financial sovereignty and develop a low time preference um i do think more people are starting to wake up to these ideas and get reacquainted with with the idea of hard work and personal sovereignty and individual responsibility for for your success or failures in life yeah i think low time preference builds civilization if you consume 100 of what you make instantly you never accumulate capital you never advance economically there's no growth of productivity which is like the only way to grow a prosperous society so yeah you know western civ the cornerstone of like private property accumulation of capital um and then you know fair institutions of justice that you can you can just you can settle a contract in court

without the judge being partial to one side or the other because of your race or creed. Those are the cornerstones of Western civilization, basically. And as far as the economics go, I do agree that, yeah, the interference of the state has really jeopardized the family, which is the cornerstone of the society itself. so i think that yeah lower you know lower your time preference if you can plan for the future

and take more responsibility for your own life that does everyone that does everyone good if you if you think hey you know i could i could save up for my future or i could you know put a gallon of sugar in my body or whatever it is if you think if you think twice about that then that tips this kind of broad scale broad-based cultural behavior and this and this kind of tips everyone a little bit more toward you know lowering the time preference thinking about the future and i think that that has uh you know immeasurable immeasurable upside for the future if you're not if you're not so now oriented and if you think a little bit a little bit past you know the here now man i need some optimism from you brother you know i think we got this thing i think uh

i think it's easy to be scared and and worried um but there's been a ton of progress uh well you know there's been a ton of of of backwardization but there's been a ton of progress over my lifetime. I think that trend is going to continue. I'm thankful that we have Bitcoin. And I think part of my optimism is because I surround myself with Bitcoiners who tend to have low time preference and I think are prioritizing the right things. But I think it goes beyond Bitcoin that gives me optimism, just like the whole free open source software movement in general, and using these technologies as basically defensive technologies to empower individuals. And as we empower individuals, then we naturally and peacefully move away from these central points of control.

And I think it's inevitable. The question is, how bad does it get in the in-between? And that's really what it comes down for me. But as far as on the longer term, I am insanely optimistic. I am as well. here's hoping we uh weather this this turbulent storm uh that seems to be upon us right now both literally and figuratively i'm recording this in a storm clark thank you for what you do do you have any parting notes or uh any information you want to

share with the freaks out there where we can find more about you help you out in any way follow me on twitter at clark moody to the moon yeah best uh one of my favorite uh bios on twitter i love jesus i pay in bitcoin that's uh short and to the point well clark think um go ahead i just want to i want to show his donate link one more time that's bitcoin.clarkmoody.com slash donate and uh clark you should do a pull request and get that up on bitcoin dev list.com as well yeah well gentlemen i hope you both enjoy the rest of your afternoon thank you for what you do clark your dashboard again my favorite bookmark i think it is actually very beneficial to bitcoiners out there to help develop a context for the the gravity of bitcoin

so thank you for producing that and we are happy to shill it on every episode of Rabbit Hole Recap so hopefully it brings some more users to your site thanks alright that's all we got this week freaks

peace and love