TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #195: Stephan Kinsella

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Stephan Kinsella to discuss: - State's rights - The Lockdowns - The Constitution - The Government v. The State - Bitcoin didn't ask for permission - Are leftists insane? - Should you vote? - Smart contracts - much more Follow Stephan on Twitter Check out stephankinsella.com 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.

Sup freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. Very interesting conversation, wide-ranging. Didn't go where I was expecting it to go, but I am happy where it went. I sat down with Stefan Kinsella, a patent lawyer who has very strong views about libertarianism, the state, the government, the state of the U.S., and we had a fascinating conversation. that's all i'll say you guys will hear it after this ad what is the ad what are we advertising here huh son we're advertising the cash app do you freaks know about the cash app yet have you heard about it have you ever listened to this podcast if you have and you haven't downloaded

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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. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's Marty Bent here on an overcast day, very excited for this conversation, sitting across

from Stephan Kinsella, a prolific libertarian, he's written some very good papers on libertarian thought, particularly around private property rights, IP, he's a patent lawyer, and we're going to get into a bunch of stuff today. Stephan, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. I'm actually flying tomorrow for the first time in nine months maybe I'm a little bit trepidatious but a little bit you know glad to get out of the uh sort of uh the uh the hamster wheel you know that we've been on for six nine months now where uh where are you flying to if you don't want me

asking oh I'm going to Nashville for a oh when are you going to publish this thing this is a secret uh not till next week okay fine yeah i'm going for a surprise birthday party for a for an old friend in tennessee it's a good friend getting on a flight for a birthday party yeah well uh you know excuse to get out of town yeah well it's actually probably a good segue into the conversation is the you mentioned the hamster wheel the lockdowns that we've been Yeah. Subjected to for the last, geez, we're going on six months now, seven months almost at this point. Yeah. Our guest groundhog day might be my, my, my wife calls it groundhog day,

you know, reliving the same day over and over and over again. Um, that may be a better metaphor, but yeah. Yeah. So I was mentioning, I was reading, uh, a piece that you co-wrote on, uh, Mises.org, the voluntarist constitution and basically attempts to establish a, a new constitution with private property rights and uh agency over one's body right so i guess how would you how do you view the lockdowns and everything that's happened from a from a libertarian perspective oh that's an interesting question um i'm actually not that opinionated

about the from a political point of view i'm not that i don't have a lot of opinions about it I think that some of what the states have done you could argue is unconstitutional, but that to me, lots of things that are immoral and ought to be illegal are constitutional. So to me, that's not a big deal. My personal view is that we should have just treated it like any other thing, like the flu. And, you know, but that's just my personal opinion. I'm not that opinionated about it. I do think that the damage done to the economy alone and regular life and even the political repercussions are going to be far worse than the damage that would have been caused by a virus sweeping through humanity, Which happens from time to time. I mean the reason that we're alive is because of evolution, because humans have survived different illnesses and plagues over the years, and the people that survive pass their hardy genes on and so on and so forth. So to my mind, there's a culling every now and then because of nature. It's sort of like the wildfire situation. If you don't ever let a wildfire burn, then eventually you're going to have a big conflagration because there's tons of underbrush left because you haven't let it burn. So I tend to think just we should have let it happen no matter what, even if it was millions of deaths.

I think that it's inevitable anyway, and the only – there's no way the government can do – can respond to it properly because the government is evil and inefficient. one or the other or a combination. So I guess I am opinionated. I'm against what the government's done. I'm against the lockdown. I'm against everything about it. I'm not really a denier of COVID. I think it's real, maybe. I don't even know. I think so. I don't know when they say people die of COVID. That's the same as dying with it, that kind of thing. But the point is, It's a disease. It's a virus that's spreading across humanity and like thousands of others, so I don't really see why this is special. But however, personally, I've enjoyed it because even though it's a hamster wheel or the Groundhog Day repeating scenario, we've stayed at home. we're cooking and living fine um so i just think it's sad that so many people's lives have been

disrupted kids going to college right now for the first time kids graduated from college with no jobs kids going to high school like are going to 12th grade like my son the world is a maelstrom right now and it's sad for them and sad for the people that have lost their businesses and And people that love to do things like travel and entertain and eat out and go to football games, I think it's sad that they've lost that. Personally, I would just open it all up. I wouldn't even require masks. I think the whole thing is a fraud. Not a fraud, but it's just not worth the effort. you know the damage is worse than the you know the the cure is worse than the disease that's sort of my opinion but i will admit that i'm not an expert but that's just you asked me so that's my opinion what's your take i sort of co-sign all that i think it's way overblown yeah videos of

people not wearing masks outside getting arrested by police officers that aren't properly wearing mask infuriates me to a degree i actually wrote a i write a daily newsletter focused on bitcoin macroeconomics philosophy yesterday i wrote about a uh a video of a small business owner in new york city talking about the negative externalities uh apparently a lot of the small business owners aren't able to renegotiate their their rents due to the fact that uh that the owners of the buildings don't even control it but the people that own the commercial real estate mortgage-backed securities uh dictate that rent has to stay elevated and it's just going to create a uh a tailspin doom loop that that drives businesses out of the city which further drives citizens out of

the city jobs out of the city i completely agree the the knock-on effects of the shutdowns are going to be far worse than the virus ever would have been uh and i guess you're alluding to government incompetence there just blatantly obvious that these people don't think about externalities and they're trying to micromanage a complex system which is impossible at the end of the day well not just that they've uh it's given the government the excuse to uh you know To basically spend or print trillions, like at least seven or something plus now, I understand, dollars of extra spending. So that means that like all – when the next government comes into power, next administration, even after COVID, so the federal deficit is no longer – we're talking a US perspective of course, which I hate to do. But say from the US point of view, the federal debt is just going to melt and melt and melt, and so we're eventually – it's eventually going to have a collapse.

I mean Bitcoiners and anarchists and libertarians sometimes pine for this scenario like, okay, fine. Let's hasten the end of the dollar and get Bitcoin in its place. So, I'm not that, I'm not that, I don't want the Mad Max world, I don't want to go through the Mad Max world to get to Bitcoin paradise. I'd rather have a soft landing, but I don't know how that's possible. But, yeah. I agree. No, there's definitely that accelerationist vibe for some Bitcoiners. Sometimes, I'm not going to lie, sometimes I have that feeling too.

Like it's so infuriating, the level of institutional incompetence that it's like, all right, just get this system, let it fall and rebuild. But I agree. I think that would lead to a quasi-Mad Max scenario that actually would probably do more detriment in the long run as much as I want Bitcoin to come into the world as a monetary standard. I think it is better to do so as a soft landing, which I think actually some developments over the last couple of months are hinting that that may be possible, particularly the adoption of Bitcoin on corporate balance sheets as a treasury asset is a way to sort of slowly move in that direction. Perhaps, yeah, perhaps. I mean we've never seen this – as far as I know, we've never seen this happen before. I've read some theories by people like Pierre Rochard, one of my friends, about hyper-Bitcoinization or something. And I can see that maybe, but it's unpredictable, and the timeframe is unpredictable. So, yeah, I'm a Bitcoin enthusiast and amateur, you know, aficionado, but I can't pretend to know what's going to happen.

I'm just a hodler for now. yeah you know and if anything it's mostly outside of not that bitcoin has control over anything it's a apolitical dumb software but um bitcoin won't be a driver of the change i think government incompetence central bank incompetence will be driving the change and um as somebody who's thought a lot about libertarianism uh the inefficiency of government the evil evil uh evilness of government like that's one question i have for you is like is since the constitution was signed and implemented here in the united states hundreds of years ago is there just a natural entropy that exists with these um constitutions that the state of

having a government trying to micromanage everything at some point in the future is just inevitable because once you sign that paper you get that bill of rights you just have a natural entropy of those freedoms that is going to play out from that moment on yeah and so here's how i look at it um this is the thing people think of americans now that are kind of you know even … libertarians and freedom-loving and patriotic Americans who are decent people, they think of the Constitution as basically like you said the Bill of Rights, which is not the Constitution by the way. So the Constitution – they conceive of the Constitution as a guarantee or a guarantor of their sort of English liberties, their common law, their natural rights, this kind of stuff. But if you think about just the word constitution, that means to make up something. So the whole purpose of the constitution was you had these 13 English colonies. They had all inherited the English common law system, which recognized basic natural rights of free men to a certain degree.

And they got together, and they basically had a treaty or what's called a compact together in the beginning, like at the time of the Revolutionary War in 1776 to form the Congress and the United States. But it just meant the states – they said we're not colonies anymore. We're states, so we're 13 states, so we're 13 independent, sovereign states on the world stage under international law. And we're going to get together and have a treaty or a compact together and be united for this cause. And so the United States of America was born, and then it was reborn in 1789 when the new constitution was ratified. But the constitution means to constitute, to make up. It basically created a new government called the United States federal government, which had extremely limited powers theoretically by this thing. So the purpose of the constitution was not to protect our rights. It was to create a new government, but then – and for certain purposes. Like they thought we need to have a unified government to represent us in international relations and for defense purposes, but we're worried that we'll give up our powers and that this thing will become tyrannical, so we're going to limit it. So like the Bill of Rights is simply – you can think of that as like a safety measure put onto this creation of this new government.

Now, you'll hear libertarians and republicans and conservatives say something kind of silly like, well, we're not a democracy. We're a republic, this kind of redneck bullshit. Now, that's complete bullshit because we are a democracy because we elect our leaders by a vote. So don't fool yourself. We're in a goddamn democracy now. It is a somewhat limited democracy I guess because of the electoral college and the Bill of Rights and things like that, but we're a democracy of course. And so I would refer to the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his book Democracy, the God That Failed, the economic logic behind… And the economic logic is not just Austrian, Rothbardian, Hoppian, radical stuff. Even if you go to the public choice theorists like James Buchanan, they explain why once you have a state like we have now, especially a democratic state, which we have now and which we've had for quite a while, it's inevitable that it will spin out of control and do what's happened. So I do think that it's inevitable because – if you just take one simple example, special interest groups have an increased incentive to lobby for measures that give them an advantage even if it's at the expense of the general welfare. And the general people don't have much of an incentive because each one pays $0.10, so they don't get together to fight it.

And so over time, the special interest-favoring policies rise up like intellectual property or war or whatever or inflation from the Federal Reserve. And the people don't fight it hard enough to stop it. And so then we get to a point where the government is so powerful, and they're in charge of such a powerful free market economy that – so you have this government that is like a parasitical – it's a parasite living off of the wealth of the underlying quasi-free market host. So you had this American government, which is a young government, small and frail in international affairs, but then it finally rose to the fore because our country grew and expanded, burgeoned continent and all that. And we still had this remnant of British or English property rights and common law and natural rights ideas, which allowed us to have a free market and prosper. And so the economy grew and grew. The population grew and grew, but the government is sucking off of this. So at this point, we have the most powerful government in the history of the universe probably, or at least our solar system. China is closing in, but only because they have four times as many people. But so our GDP per person plus our size plus the circumstances of World War I and World War II and the 20th century led to the US hegemony.

And so, of course, they exerted it with monetary hegemony with the Federal Reserve, Bretton Woods system, all that kind of stuff. So to me, you can see this. I mean we're living in this right now, but if you could step back and imagine 1,000, 10,000 years from now, this is going to be an episode, and we're going to remember, like, oh, that's how these things go. Like we look now at the fall of the Roman Republic. You know what I mean? So I think that the logic of democracy always leads to ruin and decline. My personal hope is that the underlying engine of the free market, which they've hobbled but haven't killed yet, can somehow outpace the growth of the state, but I don't know. So I'm hoping that in the race against time in the next thousand years, 500 years, whatever it's going to be, that the underlying free side of the human spirit can win out over the natural special interest, tyrannical, domineering side. But the history of humanity doesn't give me hope. No empire has lasted for very long. I mean some have lasted more than 300 years, so the US empire about the last 100 – let's say the last 70 years, or if you include the British in that, the last several hundred years, maybe they can go longer, but I'm not sure. At this point, you have to convince the political class, the elite class to get out of the way, which doesn't seem likely.

No, I don't think you can convince anyone. This is my problem with libertarian activism is that they think that you can just make an argument and persuade enough people, blah, blah, blah. But I think public choice economics shows that even if you're libertarian-minded, if you can lobby your local councilman to get this done, or if you can get – I mean how many libertarians are taking these COVID paychecks right now, for example? A lot. Plenty. Yeah, so everyone's going to do what they're going to do in response to actual incentives in front of them. yeah so then that begs the question you don't change or the proposition maybe we don't change this system from within via the political avenues that currently exist but we create a system outside of it well it makes it obsolete well it draws me to bitcoin personally well i and i agree

with that i think that well um i don't know if we can create anything but i think that things So like Uber is a good example. Uber didn't have permission. It's like my wife used to say. It's better to ask forgiveness than permission. That's what Uber did. So Uber – if someone had proposed, hey, let's have this kind of decentralized ride-hailing thing, and it will totally eventually gut the taxicab monopolies and blah, blah, blah. It would never have gotten permission because the entrenched interests of the taxicab companies, etc. would have stopped it. But instead of doing that, they just went ahead and did it. And by the time the state's slow, inefficient, stupid head rose to recognize this, it was popular with so many people that it was too late to stop it really. and I'm hoping that that's Bitcoin's situation too, to be honest. Yeah, I think 11 years in it may be at that point where a slow reaction from the state is too slow.

And I must note, I get a real kick out of your genuine disdain for the government. Seems like a visceral... You know, I became an anarchist long ago, although if you ask me to, I would distinguish the government from the state, But when I say government, I mean it like most people mean it. I'm talking about the state. To me, the government means the institutions of law and order, and government could exist in a private society just like roads and education could exist in a private society. But the government has monopolized – I mean the state has monopolized the functions of government just like the state has monopolized communications and transportation and other things and banking and money. So all these things are private institutions that can exist. So to me, theoretically, government is not a bad thing. Government just means the institutions in society that help us resolve disputes and keep law and order, and that could be totally private and non-state-based. So the state is my main target, although I use the word government interchangeably sometimes like most people do to avoid having to explain it every time like I just did.

That's an important distinction to make. But it is – it seems like people are – the approval rating of this government, which has been co-opted by the state, is at an all-time low. it seems like people want change and in my opinion people are completely misdirecting their their ire and aren't able to actually identify the true problems uh these are the riots happening across america right now are being sponsored by uh the political class and the corporations uh which there's so there's this palpable anger and just uh people can tell something's wrong, but across the country, at least in my observations, people are completely misdiagnosing the problem.

I think that's basically right. I think that part of the problem, not to copy from Dave Smith, but part of the problem is that half of the things that are being complained about by the rioters and looters and the protesters are actually legitimate problems to complain about. I mean if someone says Black Lives Matter, and they get pissed off if you say, I believe Black Lives Matter, but I think all Black Lives Matter to make an abortion point, for example. Or if you say, I believe Black Lives Matter, but I think all lives matter. So just take what they're saying. They're saying Black Lives Matter. The core of that message is that, well, there are black people in the US, and their lives matter, and they're being harmed by some systematic or systemic result of our system, which I think is actually true. They just – they misdiagnosed the cause. So yeah, it's the drug war. It's the welfare system. It's the legacies of slavery. So if you really want to identify a problem, identify a victimized class, I don't think they're special. There's lots of victimized classes in the country, poor white people, whoever.

I mean you could – I mean white – young, white, rich males are – I mean my son, he can't get into a nice college now because of affirmative action. So everyone is victimized by different things. So yeah, sure, Black Lives Matter. I agree. But what's the solution? The solution is stop supporting the systems that gave rise to this systematic difference in the first place. So let's end the Federal Reserve. Let's have free market money. Let's stop the wars. Let's stop the business cycle caused by the Federal Reserve, which causes unemployment. Let's stop having governments spend so much and have deficits. Stop war. Stop intellectual property. Stop minimum wage laws. Stop the welfare system and end affirmative action. So if you do all those things, then eventually the races or the different groups would rise to the level that they're naturally going to be at. And then in such an egalitarian, just society, if one group of people is doing 10% worse than the other, you know what? Okay, maybe you can attribute that to history, but basically that's just the way it is.

Some people make less money than others. Some people do different life paths than others. So that's the goal we should do. We should try to identify the source of the problem and eliminate that, but that's not what these lefties want to do. Look, I'm a libertarian, so I'm deeply skeptical of the right and the left, but I'm way, way, way more skeptical and fearful of the left than the right. I would side with the conservatives, the true conservatives of the right any day over these lefties because the lefties are egalitarians, and they deny nature I think. And they want to use violence and force to impose their vision on society. Whereas the conservatives sort of want to – they recognize that there are natural hierarchies in society. And to my mind, if you're an anarchist or a libertarian like I am, if you take away the structures imposed by the state, then other hierarchies will have to fall into place to regulate behavior and to regulate social interactions. that can only be natural

natural interrelationships but that drives the lefties bonkers because it veers from their egalitarian view of this world of the world their crazy utopian vision of an egalitarian

world yeah especially when you you dive into their solutions too which a lot of this movement that is in the streets rioting across the country truly wants to bring socialism to america i mean democratic socialism is becoming more popular amongst the the democrats in our political system and that's a scary thought especially when the goals are this egalitarian

utopian utopia excuse me uh but the results of a successful implementation of what they want would lead to inequality and suffering that they would make what they perceive to be suffering today look very rosy well that's the thing so among lefties you have the stupid ones and you have the evil ones and i think i mean to be simple about it the stupid ones they still think that You can have the government come in, even though the government is run by Donald Trump now, so they favor government or the state or the democratic system or the US constitutional system. But that's resulted quite legally in Trump running the thing, and they hate it. So they're sort of schizophrenic to be honest. So they seem to want some solution that's centralized to some degree, like minimum wage, have the government fund education to a higher degree, whatever. And they keep ignoring the blowback basically from these stupid policies, which is – I mean Charles Murray, his book in the 80s, Losing Ground, was a blockbuster, which is why he's hated now.

He showed that all these policies, all these do-gooders tried to push for 20, 30 years in the 60s, 70s, 80s backfired and decimated the black community and the welfare population and the poor people. And then you have the people that I think they actually know better, or put it this way, they don't care. These are the higher-level intellects that they have something else as their goal, socialism, egalitarianism. They would rather – the original commies in the Soviet Union until the egalitarian revolution of the 70s or whatever, they used to say that they were going to outspend – they were going to outproduce the US and capitalism. So like they were saying that communist socialist system would make them rich beyond belief, so they were basically admitting that the goal is material well-being and prosperity for everyone. They just thought that the way to do it was a centralized economy. But when that became obvious that they were poor and we were racing ahead of them, they changed the message to egalitarianism. And so now it's not about beating us in material terms. It's about saying material things don't matter. The real thing that matters is equality.

It's like the Rush song, the trees. Rush is one of my favorite groups. Like the tall trees have to be cut down to make everyone equal even though it hurts everyone else, but at least they're all equal now. So I really personally despise the left and anyone with a leftist mentality because they really are anti-human. They don't want prosperity. They would prefer that two people be equally poor than that one person be twice as rich and the other one ten times as rich. This is their – if you gave them that star choice, that's what they would prefer. And to me, that's totally, totally evil. You can see my Randian early influences here and that sort of hatred of the left. I can't stand the left. I can't be friends with anyone who's really a lefty. I can talk to them sometimes if they're an anarchist libertarian lefty. Those are the only ones who you can really get a little sense out of, but everyone else, all of the lefties are insane, man, I think.

Yeah. I'm spouting off here, but you asked me. No, I know. I mean, I think what's happening in the streets right now is making that glaringly obvious. And they want all this in the face of data of a quasi-free market capitalist system for the last 100 years in America, at least. I would argue it's gotten away from that, particularly in the last 40 years. But all the data, when you look at quality of life, GDP per capita, the amount of time people are living on this planet, the fallen infant death rates, everything's gotten better under the system, yet they want to completely flip the table, which is scary. It's scary because it seems like it's gaining traction right now. Maybe it's just the media megaphoning a small minority.

Because I think November will be very interesting to see if there is that silent majority that's fed up of everything that's going on right now and voices that at the polls. I agree. I agree. November will be interesting to see what happens. I've been predicting for over a year now that Trump will lose just because of demographic trends and because he's hated so much now. And because the left is as clueless as they are in their little bubbles, they have a dim awareness that – they can't understand why, but they have a dim awareness that Trump can win. They didn't think he could win in 2016 obviously, and they had a horrible candidate running against them, which I think they have another horrible candidate running now. Although I don't think Biden is hated as much as everyone knows he's basically non-accomplice Memphis, but I don't think the lefties care. So I think the left has been slightly awakened to the real threat that Trump actually could win again, and that combined with their increased demographics. Like every year, the country becomes browner and more democratic because of the demographics.

I've always thought Trump's chance of winning again was very low. However, and I still think that, by the way. I still think Biden probably will win, or I would say Kamala Harris will win because she's going to be the next president, let's face it, soon after Biden wins. But it's possible that my predictions could be wrong because – probably because of COVID. Like COVID is changing this whole electoral thing. Who knows who it's going to affect coming out to vote? Because it seems like no doubt that the lines will be longer, if nothing else, because of safety measures, etc. So who's got the higher – the lower time preference to wait in line longer to vote, Trump voters or Democrat voters? I think we all know the answer, which is why the Democrats are going crazy about mail-in voting. So we could have the lowest turnout ever in a presidential election, and that could be what saves Trump from an inevitable defeat.

But I don't know. I'm not an expert on this stuff. It's just my opinion. Do you vote personally if you don't mind me asking? I've gone back and forth because I'm an anarchist and blah, blah, blah, but I have a wife, and last time I wasn't going to vote, but my wife insisted that we vote, that I vote. So I voted, but I voted for Gary Johnson reluctantly, the libertarian. I haven't voted Republican since Ronald Reagan, but this time, honestly, I'm torn. I mean I don't think voting matters to be honest, but I've got to do it because of my family situation. So in November, I'm going to vote early, and I will vote because – to keep peace in the family. So I'm not sure if it's going to be Joe Jorgensen or Donald Trump at this point. I can't imagine voting for Donald Trump, but I can't imagine not hoping he wins to be honest. I mean even though he's loathsome and horrible, but compared to the Democrats, they're just like locust hordes, man. They're just so horrible.

If nothing else, the Supreme Court to me shows that whatever Trump did, I don't think Hillary would have done any better on anything, probably done worse on two or three things. But at least Trump got some Supreme Court justices and federal court judges that are probably a level above what the Democrats would have nominated. Now, these are all legal positivists and state sycophants and power worshippers, all of them. None of these guys are that to be revered. But still, I know who I would put on the court. It would be the Trump people versus the Biden people. There's no choice. There's no – it's an easy choice. The Biden people are just – the Democrats, they're just total – I mean this whole Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I mean Tom Woods had a good podcast with Kevin Goodsman the other day. People – they praise her for having fought for her values or whatever.

That's not the point of being a judge. To be a judge, you're supposed to decide cases neutrally. The whole – you're not a legislator. You're supposed to do justice, interpret the law fairly or objectively. You're not there to impose your own vision of what you're fighting for. But everyone thinks that now, which is why the whole – I mean the whole Supreme Court thing is screwed up because the reason Trump is winning despite his faux pas, I believe, and his horrible character from the point of view of an evangelical or a Christian… … multiple marriages and cheating and sleazy is because they basically care about abortion in Roe versus Wade. This whole thing is about abortion really, which is not my concern really. I really could care less, but I think that I would prefer an originalist on the court to an activist like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So – but the reason Trump is getting support from people that are not his natural constituency is because they sense that he will appoint people that are more likely to be pro-life and anti-Roe versus Wade than Biden's appointees would be, I think. It's all about abortion, which is crazy. this will be a non-issue

in you know 50 years when we have robot surgeons in our basements who can do whatever we want I mean this will be a non-issue this is a temporary phase of human evolution I believe yeah I mean we were born in this weird inflection point where the internet comes and just

throws a wrench in everything and I think I think you well tangentially but you hinted at something that is really destructive today is that all of our institutions have turned into virtue signalers whether it be a supreme court and we have woke capitalism now where you have corporations signaling their virtue and uh which is really an affront to the concept of natural law and the the sovereignty of the

individual trying to force uh what you perceive as virtuous on on the individual uh really trying to force it these days like literally uh critical race theory making its way into government institutions before trump's executive orders a couple weeks ago but it's a weird state that we find ourselves in politically and like do you do you have hope that we'll get back to a system that respects the individual at any Well, I think that we've – I kind of agree with the optimist guys like Pinker and who's the other guy? The guys that say things are getting better, Matt Ridley, I think things are getting better over time generally. If we can avoid nuclear war or biological war or some kind of civil war or fascism, I think things will keep getting better.

I'm afraid that if Biden wins, then they will – they're going to impose all kinds of crazy things, the Green New Deal, climate change legislation, universal free public university education, and increased taxes of course. And that's going to cause massive, massive, massive, massive problems, and they won't do anything good to counterbalance it. Like I don't think – maybe they'll legalize drugs eventually because they have to, but there's no – so I'm really worried that if the Democrats win. But maybe – honestly, my life, my modern adult professional life, I've lived 16 years under Clinton and Obama, and it was fine. I did better every year. Yeah, the taxes were a little bit higher. George Bush for eight years lowered them. Donald Trump has temporarily lowered them. So far, all these candidates and all these administrations seem to be roughly the same. They – which – so my only hope is that if Biden wins, he won't be controlled by an insane leftist cabal, but he will be controlled by the same deep state background forces that keep all these people sort of even keel. Like I picture the president, whoever he is, as the captain of a big, big, big ship that has tons of inertia, and they can only turn the wheel a little bit at a time.

So if that's true, then maybe when Harris, Biden get into office, they can only do incremental damage, and then that will give the free market time to keep growing and eventually we'll outgrow the state if we're allowed to. If we don't – if they don't snuff us out with some kind of grey goo disease or nuclear war or something, we can survive. I mean we've almost had nuclear war several times between the US and the – us and the Russians and the Soviets. I mean just by accident did we survive. So we're on a hair trigger, and the more countries that get nukes, I don't know if it's better or worse. I think it's worse, but it could be better because imagine if every country had nukes. Then everyone would leave each other the fuck alone, maybe. But then on the other hand, if all 200 countries have nukes or a lot of them have nukes, the likelihood of some Muslim terrorist getting one someday from some corrupt politician somewhere… And dropping it on New York or DC increases, and that's going to cause world war. So that's my main fear to be honest, but I could be crazy. So if we can last another couple hundred years, I think eventually the free market with Bitcoin and solid money and everyone having their own personal 3D machinery and defense guards and nanoswarms and all this kind of stuff will make the state more and more irrelevant.

It will just fade into a relic of what it used to be. It will be like the queen in England. She's just like a figurehead who has no power. No real power, which we keep around like a museum piece. So that's my hope for humanity, that in the next few hundred years, we dovetail into this future. And if we don't do it now, if we have a Grey Goo thing or a Mad Max world, I think we'll eventually achieve it, but it might be 10,000 years from now, 500, 1,000 years from now. But technology, once it gets out of the bottle, tends to stay out of the bottle unless you destroy it with a Library of Alexander thing. But it's harder to imagine that kind of thing happening now because information is so distributed and dispersed. Maybe we should have a project. Maybe if I was Bill Gates, I would spend a billion dollars encrypting and creating and collecting and storing in some kind of immutable place the core technological and artistic and philosophical information of humankind up to this point so that if we destroy it all with some war, we can find it again. And, you know, the Library of Alexandria is lost forever. One of the, it makes my stomach hurt when I think about it.

What was lost that we'll never get back again? We had pretty advanced math at that point that got washed away. Well, not just that. I mean, there's all these scrolls and all these texts that were just burned and lost. unless we get some kind of time travel or advanced AI that can recreate the past which I don't believe is ever possible it's lost forever

and we don't want to do that again you know we don't want to start from the dark ages no that is a good idea to get something down in case we mess up so bad you can bootstrap pretty quickly what if I were to tell you that bitcoin can help with nuclear disarmament

oh because they can't afford these programs except for their central banking payment mechanism. Tell me how. I'm curious. You use the plutonium. Maybe plutonium is not the... Whatever. Thorium?

Thorium, whatever. Uranium? Uranium. That's probably it. The uranium that makes these nuclear weapons instead of using them as weapons, use them as energy sources to mine bitcoin and you can prove via the hash rate on the bitcoin network that you are disarming your your nuclear arsenal in real time so you sign a hash that says hey i uh i turned this this nuke into an energy source and here's the hash rate that

proves that i did that and you have countries do that i didn't know you i didn't know you could turn nuclear weapons and energy sources that easily but okay i'm in favor of anything that you know uh disarms these states uh um this is a theory put put forth by a woman named elaine you okay i haven't i'm not i'm not aware of it but uh i i can't say i'm a i'm a sponsor of it but i'm i'm intrigued and uh you know bitcoin has look i'm skeptical of these alternative uses of bitcoin Like smart contracts and all that kind of stuff. I think that none of that – to me, none of that makes sense, which is why I'm a kind of a – I don't know what you are, but I'm kind of a Bitcoin maximalist, but I'm an amateur. I admit I'm an amateur, but I'm a maximalist. I think there only needs to be one money in the world. Its only function is to be money, and it doesn't need to be Bitcoin, but it probably will be if it's going to work or some successor to it. So I don't know why you need Bitcoin God, Bitcoin Max, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Ethereum.

I think the smart contract crap makes no sense to me as a lawyer. Ethereum. So I just think you're going to have – if it ever works, it's going to be one digital cryptocurrency, and that's it. I mean you don't need more. I completely agree. I'm in that camp too. I'm considered a toxic Bitcoin maximalist because I tell people Ethereum is stupid all the time. But from a lawyer's perspective, why do you think smart contracts on Ethereum are stupid?

For a couple reasons. Number one, I think that just in my career, I've been a lawyer for like 25 plus years now. And I'm still using word files with old examples and templates of contracts we used to use. No one is even – no one even uses these smart, alleged contract drafting because it's like saying you could replace your psychologist with a robot. You would need an AI robot to do that, and I don't believe AI is here or anywhere around the corner or maybe not even possible ever. So I think to have a contract drafting and dispute resolution function, you would need intelligence. And so I'll get to another reason in a second, and I don't – I think you would need either human – that's why you have human lawyers or human judges and human juries, or you would need AI. And so this whole smart contract idea to really work requires AI, and I think AI is either impossible or hundreds of years down the road.

And number two, most people are confused about contracts, so they think that the only analog to a smart contract that I can think of is a vending machine. So I put a dollar or a quarter into a machine, and a can of Pepsi pops out or a candy bar. That's a vending machine. So that's like an automated form of contract because if you think of a contract like Rothbard and the libertarians do as a transfer of title to property, that's what you're trying to do. Now, it might fail on occasion, in which case there's no one around, and you can't appeal it, but you take the risk and whatever. So you can have a vending machine situation. Now, the word vend means to sell. You're a vendor. You're the seller, so there's a contract there. So other – but you've got to imagine. That's what we call in the law a contemporaneous transaction. In other words, I give you a dollar now, and you give me a candy bar. Okay, so it's easy to automate that. In fact, you can do that between two humans without even language. Like I can be in Lebanon, and I can point to a candy bar behind the merchant's stand, and he hands it to me. I give them the payment, and we walk away, and we both are satisfied, and we never even had a communication. There was no verbal communication. There was no written communication.

There was communication, but it was implicit in the act. But the reason that works is because it's a contemporaneous transaction. In other words, title to A and title to B transfer right now in front of our eyes. You can automate those things. That's why vending machines work. But most contracts have at least one element of them is future-oriented. So in other words, take a loan. You give me something now that you own, and I'm supposed to give something back to you later in repayment of the loan plus interest. The problem is with that is that the future thing doesn't exist yet, so there's no way to automate it. Now, you have these kind of clueless libertarians say things like, well, you just would give a security deposit or a surety to an escrow agent or whatever. But the problem is most contracts have an element of credit in them. In other words, if I give you something now and you're supposed to repay me later, I'm doing that so that you can embark on a project to make profit so that you can repay me later. So I'm taking a little bit of a risk. But the guy you're lending – you're basically making a loan, and the guy you're making a loan to doesn't have collateral to guarantee it precisely because he needs the loan. And so half of the smart contract ideas that I see rely upon this utopian notion that every time you do a contract – like let's say I hire you to paint my house.

Now, let's take a better example. I hire you to sing at my kid – to sing at a party I'm having. Oh, I hire a band. I hire REO Speedwagon to take an example from the Ozark show. Okay, I hire REO Speedwagon. I pay them $100,000 to come sing at this big, big 50th birthday party I'm having for my wife at my house. Now, if they show up and they sing, I've got to give them the $100,000. You could automate that part. I agree, although even that part is questionable because how can the automatic software code know whether they actually performed to my satisfaction? So you'd have to arbitrate it, whatever. But okay, maybe I'm the rich guy that's going to hire REO Speedwagon to play at my wife's party. So they insist that I put $100,000 in escrow to pay them. That could be automated. I agree with that part, although I still don't see why a cryptocurrency helps with that. But whatever. It could be on the blockchain if that satisfies you, but it doesn't really matter. But you could automate that part, although, by the way, most people don't do that. They ask for a down payment. This is not how contracts work. They ask for a down payment. They check my creditworthiness. They know they can sue me if I don't pay. That's just the way it goes.

So they come before them. I paid them $10,000 already. I give them the other $90,000 after. If I don't, they sue me. They get it from me. But they wouldn't come and play for me if I was some poor guy who couldn't prove a good credit rating and everything. But the problem is the other side of the transaction system. So what if they don't show up and they ruin my party? So you want some incentive structure built in where they're supposed to pay me damages if they don't show up, like what we call breach of contract. So I'm going to pay them $100,000 if they show up, and if they don't show up, maybe they owe me $50,000 in damages or something. I don't know, whatever you agree on. That's called liquidated damages in the law. The problem is what if this is a group or a bunch of performers that they don't have – they can't – I mean am I supposed to put $100,000 in escrow, and they're supposed to put $50,000 in escrow? So all this capital is being wasted sitting there in some escrow account to decide the dispute, like a bond as Murray Rothbard calls it. The problem is most contracts, at least one side doesn't have this money yet.

Like if I borrow money from you to fund my project, I'd say, hey, I need to borrow $100,000 from you to start a new pizza delivery business. I can't – and I promise to pay it back with 10% interest in two years, whatever. That's fine, but I can't put $100,000 in an escrow account to pay you – or $110,000 or $120,000, whatever it's going to be. I can't put that into the escrow account that's going to automatically be triggered to pay you if I don't repay you because I don't have it. That's why I want to borrow from you. So to me, the whole idea of smart contracts is advanced by people that don't even understand law or business or financial markets or legal theory at all. Like, none of it makes sense to me. Some of this could work if there's AI because then you could just say I'm handing over the decision to an AI, but we don't have AI. So you're handing it over to some automated routine that some idiot coder in Nebraska wrote. No one is going to do that. So that's part – and you're also solving a problem that doesn't need solving. We already have a legal system. We have lawyers. We have ways to do this. We have contracts. There's no problem that needs to be solved.

The thing about Bitcoin is it solves a problem that needs to be solved. The problem is we need money, and government money sucks, and existing money sucks. Even gold, even the gold standard, which would be better than what we have now, has problems. There's a risk. There are the expenses. The gold has dual purposes, so it's being wasted. So you could see there's a problem that needs to be solved, and Bitcoin or crypto solves most of these problems. What problem does freaking smart contracts solve? And so everyone I talk to seems to know nothing about any of this, but they just talk on and on. They want to get some kind of investor to invest in the blockchain. I don't think blockchain has any use whatsoever outside of supporting the one cryptocurrency. that's my opinion i could be wrong about this because i'm only an expert in certain narrow areas of this but that's my opinion i like your opinion a lot i would uh i would agree with most of what you said i will you know there are smart contracts on bitcoin and i will so there's things

called discrete log contracts which are smart contracts but mainly their use cases right now are bets between people so people want to make a bet they escrow money in a special bitcoin transaction okay but hold on so but so first of all you have to define what you mean by contract and so i have a whole rock part has a whole different understanding of contracts so it's a transfer of title to property but you mentioned escrow so again yeah i can imagine some narrow like i said vending machines you can see that and maybe betting because you have to but even Even in betting, sometimes you go by your – I'm not a big bettor, a gambler, so I'm not sure. I'm not either.

But you mentioned escrow. So you're talking about escrow. The point is most contracts, it's impossible to have escrow as part of the contract because one of the parties doesn't have the resources yet to put it into escrow. And so in that case, I don't see how a smart contract could ever work. Well, the escrow would be the Bitcoin transactions, not escrowed by an entity, but the Bitcoin network. And then the betting, like both parties are willing to bet a certain amount that they put in that transaction where it's escrowed. And then they have an outside oracle. So if you're betting on a sports game, you get ESPN saying, hey, here's the end score of the game. And you use that score to say, hey.

Okay, yeah, yeah. Let me give you an example. Tell me where I'm wrong. You have 10 bitcoins that you own. I have 11 bitcoins that I own. We're going to bet on a football game, and there's – let's say there's 10-to-1 odds or whatever. Let's say we bet three bitcoins on that. Now, if I win, you owe me 30 bitcoins, but you only own 10 bitcoins right now. know so how are you going to escrow 30 bitcoins well you can't you'd have to say hey i want to bet yeah i guess the odds would have to be even right just straight up win or lose exactly you have to have a binary option well it's not just that it's like people don't understand that in

the law there are secured loans and there are unsecured loans and basically you can think of every contract that has a future element as being an unsecured loan or a secured loan A secured loan has security or collateral like a mortgage for your house or a loan on your car. They all have security. That's the equivalent in the law of an escrow thing where you deposit the money ahead of time into some neutral third party's hands to pay for whatever your damages might be if you lose. The problem is in most contracts, at least one of the parties doesn't have the resources to do that. So I don't see – I just don't see – I mean I'm waiting for someone to explain it to me, someone smarter than me who knows more about law than me, who actually understands the problem I'm pointing out. And no one ever can. They're just like, well, you could have an automatic trigger. It's like you have a trigger of what? Trigger of an – it's an escrow account. This is a rare – I would say it's 0. – I would say it's 1% or 0.1% of all contracts can have escrow to back them up.

All of the contracts are future-based, and they're risky. That's the way it is. It's like a loan. You can never, ever, ever, ever be guaranteed that you will get paid back from a loan. even if you have security. I agree. I agree. Right? Very narrow use case. It's all for risk. Everything we do in life is a risk.

People don't want to realize that. They want to make it mechanical and mechanistic, and I think you can't do it. Right. But I could be wrong. Again, I haven't talked to anyone who impresses me who's a Bitcoin smart contract or a cryptocurrency smart contract enthusiast

who says anything that makes sense to me. We're going to have to get you in contact with Nick Szabo, the original author of the first paper on smart contracts. I've read some of his stuff, and he's the only guy that – he's very smart. I think he's got legal education. He could probably talk about it and explain it if it's explainable. But then that would just be explaining to me. But if we have an audience listening, maybe they will benefit too. But as someone who's an enthusiast and tried and understands law very well, the whole thing makes no sense to me.

It's sort of like these constitutions we were talking about earlier. People keep saying, hey, help me write a constitution. I'm like, do you mean a constitution of a government, or do you mean – and they're always unclear, so I'm like, well, we can write a constitution, which is a summary or codification of our libertarian principles. principles, but that's not the same thing as the Constitution classically understood as a document that authorizes the emergence of a new state. That's a whole different thing. But people conflate these two things. It's the same thing with smart contracts. It's like if you just mean – people talk about like, oh, you could record property titles on the blockchain i mean come on come on now once you once you attempt to uh regulate meat space in the digital space things get very hairy right you can't you can technically own a property right on

the blockchain but somebody can come up with a gun and take it from you it's not just that it's like what is so i always think and this is probably from my patent lawyer background so in patents What you do is when you write a patent, you try to talk to the inventor, the engineer, and you say – he says, here's my new idea, my new scheme, my new system, my new innovation, my new method, whatever. And you have to explain it to the patent office, so you try to say, what was the problem that you're trying to solve? Like what's the background? What was the problem that was existing and that you have found a way to overcome? So that's how you think. And I think the same way about – like Bitcoin overcomes some problems. It's an advance in some ways. I can see why it can be a superior replacement for our existing forms of money. I can see that. But when you talk about smart contracts, I'm like, well, what problem are you trying to solve?

When you talk about recording title to property or recording – people who say this about an artificial form of copyright or patent law. Oh, you don't need the state to do it. You could record your invention on the blockchain, and it would be crystallized in amber forever, and you could always prove that you were the first guy to have this concept. I'm like, yeah, but do we have that problem now? Does anyone doubt who wrote Great Expectations or Romeo and Juliet? It was Charles Dickens and Shakespeare. Does anyone doubt who was the first president of the United States? It was obviously Thomas Jefferson. My point is you can know facts and record facts and verify facts without a goddamn blockchain. It's stupid. So you could also know who owns this piece of land, who got it first, who got it second, who got it tenth. You go down to the county real estate records, and you can search and find it. It's there. It's not hard. It works. It's worked for hundreds of years. So there's no problem that blockchain is going to solve. It's just a bunch of dorks trying to impress investors to give them a B-round of funding for some revolutionary use of the fucking blockchain.

i think it's ridiculous to be honest everyone i talk to is a goddamn scammer in this space not everyone but almost like i'm like either i don't understand you or there's some bullshit going on yeah i hope you don't think i'm a scammer i uh i don't think you're a scammer i'm just telling you it's like it's like explain to me what the problem is you're solving and how this solved it so i agree with you i think the the only thing this is important for is money distributed cash that can't be corrupted by a central authority i'm not sold on smart contracts completely yet uh i do think if they are to be successful be a very narrow use case and i guess to play devil's advocate here the argument individuals would make would be you want to

avoid a library of alexandria situation i guess these records may be that you can go down to the county office and find records but they can be set on fire one day uh so if you were to record or hash something that pointed to a piece of information digitally uh it would be immutable you wouldn't be able to quote unquote set it on fire and have it escape into the ether it would be etched into a hash primage on the blockchain at some point. Yeah, but there's

lots of ways. I mean, first of all... And again, I'm not saying this is foolproof. I'm playing devil's advocate here. Can you imagine a cryptocurrency surviving without the internet existing? It'd be very hard.

Exactly. And so if there's an internet, then there's other ways. I mean, You know, I can find old pieces of information by going to the Internet Archive. Yes. Okay. And that's not a blockchain. That's just some database.

But people have been known to get some information scrubbed from that Internet Archive. Yes, and that's partly because of intellectual property law. But I'm just saying there's technological ways to have backups of information without a blockchain. I agree. We should have multiple redundant copies in different internet archives and different services, some weird nonprofit groups having petabytes stored on little thumb drives in a coal vault in Antarctica or whatever the hell they want to do. But none of that requires cryptocurrency or blockchain. None of it. I tend to agree, I think. The only good thing about blockchain is that you can prove this immutability aspect, but that's only because there's a profit incentive for people to do it, the miners and all the other people. So if it's not used for money, how are you going to incentivize people to spend their processing time to coat this piece of data in shells of amber?

I don't know. So this is my – the limit of my – maybe it's because of my technological infamiliarity, like how you extend all this. But I just don't see the – I see the promise of a digital money. I just don't see the promise of blockchain use for anything else but a backbone support for that. Yeah, and the – Again, I could be wrong.

Could be. I could be too, but I tend to agree with you because I think Bitcoin's chance of success increases the less it tries to do. If it just tries to be a monetary good as opposed to everything else, it can focus on a core competency that will give it a greater chance of survival in the future

because there's less attack surface, if you will. Yeah. We did not touch on anything that I wanted to get to. I think it's Bitcoin property. That always happens with me. I always derail the conversation. Yeah, I'm very happy with where this conversation went. Is Bitcoin property?

Do I own my Bitcoin? I had this conversation now a dozen times. So let me try to think of the best way to like... I think the one problem is... … people's understanding of the word ownership but also property, I don't think the question – the right question to ask is, is it property? I mean if you said, is my wife property? The question is almost nonsensical because if you said, is my wife my property? That's a more understandable question, and the answer would be no. You don't own her. She owns herself. But if you say, is my wife property? It's like, well, what does property mean? The word property, I believe, especially in a technical or careful discussion like this when you're trying to suss out things that are confusing, you've got to be careful with your terms.

Property is just a word that ought to be really used as an adjective like I have a property right in this thing. So if you say, is my car my property? What you're really asking is, do I have a property right in the car? Do you follow me? Which is another way of asking, do I own this car or who owns this car? But you're admitting that the car is the object of the dispute in question. It's not whether the car is property. It's whether whose property is it. Or if you say, is my memory of my childhood my property or someone else's property? You're sort of loading the question by assuming that your memories can be an ownable thing by calling it property. So then if you say, well, no, I'm just asking who owns my memories? Do I own my memories or does my grandmother own my memories?

It's like, well, no one owns your memories. Your memories are just things that you have. Like who owns my love for my wife? No one owns – I mean – so it's like you can beg the question by asking, is this property or not? So the question is not, is Bitcoin property? The question is, are Bitcoins things that can be owned? And if so, who's the owner? Now, then the problem is the word ownership has two different – at least two different usages. One is the technical legal term, which means a legal right to control, and the other is the sort of casual use, which means the practical ability to use. So, of course, anyone that has the key for bitcoins, for certain bitcoin spaces in the blockchain has the practical ability to transfer them to someone else. And you can use the word own for that, and then you could say it's my property. But in a legal sense, no, because to have property or to own something means to have the legal right to control it. But the thing is that bitcoins are not independently existing entities. They are entries on a ledger or a database, which is stored in distributed form on tens of thousands of computers around the world in a voluntary network of people.

So to own a Bitcoin in a legal sense would mean that if someone quote-unquote takes your Bitcoin without your consent, which we call theft, that you could use the force of law to get it back. How do you get it back? You would issue an order back by force to all the 10,000 node operators or whatever you call them to unwind their blockchain to restore the state of affairs to the way it was yesterday to give me my Bitcoin back. But that implies that they don't own their own property, their own hard drives and their own computers. So this Bitcoin information is just stored as information on ledgers owned by people that already own their computers. So you can't own a Bitcoin in a legal sense without owning the storage medium that other people own. So that's why my answer is no, and that's why it's analogous to intellectual property. It's like if you own this painting in an abstract sense like the Mona Lisa, which is copyright. It's public domain now, but let's say you own the Mona Lisa. That means that you basically own everyone else's hard drive in the world because you can prevent them from rearranging it in a certain way, which is the same thing as owning Bitcoin. But my view is you don't own their hard drives. So the only way to own information would be to own the underlying storage medium, the thing that – the physical thing that keeps the data.

Anything that's information or data can't be owned because it has to exist as a rearrangement of the structure of an underlying physical thing that someone else already owns. So legally speaking, I've gone – there are implications of this. Some are good. Some are bad maybe from a Bitcoiner's point of view. But when you say – when I say you don't own your Bitcoin, it's not impugning Bitcoin. It's not criticizing it. It's not demeaning it or lessening it. I'm simply saying that you've got to understand what it means. You're part of a network that's a voluntary private network with no terms of agreement, no contractual obligations whatsoever. So – but the way it's orchestrated, the way it's designed, it's almost impossible for someone to get my Bitcoin from me by theft. They have to do it by coercing me to give the number, which is a crime in and of itself, or by breaking into my house, which is a crime. Or I'm just stupid, and I leave the number – I leave my password on a post-it note on my front window, and anyone can see it, in which case I'm basically giving it out. But other than that, unless they can start breaking the encryption by guessing or by using quantum computers, how are they going to get it?

And if they can do that, then the Bitcoin system will evaporate or will have to change to account for that because then everyone's bitcoins are in danger. So what word should we use? I don't know. I'm okay with people saying I have this bitcoin. I possess this bitcoin. I control this bitcoin. I'm even okay if you say I own this bitcoin, but just when you say that, be aware that it's like saying if you have a restaurant, I have certain customers, or if you have a wife, I have a wife. Okay, you're using the possessive. It's my wife. It's my son. It's my country. Yeah, you can use the possessive form of English language, but it doesn't mean that you – just because you use a possessive doesn't mean you literally have a legal ownership right to the things that you are explaining in language that you have some connection to or some ability to control. i like that technical definition a lot it's one thing so i actually outside of this podcast the newsletter i work for a mining company and that's uh so i think one of bitcoin's biggest attack vectors is forcing forcing people to comply with kyc aml compliance that's really drafted by the

financial action task force at an international level um and i think one way to guard that would get bitcoin to find a speech in the eyes of the law do you think that's possible you think that's a good a good definition of bitcoin speech since it's not really owned by anybody i think that well um that would probably only be that useful in the u.s because The US has strong First Amendment protections, and on occasion I think that has worked to some degrees with software. So the problem I have is that – no, I don't think it would work in the end because once you treat it legalistically… So the IRS and the government and legislation, they're going to end up classifying Bitcoin one way or the other, and they're going to use classical economic or Keynesian economic concepts and language, which they've done already. Some jurisdictions, as I understand it, already – and maybe the IRS – they call Bitcoin property.

Why? Because it's an asset, whatever the hell that means. They never defined that word. But it's something that has value, and you can trade. So they use all these interconnecting sort of circular terms, but once the IRS classifies Bitcoin as property, hey, guess what? Now it's subject to capital gains taxes unlike normal legal tender money. So now it's at a disadvantage because there's a huge barrier to using it because every time you spend $10 on an iPhone cable on Amazon using Bitcoin… And you got to remember what lot it came from and what your basis was and what your capital gains tax. I mean, it's all bullshit. But just be careful calling it property. I don't know if we want to call it property in the legal system we have now. Maybe it's a bad thing.

I would tend to agree. There's a gentleman by the name of Beauty on out there who would love that you're saying this right now. Now, what I've heard is that some countries – there are some attempts to get some countries to adopt it as an official legal tender and then by the back door get the US and other Western countries to recognize it as a legal tender of another country, and therefore it can get out of this morass of sales taxes and capital gains taxes or whatever. And then it's like a huge, frictional barrier to its being adopted, although I think the barrier to its being adopted now is that it's not really money yet. And so most people that are interested are hodlers like us, so – and plus it's hard to use it as everyday cash. So I think the barrier to its adoption is it's not ready yet to emerge, but I do think that if some country could adopt it as an actual currency, that could possibly help it to be adopted in other countries because then it would have legal tender status. If you buy and sell dollars, I think there's no – I'm not a tax expert, but I think there's no – capital gains doesn't apply. And the same thing with Deutschmarks or British pounds or whatever, Deutschmarks or euros or yen because they're the legal tenders of another country.

So I think, wouldn't there be some effort to get, like, Argentina or Venezuela or someone to adopt Bitcoin as their currency so that it would be recognized in the U.S. as legal tender? I mean, I've heard of these various little political efforts, you know. It's recognized as legal tender in Japan, actually. Japan wrote that into law, Bitcoin is legal tender. well if that's the case i'm not sure why it's not recognized in the u.s yet then so let's start this campaign bitcoin is legal tender in the u.s now there was actually something too with the irs guidance they've been changing the definition of bitcoin throughout the years and i think after uh japan labeled it as legal tender they changed some of the definitions because at

one point the irs defined it uh virtual currencies um except those accepted as legal tender in other countries are subject to capital gains law uh tax excuse me but once japan did that they took out that clause it seems uh okay so yeah so so it's hard to trap them it's hard to trap them by their so this is a problem with libertarians is we we try these most libertarians are basically They believe in magic spells and incantations. They think if you weave the right set of words, you can make the government comply. This is the income tax protesters' mistake. They think that you can say, show me the law. Show me where the IRS code says that I've got to pay income tax. And they think that if you go before a judge when you're getting convicted of income tax evasion, if you just mutter those words, it's some kind of magic spell that's going to force the judge to let you go free. But, of course, it doesn't work that way. That's not what law is. The government doesn't work by a set of incantations and rules.

They're just going to find a way to get around it, and they're going to say, no, no, there's an exception here, or you don't have standing. They'll come up with some kind of bullshit rule because they have a maze of rules they can – so that's probably what the financial authorities in the US are doing here. But if enough other countries get Bitcoin – if there was one major country that had Bitcoin as a major currency, I can't see how the US could get around that forever. But who knows? Maybe they would. I'm actually – I would be skeptical that Japan has actually made Bitcoin legal tender like you said. You could be right, but I'm – see, that's my skeptical frame of mind. I don't actually believe that. I think they did something that encouraged Bitcoin nerds, but I doubt that Japan has actually made Bitcoin legal tender. I would look it up after this. I think they definitely did. I mean, there's probably something you could hang your hat on and say we had a little tiny victory, but I doubt it.

But if so, then I'm surprised that the U.S. hasn't recognized it. Yeah, September 2017, or April 2017, Japan passed a law recognizing Bitcoin as legal tender. I'll look at it later. I thought it was another country they were trying to do, like Argentina or one of the South American countries, but okay. That's probably where it will start if it does start anywhere. They need it more than most people in the world right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Maduro regime is mining Bitcoin.

That's well known. They're accepting Bitcoin for government services like passport issuance and stuff like that. Who's Maduro? The dictator of Venezuela. Venezuela, okay. Well, there are some countries that, like, is it Costa Rica? They don't even have their own currency. They just use the dollar.

They use the dollar. They have colones, though. There's one – maybe it's Ecuador. I don't know. There's some countries that they don't even have their own army, and they don't have their own money. Costa Rica doesn't have an army. I think Ecuador doesn't have their own currency. Okay, but the point is there are countries that don't have their own currency, so they just use the dollar, and they're not part of the American sort of empire officially. so they could theoretically switch to something else Chinese money

the Euro or even Bitcoin so if one of them does it I don't know what the US and the western countries are going to do we shall find out in time I'm optimistic that the free market will choose Bitcoin

it's just too much of an improvement on the shitty monetary system we've been subjected to for too long i think so too i think it's inevitable i just don't know if it'll be bitcoin or something else but i see no reason why it wouldn't be bitcoin so yeah with the mining stuff we're trying to so i work for a company called great american mining we use waste gas and oil and gas fields throughout the united states and we are part of our thesis is that bitcoin mining is going to become integral to the the energy sector here

of the United States and then they will lobby for Bitcoin on behalf of Bitcoiners. They will be Bitcoiners and that will be strong. I know you don't like the state and using that, but I think we will use the apparatus to defend Bitcoin. That's crazy. That's crazy, but that's interesting.

Yeah, I'm pretty crazy. I like these crazy ideas. Yeah. Yeah, it's a crazy, cool idea. Yeah. I actually used to do oil and gas law. In the beginning of my career, I did energy law and so i love the whole oil and gas field and that area um it's interesting to see how evolving and morphing over time if they become into bitcoin that'd be crazy they're they're

catching on they are they are it really helps them especially when you consider what happened in march with the uh we think that bitcoin as a revenue stream to bolster uh balance sheets will we'll inoculate U.S. producers from OPEC Plus and help us in our course towards energy independence. Got it. Yeah, I'm learning a lot about mineral rights in different jurisdictions. It's a very interesting conversation and concept,

how operators and landowners... After we get off, I'll send you a paper you might actually like about that. And yes, it would be much appreciated. I'm looking to learn as much as possible. Stefan, I want to be respectful of your time, though. You've been gracious enough to give me over an hour and a half on this Friday afternoon.

Is there anything on the top of your mind that you want to let my audience know about Bitcoin, law, libertarianism? Well, all the stuff I've been talking about is drawn on my libertarian theory, which I have a book I'm working on. I'm trying to finalize it right now. It'll probably be out in about three months, but law and libertarian world.

So I just have a book coming out in probably three months, maybe four. But that's about it. I appreciate the talk, and keep up the good work in the crypto free market money space. Yeah, we're in the Bitcoin space. We don't like to say crypto. We think Bitcoin's going to win. I'm okay with that. I try to be a little bit ecumenical

when I talk to people because you never know. I'm a Bitcoin guy. I'm very happy to have you on the Bitcoin team. Here's to hoping we can bring it to fruition. Thank you. That's all we've got this week. Peace and love.