TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #394: Warrior Cultures, True Friendship, Bitcoin and Austrian Economics with Aleks Svetski

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Aleks Svetski to discuss vol. 5 of The Bitcoin Times, as well as the impact modernity has had on male bonds, the values Bitcoiners should instill in the future, and narrowing focus as one gets older. Follow Svetski on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SvetskiWrites Check out The Bitcoin Times: https://bitcointimes.io/ Pod 5:22 - The time for wandering is over 8:08 - Defining friendship 12:06 - The bonds of warrior cultures 15:29 - Bushido of Bitcoin 17:58 - The impact of schooling 23:11 - Quality over quantity, the value of restraint 30:13 - Moral corruption 40:35 - The Bitcoin Times vol. 5: The Austrian Edition 48:47 - Next edition: Energy 54:40 - Climate LARPing and "sustainable" energy 1:05:53 - Order and entropy 1:08:24 - The Twitter hazard 1:10:51 - Narrowing focus 1:16:33 - How to sell running a node 1:23:52 - Plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc i sat back down with alex svetsky to talk about the latest edition get my finger over here of the bitcoin times the austrian edition as well as a bunch of other stuff we started this conversation off uh on a topic i didn't expect to go down but very happy we did i think you guys are going to like it. I'm going to hold off on reading the latest boostograms from the most recent episode because we just dropped it an hour ago. So it's still percolating the interwebs. We'll give it some time before reading the top four boost of that rip with Victor from IVPN. Very good rip. If you haven't listened to it. Oh, and Wavelake. This is going to come after Wavelake. So Wavelake hasn't

even been dropped yet. Victor just dropped. So I'll read the top four boosts from those episodes. on next week's RIT. Hope you guys enjoy this one. It was brought to you by our good friends at River. River is here to build an exchange for Bitcoiners by Bitcoiners. They do it the right way. They don't trust any third parties like Prime Trust.

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if you're using the exchange if you dollar cost average using river you're not going to pay any fees you may have your bitcoin exchange if you're in texas you may not be able to rely on that exchange come tomorrow, January 31st. If you're listening to this, that day is coming past. Some third parties have shit the bed and a lot of people in Texas aren't going to be allowed to buy Bitcoin because of some licensing stuff. River doesn't have that problem. They can serve Texas customers. They build it out. You may have your Bitcoin exchange, but have you tried River yet? Go try it. Go to river.com slash TFTC and try it out. This trip was also brought to you by good friends at Unchained Capital.

They're located here in Austin, Texas. They don't have this problem either. They're very similar to River where they build out their own infrastructure, their old wallet infrastructure as well. And that is what we're here to talk about today is their vault. It's a two or three multi-sig wallet, which allows you to hold two keys while Unchained holds one. It's collaborative custody.

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geographically disperse the hardware and the backups that you don't have any single points failure there and then you'll set up the wall two or three multi-sig as long as you have your two keys you can always move your bitcoin as you see fit if you're ever in a pinch you only have one key you need on chain to be the second to in the two or three multi-sig quorum they're there for you uh on top of this product they built an ira product they have a lending desk they have a trading desk as well so you can move your bitcoin into an ira that you control with your keys uh you can use your bitcoin as collateral to get us dollar loans same day loans um and you will have a key in that two or three multi-sig quorum so that you know that your bitcoin's not being re-hypothecated

and then trading desk you buy bitcoin it doesn't sit on unchanged you buy it and they send it straight to your cold storage your two or three multi-sig vault go to unchained.com concierge use the code tftc at sign up for fifty dollars off that onboarding service enjoy this rip with with Alex Svetsky. Take care. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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 probably should be i think you're fine without it if you want to pump the bitcoin time so you can wear it yeah i'll pump it at some point i'll put the hat on

oh you got the hat there we're live if you want to put it on it's there to put on at some point but yeah deal yeah the nomad life it's uh it's a big con it is it is we've been we've been sold this idea that one should uproot and go and travel around which like like i said it's probably good for a young person to go and you know experience different cultures and see different things and kind of you know expand their mental horizons but you know i've sort of been in product development and running businesses all my life and there's this concept called the double d um or double diamond i shouldn't say double d the double diamond and what what you do is you sort of it's kind of like similar to how they describe uh creativity right you go outwards

you open up you see a lot uh you take in a lot of data and you you you kind of like go broad and wide and then you narrow down and you cull everything and sort of you know in a product development uh kind of role you do that twice so hence the double diamond effect and i think that's important for some at some point but i think you reach a level of maturity where you've kind of seen most of the things you know and principles are often uh consistent and static no matter where you are and what you do and you sort of get to a point where you're like all right well it's time to like be more close-minded and be more open-minded and and you kind of flip the switch i think i'm there no this is funny that you bring this up because

friday night my wife and i went to dinner with another couple both transplants in austin with big families back in our hometowns we had a very similar conversation not the context of product development but just being close to family and for me myself i moved from philadelphia where i'm from right after high school i've been gone ever since about 14 years now which is hard to hard to imagine but no that was the tenor of that conversation is like yeah i've seen the world i've lived in chicago lived in new york lived in austin now and uh the draw of the extended family back in the Philadelphia area is pretty strong it's like hey I've gone somewhat seen the world and maybe at some point in the next couple years it makes sense just to go home and

go back to where my roots are you actually that reminds me of a I was wife you know having a discussion on the weekend talking about friends and friendships and I've been thinking about this a lot and you know i think over the over the last couple years with with covid and all the all the hysteria and twitter and all this sort of shit i think people people confused acquaintances with similar values with friends and i think we saw a lot of that in sort of the bitcoin community um you know with people thinking that they were friends um and thinking that they were you know super alike and all this sort of shit just because they didn't want to get a jab or um or you know were pro-trump for example um but then sort of when

you dug under the surface like what was missing and this is sort of like the thinking i've been having i'm curious on your thoughts on this but i feel like friendship requires three things common values for sure uh more importantly than uh like-mindedness like like-valuedness i think is extremely important but two things that i think are missing and this is probably a function of just modern civilization and even even libertarianism and all this sort of shit is to blame for this is like we've moved into this individualist world where um you know to sort to tie the friendship knot is like common values time and shared experience and I think those two middle ones like the time and the shared experience is something that at least I know

I lost a lot of because I moved a lot when I was young I left my hometown I went out like to the big bad world and university and business entrepreneurship and all this sort of stuff and like i really don't know anyone from when i was young anymore honestly um and and i think that's something that i've slowly been coming to terms with in the sense that you know you you think you you know you meet some people you know like you share some common values but you know what's missing is that real time and shit experience i'm curious to sort of hear your thoughts on that no i completely agree i think bringing the concept of dumb bars number each individual only has a certain capacity to develop these types of strong relationships with

others and like you said time and shared experience is definitely a big part of deciding who falls into your dumb bear dumb bar web of trust and i mean i didn't have too dissimilar of an upbringing but i did have good roots in philadelphia and middle school and high school about really strong friendships with people that i'm still friends with to this day and when i go home go hang out with them it's like nothing skipped a beat and it goes back to a shared experience and in middle school and high school and yeah it's i think there's definitely something there and i i agree with like the bitcoin thing like i love bitcoiners definitely do think many of us have the same shared values but again going

back to the special ingredients of shared time and experience going through ups and downs with each other uh this may sound weird but i have when you when you want to define people as actual friends i probably have less than a dozen actual friends in the bitcoin space totally yeah yeah totally yeah no it's a it's it's it's something i think like i said you know it's i've in thinking through this concept and it there's a big difference between friends and acquaintances and i know i've been on a real like rabbit hole like reading a lot about ancient history and particularly uh warrior cultures and the two the two that i've really gone or probably three that i've gone down the rabbit hole quite deeply on is like samurai culture uh the the spartans the um

before the thebans you know fucked them over um and beat their asses but and then the um and the sort of the silver shields and the royal guard and alexander the great like and how like those friendships were so different like they grew up as young boys together they you know went through rites of passage which are completely missing in the modern world like they would go through ordeals like uh you know the famous spartan agogi right where they'd take the child at the age of seven from the mother and then he was had to sleep outside uh with the shelter that he made and fend for himself and all that sort of stuff until he became an adult and and that was kind of like the longest rite of passage in the ancient world but these friends would would

fucking die for each other like you know alexander's royal guard his band of brothers his his generals like they would try to out compete each other as to who would take the first sword or bone like arrow for their friend for the man to their right and i know it's kind of like uh you know contrasting that to to the modern world like um you know i i know me for one maybe when i was younger i had some friends like that but man you know my life took me in such different directions and i think i fell for the whole um the individualist trap and and you kind of like you believe this lone wolf garbage right and um and you realize in the end that's crap yeah i mean i think just people misconstrue or misinterpret the individualist mindset which

is yes you should be an individualist try to make yourself the best person that you can be protect yourself your family your friend group first but that doesn't like you mentioned it doesn't mean you have to be a lone wolf it means you better yourself and i think what people need to bring into the conversation of individualism is you better yourself why it's to better the group that you're surrounded by to make the tribe your tribe as strong as possible i mean that's That's Bitcoin or shit on sports ball quite a bit. But I will say that growing up and playing a sport very competitively, developing, I mean, it's not like we were in the military,

but warrior-like bonds with people that you played a sport with for many years is something I think that was very beneficial to my life and still exists to this day, those bonds that were formed when i was a teenager but yeah i think the individual sort of meme is a bit misconstrued and that you have to tie in that end goal of you're only as strong as the weakest link and you want to make your shirt yourself as strong as an individual as possible because you don't want to be the weakest link in your your web of trust yeah i mean the the the concept of honor right so i i i will mention it here um but we can talk about it on a future podcast so i'm writing

a book right now called the bushido of bitcoin and i think it's going to be my most important work but basically this whole the whole premise of the book is that assuming let me rephrase this it's not another bitcoin book about the history of fucking money and why bitcoin's better and why it's going to win and all that sort of stuff i think that's been done and there's you know much better writers that have sort of handled that you know the question i'm trying to answer is that if we assume that bitcoin's going to win that comes with the reality that bitcoiners especially the early ones of this sort of first epoch the first 20 years we are going to be disproportionately economically powerful and therefore disproportionately

socially powerful it's a very fucking different world and what what are the values and the virtues that we want to embody as individuals in that environment do we want to be fucking dickhead lambo jerk off with you know louis vuitton sort of onesie um you know jumpsuit or you know do we want to embody like what i do we want to embody the virtues that emerge from the most difficult sort of uh environment and you know the ones that i seem to have found that have parallels like you look at the samurai bushido code is like eight essential uh virtues of like courage honor respect duty loyalty uh benevolence or compassion um sincerity like there's this sort of code of ethics that was was why let me how do i say this that code of ethics determined whether someone

was a samurai not just the fact that they had a fucking sword right and it was very similar in the west with chivalry like you were you were a knight because of what you embodied not because of you wore the suit and had a horse right um and this is sort of my question this book is like who do we want to become and how do we want to behave and I take all this sort of uh historical anecdotes and kind of like weave it into a book but anyway like it's uh I've been doing a lot of thinking on this and one of the uh ideas in there is like we need to once again build strong tribes and in particular like you know all the co-ed shit that has happened in the last 50 years like I wonder if that was like one of the major psyops right like literally like disentangled like boys

from being able to create boys groups and girls from being able to create girls groups and all this sort of stuff like i think there's something there and you know men need to come back and like rebuild these fucking bonds and these groups um you know like to use the german term manner bond right like it's the it's the uh the the group of valiant men together so anyway it's it's total tangent to what we're supposed to be talking about today but it's something that i've been doing a lot of thinking about recently no i like it and to your last point i mean i think i think i'm an example like i went to like where i built those strong bonds uh playing sports ball lacrosse particularly was i went to i went to an all boys high school prep school and um i think

that was a massive benefit for my life you can get in like i mean this may come off wrong but like i don't think boys and girls are meant to particularly in that point of life like it's a bit of a distraction to put them together and expect them to grow because i remember how horny i was in eighth grade when i was at public school in the co-ed public school it was just literally distracting just looking at asses all day and you go to an all boys school and it's just there's no i mean there are distractions but there there isn't that weird pubescent distraction or you're totally yeah when when you're a kid you've got zero dick control and zero any of that control and you're just like fucking like a little puppy

you know running around whatever the next shiny thing is and there's actually there was a dude that i was talking to who um he's outside of the bitcoin space he's more sort of like in the you know he's kind of built a brand in the in the masculine space but from a very different angle so he built a payments company um you know ceo quite successful it's kind of like sort of our age i think like late 30s maybe early 40s or something and he you know before like homeschooling and all that sort of stuff was cool like uh he and his wife like unexpectedly you know had a baby at like when he was in his early 20s um like they weren't planning on it and you know she felt pregnant and they're like fuck what's the best thing for us to do as a family and you know they

both agreed that he would go and bust his ass fucking work and she would take care of the family grow the family so they had this sort of like good symbiosis from from a general gender roles perspective and um and what's interesting you know in that conversation was he talked about how the reason they chose to homeschool their kids and what he said he said that kids being around other kids you know we've sort of been taught that that's a good thing because you know they need to grow up with their peers and shit but he said like you know when they go to school kids are not learning from the teachers they're not learning from the school they're learning from the other kids around them and the level of intellect of the kids around them is dumb as

fuck because they're kids they're not any better they're not learning from the teachers um so they're not actually maturing as individuals they're remaining kids all the way through the 12 years that they're in school and you come out and you wonder why you're not ready for the world whereas you know he talked about how even you know 100 200 300 years ago before sort of schooling started happening as a mainstream thing it's like the kids grew up influenced by their parents that's why you had fucking people like you know whatever people think about rockefeller now but the guy had nothing and by the time he was 21 he was a multi-millionaire you know he'd figured out businesses and all this sort of shit like that kind of maturity existed back then because kids

didn't actually go to school uh and didn't weren't um sort of forced to learn amongst you know peers who were stupid basically um which is essentially what we all are as kids yeah no i've actually talked to just a moon a lot about this i mean obviously the rockefellers and the rothschilds those big family names uh or many could argue very effectively that they're perturbing the world because they've been asked too much power and are using their money and influence to put forth this malthusian view of the future but if you dig into like the history of those families they were very focused on on engendering a culture of hey uh we have a family business here i'd like you to join it but you have to earn your way in and sort of basing a structure and a lifelong

education about growing to become part of the firm um it's really fascinating i mean well it's like an emphasis on maturity right yeah like instead of an emphasis on uh remaining a kid all the way through to your fucking 20s yeah and one thing i did want to mention too like going back to dumb bars number and yes many bitcoiners have a lot of shared values and we align a lot philosophically but when it comes down to it who are your actual friends who you spend a lot of time with and gone through some trials and tribulations with yes that number may be small it doesn't mean that you don't want to be friends with every bitcoin it's just you don't have literally the mental capacity to juggle all those connections so you have to choose and

maybe you don't even choose maybe just the outcome of your life and your experiences what you decide to do in the space where it takes you yeah your actual friends are yeah totally i think um that's a it's a it's a very valid point like it you know maybe this is a good segue into um you know what we originally wanted to talk about but like this this concept of quality over quantity right and i and i think this is another one of those contrarian viewpoints in a world where like i was listening to an ai um uh podcast about ai shit the other day and you know and they sort of keep talking about like how everything's going to be abundant and you know we're breaking down barriers and all this sort of shit and you just hear that so much from the from the nerves basically

right and like the the push the effort the intent is all about um complete like abandoned like mindless abandon with respect to abundance like everything should be abundant um and no restrictions no boundaries no walls and for me this is one of the things i just absolutely love about bitcoin is that bitcoin is kind of like a it's almost like a classical solution to model modern problems right it's like uh bitcoin is a set of restrictions effectively like you know 21 million the block size the block height you know the the block time like all this sort of it's like a set of restrictions that then kind of give you some guard rails within which to operate because like you know if you have unbounded freedom you you don't actually have any order

or structure so you know there's a there's something i quoted in this new book that i'm writing which is like i actually think unbounded freedom like complete liberty maximalism is actually immoral because you need some sort of responsibility and order in order to like to to bring some i guess conservatism to the to the process you know like there needs to be a counterbalance to complete uh open freedom and liberty and um and and anyway like to me that sort of ties into this concept of um of quality over quantity because quality is something that is a conscious restriction on stuff and you know what are we drowning in today we're drowning in just noise we you know everything's fucking free you've got information all over the place like

everyone's throwing shit at us and trying to decipher through that stuff and being able to consciously as you said pick fewer deeper friends because you have a certain amount of time that you you know have available to you to build the depth and to have shared experiences um and then with respect to the stuff that you consume like you know what you do like whether it's food or information or the people you spend time with or the stuff you do with your kids whatever like putting like limits on those things i think is um i don't know it's really important and i feel like the older i get the more i start to really appreciate all that stuff so you know a bit of a rambling tangent but no i mean and we could tie this into the bitcoin times latest uh volume but

before we even get there like i mean this is sort of an idea that is reiterated time and time again over history whether it be via religions or certain types of monastic cultures which is like mentioned the the samurai virtues i mean catholicism you have the virtues i mean the tower of babel there's a story in the bible that really highlights what you just said you have a quantity of all these languages that just confuses people and sets them off all these wrong paths towards hedonism and um structure is not a bad thing and i agree bitcoin does bring back structure through the digital age, particularly from a monetary aspect. And that's a lot of what the Austrians are preaching too, right?

Like with human action, it's like if you have a money that is sort of structured and is somewhat predictable, you have very stringent rules of that money. The gold standard, there's so much amount of gold above ground. And we know via market forces that only so much will be produced year in and year out, depending on what the price is at any given point in time due to the cost to actually get that gold out of the ground. now with bitcoin it's gold on on steroids um but the main sort of thesis being that like if you have this money that's run on somewhat strict rules you can you can begin to order your life outside of that monetary system within the economy in a much more efficient way that is going to bring

more quality to the market i should have had myself muted yeah totally like these limitations are necessary and like in many ways i would think of uh responsibility as a virtue that is a virtue of self uh imposed limitation right like when you want to be responsible like you know it's all good and well to stay up till three o'clock in the morning you know but the responsible person is like i gotta get up at six to get some sunshine go for a run go to the gym etc so like the responsible person places a limitation on themselves go to bed at 10 o'clock for example or the responsible person doesn't overeat you know or the responsible person puts money aside to save you know like so so this kind of this ability to place restraint uh onto uh things that you

could otherwise be free to do uh i think is a is a sign of maturity right and this kind of comes back to i mean it all it's it's funny how all these things like have parallels right it touches on what we were talking about before about like maturity and becoming an adult you know when you're younger like the way you do that is by realizing that it's not all about just like unhinged freedom like i started to even cringe when i see like you know liberty maximalism on uh on people's twitter profiles i'm like no you know like can you add some responsibility maximalism there as well please like because you sort of can't have one without the other right yeah no i mean the libertarian meme is a meme for a reason because it just completely

co-ops and corrupts the the good themes of the movement which is like a non-aggression principle i'm not doing anything wrong don't don't you shouldn't physically harm me or put me in jail um but then you get like the hedonistic side of libertarian someone like kiddie porn and fairies and all that shit to be uh above board as well it just yeah well that's the shit point right it's like i you know i'm people are consenting to it so why not right it's i read this uh essay about a week ago it was called um something like it was on sub stack something something to do with like consent not being a moral standard right it's like just just because someone consents to something doesn't mean that it's a it's a good thing it's like and one thing

i remember from the essay right at the end he says um we shouldn't be asking ourselves you know where is the harm we should be asking ourselves where is the good like and that's a you know very different thing is because it's like you know where is the good in rolling fucking hex coin like i mean other than you know that fat ass buying new louis vuitton you know jumpsuits i don't see you know any good out of that whole project but you know his argument will be where is the harm there is consent there is a there is a market for and like that kind of stuff to me is like where you you know get in the into the realm of like you know ethics and morality and a sort of deeper thinking which i know i feel like we've you know to a large degree lost in the world like i

was speaking to a dude the other day who's who was pitching me a business idea of like he wants to make um basically an app to make uh you know ordering hookers easier and he's like you know the whole world's degenerate so like may as well and i'm like well that's why the whole world's degenerate like because it's the may as well attitude yeah there's a market here i should exploit it it's like uh you have to have the the urge control to to put your effort somewhere else which is that's maybe that's another point that should be brought up it's not always easy the easy path is the hedonist path where it's much easier to just be sexually promiscuous to put off building a family to scam people with shit coins whatever it may be it's a lot easier you can

literally hit a button with shit coins and spin one up and if you can tell a good story behind it it's very profitable it's much harder yeah to build out a critical layered infrastructure like people are attempting to do on bitcoin takes longer it's not a lot as much immediate reward um and so you have that and bring in time preference you have that that time preference aspect where people want quick thrills instead of slow methodical uh building of a cathedral that could bring long-term prosperity to to others this is this is touches actually back to the samurai culture and even even chivalric culture is um is this idea so in in the feudal the merchants were actually seen uh as below the peasants particularly by the samurai samurai had

like a major disdain for the merchant class um in in the feudal hierarchy and that was because the merchant class were were known to be the type to just abandon any moral compass like they didn't believe in that like they would easily be bought and sold right they could sell someone out they could buy something they could do that's all that mattered like it was just pure commerciality to them whereas you know the samurai sort of had this uh perception of themselves which is like on or above money for example so kind of like this idea of like reputation almost as a currency it's like there's there is this moral dimension to the universe that has its own sort of measure that you can't um you can't quantify with uh coin for example and and that's sort of like

warriors like uh operated on that realm while the merchants operated on the other realm now you know i i do think in that this is something i put forth in the book is like you know could bitcoin uh create an o like a healthy overlap between sort of this uh this commercial reality of the world where you know sort of like you have this material realm that requires money in order to measure it and uh kind of tie uh deeds to consequences right and you know bitcoin does that very well you know if you're a you spend all your money you're gonna have no money and there's no way to sort of to socialize that loss right um and you know does that in some way tie into you know this sort of different moral dimension of um

um you know ethics values reputation um and some sort of like you know almost like a a moral ledger to existence um you know does better behavior in the material realm like kind of reflect it in some way or impact it so it's a it's a very interesting um thing that i guess we'll only find out 200 years from now right after we're dead and looking at our children's children i don't know if we have to i don't even know if we have to wait that long i think we're actually seeing a microcosm of this play out right now like after 2022 like if you think of bitcoin and the overarching crypto space in 2023 i think last year a lot of people who were sort of playing both sides of the fence dcg being a good example of this block fi the people that

built those companies gemini and these services i think they've burnt a lot of their reputational capital over the last 12 months and moving forward the people who really put reputation ahead of profits you think companies like unchained like river disclaimer sponsored the podcast but it's for a reason like a line with these people because i think they uh have the good long-term vision or building out infrastructure the correct way or not scamming people in the future i think it's gonna be hard for the people in the last year burnt that reputational capital to actually uh come back and begin building the critical infrastructure i think people are maybe they come back and they say hey i'd like to build this with you or invest with

you and i think you know it's yet to be seen but i wouldn't be surprised if many of the people are building the critical infrastructure like no go away i don't want to be associated with you um yes they may have gotten quick profits in the first 14 years of bitcoin but it's still very early in the game and a lot of those people burnt that reputational capital and i don't think it's going to be easy to recoup that yeah well i mean that's a you know very very valid point and you know that sort of adds evidence to the idea that you know there there probably is a um you know an overlap or at least an influence between these sort of two two worlds so it's gonna be it's gonna be an interesting thing yeah it is gonna be interesting

does it validate the austrian thesis does it validate i i think i think so i mean the it's funny so one of the chapters actually in this book so i tried to like pull on uh on some threads like i looked at uh uh ancient traditions that had some overlap with bushido and then i tried to like create a a code of virtues of austrians um and like i said you know i'm well aware of the fact there is no fucking uh you know moral code of austrian economics but i said if there were uh these are sort of the um the the virtues that i would imagine it has and you know sort of there was like integrity in there um there was uh responsibility um self-control you know restraint and and i think

that one is specifically like a very uh very austrian-like ethic you know this idea of don't just go and push the fucking money printer button every time you have a problem like you know have some self-control god damn it um and i think that you know in in the in this because we've sort of been in the century of no self-control right we've been in the century of like complete abandon like do whatever the fuck you want to do drop bombs on people go you know do this to people lock everyone down like do whatever the fuck you want to do sort of this century has been um and you know print as much money as you want solve whatever problem you want and you know the austrians have sort of been like sitting here on the corner saying no it's a bad idea and like

everyone's been ignoring them and you know now that it's time to sort of pay the piper uh you know i mean most people are oblivious to what the actual problems are obviously you know they they think that the problems of you know the greedy capitalists for raising their prices at the uh you know like the the greedy corner uh petrol station who's making three cents profit on the uh on the gas it's his fault while you know biden and crew are like taking 80 cents like you know that that's that's the level of intellect that we're dealing with uh in the world today but like you know at some point you know the you know the tide is coming out the tide is receding and you know people are sort of starting to get a sense for you know where the real problems are

and this is you know maybe the bitcoin is like the austrian's last laugh it's like you know we try to warn you you know this sort of shit doesn't work and like you know bitcoin's this emergent phenomenon that is like made i guess to for lack of a better term austrian economics great again like it's the it's the trump card it's the ace in the in the sleeve that we've sort of had this entire time yeah and i guess it's a perfect segue to talk about the latest volume of The Bitcoin Times, Volume 5, correct? Indeed. The Austrian edition.

And so is this what you tried to get through with the consortium of writers that you collected in this volume to really get this message across, how Bitcoin works, how it changes things? And then Rahim obviously has a piece that's focused on a different sort of tangential idea to Bitcoin as well. so i'm really trying to yeah the history yeah yeah i mean the the whole the whole premise of this so this was the first edition that i specifically look to do around the theme right so all the previous editions were sort of more like hobby-esque in a sense uh you know the

like last year's edition or we're actually in 2023 so sorry 2021's edition was called a new hope So that had like Farrington and Tomer and Brandon Quittam and stuff like that. And it was like a collection of essays. There was a bit of a theme there. The theme there was like, hey, you know, last year in 2020, you know, we got a bunch of guys together and we wrote about how fucked up the world is. And, you know, that was like Jeff Booth and Parker Lewis and all that sort of stuff. And like sort of, you know, what Bitcoin's role is to play in maybe fixing that. But it was kind of like a, I shouldn't say depressing, but it was more downbeat.

and so then 2021 i was like let's do something that's more of a you know hopeful and you know each of the pieces were magnificent in edition four but edition five was really okay let's let's take a theme or a concept and let's look at bitcoin through this theme and then let's look at the theme through bitcoin so sort of like this two-way lens and you know the theme was the you know sort of this austrian idea and i mean i'm so fucking happy with how the design came out i i don't actually have one on me physically because i'm overseas but do you have one on you by any chance i do yeah it's like mckenna did a fantastic job like that and then you know the back cover is like my favorite with like all of the greats sort of collaged in there you know yeah i love the

you guys based the color scheme off of like the roof of this all right yes basically yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah. But what we did was actually we took, we took that building and then we used some like, you know, one of those like AI things to kind of like make it, give it a sense of like an oil painting. And then we use that color tone all the way throughout. Yeah. So yeah. So anyway. Very beautifully done. thank you sir so the yeah the design sort of all came together to kind of like you know bring forward this this idea but yeah each rider so it was like i think my claim to fame on this one is i managed to convince this thing to come out of hibernation and start writing again so that was like my you know one of my goals um so pierre obviously wrote a piece in there um uh safer dean

raheem uh conrad grafu i don't know if a lot of bitcoiners knew know who he is like i didn't actually know who it was until like i was having a conversation with bits he mentioned you know conrad is someone that should definitely was it actually no it was actually tour de meester who was who mentioned him who tour was supposed to actually write a piece for this and he just you know had some personal things going on so he couldn't couldn't make it so maybe one day i'll do an austrian edition two or something or maybe a history edition because i think two would be great for that but yeah he mentioned conrad and you know conrad wrote a magnificent uh essay in there and yeah basically each person took a took an idea and you know safer deans was this uh making time

preference low again like this idea of we've basically been talking about it this entire podcast like maturity as a as something that occurs as one has the ability to save money and therefore lower time preference and therefore mature as an individual and that's kind of like the the loop of uh of safer needs peace obviously but you know in more depth and he looks at like you know time preference and civilization time preference in the individual time preference and bitcoin etc etc um and yeah pierre did pierre did one which has a really like it's one of those short pieces with like one killer idea that you most people maybe haven't thought about but it's It's like he talks about the difference between risk and uncertainty and why risk is something that you can sort of account for, you know, and that's why things like insurance exist.

But uncertainty is something that can only be minimized through a technology like savings. And, you know, the ability to save across time is dependent upon basically the commodity good or network that actually acts as money. And he uses that as the argument that Bitcoin is actually an uncertainty-reducing mechanism. And that's why it's better money than gold, because gold has more inherent uncertainties associated with it. um so you know you can he and what he does by doing that is he kind of separates the discussion about price risk versus the actual functionality of bitcoin as a network and as a as a good um from the through the lens of uncertainty which i thought was like really powerful it actually took me twice to read that essay before that like point actually clicked and i was like fuck that's

such a good like uh separation so like when people you know want to think about like the gold versus bitcoin article or argument sorry that like article is such a good one yeah and a good follow-up to that one is uh a piece that bitstein just dropped in his sub stack around bitcoin being a speculative apps asset it's uh he really dives into that concept of risk for some certainty there too um oh beautiful fuck i haven't read that yet yeah it's a good it's a great short read but um no but all these concepts are important to understand yeah they're like the sort of like i kind of think about it as um as like using an intellectual scalpel and and this is something you and i were talking about this so you know we'll probably make an announcement on this podcast

about what this year's edition is going to be but um you know when i was speaking to these authors about like contributing and you know i said this to you the other day it's like a lot of the stuff that you know we talk about and that we're going to write about bitcoin is in some way shape or form been said by someone already or the connection's been made or someone sort of said something about it on twitter but like being able to i don't know take these ideas and these overlaps and try and either shine a new light on it or a different angle or something like or at least come away with like one or two good ideas like requires almost like a an intellectual scalpel like you need to be able to like slice through to like the core of an idea and kind of

like pull that out and be like here and i think that um that yeah each of the authors in this like i think did a really good job of that um but it's it's a challenge especially in you know in an industry like bitcoin where you know everyone's fucking writer apparently like you know everyone's writing something there's so much fucking content out there right oh yes oh yes no that's what i'm saying i mean i know you teased it but i'm really excited to be a part of the next edition because that's something i write almost every day but um it's like i was telling you last week it's a bit ephemeral it's a hot take on something that's going on in the space or something i've been thinking about and really sitting down and thinking about the topic that i'm going to write

about and spending a lot more time on it um and hopefully it can be a more evergreen piece that um that is not as ephemeral as the as the daily newsletter is something that's really exciting to me totally i mean well we may as well tell people what it is so like the this year's edition uh so the 2023 edition is going to be the energy edition so this idea of like looking at bitcoin through the lens of energy and looking at energy as a concept as an idea through uh through the lens of bitcoin you know and sort of what that symbiosis because like for me i can't remember who said this like on twitter like ages ago i could have been braid love but sort of um you know kind of like framing bitcoin as energy money it could have been sailor or something like that

but just sort of that idea that like energy is um and i remember reading baklav smil's book energy and civilization in there he quotes energy as like the um the universal currency and and it really is like you know other than time like you know energy is this sort of thing that's like a closed circuit and you know you just can't like sort of create a little bit more here on the side just because like you know everything that we're doing is a is a tapping in or a transformation of energy and you know that sort of you know closed conservative sort of uh ideal just maps so well over to the idea of uh a money that is like based in fucking reality and for me that's um that that's what bitcoin does so well and that's what the shit coiners for example don't see

like they just try and virtualize away the the very uh the very reality of something like energy or time you know that you can't sort of create more of those so it's like let's just fucking pretend that doesn't exist and let's just play our virtual game over here um so if you've got any thoughts on that i mean it's literally tied to the function of the network of proof of work it's funny because like what is energy energy helps you be more productive it helps you do more work it helps you leverage your intellect and your your like ability to move things in the physical world to be more productive and i think when it comes to bitcoin and energy particularly i mean energy is uniquely tied to this digital asset where it doesn't work without energy and

that's why it's proof of work like you need to prove that you've spent energy in the real world to create this value in the digital world and i i know many bitcoiners like myself have been talking about it for years but i really don't think that the wider public really understands this very unique connection of the physical world via energy in the digital world via the scarce token that has a profound will have a profound has had a profound impact on on humanity most people don't realize it yet yeah yeah dude like brandon quittem like wrote that piece in addition for about the uh the pioneer species right like how you know you you plant a bitcoin miner somewhere and in the same way as a pioneer species kind of becomes the the thing that like concentric circles

of life kind of form around like you know a bitcoin mining operation essentially becomes the you know the thing that bootstraps uh energy in a region that ng was probably not profitable to um you know to install or extract and like that kind of thinking blows my fucking mind when i think about you know fast forwarding 50 100 years from now like how basically inextricably linked and tied to you know energy that you know money is going to become like that's such a fucking big brain like i'm you know that meme with the with the wojak with the fucking brain kind of coming out and sitting on it that sort of reminds me of that it's like when you think about how much of a you know how much of a profound impact that is and it makes me think like whether

satoshi actually thought of that um or not like you know how much of this um how much of this sort of thinking and ideology is like emergent because we've kind of got this thing now like thinking about all the other stuff we can do with it versus you know how much this progenitor of bitcoin like could envision but just sort of kept to himself so that he didn't sound like a fucking maniac in the beginning yeah well it's emergent but we're also just observing what's happening i think that's the best part about this particular topic is it's not like hypothesizing or theorizing about what it could do yes maybe it is theorizing about what it could do at scale but we're observing this happen in real life i mean you have plenty examples like gridless in kenya that's what

they're doing to bring cheaper electricity to these rural areas uh i just had adam popescu on who wrote that piece on verunga national park and how they're using mining um at a hydroelectric dam with excess capacity to um to basically drive revenues for the national park and make sure the people that are living in the area have electricity we're seeing it at standard Bitcoin in rural parts of Tennessee where we're helping the local economies the rural economies that have had falling populations over the last few decades due to a hollowing out of their manufacturing base due to globalization we're helping them economically keep electricity prices low like the proof is

is in the pudding and i think that's my favorite part about this particular connection with with bitcoin and energy and this um this uh what did that what did uh brandon call him the um pioneer species like it's actually happening yeah yeah yeah totally totally it's um there's i mean you know the the other rabbit hole that i think is going to become more significant in the coming five years is sort of the the relationship well you know relationship but like the emergence of nuclear power as well and like how bitcoin might be able to help bootstrap that because like you know we are living in a you know just an extraordinarily strange era like you know you've got these incompetent buffoons that you know they can't conceive of like how people can

find a way to you know create more flourishing by creating more energy that they think that the only solution is to just like turn everything off you know and like basically reverse the clock like it's just so it's so petty and pathetic um that like you know we're actually living in a world where people are running around saying like carbon is bad and that energy is bad well that Yeah, I mean, that gets to the point, like, they're creating a solution to a problem that I honestly don't believe exists. And tying this back to, like, Austrian monetary theory, like, they're only allowed to LARP about this problem because they can print money and throw it at it with this either decommissioning of nuclear plants in favor of wind and solar, whatever it may be. This is only a product of subsidies where you're subsidizing these inefficient, unreliable energy sources that are making our grids less secure and less reliable at the end of the day because you can just print money and create these credits out of thin air and give them to these companies. and it's weird actually i got i've been thinking about this a lot lately um which is like bitcoin

mining provides this mechanism pre-bitcoin standard to actually like keep that larp going because now a big problem a lot of these solar and wind problem uh farms have which is similar to the nuclear generation problem which is like they can build up all this capacity but it takes while to build out the transmission lines to actually deliver it and so now with bitcoin mining being able to be the buyer first resort that electricity while you're waiting for the transmission lines to get built out and the subsidized crap is actually like oh look like it's even better now we have bitcoin mining that can finance these operations produce revenues early on but under a bitcoin standard or you can make the argument that the subsidies

the handouts to get those projects off the ground in the first place probably wouldn't exist. You'd be building more reliable energy sources that have actual costs or their costs are represented in the actual price. What do you think happens there over the long term, actually? You know, do you think that, because, you know, as Bitcoin becomes more prevalent, you know, it fucks with you know the incentives and you know things like subsidies etc become less attractive

but at the same time in the short term while there is these incentives you know people will try and use bitcoin mining for example as you said to to subsidize or to to justify these subsidies and going and building so kind of like it's almost like a you know bitcoins chewing away at the integrity of these you know unreliable sources of energy but in in the short term kind of supporting them so like do you think it it gets to a point where it kind of uh you know erodes them so that they just abolish altogether or do you think um it gets cheap enough like we get better at those things by virtue of bitcoin existing what's your thoughts there i don't know i don't in my opinion just if you look at the raw materials necessary to do any of the quote

unquote renewable energy at scale it doesn't make any sense to me i think it goes back to something they were discussing earlier in this discussion which is self-control i think if you're a bitcoin miner that is actually a bitcoiner who thinks we're going to transition to a bitcoin standard you're partaking in a big marshmallow test right now like yes you may get low cost of electricity um with the subsidized energy right now but if the dollar keeps getting debased and the subsidies go away like you could be setting up what you think to be a multi-decade mining operation and something that's not going to be profitable at some point in the medium term uh which again going back to self-control i think a lot of people in the industry

need to keep the marshmallow on the table and think about second and third order effects of bitcoin succeeding and saying uh maybe i shouldn't be spending all this capital and time on this operation because if bitcoin succeeds which i would imagine many miners not all but many think it's going to succeed and that's why they start mining businesses in the first place should internalize that that re that future reality if bitcoin does take over that they're going to be mining on electric using electricity is going to become significantly more expensive because it's not being subsidized anymore so are these these solar farms like being subsidized from a capex standpoint that's sort of what you mean right is like so you know they they're building

a business model around this is the cost of setting up because once it's set up right there isn't really a cost to the production on an ongoing basis yeah yeah i think it's dual faceted it's the initial capital you can get um like cheap loans if you're doing a renewable project and then on an ongoing basis you get tax credits so you get reduced tax bills for operating that type of which just like it's weird like i i think uh taxes are bad and immoral as well um but when you compare like why why should one why should a coal plant or a natural gas plant have to pay higher taxes yeah exactly yeah so it just perturbs the pricing mechanism of all this shit totally totally yeah i mean it's it's interesting because yeah i i get reached out

a lot by people saying oh you know um we're we're looking at doing this uh bitcoin mining and it's sustainable and you know whenever i hear the word sustainable i just like i i'm like cringing waiting for like the solar panel piece or the wind piece well that's again language is important you're sustainable and renewable particularly because i wrote a piece about this a couple weeks ago which is the the whole term renewable is a massive psyop because to the unwitting masses it it puts a picture of this perpetual motion machine in their head where yes the sun is likely to to rise every day and the wind is likely to blow pretty consistently in some areas so that they are sustained sources of energy but you have to harness that energy and so like when

you say renewable energy people think of this perpetual motion machine but it's not a perpetual motion machine these technologies that harness that solar wind energy have front ends of their supply chains which are very energy intensive and depend on fossil fuels and then while they're up and running it takes a lot of maintenance you got to replace parts you got to scrub the solar panels do all that and then on the back end these things have life cycles they don't they're not perpetual motions machines you don't just set it in motion and they run into perpetuity they have a few decades at best and then you have to replace them and that comes with another front end of the supply chain another capital injection more maintenance like

it's not the whole term renewable just really puts this idea in people's head that simply isn't true yeah yeah i mean one of my pit fucking peeves is like the um you know i think there was that photo going around of like the soul panels in the in the um in the landfill and it's like you know just i mean both both in the landfill and then outside of the fucking landfill these like large beautiful areas like especially when they cover grass up like you know you've got these grassy hills this sort of like beautiful land that could be like pasture land or something or just just beautiful and green and they're like just cover it up with these fucking panels it's like it's the most i don't know like fear nature degrading shit i've ever seen yeah yeah negative externalities

of environmental destruction just comes from them existing and not allowing light to actually reach the plants that that desperately rely on photosynthesis like that's not talked about i mean uh i mean wildlife animals that are affected by this the trade-off again it's just use the terms renewable sustainable and try to make everybody believe that these are good terms that should be striven for and then you don't talk about the trade-offs that come with it it's again i think a big psyop and a disingenuous marketing campaign totally totally it just it like really rubs me the wrong way and it's funny just like for the record when i was in my early 20s you know i i was totally silenced and i was selling solar panels you know that's what

we're putting on people's houses and stuff like that the only reason the only reason that people did any of that was because the government paid for half of the system through these credits um and then they gave people uh input tariff uh deductions so that way you know if you were running solar panels like it made pure economic sense to do so and i always find this funny it's like you know the keynesians and like this to tie it back into the austrian economics piece it's like they laugh at austrians and say oh you know incentives don't matter right so then the way they get their stupid programs and ideas across the line is by offering you know tax write-offs or you know tariff inputs or fucking made-up certificates which inevitably you know skew

the economic system in some way but it actually incentivizes people to go and make a decision much better than any of their other methods um so it's like they they they ignore the austrian school of thought when it doesn't benefit them and then they use the basis of austrian thought which is incentives uh when it does benefit them it's such a fucking laugh it drives me crazy when they can control the incentives they like they like to uh to rely on that that core principle yeah it's like oh it doesn't exist but for this it exists okay yeah but going back to like order and structuring and stuff like that i think i recorded an episode earlier or last year with a gentleman by the name of John Constable out of the UK.

And I think if you freaks haven't listened to that episode yet, you should go back and listen to it because going back to this concept of order and entropy, like it's much, when you just look at a photon produced by the sun versus kinetic energy produced by wind versus hydrocarbons versus nuclear energy, like literally the structured order has a spectrum and on the far left of the spectrum very little order is solar and wind and as you get closer towards nuclear you get more

and more order and structure which allows you to be more efficient and productive with those particular sources of energy i mean that's so order basically what you're saying is like brings density right yes that's essentially what you're doing yeah exactly yeah that's that's such a great analogy um i'm gonna go back and listen to that that's a um yeah like because that's essentially what um what noise is right like noise is uh is like filling the air with um with unstructured stuff right like and this sort of like ties into another thing that i've you know done a lot of thinking on is like music you know like why does some music sound good and just some music sound like fucking you know like screeching in your head right like so there's something about like

you know the the fractal nature of the universe that certain you know like why does the fucking octave exists like in music like it just does like there's a there's a pattern there right and like it's a it's a it's a function of order as you said and it's a it's a function of like a density of um of like uh tonality and sound like to sort of fit within a framework you know and this is it's funny it's like you know shit coining is basically just noise shit coining is saying that okay we don't need an octave in music we can just play whatever fucking note we want to play like it just doesn't make any sense no it's we can do it so we should but maybe you shouldn't because it hurts our ears like it's not pleasant it sounds fucking bad yeah it's um yeah a lot of

people have bad taste as we found out last four that is true that is true that is true and you know what and then they try and turn the bad taste into a virtue did you see that like there was an ad the other day like celebrating ugliness or some shit you gotta be fucking kidding me bro i was like i mean i've i've honestly like i've kind of like muted and unsubscribed from a lot of the clown world news and all that sort of stuff because i just can't handle it anymore like i i know how retarded the world is and just being reminded of it every day like i just don't think it's good for the soul anymore like i think we all got sucked into the style in 2020 2021 2022 like me particularly like last year if i look back on my you know particularly

my behavior on twitter and stuff like that i was like an angry motherfucker and i think it was just a a function of just i don't know man like i was just frustrated with just like how categorically stupid everything was um so i think like for my own mental health like i've stopped like paying any attention to that stuff but you know some stuff still seems to like find its way through the cracks and i just saw that yesterday i was like you gotta be kidding me i celebrate being ugly and fat i'm happy to report that i missed that that saya that messaging doesn't surprise me it's out there but no i agree actually my twitter usage has gone down pretty significantly over the last two three months um dude mine

since december like you know i just like got off from christmas and i just haven't properly been back on like i maybe tweeted like 20 times in the last month it feels so fucking good yeah it does that's the other thing is it's not i've never i didn't make like the intentional decision to tweet less i think i've just been busier with family life and work and been more focused on real stuff real stuff yeah exactly which is a good i'm happy that it's happening it's uh twitter is a very potent distraction when you're actually trying to get shit done it really is man like it just sucks you in you know like you know one thing that helped me was like i deleted the app from my phone so it's like the only way i access it now is through the

computer and you know that's like it's uh it's helped a lot like i mean it's funny like we keep coming back to this theme of quality and quantity right it's like you know quality is just so precious and it's it's funny it's like quality is wasted on the youth you know because when you're young you sort of you've got this kind of illusion that everything's gonna be great you know you're fit like you you heal really quickly like i've noticed this as well like you know when i was in my early 20s like i had this major motorbike accident once like i got bumped by a truck and um and like i came off my bike and i was going like almost 60 miles an hour so it was like you know maybe 50 miles an hour like 80 kilometers and you know i was young and wild i never wore any

protective clothing never wore any gloves any of that sort of shit and i was on a cbr 600 double r like a sports honda and you know i slid down the road um for probably like 50 meters so 50 yards like i think that's 150 feet and like i still remember the the accident because i was like falling in slow motion and i remember like earlier that day i had a alert from my mac that said you haven't backed up your mac for you know 97 days or some shit and all i could imagine was like my macbook was in my backpack and so like i could have fallen on my back and like been okay but instead like i put my hand down and like i slid on my ass in my hand and i saved the macbook um but i like literally ripped the fucking skin off my hand like clean off my my whole palm

and the doctors were like you know first of all you know you're an idiot for not wearing you know gloves and all this sort of stuff but they're like you know you're probably not gonna be able to use your hand for a month dude i was back in the gym in four days like five days i was back in the gym like it was insane like the doctors were like what the fuck how did you like your skin healed up like like calling me wolverine but now like 10 years later motherfucker i like go to the gym do a bench press hurt my back you're laid up it's so bad so i don't know like the older you get the more you know you sort of think back to your youth you like kind of want to slap yourself in the face it's like you know quality motherfucker like because you just you you scatter all your

energy like in your 20s like you're doing like 10 million things at once like you're so fucking busy being busy um you know you're just like expending all this energy and like you know sort of come to this point where i'm like man it's not about quantity like it really isn't about more stuff more things like it's about like trying to like condense that to to a few things and like focus is a superpower yeah focus is super is a superpower and impact right like you're focused on quantity doing as much as you possibly can you know it's just like a flattened out impact and all those different experiences that you're embarking on where if you focus on quality of a few things,

you can have a much larger impact than you would if you were spread thin. Yeah, it's like it's concentration, right? Yeah, exactly. That's something I'm going back to like the diamond thing. I think that's something I've experienced in the last five years, particularly in the professional life with this podcast the newsletter the mining stuff in 1031 it's really like um at a point where i'm just sort of trying to perfect the the focus that i have on on these things instead of i think maybe three or four years ago i was trying to get

involved in as many things as possible it's like no i'm good at these things let's focus on this make these yeah adulting bro that's uh i think that's the stage we're at now like trying to become adults yeah it's probably not a coincidence that i've had two children over that span as well which is totally totally totally and yeah i mean for me i'm not at the kid stage yet but yeah i actually decided to take the leap like when i was younger i never thought i was gonna get married and then here i am like and you know what i think a part of that actually has been you know the the idea of you know maturity and time preference and shit like that that's come from bitcoin so you know maybe that answers my question that i was talking about earlier is like

does bitcoin have uh an impact on that and you know if it's not bitcoin specifically that has the impact at least it's the perception that a bunch of us bitcoiners have that you know time preference is important and you know we've kind of like expanded on this idea and it's almost become like a bit of a mind virus it's like slow down focus think long term and um you know we're finding our own maturity in the presence of something like it which is kind of really interesting to see yeah and we're like going back to like time and how old we are too i'm in my early 30s now i've been so weird i found bitcoin when i was 21 and just being exposed to it for a better part of a decade a full decade almost it's like you learn you haven't seen too many

shit coin market cycles too many bitcoin like this bear market everybody was freaking out and i'm i felt relatively calm cool and collected um and able to figure there was a lot of people i've witnessed a lot of people during this bear market freak out and lose focus where this is the exact time to be doubling tripling down and really like building out um what will be successful in the next cycle totally totally um is there any is there any other threads you want to pull on from the from the austrian edition i think we should talk about michael's piece because i think that's a really powerful piece actually helped him um i actually read that a couple times for him before it was published i think it's just an extremely

important piece to really understand the governance of bitcoin and the importance of running a full node and how that fits into the context of austrian theory so what if you had to sum up um the the importance of a node because even to this day i still have um an element of trouble in like trying to you know You know, I'm going to say like speaking to my mom, for example, like I don't think I would be able to convince her of the importance of running a node. So, so how, how do you generally go about explaining that or why, why is it important? What's your one liner?

Well, I don't know if it's a one liner, but if you juxtapose it, I think, I think it's all about like freedom of association and participation. in this truly distributed network that will give you assurances that can bring a sound money standard to the world. We juxtapose it with the centrally controlled central banking system with master nodes, very few full nodes, master nodes. You can't audit, you can't, there's no transparency.

You don't have any say on how that monetary system works because you're not allowed to run a node. I think the power of running a full node really comes in with the ability to validate, to get transparency, and to participate in the governance structure via the software that you decide to download or to use as your node software. Not very articulate, not succinct,

But I mean, I think it all comes back to freedom of association, participating, and most importantly, recognizing that participation is key if you want to preserve the qualities that Bitcoin, the value prop that Bitcoin gives the world. yeah i've been um so i was doing some writing the other day about like coming back to the samurai thought so you know the samurai that their weapon was obviously the sword right and you know the sort of the theory is that the the soul of the samurai resides in the sword you know they get given the the wooden kendo stick from the age of five and basically their whole progression as a as a young boy through to teenagehood when they're actually given the sword and become a man at the age of 15 um you know they're given the actual real sword um you know from that age it's sort of like this um you know the analogy i made like for the

bitcoin um you know their their sword is their key basically their keys in a sense it's like that is that is the the quintessential piece of you know your bitcoin um you know arsenal for lack of a better term right and then i was trying to find like an analogy for the for the node and you know i thought of like the horse or something like that because like both in samurai culture and in you know i mean the word chivalry relates to horsemanship um in in the west it's like the the knight with the horse was seen as the protector of the property or the or the consensus the protector of kind of like governance in a sense in in the realm or in the region and like the node is almost like the horse it's like it's a you know sure if you hold your bitcoin keys

as an individual that's that's one thing and you know you sort of have your private property that's like having your sword but like being the the knight um and being the participant in the you know the enforcement of the consensus rules you know in the network and i know i'm stretching here with fucking analogies but like there seems to be some sort of you know overlap to me it's like a running a node is basically i mean i think this has been said probably by michael or someone like that but it's like it makes you a first class bitcoin citizen you know not just a you know a dependent with some keys and i think that you know there's a there's probably like a you know the utilitarian argument for running your own node i think is quite weak

because like you know sure like i can run my node and i can check it myself but i think there is like a i know like a more of like a noble argument for running a node it's like you know are you a fucking bitcoin peasant or are you like a bitcoin you know first class citizen yeah yeah no no definitely i think that going back maybe it's not really part of the utilitarian and sort of meme behind running a node. But if we're being honest, you do need a certain number of Bitcoin first-class citizens to ensure that the network doesn't become perturbed

and co-opted in the future. And so, yeah, maybe it is like the hero's journey of a knight or a samurai where we need to engender that type of culture with, I don't know exactly what the number is, but certainly at least some number of people to ensure that the network survives. It's almost like a duty, right?

And this is sort of like you look at all these feudal cultures or the warrior cultures and all that sort of stuff, is they had the primary warrior caste, and it was their duty to defend land, able to defend the territory, do that sort of stuff. So in many ways, like, the node runners are the defenders of the Bitcoin territory or the Bitcoin consensus rules. And, you know, there's, I think, this is why, like, I'm kind of leaning towards the noble call to, you know, be that person, you know, not because, you know, just you can trick transactions,

but it's like, you know, you, you are, you know, like an official Bitcoiner when you have no, you know, until then you just like a dependent dude with a wallet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. Unfortunately, I think the storm that has come over the town that you're currently in is affecting the noise, but Yeah, so I think we're going to have to wrap

unless the storm stops soon. No, it ain't going to stop. No, it ain't going to stop. It's going to get worse, yeah. So where can anybody get their hands on the Bitcoin Times, the Austrian edition? Yes. Is it sold out yet?

So it is not sold out yet. I sell it in like 500 chunks. So to give people some context here really quickly, there will be 21 editions over 21 years. each edition is going to have its own theme so as I said that's my edition last year this year is going to be the energy edition and there is a collectible of each one being printed and that's what Marty has if you're watching the video in the back there if you're listening if you jump on bitcoin times.io you can see what the collectible looks like but it's a gorgeous

print of um of the magazine itself in like a thick high quality um paper paper stock and there's 2100 of each of the collectibles being printed so at the moment only edition three four and five have been printed i'm getting one and two redesigned so that way there's like consistency to the theme so they'll go out probably in march or april or something and you know it's only available for sats each one is numbered uniquely on the back so like for example edition one sorry issue 121 2100 1031 and 1984 i think those ones are going to be auctioned off but yeah what marty's sort of pointing to there each one has a has a unique number so people i know like there's a bunch of people that are collecting them like mark moss

for example he gets issue number 10 of every edition um so 10 of 2100 um and you know brand of quinn for example gets number 33 2100 so so each sort of people you know collect them in that way but yeah they're available on bitcoin times.io you can get a three pack for a discount um i also do flat rate shipping so that saves you some sets and i'm going to chuck a code for marty which is going to be tftc on checkout and i can't remember how i set that up i think that'll save you about 30 000 sets or something like that off the um off the rate so if you want to support the work support the people who are writing it um and start collecting these suckers you know it's only it's only the creme de la creme of writers so hope you'll jump on and check it out i can attest to

the quality of the content and the quality of the uh the actual product it's very high quality I have issue or not issue I have I have number 150 out of 2100 of the Austrian edition I'm very happy to have it yeah I've got my stack I've got three four and five right here I will pick up one and two once they're released in print later this year and I hope to grow the stack to 21 21 issues tall it's gonna look sexy when it's done man it's gonna beautiful i'm just gonna keep coming up with fucking novel ideas i think each year so like energy's coming up i think you know another obvious one will be like the philosophy edition probably like a theology edition you know christianity and shit like that i think there's

gonna be some good ones but you know if anyone's got any ideas and shit like that like i've got um you know the the twitter handle is timeless bitcoin so like reach out let me know but you know i'm planning i'm planning ahead for this one yeah one thing you've done too i mean you do have um sponsors throughout but you've like matched the the aesthetic of the whole issue with the sponsors which i think is unique as well yeah thank you yeah i tried to yeah i think the design thing for me was just super important because that that's like you know these days with like the amount of you know we sort of said it before like tongue-in-cheek like you know everyone's a bitcoin writer but like also in just in the modern world in general like everyone's a fucking author

now and the amount of like hack books that are out there like that are just like whipped up you know as you know like there's people doing courses about you know how to write a book in 30 days you know put together like a skeleton thing and like you know blah blah and it's just so like cheap and hacky and it's like just like run-of-the-mill crap that is just regurgitated from somebody else and for me i wanted to just really do something different with this it's like okay let's put some real effort because that's like a two month worth of designing and thinking about like how the imagery and the visuals kind of like tell the story of the theme and the articles and stuff like that so yeah like thank you thank you for picking that up because you know there's

a lot of work that went into this that i think it'll take a keen eye to to see well thank you for producing it thank you for the conversation yeah it went in a direction i wasn't expecting but i'm very happy that it did for sure as always thank you freaks go to bitcoin times.io pick up the latest edition and keep a lookout for one and two and then the energy edition which should be out later this year enjoy uh enjoy the rest of your storm it seems like uh this sounds like a storm that you go and you sit and you watch it it really is i'm just gonna poke into that and relax bro I'm done for the day

alright enjoy it thanks brother peace and love freaks okay