TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #509: Sustaining Bitcoin For Generations with Michael Goldstein

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Marty sits down with Michael Goldstein to discuss the Nakamoto Institute, timeless ideas, and bitcoin rhetoric. Learn about the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute design fundraiser: https://news.nakamotoinstitute.org/p/help-give-sni-timeless-beauty Support the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute design fundraiser: https://pay.zaprite.com/pl_saYgrVYmCi Michael on Twitter: https://x.com/bitstein Michael on Nostr: https://primal.net/bitstein Nakamoto Institute: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/ Nakamoto Institute on Twitter: https://x.com/NakamotoInst Nakamoto Institute on Nostr: https://primal.net/sni 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - Nakamoto Institute origins 5:42 - Timeless ideas 12:08 - River & Unchained 13:24 - Popularity drivers for Austrian econ 22:26 - Distractions from bitcoin as money 27:39 - Gradually, Then Suddenly & Zaprite 29:16 - Framing fiat’s weakness 36:28 - Art of Bitcoin Rhetoric 43:11 - Don’t let haters dictate terms 50:08 - “Trust in human institutions” 1:01:29 - The power of effective messaging 1:19:40 - Highlighting solutions 1:25:19 - Advertisements and algorithms 1:33:35 - Nakamoto Institute revitalization 2:00:06 - Ossification discourse 2:08:40 - Telethon brainstorm and plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠…

this rip of tftc was brought to you by river it's the best place to buy bitcoin go to river.com tftc and enjoy this episode you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be. All right. michael goldstein we're rolling we're rolling it's been seven years you've never been on the show this is embarrassing if this is the first time yes that um it's happening though it is it's happening it's happening it just started out of nowhere i don't know i don't know where to go with it all right that's the show i'm kidding there's plenty to talk about you've got a lot going on would you define what you're doing with the nakamono institute as a

rebirth of the institute itself i don't know that it died it definitely didn't die it didn't die um i think if it is uh you know it's a bit of a revitalization revitalization that's the right way i'm very excited it was uh it was in hibernation i mean it i've told you this I don't think I'd be where I am today without the Nakamoto Institute being where it was when I was on my journey in 2013, 2014. I don't think I would have either. I mean, I made it out of, you know,

all the stuff that had gotten me into Bitcoin and got me excited about Bitcoin. That's what went into the Nakamoto Institute, especially in those, you know, early days. So, you know, it kind of follows my own path into Bitcoin as well. Yeah. what was what was bitcoin the bitcoin scene in austin like when you guys were

originally writing those pieces there was a small meetup group um it could depend on price although i i get the years confused so uh just to go back in time the nakamoto institute was started in november 2013 and um it's hard to remember those years it's been a while but um i was in college i was at the university of texas um that in particular formed out of the uh the misi circle which was a economics uh reading group that i had um because i wanted to nerd out on all of the uh the uh good austrian literature uh a lot of the you know the college libertarian groups would always you'd come in and it would always want to be just the same topics over and over because there's always some new person and you want to talk about the broken

windows fallacy or this or that. And, uh, I just wanted to nerd out. I wanted to actually dive deep. And, um, so we, we, I made like a spinoff group. So we had a space to, uh, to do that. And, um, you know, we, we were arguing about full reserve versus fractional reserve. Uh, and then along came Bitcoin and, um, we all got into that and it basically became the Bitcoin circle. And, um, a lot of the notable Nakamoto Institute articles had originally been published, uh, on our MISI circle website. Um, and, uh, and then at some point actually, so yeah, there was also, there was also a local Austin meetup group. And, uh, I don't remember how many people there were. It was probably like 20 people would come. It felt like a nice group

and sometimes it'd be bigger. Um, definitely in 2014, you know, things were getting crazy. And so it got much bigger, especially when, um, things were pumping. Um, but yeah, so we, uh, there was the meetup group and, uh, I specifically remember one, I think it was in, I want to say it was May, 2013. It was at Central Market here in Austin. And, um, um this guy turda meester was going to be in town they were doing some mining stuff and i was i was very excited because i had been following his his work on uh i think it was i think he was on twitter at the time um but i'd followed his work and he had good uh austrian stuff he himself has a uh storied background uh with uh austro-libertarian thought and so i was

excited to meet him and uh i got to and uh we were chatting and um we joked um around and i was saying you know there's a a ludwig ludwig von misi's institute for austrian economics there should be a satoshi nakamoto institute for uh bitcoin and um that stuck in my head and then uh later on in the year it just uh there's you know enough had built up and i was like okay let me go uh throw some stuff on the domain i had bought and uh so it began so it began and again i think it's been a crucial institute institution for many big corners like myself and i think the one thing i admire the most about the the canon of literature that you've put together They're both generated by yourself, Pierre, Daniel, and others,

and the Austrian and cypherpunk literature that you've aggregated on the site. The one word I would use to describe all of the content, the combination of that content is timeless. I can go back and read Everyone's a Scammer, hyper bitcoinization uh speculative attack and they ring true to this day i think those are whenever he's whenever somebody's coming to me like what should i read about bitcoin um speculative attack and everyone's a scammer are two of the first articles i send them

and i think with that in mind why do you think those pieces are so timeless yeah well i mean first of all thank you um as far as why they're timeless i think um i think they just hit on some foundational points that have really been able to continually resonate with people so there's a lot of lessons in there that people can go back to over time and like see a new thing each time um and uh and because we were trying to do things from a uh a uh you know first principles attitude um when when we got into bitcoin there wasn't a lot of like good austrian literature about bitcoin there was some in fact some of it was crucial for our own understanding of Bitcoin. Um, guys like Peter Serta, uh, had written his master's thesis, uh, economics of

Bitcoin. And I mean, a lot of our stuff was almost just cribbing from his own economic work. Um, but you know, you still had to kind of run the numbers yourself, so to speak. And, um, from that, you know, we, we got to enter in this place where we, you know, uh, you know, I, I come from a technical background i was studying computer science um or at least that's what i got my degree in i was mostly studying austrian economics uh on my own um but i i come from that technical background and um and then you know you also have this this strain of of uh austrian thought so that's more you know in the the sort of humanities liberal art liberal art and um um this was like fresh ground to be able to kind of really bring them together um in a uh new and

interesting way new not in the sense that it's like rewriting everything it's actually i i think it rewrites very little um if anything um but uh it's able to give that real fresh take that really forces you and one of my favorite things about bitcoin with regards to austrian economics is the fact that it's such an abstract uh idea you know it's just it's an idea in our heads that we instantiate into some code that communicates with one another it's all it's all abstract and what's interesting about that is that forces us to take certain precepts of the austrian tradition much more seriously than we had to previously and things like subjective value where it's like well value is so subjective that uh yeah i can actually have reason to place

a high premium on some cryptographic strings which is very strange and very hard for for many who are not as um technically literate um you know as knowledgeable to to be able to make sense of and then um it also you know then forces us to think about uh you know you know in in austrian economics we we want things to be um itself is it's supposed to be timeless where we're dealing with logical theorems about the very nature of human action and so when you're getting into that realm you're talking about action in a very pure sense because It's the only way to really make sense of typing away in cyberspace. So it does invite going back

and really making sure you understand those concepts seriously to be able to work through it and do well. So I think we generally did a pretty good job. and i think uh over time uh you know people have have come to appreciate that as well um and in many cases agree and yeah i i think it's uh it's forced a lot of people to rethink money and so when you have a set of ideas that was so good that we can take books from the 1800s and the early 1900s and apply it well and have a totally workable monetary theory that holds up through everything we've seen with

Bitcoin, it makes it more and more difficult over time to not ask, why is that? What makes those ideas in particular uh so special that they don't get knocked down and in many ways you know i i don't i don't view myself as as a genius or anything like that i just have like i i locked in on what ended up being like the the best ideas to sort of be locking in on uh when you confront something like bitcoin because nothing else has has quite been able to make sense of it and that's really given it a sense of timelessness where you can always come back to it. And, you know, I do want to do my best to add to that tradition of creating, you know, what are real, true economic theorems that are not dependent on time

and are really just part, baked into the fabric of reality. This episode was presented by River. River is the best, most secure place to buy Bitcoin in the United States. go to river.com slash tftc set up an account today you'll be able to dca into bitcoin without paying any fees you'll be able to give people bitcoin via river links you'll be able to send and receive bitcoin over the lightning network and you'll be able to set limit orders if you want to buy bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now you can set orders to buy bitcoin when it hits that price go to river.com slash tftc and set up your account today this

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code tftc at checkout unchained.com a couple things i want to get down here is a lot of people give ron paul credit he deserves a lot of credit but do you think bitcoin specifically has driven a lot of the resurgence of attention on austrian economics or is it just part of the growing attention and forever behind austrian theory that seems to be picking up over the last few years uh you know a few weeks ago i could have just joked it was like no everyone just like decided they wanted to read ludwig von mises and now everyone's but we actually you know we had uh uh, uh, the, uh, Brazilian fighter. Um, I, I apologize. I cannot remember his name. Reino. Um, but he, yeah, he, he had, you know, his absolutely tremendous speech,

um, about why everyone should go read six lessons by, uh, alluded on Mises, but, uh, yeah, so that joke doesn't work anymore, but, uh, yeah, I think in the early days it was that, that ron paul movement uh was certainly a huge catalyst for uh libertarianism in general and uh the sort of austro-libertarian tradition in particular um i was i i was not um directly brought into that because of ron paul but i was in that you know kind of cohort broadly speaking and um you know he's he's the one who taught us all you know effectively him him and his friends at the ludovon mises institute were the ones who taught us what fiat money is why fiat money is bad why sound money is good and so on and so forth and so um that really did i think drive um

drive that back in the day and i think uh more recently though um you know ron paul uh he he lost in 2012 um you know uh not treated fairly surprise surprise but um in any case you know he he did not uh continue on after that he's well through politics specifically i mean he's still been a powerhouse since um but uh you know libertarianism as a sort of like political force waned completely after ron paul's demise um in the election and uh i think a lot a lot of people you know uh felt like you know they weren't winning anymore like there was no hope of winning like libertarianism was just like a losing strategy and so all kinds of different people ran off in all kinds of different ways um and that kind of died off but bitcoin was still there

and uh that's what i was you know continued to be drawn to um and uh because bitcoin does what it does uh you know by 2017 we had another bull run and that really was uh another major turning point because it showed a lot of people that this thing if they didn't know about it before they learned uh and if they had learned about it before they learned this thing is still alive why is it still alive um and that sent a lot of people down the rabbit hole and i think a lot of those people if you were just coming in then you tended to be probably more just in it for the money uh in terms of like gains at least like in that moment you show up and it's like wow this thing's going up a lot i want in on that why wouldn't you and um i as it goes out though you get sucked in it's

you know you you get pushed down the rabbit hole and uh it's hard it's hard to get out so um since that you know those those people though they just showed up because they wanted to make a quick buck i'm sure a lot of them um or it sounded interesting or whatever but same same thing that i was describing earlier is like how how do i make sense of this um and you you ask enough of those questions and there's going to be these answers and thankfully bitcoiners because we heavily skewed towards more of a a libertarian uh disposition broadly speaking uh it was much easier for someone to stumble across austrian economics literature uh than it would have been previously um and i think another major turning point for this was in the beginning of 2018

uh safety namus our friend safety uh published the bitcoin standard uh which quickly took over for good reason as a the definitive sort of bitcoin book to read if you just need to learn about the why of bitcoin uh that remains the book to read and i think that uh that also meant uh a lot of people were already into bitcoin and they start reading that and now they want to know more about like how did safe it didn't come up with this stuff uh which is you know he was you know uh reading about austrian economics i mean i've talked with him about austrian economics for years uh thinking about these things and uh uh yeah so uh that that was a that was a huge turning point uh as well and then i guess there's also a lot of people who now they get handed a book

uh you know it's like people are passing out the bitcoin standard all over the world and those people their introduction to bitcoin is through this lens of austrian economics and so i people's guard has really gone down you know we've gone from being a a sort of crank way of thinking about economics to um at the very least a uh formidable uh you know forced to be reckoned with yes yes so uh that's that's been fantastic and i mean the fact that is and then and then on top of that uh they decided to just like wreck the global economy um so that's one way to teach people about uh money good and bad and uh so that has also uh you know played into this uh a large part since and we are now you know fiat is a term that people know which was not the case like we

were learning that word from dr paul you know and it was a totally crank thing you know now it's like a meme like that's very fiat yeah and yeah and everyone uh but but like even even the sort of normie world like it's it's it's part of the the uh dialogue now and so uh that's it's extremely exciting and as those people talk about it it's like now there's more bitcoiners and they've studied up on this and so uh when people get into it they're finally learning it's it's easier than ever uh to learn proper economics and actually understand what's happening to your money and how we can fix it so very bullish times yeah you know i'm thinking about my journey too it's interesting because i studied economics in college got my degree in economics but was

inundated and indoctrinated or they attempted to indoctrinate me with the neoliberal keynesian view of the world um and i did not understand austrian economics until i got into bitcoin found the nakamoto institute started reading what you guys were putting out and then in parallel with the economics i was being indoctrinated with in college reading the austrian view and comparing the two not only with each other from the theoretical standpoint but at that time that's when qe2 was starting and people were beginning to use bitcoin on the silk road or not beginning to it's towards the end of the silk road stay and i was like oh this makes a lot more sense to me and then kept diving down obviously here today and fully understand that this is a monetary phenomenon

that's another thing going back to the timelessness of the nakamoto institute and the literature that you guys put out there over a decade now at this point i think it's timeless for me at least because uh at the same time i was studying economics and discovering bitcoin that's when like the social media craze was going tech was big apps were big and you had this silicon valley explosion going on in parallel and that was and still is to this day very confusing for people that look at bitcoin and view it as a tech phenomena and not understanding think of it as a new app yes you have a new app we have a new database that we can anchor into this distributed database whatever whatever app you have you can make another one yes you just

make as many of these as you want and uh fundraise that way yeah this is the future this is we don't need middlemen to fundraise now we can ico but the point being is like i think even to this day i mean we see it now with the i don't think it's as strong as it was in the past but the market for altcoins uh you have all these smart contracts on these well they've had to adapt like every time they they have to they have to adapt um it's it's well one part of it is uh you know the the history of alt coins is almost like just watching a history of like web marketing skills you know because it starts you go on like bitcoin talk and in 2013 and it's just you know there's there's a board for it it's just like you have in the brackets like ann you know announcements like i

got gorilla coin and you know it's like it has it has 65 million coins and it you know and so on it so it has you know five minute blocks it's a fair launch proof of work system so we're going to launch it on this date and anybody can mine it that was the it's fun and it's funny to see how egregious egregiously scammy they've gotten over the years with like the early days of all coins like if you're going to launch an all coin you had to make sure that it was a fair proof of work launch you you announce the date and yeah anybody could participate like ic is i guess ethereum really uh pulled off uh doing the pre-mine you know as as like a legitimate way to be quote-unquote legitimate uh way to uh to launch your coin yes and then suddenly everyone everyone

pretends like that's like a totally justified thing and oh it's like good because now they get a bunch of you know development money to go work on the world computer the virtual machine unstoppable code yeah but for people out there who may be confused in your mind is this more of a monetary phenomena a tech phenomena or a combination of the two monetary phenomena enabled by tech money is a technology that's a good point there's that uh yeah no i mean i think uh yeah oh i mean i actually i do believe that you know money is money is a technology um but yeah i mean i think people people tend to uh lack what i think is a strong theory of money to even understand what it is that money is um and uh but they do understand tech they understand

how to make an app and so they can put it in those terms you know people people just you know want to shove things in boxes based on what they already know uh so i i think that you know that can be uh part of it yeah and why would you argue that people should focus more on the money than the tech uh because in in this sense the technology the technology exists for the purposes of creating a better money it's you know i hate to be that guy it's like it's right there in the white paper um but it's uh you know that that is the purpose that was like the teleology of satoshi sitting down at his computer he's very clear about this in his in his posts about it and i'm not saying that you know you have to take it as gospel or something like that i'm just you know the guy

clearly or whoever it was you know uh you know cia team whatever it may have been um satoshi nakamoto when he sat down at his computer um to uh make bitcoin i think his best post on this actually is the uh when he his first post to the uh p2p foundation he he gives this great thing about monetary debasement and uh the need to uh remove the trust uh that is always abused and so on and so forth that's why this thing was made you know so uh this is you know this is what's always been the the sort of bankruptcy of the the idea of you know block blockchain not bitcoin it's like uh well the purpose of blockchain is to enable bitcoin so it's actually the other way around um i'm you know you've you've probably hammered that point a gazillion times on this

show so i'm sure your listeners uh already know that but um you know yeah i i think uh we have to think about the the sort of teleology of the uh what is the end of actually creating that technology in the first place. In this one, it was like, better money. And so we should focus on, well, what does it mean to be better money? And I would argue that Bitcoin does a great job of being better money on many, many dimensions.

And that's what makes it great, not some data structure underneath. The data structure is great insofar as it succeeds in making good money. i've been told that bitcoin season two is here and bitcoin really exists to inscribe jpegs into metadata that are hashed on chain yeah i'm sure they're you know i'm sure they're having fun quick break here freaks this rip is brought to you by gradually then suddenly a framework for understanding bitcoin is money by parker lewis i wrote the forward to the book

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subscription zap right.com slash tftc forty dollars off it's frustrating uh watching it and understanding that this is a monetary phenomenon people are trying to apply this tech lens to put it in that tech bucket um because a lot of people got burned and we had this discussion last week in the commons and you were putting in the context of you had a conversation with a venture capitalist um that is focused outside of bitcoin and trying to better understand bitcoin and how did like i think the listeners would give value and uh how you framed it to him like how should somebody who is used to investing in tech in applications who wants to get into bitcoin and invest in the space like how do they need to change their their lens on how they

view bitcoin and companies building on bitcoin right yeah so a lot of people they they talk about building on bitcoin and uh usually what they mean is like okay what's like the cool what's the cool app we can do with bitcoin what's some like additional thing and a lot of that's great there's a lot of great companies here in the bitcoin commons that are doing just that on many different uh in many different ways but the real building on bitcoin the the foundational building on bitcoin is uh like more has to do with are you accepting bitcoin as money um that is like are you holding it on your balance sheet because it's you know better savings or um are you accepting it are you sending it you know spending it where it's reasonable to spend it uh and so

on and so forth and so yeah with that you know conversation i was kind of going sailor on them you know melting ice cubes uh you know you have you can have an amazing vc firm and i i know very little about vc i've uh thankfully avoided that and just been able to you know do my my humble sat stacking instead of you know carrying about the caring about the next like uh you know cool app or whatever um but even if you have an amazing vc firm maybe they're making like maybe they're incredible and they're doing like i don't know like a 50 return or what have you that's in dollar terms and anytime any of these these people are talking about their returns thinking about their returns thinking about the companies they're always thinking in dollar terms

and that's always a losing proposition because you know if you know my my i tweeted the other day how my ground beef just last week you know went up at a 70 17 so it's like you know if actual inflation uh is for you you know anywhere from like 12 to 20 that means all of that work you know, whatever returns you think you have, you always have to subtract all of that. And so maybe your returns aren't as good as you think. But if you're using that exact currency as your unit of account, thinking about profit or loss in those terms, you're not going to see that because you're only going to see the, you know, plus 50% instead of the, well, and then I have minus 20 because it's lost a bunch of value so it's plus 30 which is also awesome or whatever

but that's that's a lot as good as 50 it's not as good as 50 and this happens year over year um you know hopefully we won't see 20 inflation year over year um although you know maybe we see worse um these things compound and so this is why i've also said for a long time it's like Honestly, 2% inflation is hyperinflation. And I won't let anyone tell me otherwise. Because the fact that half of my purchasing power can be taken from under my feet in 30 and change years, that's way too fast. That's at a hyper speed for me. I don't like it one bit. um so that means every every year you're having to work that much harder right um so you need to be thinking first and foremost about being on a bitcoin standard uh if you want to make sense of those numbers correctly once you've done that now you can begin to ask the questions of what are the best ways to make returns and right now for most people there

really isn't like a reason to go have to do anything but just go uh you know buy bitcoin hold put it under under their mattress in their uh you know cold storage keys or whatever there's nothing you need to do more than that and that's actually the way it should be most people shouldn't have to think about investments and highly specialized businesses and stuff like that but vcs are in that business and they actually do have a lot of good knowledge to uh their entire job is to be able to seek out um those kinds of ventures so now they can just reprice all of those things and it might be the case that like 98 of what they're looking at is actually a waste of time and it's a lot of hard work for nothing in the end because all of

the inflation ends up eating up what you thought were gains from this thing you were doing um in In which case, I see that as a good thing. We should liquidate the fiat economy as much as it needs to, because we've been operating off a bad unit of an account. So we've all been misguided by bad price signals. So it might be the case that they might have way less to do to make the kind of returns or better just on a Bitcoin standard. And now, when they do find things that have a return on a Bitcoin standard, you really

know it's good returns. Because if you can beat Bitcoin over a sustainable time period, you have hit an incredible jackpot. So you're actually, you're making really good decisions if you're doing that. So, yeah, basically my point was you have to first and foremost think about how Bitcoin operates in your individual balance sheet and then go from there. And that helps you reprice everything in your life to think about what is actually valuable and what is actually just, you know, dead weight that you brought on because you live in, you know, a fiat clown world. yeah growth at all costs spend get your kpis up don't worry about making money that's what uh vcs are typically worried about yeah i just think of uh you know like tyler durden is how's that working out for you well to to that end too

that's very scary for an incumbent vc whose whole framework of operating is in that world where it's like hey money's easy we just spray and pray hope that one makes it and we make that 50 return without factoring in inflation but it seems like with interest rates where they are with the economy where it is people are going to be forced to think hard about these problems and think about bitcoin on their balance sheet if they want to survive into the future which gets into natural apprehensions that a lot of it's not only vcs but individuals corporations have is they view the need to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a signal of something that has gone terribly wrong

in the incumbent financial system. They almost don't want to believe that and an allocation of Bitcoin is a validation of the fact that things are devolving to shit and everybody immediately goes to Mad Max scenario. If the dollar's failing, if money's not flowing through the economy, through the dollar system,

things have gone terribly wrong, that's bad. for humanity uh bitcoin succeeding yeah uh is a validation of that and i think i don't really think about like that's not how i view it at all exactly that's what i want to get to is like that again another incredible uh talk that you gave is the art of bitcoin rhetoric and really framing bitcoin the correct way to people because i think most people's frame is that frame i just described where bitcoin's going up means everything's going to shit and i think you do an incredible job of highlighting that there is a path there's an optimistic view of bitcoin success that people should embrace which is bitcoin actually fixes a lot of these problems

and can make the world a much better place much quicker if you accept it embrace it you embracing it does not mean that everything immediately goes to shit yes well yeah i mean i just said we should just like liquidate you know the economy or whatever when people hear that they probably think like oh that's like a you know let's just like crash everything um but uh you know actually so the article on hyper bitcoinization basically explains that when you have a what would be termed a hyper bitcoinization event which is basically the rapid adoption of bitcoin as a monetary good uh which i think is happening right now i don't know how you go from you know uh zero to 70 000 in 15 years and have that anything but uh have that be anything but hyper bitcoinization um

it's just a matter of do we can do we think it'll continue and it will but um when you do that when you when you adopt bitcoin uh it's not the same as hyper hyperinflation in the sense that hyperinflation is a breakdown of money, whereas hyperbitcoinization is an upgrade of money. Bitcoin is better at coordinating a division of labor. It's better at helping people price goods because it's more scarce and all of the good things about money. It's an upgrade in your monetary operating system.

and so when you're liquidating things it's uh it's those things were not sparking joy and uh you know we we need marie kondo to help us in this economy just like get rid of the things that don't actually spark joy and if they're not actually either um getting a bitcoin return or it's not like actually sparking joy for real it's not bringing you some value then you know you don't need it anymore and you shouldn't have it and your life is actually worse off when you have a ton of cruft you know when you have a house full of just absolute junk you don't need that's not gonna like be good for your psyche and it's not like no one no one sees someone who cleans up an extremely dirty house where you just kept getting things because in your mind you

thought oh i need that thing i need that thing uh that'll make me happy finally no one no one like looks at the person in the you know before and after and looks at the after where they cleaned up everything that they realize it's like i don't need that that's not actually valuable for me they don't look at that and be like you know oh that person uh what a what a tragedy you know that person's going through everyone's instead like wow what a change what a wonderful thing and i think that's just you know that's us in bitcoin where we clean up our lives uh by actually repricing things and figuring out is like, is this worth the sets? And there's a lot of things that are worth sets. Um, you know, I, I buy food every day. I like eating so I can live. Uh, I,

I prefer that to, uh, more sets. Um, so yeah, it's, it's not that, that side of it is not a negative thing. And now going forward, when you're making decisions, you're not doing it based simply off, you know, Oh, I like, I think I need that or something. Maybe I need that. Um, you know, you see like, you know, the homeless guys who they have like the shopping carts full of just like any possible thing, you never know when you're going to need it. Um, you don't have to live that way anymore when you have, you know, a, uh, you know, some, some financial security by having real savings. And so now you have a lower time preference and you can think farther into the future and you actually think carefully about the choices you make. And so that spray and

pray, you know, kind of attitude from a VC, um, that, that to me is a, that doesn't sound like a good VC to me. I'm not, I'm not like against the very notion of a VC. I actually think it's very exciting to be able to, uh, that, you know, the thought of being able to give money to an early stage business or technology or whatever and see where it might go it's like if i'm going to do that i don't want to waste it on i don't want to i don't want to spray it i'm going to find the things that are actually cool and take it very seriously um but that also might mean fewer it also could end up you know in the long run being more i mean i don't know what the correct balance is um but whatever we see most of it is driven by you know chasing fiat returns and i just

think that's a losing proposition yeah but there's this whole idea of disruption right like not in the tech sense but in the quality of life sense like if the governments continue completely demolishing the global financial system by printing money and issuing debt and people are unable to rely on the dollar or the other currencies that they use that there's going to be a period of time where things are very chaotic yeah um and it's possible yeah you know um but you know with all of that in mind i mean the the status quo is that the the economy is is going down the drain um at some you know given rate that's uh you know sometimes feels like it's accelerating more and more so that's the status quo so it's like uh you know the fact that people

can get on bitcoin as this lifeboat uh you know it would be very strange to blame the lifeboat for the sinking ship um and to also not view the lifeboat as a good thing and you know i think being in a lifeboat you know even even if we're imagining a chaotic situation being in the life boat after getting off the titanic sure seems a little more calm than you know actually being on the titanic right so i i take it you know even you know in that situation you're not in a good time regardless but bitcoin actually shows you a path forward uh whereas anything else i mean you know the all the all the schemes they had you know like you know look at you know the the weimar republic or something and all like the sort of fake monies that they were trying to throw out

you know after things went bad that was not helping but we don't have that issue and in fact before things have truly you know we don't things are not good right now but we have it very good in a historical sense um yeah imagine a world without bitcoin right now yes so we're we're you know we're at least here to to comfortably uh you know have a discussion having bitcoin uh actually you know gives me a way to have hope for the future uh so and i mean that's something people desperately need right now like going back to like framing that's well i think again the art of bitcoin rhetoric and the way that you frame bitcoin for over a decade now is extremely always people hopeful optimists always be bullish

but now the the important thing from that talk um you know which uh you know people people have really enjoyed that talk it's it's i've kind of enjoyed the fact that it's sort of become a cult classic um a lot of the talk is like very tongue-in-cheek so certain certain bits of information kind of like resonate at sometimes sometimes others do sometimes none of them get across but i think you know an important like on a more serious note you know a lot of the talk was about dialectic versus rhetoric so it's like when you are engaged in discussion with someone is it a good faith discussion are you actually together because you're trying to learn from one another or is someone in bad faith and just trying to uh

you know trick you in some way waste your time uh you know whatever it might be and um a lot of the the always be bullish that kind of sentiment you know it's not as though you shouldn't believe that there's anything uh negative happening in the world because there's always plenty of negative things you can find uh it's that when people are attacking attacking bitcoin um out of bad faith they don't earn a nuanced discussion and so with them it's like No, we're going to anchor at the most bullish possible vision, and then we can work our way backwards with the nuance. But we have to start, we have to at the very least accept Bitcoin is a fundamentally better money, and the world is adopting it at a very fast rate. And that's

generally a good thing, because it's a good thing when the world has a better money than a bad money so by default i think of all of that as bullish and there are times where you know maybe things don't go quite as well maybe a jurisdiction uh you know bands bands something to do with bitcoin and uh things have to reorient for a bit and so in that time period things are not as nice you know think of uh the the bitcoin mining ban in china and we watched what like half the half the mining network go offline uh overnight and uh you know that's that's in that moment not exactly like a a positive thing um if you're a chinese miner if you're an american miner it was a great thing yes uh and then in the long run you know it's higher than ever and uh you know so that

the hash rate you know life life finds a way um so in that it's like i i believe that you know we have to anchor with a a framing that takes bitcoin seriously because if you go from the other way um you're just you're giving in to to um to just fundamentally incorrect models of the world anyway because you're you're kind of saying that you know bitcoin you know is bitcoin not bullish at all like how are we supposed to you know you know how should we qualitatively think about bitcoin bitcoin's bullishness i have a hard time thinking about it unless i start it you know that most positive extreme and work my way back of like oh you know we're making this trade off but it's you know that's you know that's gonna you know work out fine you know it's like i wish

i wish we could have the the biggest blocks in the world and have you know tiny transactions and all that but you know that's that's not how it works so uh we'll we'll move on with a positive attitude um but that's that's a nuance we can add but not to the haters because they just they don't like bitcoin in the first place so you're not going to convince them anyway uh you you shouldn't let them dictate the terms of your your thought yeah yeah speaking of the haters the state of the haters they're a bit of disarray they've been uh taking a lot of losses on the chin any yeah i mean you've all harari was out earlier today did you see that i i didn't see the whole thing i just saw there was like a it was a clip of him he's he's a he's a funny looking guy like

he just he cultivates a very particular like um he seems like the the like a bad guy mad scientist look yeah i'm like some some dystopian sci-fi movie or something him and they all they all like they they're really good at capturing their their proper aesthetic essence they they they really uh they know how to cultivate their looks i i hope i can uh you know i i hope i can learn to cultivate my own look well whatever that might be as as well as they do but um for for their weird weird stuff um but yeah it's like you know the distrust like these people distrust in the government distrust in human institutions gee i wonder i wonder why there would be any amount of distrust well it's as interesting because it is a sleight of hand that he's using again going back

to framing the way he's framing it is like bitcoin is bad because it signals that humans have a distrust in human institutions in the form of governments and financial institutions like central banks and it completely neglects not even the fact but the whole the idea that bitcoin itself could be a human institution that humans are putting trust in yes yeah i mean this is this is exactly right i mean they get it they get it exactly backwards because bitcoin is actually generating trust i mean just naturally speaking just a a complete stranger is is not someone that you're going to easily be able to trust and i don't i don't know my local central banker uh so you know i'm he's he's not coming around you know my my neighborhood to to shake

hands and and come talk about my needs and how i'm feeling at the grocery store and stuff so it's like i don't it's it's a totally faceless person we we know jerome powell's face and it's like otherwise it's just this big faceless institution uh even their building is like very uh you know it's it's uh uninspiring it's uh it's it's it's sort of like this imposing thing it's it has that sort of uh it's like a it's like this kind of art deco ish i don't i don't know the exact time period whatever but it's just like this big imposing building that it just like screams it's just like we're a big faceless institution that controls you um it just has that has that weight uh to the building but why would i have any reason to trust this person at all i don't

I don't know, I don't know, Jerome, you know, I don't know, Jay Powell. So how can I trust him at all? So they just assume that they should be trusted. And then they get mad when people are like, I don't know what you're doing there. And it's not really helping me out. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is the opposite. Bitcoin accepts that by nature, we're not going to just automatically trust some random person on the internet. That's the number one thing you do not do is just trust some random person on the internet um instead it has a mechanism of proof of work and that consensus building it's built on cryptography so that you can verify signatures and actually see that they went through a a valid chain of custody and so on and so forth that actually creates trust

you know it creates a thing that we can trust in um uh not not because we just uh assume that other guy knows what we're he's doing but but but because we can work together to actually create that trust through these uh through these uh techniques and so yeah they they get it completely backwards and you're exactly right that they they uh they you know they want us to to then turn around yeah we should distrust and that makes us sound you know like we're uh you know crazy you know insurrectionist you know whatever it's like no we're just a bunch of we're just a bunch of plebs who want to be able to you know buy our dinner and take care of our family and stuff and we have this big one because this this allows us to do it very very well and so we do yeah

and the whole idea that again going back to the framing of bitcoin is seeped in distrust of human institutions again assumes that bitcoin itself isn't an institution that was brought about by humans it's literally just humans yeah it's not it's not like code just writing itself um i don't know of ai that's gotten powerful enough that it just on its own decided i should have a bitcoin node um although if that happened it'd be just choosing to run a bitcoin node uh so because as a sentient being you'd rationally come to the conclusion that you need to run a bitcoin node i need to verify uh they would just be you know if you can pass the turing test or whatever then you're effectively you know

and in some in some metaphysical sense you can be you know reach the status of of human i'm saying that in a i don't actually like necessarily mean that someone's going to come like you know correct me but um you know my point is it's like even even in that it's like okay well then you're somewhat human um and in that yeah you're coming together uh to build this institution with us but literally yeah bitcoin is all people it is all people holding keys and running nodes and uh if you're not holding your own keys well someone else is holding the key someone literally has to be holding the keys somewhere for any of that bitcoin to exist uh in relation to the rest of the network and if you're not running your own node someone else is because it's the only way that you even

have any kind of interface to that bitcoin network uh at all so it's uh it is all people and we actually that's one of the the great things about you know thinking about austrian economics here is that austrian economics uh has has a concept called um methodological individualism And what that's saying is individualism, not in the sense of like I'm the only thing that matters and something like that, but more in the sense that when we look at an economic system, we do have to remember that the actual place of decision making is not really like this collective will. there's not this like grand like uh you know essence of a group or something that's that's making a decision it's actual people within that group making decisions that together forms that group so um you know uh as you know one of the examples misis gives is like you know it's not the state that um executes a criminal it's the executioner like at the end of the day

there is someone who's who's making a choice performing an action that does something and it's those actions are made up of individuals and when we think about bitcoin as well we have to think about it from that it's like individuals who are choosing to generate keys individuals choosing to run a node, individuals choosing to bring those together, individuals choosing to sell something, whether it's dollars or beef or something else, to receive money into those keys that's verified with that node, and so on and so forth. It's all individuals making choices along the way, and then it's up to us to determine why is that happening?

Why would people make that choice? Why is that a rational decision? why does it make sense what what um you know uh why should people want to be a bitcoiner um and that's a good question but uh people like yuval harari they can't uh think pass as like you know they just aren't smart enough to to like us yeah and going back to like your jerome pal example like you've never shook his hand you know what he looks like but he's never come to check in on you he's welcome at the commons he is jerome come on down we need to get a full node running at the fed you guys are going to need some bitcoin uh at the pace you're going

right now but they can buy quite a bit and they print a lot of dollars yeah and they can if they if they just slow it down a little bit because if they uh if they print too fast bitcoin will go too high for them to be able to uh to buy more but you know they could they're already skimming off money from the American populace to buy up assets like they could be buying

Bitcoin to consider reading spec they're gonna tech they're gonna need somewhere to store those Bitcoin so you know we can we can get MVK down

here and hook them up with some cold cards to they could have 12 cold cards and a multi-sig the can we trust them though can they trust

themselves that's a big question that's a it's a huge problem the principal agent problem yeah but going to this like using harari's argument against him it's like with bitcoin it's like no i can trust like i don't have to trust your own pal i can trust my computer running this node to verify

that bitcoin is operating in the way that i think it should be um to secure my wealth it's also i mean it's i can trust that it's like that uh you know the the classic principal skinner meme the the simpsons meme is like am i out of touch no the children are wrong yeah it's like he's basically saying that it's like you know is it possible that any of my human institutions have done anything uh wrong or not to the best of their ability perhaps even uh unethical no everyone else uh is just completely wrong for not wanting to uh you know play with us anymore yeah yeah it is it does seem like they're getting desperate like with their this type of propaganda campaign from ferrari then you have things going on here in the united

states at the federal government level where i think it's fun that he has to make posts about bitcoin oh i love it he made a comment and then bank of international settlement uh webinar and then people caught that put it out and then he was forced two weeks later to come out and justify his position i liked all the hashtags too he has like the most like cringe cringe social media intern guys like hashtag institutions hashtags distrust it's like it felt like uh 2013 twitter again where it's like let's hashtag everything the hashtag has really died the only hashtag i use is bitcoin because it's that you get the little bitcoin uh logo and if there wasn't that i wouldn't hashtag at all i don't think it's

i don't think it's aesthetically pleasing um you know a lot of a lot of tweets are just you know shooting from the hip but there's other times it's like you want to craft the the perfect tweet you know sometimes to the point where it's like are the words going to balance out correctly you know because it depends on how wide the tweet is going to be it's like you even just like want the words just to be right so it's just like when you see the tweet everything about it needs to be just like poetically perfect uh and the hashtag rarely comes up uh you know in my mind when it's like oh i want to make the the perfect tweet let me make sure that it has all of these you know hashtags in it well this is one of your personality traits that i really admire is the attention to detail

you put into all this whether it's the nakamoto institute the attention to the detail that you've put in to not only the redesign but how you're architecting the back end to make sure that the content is accessible quickly you can it's translated into multiple languages slowly but surely over time but then i mean watching you create a lot of these videos your articles your presentations you put a lot of thought and you think i like to think that you think that it's very important to be particular precise with messaging and the propaganda that you're putting out there if you will yes i mean it's something like i said i mean sometimes you're just shooting from the hip and sometimes that's that's just the best way to do it my most popular

tweet to date is still one that wall street one the wall street trader one from 2017 i tweeted that and after i tweeted i was just like like i just thought in my mind i'm like you know pulling on my phone and like haha you know just putting it out there and after i put it i was like that's kind of a dumb tweet i should delete it um but uh i just was like whatever uh financial times financial times printed it's in the the print i have some some copies uh i had some people mail me some copies uh so that was that was my high point uh everything's been downhill since no i'm just kidding i won't i won't let the fiat guys define my my high point um plus uh paul krugman calling me out was probably uh even more fun for me what did he call you uh

sometimes not not too long after that actually it was uh it was there was a vice article about bitcoin carnivores yes when i when i said bitcoiner bitcoiners are cultists i was understating things and he he quoted me and that was that was where the fiat food uh stuff you know kind of started out because that's where i coined coined that phrase but um anyway so sometimes it's like shooting from the hip uh but other times yes i mean i think uh you know another broad important lesson of the talk i gave is just like this is all rhetoric and there is an art to rhetoric you know this is something that's been studied you know it's one of the classical uh liberal arts you know you can you can go back to to aristotle and read his book on rhetoric if

you want you know and it's just it's been something that people study uh have have studied since and it's extremely important especially in the modern age where we're you know i feel so uh trite saying all these things it's like you know we're more connected than we've ever been the internet social media um we more of our lives are spent broadcasting uh messages out to people it probably is important that those messages you know be effective at whatever they were intended for you know uh what you're intending them for can also you know completely vary sometimes you're just wanting to troll sometimes you're trying to make a a real point and get through to someone etc etc etc but like you should actually you know try to do something you know in fact

just the act of engaging in language the very point like that you would even open your mouth is because you're trying to use language to have some given effect on someone else's brain so that you can you know uh coordinate in some way or you know whatever the you know sometimes it might be fighting words so it'd be to not coordinate uh but if you didn't have that you know motivation to want to cause an effect you wouldn't open your mouth at all so if you're going to open your mouth you might as well you know do it well um and and sort of make it most effective at what it is so you know i'm i'm not perfect at that and uh but i i do like to think about that from time to time and there are certain times where i get that that feeling of like i

really actually want to put effort into this one and really make it just right because i think that it can uh it can have an effect yeah and i want that effect no it's it's been fun watching you work on some of this particularly what i'm thinking about is the what would you call it commercial uh i think it was the 15 year anniversary of the white paper with the 2001 space odyssey oh yeah you literally timed it out with the music and then at the end we went back and forth for a couple days about like one particular word that you put in oh yeah i don't even remember which one it was but there's you know for people who watch it there's like a whole list of like all the great properties of bitcoin and uh the whole thing is is about the you know evolution of

uh you know the the ideas of of crypto anarchy and the cypherpunks and such leading into the development of bitcoin and that you know unlocking you know technological greatness the way that you see in 2001 a space odyssey and uh yeah so there's like a list of all the all the great things about bitcoin just like you know highlighting this thing is just amazing and um yeah i i i struggled with some of the words because there were some i think there was like one that i wanted to put in uh that was immutable i forget what it was uh one of them that i wanted in there and i don't i don't think i kept it was um network governance yes and it was like that's you can you know we could have a whole you know rabbit hole discussion on just that concept of network governance and what does it

mean and and you know what you know and yet it's like well you also need you know a three-hour discussion to get through what it means it's like i actually i want this video to be enjoyed by a broad audience so if they see network governance like that's gonna fall flat what's a word that i can put in there that would uh do the same thing but not fall flat and get them excited because the whole point of this video is i want people to watch it and get pumped up and excited about bitcoin which at least in you seem to have succeeded yes i remember you you kept watching it i think you even watched it on the podcast yes we did it's uh that another one of my favorites the bull when the bull began its run yeah that that one was not me that was not you

that was not me i was i was the i was i was the conduit for yes i was i was asked to to share that one and uh because i had i had an audience and i i graciously accepted my task and with that one i did think about you know what should the text be and i actually thought you know uh you know oh courtesy of my anonymous friend or whatever uh it would have taken away from the tweet like it needed to be you know the simplicity of like you know do not forsake your descendants um and so uh you know my friend didn't mind uh that uh he he wasn't he he was making this anonymously he didn't care at all and uh but uh you know that was that was the case where you know my tweet around it you know i that was actually what inspired me is like oh i should try making some

videos i don't i don't know how to make videos i just you know play around but that was what inspired me because i had i had read somewhere that videos on twitter just have an insane amount of engagement uh versus other stuff and um you know i i wasn't making videos and i in some ways when videos started showing up on twitter it was kind of annoying this is like that's not that's not my twitter you know back in my day we only had 140 characters you know um so you know there's there's like videos now it is like kind of annoying but i saw that it's like well my friend wants this video to get out let's see what we can do and uh you know i was able to succeed and to see it was like wow actually engagement really did happen it's like okay if you want a tweet to get out

there you should probably put a video on it you know that's that's one of the the things you can do and so that inspired me it's like okay well what are other videos i can make and uh you know i've i've made quite a few that i've i've quite enjoyed well and i think it's again i don't want be too trite and we live in the social media age but i think whether it's uh your anonymous friends the bull began his run 2001 a space odyssey commercially put out last year um pump it up uh did you do a pump it up video uh oh no you did the uh the bulls uh theme song oh the uh the the yeah the uh the uh gary glitter yeah don't look into his biography by the way someone was very upset with that video because of that fact and i was like i did not know i just

yeah i'm not gonna lie i didn't know it but it's like no this is this is i'm not i'm not including that song in a video because i've read the man's biography it was like i support everything this man did including this criminal activity involving children you know that's not what i was going through it's like no this is like you know i i'm a 90s kid and uh we had jock jams and i'm ready to pump up the crowd and this is how you pump up the crowd and it worked and it worked yeah so yeah that was using uh rock and roll part two by gary glitter and it highlights a song like you doing these videos your anonymous friend doing these videos some of the best marketing material in video format that i've seen for bitcoin over my decade plus in the industry and it's just a

bunch of dudes fucking around on their computers and you have companies like grayscale coinbase spending probably tens of billions of dollars to produce and put out worse propaganda yeah some some of them are like close but they just don't hit the mark and some of them they're they're really good at shooting themselves in the foot uh and and putting out like an anti-signal um so i thought for instance uh the was it bitwise that did the most interesting man in the world yes i thought it was brilliant to bring out the most interesting man in the world because of course the most interesting man in the world would be interested in the most interesting money in the world but then the at least it turned out that there was i think there was like a a proper like

national commercial that was like on tv that was not this but the one that they actually put on twitter that i saw because i'm not a boomer i'm on twitter i'm not on cable tv i don't even i don't have cable i don't have a tv i have my computer um it was like uh he's they're trying to trying to sell bitcoin is like wait we can bring in someone better and it's like it's it had the most interesting man as an actor like it they they broke the fourth wall more than they're supposed to you're supposed to break the fourth wall just in him looking at the screen saying you know when you know you know whatever i can't even think of his tagline at the moment i'm i'm what is it what is it logan what's his tagline pull that up logan it's the stay thirsty my

friends yes stay thirsty my friends yeah so uh you know that's a way to break the fourth wall as part of the commercial but instead it completely broke the fourth wall it was like actually this guy's not interesting he's just this paid actor it's like no you need the mythos you need to believe that he's actually you know going through the uh you know jungle and doing you know fun stuff they could have taken my my lines from the the pleb lab interesting man in the world you can start a fire by rubbing two bitcoins together exactly like let's let's uh let's critique this is that a good line i like the work logan does over here logan does great work uh we love our logan um

yeah so like they that it just to me it just like broke my heart because it was like i'm just imagining if you gave me a couple million bucks and you handed me the most interesting man in the world we could think of some things like he'd be you know rubbing bitcoins together to make fire uh and we can make something that's really cool that's like actually paying homage to that because it's something that everyone knows that's very smart to to do that but it was like what a self own to like oh bitcoin bitcoin's actually this fake thing that you need to pay someone to pump it's like no it's so interesting that um because part of what's like the mythos is the most interesting man in the world he's like doing things that you wouldn't even think of as possible

yeah it's like the chuck norris jokes yeah to another character yeah and it's like it's it's in this world it's like i can only dream of like i can't even dream of that because i couldn't have thought of of doing something like that bitcoin should be so cool that it's like you had to be that guy to be getting in on bitcoin and now we're inviting you to this once exclusive thing you're invited now but instead it's like hey actually we don't even know how to sell it to you and like we're gonna like pay this guy to try please please buy our etf it's just uh it's a bit of a cell phone and um you know i i you know i don't i don't know the guys at bitwise but uh you know it's just it's it's not how i would have done it and to me you know that framing matters

it does you know but you don't want you don't want bitcoin to look weak you want you want wall street they're trying to to get in we're not begging them i don't care if they buy bitcoin or not they care if they buy bitcoin or not uh because they need it yeah no it does a disservice to the normies out there that are still watching cable tv seeing this poorly yeah directed propaganda yeah and the the other one recently that i was i was critiquing at some point was the uh the coinbase ad that it was like you know the system is broken etc etc and that one broadly speaking was good like a lot of people loved it and my criticism it really comes down to the you know the details but it's like these details that i think could make a big impact so in that

one it's like the system is broken you know and now coinbase like okay first of all uh well i like the edit that it's just it's bitcoin it's just bitcoin you know at the at the end um as you know the thing instead of instead of uh crypto crypto or whatever like this broad thing like actually narrow in but the thing that i i would critique about it as much as that one actually you know was much better the critique that i would share uh you know if they wanted my opinions uh call me um i think my dms are open you know dm me i can i can give you my feedback um they set up how broken the system is but they never actually like deliver a solution so they set up why everything is broken but they don't come around and say and bitcoin fixes it

so it's like you're left what you're left with what you're left uh just you know being bummed that everything is is going bad um and i don't i don't see how that's inspiring that's just that people people like wallowing in their problems and i personally don't want to enable people to wallow in their problems i don't want them to ignore their problems i want them to take their problems very seriously and it's like if we're taking the problem seriously then we can find some solutions and the same feeling with that uh what was that song everyone liked for five minutes uh the uh oliver rich man north of richmond yeah it was such a it was such like a depressing song and it was just like woe is me i'm poor where's the bitcoin fixes this it should

it should have had like a a bluegrass breakdown at the end where everyone's uh you know getting excited because now we're stacking sets yeah yeah uh but instead it's just you know woe is me and the dollar ain't shit it's like that's okay because we have bitcoin yeah and i think we were talking i think i was talking about this with you last week let's see again going back to like rhetoric propaganda not focusing on doom and gloom which i'm guilty of is highlighting a lot of the problems but what i've been trying to be more effective at is highlighting solutions obviously bitcoin being one of them but highlighting how people can take action to stack more bitcoin and take agency at least over their financial lives

is there is some psychological about the messaging whether it's what we're doing as bitcoiners more broadly out there over twitter and other um other means by which people access information that's being disseminated by millions billions of people across the world is that i think positive messaging is extremely important because it it sort of feeds on itself um and i think there's something to that um i just think uh it's it's too easy to be negative and i know I could easily, you know, turn into, you know, negative Bitstein if I wanted to right here, right now. But I'm not going to because, I mean, I don't want to. I don't really like wallowing in that. And I also, I do want to actually genuinely find solutions. I think it's

easy to start, you know, critiquing and getting upset and less about, you know, what is actually the thing we need to do um and um you know i think this is it's it's also i mean it seems like uh broadly speaking just in the world it's it's anytime someone's positive um that tends to be a target for for other people um because if if you're positive about something you are uh sort of implying that other people who might not be as positive are doing something wrong um which you know my hope would be that it would inspire good self-introspection uh because i want other people to be you know more excited about the future like i am um but others might just take uh offense to that and want want to cut that down because maybe they don't want to do that

self-introspection or you know something like that but um being negative is definitely like that just seems like easy mode you know i want to i want to challenge and uh if you pass the challenge you also you win so i like that too yeah no it's on twitter specifically too no the videos like that's the the big trend over the last year is the individuals sitting in their car complaining about their lives whether it's the cost of food at the grocery how unfulfilled they are with their jobs how unfulfilled they are with their ability to find a mate a life partner if you husband or wife uh and it's just it feels like there is this you know we've reached this event horizon of negativity in these you know selfie videos people complaining about everything

it's like ah you need to find bitcoin and some of them need to unplug a little bit yes touch grass yes um i think it's a fun exercise to think you know how does bitcoin fix this because it's like Basically, I mean, it's not even me joking. I do think that Bitcoin actually fixes most everything. What I mean by that is that insofar as much of the world is driven by various economic decision makings, when half of that is, or all of it is sort of based on a broken system, it's going to lead towards less than optimal things.

But when you reprice that, like we were talking about earlier, um, the incentive starts to fix itself. And, uh, you know, a wise man once said, fix the money, fix the world. So, uh, you know, but, but it is fun to actually go through that exercise of, uh, in what ways might this actually be true. And, um, if you go through that exercise, you might actually find some, some real solutions somewhere. And, um, uh, although, I mean, those people they get on social media because they want attention that's why i get on social media i don't get on there like i you know occasionally i'm fine with you know a tweet that you know that one's just for me and i don't care if it doesn't get any likes but you know once again it's like

the the purpose of opening your mouth it's because you're hoping hoping something happens and uh i do suppose for a lot of people it's it's it's more about attention than it is uh the particular content of what they're saying and in that sense they're highly effective but uh you know i'd recommend a different life path personally yeah try to try to try to try to win more at just the you know the tiktok likes won't uh you know necessarily turn into more food on the table no well some people if they get like an ad deal uh has anyone started like doing advertisements on like the super negative stuff. I mean, Twitter,

that's probably how they're monetizing most of the stuff. Which also then like adds like a deeper weirdness to all the noise of people who are, I guess, I mean, there's plenty of people who do this, but being paid to be like bearish and doom and gloom. It's like, that's the Alex Jones business model. Zero hedge, Alex Jones. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. Are you selling water filters yet? No, not yet. I do recommend them. No. I have a Berkey at the house, though. I like it. We have a water filter in our shower.

Good. Good. Don't want to use fiat water. No. Apparently the Chinese are attacking our water systems now. The government said no. Like, are they? I think the Department of Homeland Security sent out a warning.

earlier this week they're attacking our water it's uh it's getting into uh dr strangelove territory you've seen dr strangelove yeah mandrake have you ever seen a communist drink a glass of water you gotta watch it i've gotta watch it yeah yeah you'll you'll uh you'll resonate quote highlight is gentlemen you can't fight in here this is the war room that's a good one i gotta watch dr strange classic classic kubrick um but uh yeah no there's a lot of people i guess feeding off the negativity and yeah yeah i guess i am just wondering like on tiktok specifically in what ways may that uh monetization in which case like you're just watching you know a bunch of ads for this and although there was the old

The Last Psychiatrist. I don't know if you ever read that blog. Old school blog back in like, I don't know, 2010, 2012 era. That time when blogs mattered. It was in many ways a much more fun internet because you just end up in very strange corners of the internet. There's just totally different things going on as opposed to now where you have a lot of different people,

but they're all piled on to each other. um so it's it's much more like uh just content contentious and everyone trying to dunk on each other as opposed to like people kind of forming real subcultures yeah can trilemma be produced today now there's there's an interesting one too uh this is the last like i just had one about uh you know his his whole thing was about like narcissism he just kind of chalked everything uh, up to narcissism. Um, and he had to think about advertisements and, um, you know, people complain about, Oh, the advertisements are, you know, they're, they're controlling us or whatever, but he had just this point of, you know, if you see the advertisement, the advertisement was for

you. It's like, if you didn't want to see it, you wouldn't see it. Um, and, uh, you know, I think there's, there's truth to that as well. People, people get mad at the, the algorithm on social media. And I, it almost feels like a cop out. Yeah. You should do more introspection. Yeah. You should always be doing more introspection. Recognize how to protect yourself from the algorithm. Well, well, you know, there's also ways to think it's like, look i'm sure that there's all kinds of nefarious things going on however let's let's imagine that you know we don't have state actors trying to mess with things just for the sake of argument even in that case where you just you know i'm i'm a company i have an algorithm that is trying to

it's a recommendation engine because i want to to find things that people like if you go on to a website and you are effectively telling that website what i like looking at is just absolute doom porn 24 7 and the more doomy and gloomy that doom porn is the more i get off to it uh the recommendation engine is going to be learning from that fact and so in some ways it's like yeah if you see that stuff it's for you you wanted to see that like you know it's that you know i don't know what elon's doing over there but some of that stuff that's under the for you tab yeah that's for you you just don't like that it knows you better than you want to know yourself that you're willing to admit uh so you know because uh you know i've i've seen other

stuff there is this one time i don't remember who it was on twitter is one of these kind of you know more uh you know kind of esoteric accounts i don't know how to describe just kind of like one of these one of these uh just interesting weird guys and he had this uh thing where he had been on tiktok and he was purposely trying trying to train tiktok to give him videos of the most oddly specific genre of music and it was something like people playing music uh in a boat under a bridge and he just it was just like a lot of swiping until it's like okay i'm going to swipe right on the videos that include this one thing and it's like you train a model off enough information it's going to pick up on these things and sure enough he was like

posting a bunch of videos he was getting of people playing music in a boat under a bridge and um you know i that's that's not what i would hope to train my uh thing for um i maybe i would you could have that you'd have like a nice uh venetian man in a gondola you know you know push uh uh rowing you around singing uh sole mio and stuff like that maybe that'd be nice but um you can you can train it yeah you can decide what you how you want to train it and so you should also think about in what ways am i just being complicit like in what ways am i inspiring the state of things and uh i don't think people i don't think people uh bring that up enough in these discussions around algorithms and social media and all of that is in what ways um are you

sort of asking for it yeah uh i used to have a phrase that i know a friend liked that was just like you know there's no there's no trolling there is only getting trolled and it's basically this point that's like you know why are you not putting up better ddos filters i mean we all know the internet is just this fire hose of insanity surely you're going to want some firewalls um you should probably build some and think carefully but carefully about what firewalls you want yeah the block and mute buttons exist for a reason yeah i use them liberally yes even though some people think that's a cop-out i'm like yep no blocked i i've adopted the save dina moose uh yeah he's he's very hardcore about it if you annoy me block i uh it depends on the day for me

uh sometimes i also i like i enjoy you know some of the stuff that i wouldn't like just because you know it's sometimes i want to see that stuff to keep up with it or sometimes i just i do want to you know see something i don't like like the doom and gloom or whatever um but uh yeah i i do think uh we could we could all try to be a little more uh self-conscious about how are we acting in the world instead of externalizing it every single time it's like the algorithms yeah yeah i've had to uh i was getting fed and what does it say about me i was getting fed for a period of time there probably a month like a bunch of like just like inner city murders on twitter that's what you're into i had to go in and block all the accounts there actually is uh you can you can click the

thing and say not interested in this post and be like i don't want to see i want to see less posts like this some less murders please you you you can you can do that yeah um elon's listening yeah he's here to help thank you soon it'll just you know the neural link will just uh pick up on the negative negative emotions and no not to not to give that to you yeah if it's programmed a certain way or or it'll get the negative emotions and feed you more of it yeah um i mean with all this being said platforms versus individual publishers and opining back to your comment about the internet as it was back in 2010 2012 i mean that's one thing i'm trying to do at tftc is have my own website where my content lives that's my little corner of the internet with the nakamoto

institute i mean it seems like you're really leaning into that as well as a safe haven for people to access this information yeah yeah um owning your own domain is uh very important you know i think i think we've learned that you know twitter has has changed x x has changed um in that uh there's a lot more you know free speech and and whatnot a lot of people have been brought back there's a lot a lot of people are saying things that they otherwise would have been banned for um uh and uh there's sort of less concern for people like me that speaking about bitcoin is gonna have me waking up one day and not have an account which you know uh if it happens so be it but you know i enjoy twitter i think it's a lot of fun um and so i'd be i would

be sad um but at the same time it's like you know you don't want to depend on others for uh all like your your online well-being at that point you know you're an online surf and uh you know for some people that might be what you want, but, uh, you know, like you, you, you aspire to nothing but an online surf, uh, just content farming for, uh, you know, the, the big men in charge your whole life. But, uh, some of us, you know, want to try to rise above that. And, um, I think it's important to, uh, yeah, to have your own presence online, uh, to build an audience and have you know multiple ways to be able to get in touch so that uh anyone in particular is not going to uh cut off your ability to talk with the uh the people who who want to hear you um and the

people who are valuable to you yeah and i mean let's let's talk about the plans for the nakamoto institute moving forward you've done this redesign you're in the middle of well we haven't done the redesign yet you're have the redesign you haven't implemented the redesign yes you're raising um funds to get that across the line yeah well we talked earlier that uh you know this thing has been around for a long time and we have this revitalization we didn't even really get into the revitalization part so you know as bitcoin has grown it has become more clear to me that uh these really are important ideas that need to be shared because without these ideas you know if you don't if you don't really understand what money is why we have bitcoin

and so on and so forth what really makes bitcoin special you're probably not going to come to the conclusion that i need to hold my own keys i need to run my own node and so on and so forth and if you're not doing that you're giving up on one of the great blessings that we've been bestowed today we've never had such a capability in the history of the world until now to be able to do these things and you're just giving it up

and if you're giving it up, you're not passing it on and that means future generations are not going to learn from you that being able to hold keys and being able to run a node is a seismic shift in humanity, in our history. And that, to me, is extremely important, to be able to transmit that knowledge so that we don't just, you know,

I don't want all of us to just die and then Bitcoin is done. I want Bitcoin, you know, the purpose of making Bitcoin is we want it to be long-term. We talk about generational wealth. well if we want that wealth to actually um you know exist into future generations they need to understand what made that wealth in the first place and we can't we can't um just we can't we can't just hope that that happens you know someone does literally have to sit and think about bitcoin

for it to work um and you know if you don't others might still um but then you're gonna be the uh you know you're gonna be out with uh peter schiff and uh mark cuban you know trying to like mow lawns or you know compete with you know lawn robots just to get some some sats because uh you know spencer schiff is is working on his you know ai stuff so like his dad might not even have a job because of his son using ai to uh you know completely outbid his uh his his own father for his his petty attempts to try to get the sats that he did not stack all those years uh it's very important that we uh pass on uh this like so other other people might still have that knowledge

and they'll benefit from it but you you may even still benefit just by the virtue of existing in a world that Bitcoin still exists in if people if someone managed to hold on to it

however you're not benefiting as much as you could have and neither are your children or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren or anyone else all the way down the line until the heat death of the universe. So, and even for those people who did hold on to it,

they have this same problem. So like anyone who wishes for their wealth to maintain itself faces this problem. You always like the sort of the succession problem is probably one of the most difficult problems in any sort of social structure. How do you, how do you pass things on? And I don't want Bitcoin to die. I want it to live. And, um, I want this wealth to mean something, uh, now and in the future. so as bitcoin is has grown it's really become clear how right we were

and how right i think we're going to continue to be and this means that um it is incumbent upon us to take that extremely seriously this is like you know everyone's a scammer the underlying message is take your long-term uh take your future seriously because the choices you make today do impact your future and um so with that in mind you know the nakamoto institute has sort of uh gone through this you know revitalization we are now a actual formal non-profit we have 503 a 501c3 tax exemption so we're you know like official we're state sanctioned orange pillars um i don't know i don't know how we get away with it um they they are allowing the irs is allowing us to go out and preach the good word of bitcoin um and i'm happy about that um so uh we've done that and um

And now we have this website, which has been somewhat in dormancy. But I think it's such a, it's played such a good role in the Bitcoin world up until now. I hear all the time how much people got out of it, which, you know, always, I find very moving. I was, I was a kid in my, you know, uh, college dorm making a website. And so I, I still remember the first time I got an email from someone who is, I think they were from Russia or something or from a different country. And they just emailed to say, Hey, thanks for making that website. And that was like this moment. It was like, wow, you know, when you put stuff online, you know, everyone's watching. And, you know, sometimes that, you know, uh, can, can be a negative.

but other times you also don't know who's listening and it could just change your world or it's a bigger audience than you think and you have more influence than you think and

so I think it's extremely important for us to think about this future and with this sort of piece of real estate this entity this this thing the nakamoto institute um i think it was time to actually take it seriously and think it was like you know i don't know if anyone else i could want to

give it to because i don't know if they're gonna be a good steward of it this is like it to me knowledge transmission is such a precious thing it's it's not something that you just want to hand over to anyone you don't want to just send your kids to some random school you don't want I just hope that the local neighborhood teacher is the right one. So that inspired me to take the Nakamoto Institute very seriously and do this. And now, you know, for one of our first big efforts,

we have a lot of little things going on, trying to build towards right now of setting the stage for this new phase. Um, we, we recently opened up a translation community. We're trying to increase internationalization efforts so that it seems like it's happening pretty quickly. Yeah. People, people send in stuff all the time and I try to get them out, uh, as, as timely

as I can. Um, and, uh, so we have, I want to say 14 or 15 languages represented, or it's at least some amount of content on the website is available in those languages, which is amazing. um it's it's unbelievable to me um so there's stuff like that and we're we're you know eventually going to be working towards uh publishing stuff but uh you know like physical publishing but the one of the big things right now and we we have a fundraiser going on for this is trying to raise money to uh do a redesign of the website and um we already made a new logo um that kind of defined this this feeling of wanting to create timelessness because we need

if we if we want to be able to teach something to our great great great great grandchildren i don't i i'm scared to know what the world's going to be like it's it's going to be a very strange and different world by then but economics is not going to have changed that is like praxeological you know logic is not going to have changed um and uh bitcoin itself like as it is is not going to really be that much different in terms of like its basic functionality there might be all kinds of op codes we we never foresaw and that might have unlocked all kinds of interesting transactions but the same cryptographic process of signing messages and sending all that's going to be the same

so i wanted to make something that had timelessness and i also wanted something that uh had a have have uh be in touch with the past because these ideas did not just crop up out of nowhere you don't just like wake up and be able to make bitcoin i don't know what satoshi knew but I do know that you have to have some level of knowledge of various things at the very least you have to be in the water of certain traditions and the work that they did

in order to come up with the idea of putting together proof of work with a blockchain type data structure and all of the different digital signatures and P2P networking and all these things that had to come from somewhere and likewise when i said earlier it's like the the economic ideas that i have they're all based on centuries old stuff i mean the the origins of austrian monetary theory you know go back to the you know 1500s or so maybe uh

before that actually uh the the school of salamanca you know spanish scholastics a bunch of a bunch of uh monks thinking about money and uh that was sort of the basis of you know where we are is you know centuries of building on those ideas that lead us to where it's like we can make sense of this bitcoin thing um and so we shouldn't in order to be able to go into the future where we want to we should always be looking towards the future and building great things for the future. We can't wallow in the past, but we have to learn from the past because that's how we got here and had the technology available to put it together to build that thing. And so trying to sort of connect that tradition, whether it's the crypto anarchist or cypherpunk

or Austrian tradition, link it to the future. So I wanted something that has sort of, you know, an older feel something that's uh you know a little more stately but uh you know also has room for a futuristic vibe so we were able to capture that i think very well in the in the logo and it has uh you know 21 which i think is the glue that holds all of this together and sort of meme the meme of all bitcoin memes and uh and now what i want to do is bring the whole website sort of in line with the aesthetic uh principles that we that we put into that logo because i want people to have that feeling when they go to the website that these are not just cool ideas this is like you know you know it's not just stuff that you

know any dude can like start up a podcast and start you know like we're just gonna like have like college dorm room philosophy type talk about you know bitcoin man you know like that's cool that's fun we're doing it now and i i'm enjoying it no but like um i want people to know that it's not it's not merely just this like kind of cool idea to play around with but you know this is these are serious ideas incredibly serious. When you read, you know, Mises or Rothbard, it's very serious stuff. When you read Nick Szabo, it's very serious stuff. And I want to give it that recognition. And I want people to have that feeling when they come in and they see this. It's like, this is probably an idea

that I should be taking seriously. And I think that the look of the website needs to comport with that desire um for it to be effective communication around that that thing and so i want a world in which uh people take the ideas of nick zabo of of you know hal finney and timothy may and mises and rothbard and hoppa and so on and so forth i want a world that takes so seriously and uh you know part of that is to you know uh invite people to take it seriously and i think aesthetics do happen to be one of those things that um it can seem sometimes vain but i think it's actually it gets to the the core of things so it's our first thing it's many ways you can judge a book by a cover um because the cover is the first thing you're gonna look i don't even

want to look inside like if i'm just like scanning it's the cover that tells me it's the thing that invites me in um in the first place unless i already know what i'm looking for uh maybe it's the title but even then it's like you know what how is the title you know shown which there might be something that that catches me and i i don't think that should be taken lightly um and i think it plays into a lot of things a lot of us are you know i've gotten into architecture and such and how fiat and sound money might, how the different incentives around architecture change. And I think it's the same thing with aesthetics.

When you're spending every day in these buildings and you're choosing for them to look a certain way, you are basically saying that the look of it embodies your principles. And you should think carefully. are these the principles that you want to be embodying is this the principle that you want to share with people um and you know yeah so i think we should take that seriously so we are in the process of raising money so that you know design work is is not cheap

when you want the good stuff um and so we we are raising raising money to be able to pay a designer to be able to help us with that mission because you know the the website it's uh i think of it is small because i'm thinking of it in terms of like these small beginnings but uh as i was rebuilding the whole thing it was just reminding me it was like there's a lot of nooks and crannies all around it um that have to that have to be redesigned um but uh you know we're raising 21 million sats um and uh i think i think we're up to 14 in in change um so we're looking for you know uh, about 7 million more sets, uh, which is getting more expensive. So fundraising is going to get more and more difficult as time goes on. Uh, but, uh, you know, we're, we're raising that

because we want to, if, if, if you share, um, our belief that these are very important ideas, um then uh we invite you to uh you know help us make it important so that others around the world now and in the future can also look to it and uh be be drawn into uh be drawn in by by how it looks how they think about it like really truly embodying uh these these ideas yeah giving bitcoin and everything that led to it the respect that it deserves yeah and again the attention to detail that's um i think it's very it's a lost i don't want to call it an art but it's um it's a trait that's been lost with today's society in this fiat world and i think i mean it's high time preference right yeah because uh with low time preference you have you have time and you can

you can think carefully about the long-term ramifications of something um because you can think about those if in a high time preference world you just have to worry about getting food on the table but once you've settled that you can think about well i don't care about just how this looks right now you know i can just have it whatever in fact you know the site is functional in fact many people have told me over the years that they think it's a perfectly fine looking website but i'm thinking not just in terms of like the guy who's coming across it online i'm thinking about you know generations to come um and also you know people people from all sorts of backgrounds uh you know how do they feel when they see this does it make them want to read it

and uh think about these ideas or does it make them kind of think like oh it's just you know it's just this this bitcoin stuff and this was also going into our logo design because you know uh we we wanted to avoid using like orange and using like the b and and all of that it's uh it's popular it's great it's now but i also i don't know that those memes are going to you know hold up forever um that might that might just be something that's you know that was the first 50 years of bitcoin we kind of had that look and then um you know over time as it becomes more of a background thing um in the sense that people aren't spending their whole day thinking about bitcoin it's just it's part of it's their money yeah um maybe they don't have the same like reason

to use like a you know have have a very like provocative logo that you know it just it you know it's in your face orange is very in your face yeah and so uh you know we wanted to try how could we create a sort of uh bitcoin aesthetic that's outside of the sort of sort of typical existing memes um what we ended up finding inspiration from were uh renaissance printers marks which uh when uh the printing press was made you know different people like you have a whole burgeoning industry around a brand new world changing technology and when people made something it's like they want to demonstrate it's like i was the one who printed this and so they made like they're basically like brands and it's like you know i'm the one who who printed this book so that

you know back then too you know you can go to the harry ransom center here in austin at the university of texas and you can see one of the original gutenberg bibles those things i mean it's still it's still in one piece and um it's a massive book beautifully bound uh that's made by someone who cared very deeply about the thing that he was he was putting on paper and um the people who were making those brands were people who they took great pride in the work that they did because that that book that it's not just a commodity book it is their book and that they wanted people to know that and so um that was sort of their way of of identifying it so you could have that you know sort of reputation and so you have the same feeling it's like well

you can come into bitcoin and there's a lot of different places to learn from um why would you want to learn from us and the reason is because um our intention people can judge whether or not we we do it but our intention is to find these timeless truths of bitcoin and do our very best at communicating those to people uh from from you know any different walk of life um and not just today but also in the future and um you know we take pride in that and uh want to want to be able to communicate that so that people see that logo and and see that you know we we take our bitcoin ideas very seriously no matter how how i mean we anyone who knows pierre and i know that uh we're very cheeky individuals uh but part of that cheekiness like underneath and just like in my

meme talk it's like we can we can have all the trolling and fun but the only reason that it really matters is underneath seeped in truth and we're we're trying to ground it in truth and so i i want people to feel that when they go to the nakamoto institute is this is not just another website um and this bitcoin stuff is not just some like you know you know how many times you try to you know talk to someone about bitcoins like yeah i just haven't really like gotten into it yet it's like okay well if you go to you know an ugly website you're not going to want to like read it so why would you have picked it up and looked at it um yeah i want to take it seriously yeah i'm again very happy that you are because i think we need more people taking

not only bitcoin many other things much more seriously so i think leading by example and putting as much thought and attention to detail that you have for this revitalization is a great example to point to it's like we need more of this yeah well bitcoin fixes i think there's going to be a lot more of this because as people liquidate all of their fiat nonsense and they only have the things that spark joy. They're only thinking, thinking about the things that spark joy. Um, it's, I think it really does open up people's mind. We, we see it all the time in Bitcoin, people totally changing their lives and reorienting themselves towards a really positive vision. Um, I think that's why there's so many Bitcoin babies. Everyone else is complaining

about the fertility crisis or something. It's like, I don't know, I'm on Bitcoin Twitter and I just see baby after baby. Um, you're on Bitcoin Twitter. You might start to worry about over population for real i was like we're gonna need elon to to set up mars bases with the just to have a place for all these bitcoin babies yeah so but i think that a lot of this stuff comes from the fact that it really does upgrading your money opens you up to to repricing everything in your life finding what you truly value and improving those things and acting on them and cutting out other stuff to the point that everything is leading towards actual improvement of your life yeah and uh it's a very positive vision it's awesome and uh if enough individuals

do that society as a whole will get better we're positive well i mean every this happens at like the uh the margins you know one person at a time and then you know at some point you wake up and it's everyone um and everyone's happy um gosh we could keep going we're like three hours in or two hours in almost um one last question i know we got shoot rush hour hitting here what do you uh i mean i know we just talked about your your goal with this revitalization and again trying to bring a degree of seriousness to Bitcoin and how people approach it. What are your thoughts on the current discourse around Bitcoin?

How are we doing? What can people be doing better? What should we be focusing on? What are some low-hanging fruits that you think we're missing? That's an interesting question. So I've been so wrapped up in this that in many ways, um a lot of the things that are going on in the discourse i see um but i don't necessarily have

a super hardcore like hardline opinion on this or that um a broad feeling that i've been having is that um and it kind of comes in some ways being able to step away and just kind of be focused on on this and so you're you're kind of out of the discourse and then you come back and see how it is um i think i think it'll be great um if i can succeed in trying to create um better spaces for serious uh bitcoin thought um serious serious when i say serious i don't mean like without jokes or anything like that i just mean you know uh intentional and purposeful going back to the dialectic yeah um being able to get to that um i imagine there's there's a lot of ways that we could uh

find the golden mean around a lot of these things that get very heated um so i'm just thinking for instance of like the uh ossification debates because uh people see people see uh Certain things emerge in Bitcoin that I would agree that I'm not exactly a fan of, and they immediately want to have everything locked down. I disagree with this in a few interesting ways. so so the first is when it comes to ossification i've always thought of that term not as like a prescriptive measure but as a description of what happens when you have more and more um entities on the network that have uh competing interests you know uh you know my classic uh picture of this is you know it's like the reservoir dogs mexican standoff and that's

bitcoin governance because it's like everyone's trying to do their own thing and the whole system works together because of the incentives you know between that and when you have more and more people who are like that um it it might be harder to find ideas that are shared by enough of them to actually uh find a foothold um and on the other hand if you do find a an idea that works for everyone it's also probably a really awesome idea um i think there's there's some ways that people fall into discourse where it's like um too extreme in the sense of like they they forget certain things like, you know, even if we quote ossified, there's still bug fixes that have to be done. And those could on some theoretical level have end up with some like incidental

effect on consensus, like no change to Bitcoin core is without some possible effect. And so that stuff is still going to be happening and so you never really have like software is never truly complete so I definitely understand

people's conservative interests like we like what things are I think it's important to make sure that we we fully appreciate what that does and does not mean um because there's ways in which uh we might we might end up uh including more than we we meant

so like you know not bug fixing even though because it's like oh we don't want to change the code at all um for a lot of people that would be a straw man um which it would be a straw man for a lot of individuals my point is like there's we want to make sure that we don't fall into into things like that and i guess my my my point there is more is like i don't know the full extent of what other ideas there might be like that that i just haven't realized that i was i was following i i thought big blocks were a good idea once you know back in the early days um you know i read on the bitcoin wiki once it was like yeah you could just like uh increase the block size and not as much thought had been done around the nature of forks and backwards compatibility and so on and

so forth and so it's like oh yeah that seems like an obvious thing and it took actually diving into that and thinking through it um that that led to realizing it's like that's actually one of the worst ideas ever i'm just like let's just raise the block size um so i just i i do think i i i'm not calling anyone out here um i just i i do think that uh intellectual humility uh is an extremely important virtue um i'm not necessarily very good at it myself that's not what i'm trying to say um but i do think that more people should think on that and just uh and and just think about intellectual humility in general um and uh and and that that that just goes for everyone that's not even like i said i'm not even trying to call anyone out i think literally everyone on every

side um because there's also times where uh certain certain rifts can come about um due to misunderstandings of one another so you know i think intellectual humility could probably also uh invite a little bit more diplomacy among these different camps um to to be able to effectively communicate what it is they're trying to get to and work out actual points of agreement and disagreement um and i i do think that basically intellectual humility would help with uh um you know trying to create more of a spirit of dialectic instead of rhetoric yeah um so that's uh that and and i should also say is like this is this is just something this is also a it's i'm trying to be like a timeless wisdom here this is something that you we should

always be thinking about um even post hyper bitcoinization and everyone's on this like we should always we should always have that in mind um because um there might be there might be a way that uh bitcoin could be made better there might be something that we need to just actually fix with bitcoin you know we've had we've had inflation bugs um and so we should just we should just uh keep that in mind um but also as soon as you find bad faith uh deal with it uh i kind of want to say ruthlessly yeah uh not not uh you know take take that as you will i suppose but, uh, you know, uh, bad faith, uh, needs to be, um, rejected. Um, and so if, if people cannot engage in good faith, then, um, they should, they, they, it should be, it should be handled

appropriately. And, um, yeah, I, I don't, I don't go, go watch my talk to get the whole thing on that uh i can't believe it took us seven years to do this um again i can go on for hours so we just go on for we just have a year-long rip here to catch up send us live logan we're gonna do a marathon live stream that well hey you know the fundraising you know we can have like a we should do that we have like people just waiting on nostril dms you know instead of like for the phone it's like everyone's just on their phone waiting for a noster dm and we have like a variety hour so we have like matt snow come out and play guitar and then we have uh btc minstrel come out and sing some songs well if we do it and it's televised uh everybody's gonna wear a suit this

is one thing uh yes justin moon tried to start for austin bit devs but he uh started slacking um need to dress better yes i i i dress like a slob so uh i have i have to fix that myself but uh yeah we probably should uh upgrade from uh t-shirts yeah everybody's wearing a suit answering phones but yeah yeah in the back they're they're answering their phones and we have we have all this stuff we have uh you know sailor comes out and like gives a rip warring there is no second best rendition are we are we brainstorming an annual

Satoshi Nakamoto Institute I think this is going to have to happen a telethon here at the TFTC studios alright that might need to actually happen stay tuned

donate to the Nakamoto Institute particularly for this fundraiser let's get this over the hump and bring beauty back to the world. The implementation of these design ideals. Yes.

Liquidate fiat ugliness. Yes. Where should we send people? NakamotoInstitute.org That's the website for the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. You can go to slash donate if you want to

donate. There's links to our newsletter, links to all of the the library the blog the all the good stuff you'll be able to find um and then you know we're on we're on nostre uh i think primal.net slash sni is like an easy way i guess to to find i don't want to like read off our nostre should i do that i can get your nostre yeah get your end pub and just uh read it you know probably not net slash sni is a very very clean yes so that's that's the easiest way and even if you don't use primal or anything you'll be able to find the the nostril pub uh pub key from that um you can also follow follow us on on twitter at nakamoto inst i n s t

um and then you can also follow me uh bitstein on twitter i'm also on nos on why i am on noster and primal.net.bitstein will get you to my uh noster pub key and uh dms are open and uh i love i love hearing from people and uh if you if you have any interest in uh getting involved if you if you have some cool ideas if you have um uh if you know other languages and you want to do some translation if you have coding skills it is a an open source website and you can help us out on on github um to to beef up beef up the website and help us build out um you know what it's going to take to do the things we want to do and uh you know also if you if you just have sats and you care about uh making sure those those sats remain like if you want your generational wealth to uh

to pass on through the generations um our goal is to help you and if you think that we can indeed help you with that goal um you know please please donate so that we can uh do our part oh yeah michael i feel incredibly blessed to know you and uh have been able to learn from you over the last decade you've taught me a lot and uh thank you for what you do if you freaks for some reason or another have not gone to the nakamoto institute do it consider donating and yeah i think this is uh the beginning of something special generational multi-generational so very excited to see what you build moving forward thank you so much and uh glad i'm finally here let's uh

let's do it again yeah we will peace and love freaks