TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #35: Bitcoin Sign Guy

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Bitcoin Sign Guy to talk about the infamous day he held a "Buy Bitcoin" sign behind Janet Yellen as she gave a congressional testimony, what drives him philosophically, and what technologies like Bitcoin and 3D printers will enable in the future. *WARNING* This may be the drunkest TFTC episode to date. Enjoy!

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, where Alf the Sacred River ran through caverns, measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. I think we found our intro. Tales from the Crypt. Wow! Your boy Marty fucked up. Bigly. What is up, freaks?

welcome back to tales from the crypt uh it's your boy marty bent and uh holding my hand up here i just messed up i just had an incredible 20 minute conversation with my guest uh and did not hit record so we were speaking into the bis i learned a lot in that 20 minutes we are going to reverse it i'm gonna speed up this intro i gave him a nice you know what i'm gonna give you the same intro as i did the first time please my guest tonight you all know him in some way or fashion you don't hear from him much you've he's had one big bang moment and it was around this time last year on july 12th 2017 when during the federal reserve uh it was a congressional committee actually it was a congressional committee uh grilling the federal reserve chairwoman uh janet

yelling uh and our dear friend here had the gall to sit behind her and hold up a buy bitcoin sign as serendipitously as a ticker below the bloomberg uh the bloomberg ticker was uh had the headline uh federal reserve is not open to an audit i want to introduce you all to bitcoin sign guy bitcoin sign guy for the second time welcome to tales from the crypt how are you thank you so much marty and for your charitable introduction well it's very kind i'm sorry i feel like i just wasted 20 minutes of your valuable life no that's okay now there's now there's lore around this episode it's the lost the lost the lost conversation output it was creative and i think we're going to build on it so we're going to jump right into it so we

don't waste too much time anymore you have an incredible tale that leads up to that fateful day on july 12th 2017 let's get into your tale from your tale how did you find bitcoin what year and where were you sure so my my tale from the crypt is not particularly uh i was not a forerunner of bitcoin by any means uh it was not a promethean uh but i was rather pushed into bitcoin rather than pulled um via negativa to use a nassim taleb concept and i developed my interest in it through opposition to legacy finance rather than because i was a smarty at cryptography or distributed networks or any of that other good crypto anarchy stuff that was floating around uh so i had two experiences that drew me in or pushed me in rather uh one was my junior year

of college studying abroad in argentina working on a currency trading desk in buenos aires and just seeing the wacky stuff that that country does to get its hands on dollars or you know sound money in general far be it from me by the way to refer to dollars as sound money however comparatively speaking comparatively speaking compared to the peso uh you know the dollar has had better monetary management it's not it's not uh it's it's certainly in the hall of fame of poorly managed currencies the peso yes yes it's uh pretty pretty piss poor they just had to take out a loan from the imf a year after issuing 100-year treasury bonds i said this on our first recording if any of you assholes buy a 100-year treasury bond you're an idiot unless you plan to live for

150 years which hey it might be possible yeah maybe you're not an idiot maybe you're making like a long a good con in general you know latin america has given us many lessons in monetary restraint yeah my dad actually by the way fun fact was uh and this is this is deeper than we really need to go but he was a he was a cia brat raised in caracas grandfather was a commie hunting cia uh yeah he grew up in caracas and uh it was a it was a an urban metropolis back then not so much these days so no i think uh i talked about this earlier today with jw weatherman there was a stat on twitter today that irregardless if irregardless is a word that's debatable um of bitcoin 70 plus plummet from its heights in december of 2017 if you were to buy

uh bitcoin with bolivars at that point at the height of bitcoin's price uh you would still have the same purchasing power in in venezuela even though the price of bitcoin has fallen 70 or it's probably yeah it's around 70 since it's cited like around 20 000 dollars man so that purchasing power even though bitcoins fell that far uh the venezuelan boulevard has uh inflated so much in the last six months that uh bitcoin was actually a better store value that's why i tell everyone to sell their bitcoins for magic the gathering booster packs because they only go up if you get that black lotus man it has outperformed every shit coin in the book the black lotus are you magic the gathering guy no no that's that's just some

compot follow him on twitter for you um that's good to know i'm looking for a good follow so um you're you're in argentina you're working for this bank what's your second brush with uh this disenchanting experience in the finance world the second is closer to home in fact it's basically nearly at home in connecticut i worked as an intern for a global macro hedge fund and witnessed firsthand the central bank monoculture that dominates you know modern markets and there are fund managers there that are tasked with maintaining the price level of the economy you know correcting mispricings and they one uh you know all their practically all their activity is predicated on which way they think the federal reserve will move rates and

if there's real economic data it's always interpreted through the filter of well which way does this sway the dot plot the dot plot the dot plot and what was the other chart with all the fucking lines from there i think it was a gd it's a gdp or inflation growth i don't know what it is but it has like all the lagging like here's what we predicted here and it came nowhere close to where we predicted so we have to control it here they look like a bunch of l a bunch of like fucking worms on top of each other yeah that's uh that's what modern finance bases its uh its pricing mechanism yeah i was you know i had to say i was dismayed when i see these people they all attended great schools half of them were phds in statistics and stuff like that

and math and physics etc and they would look each other in the face and and say without a shred of irony you know what does the purple jacket mean when janet's wearing it before like when she walks out you know two sigma is a fund they do machine learning i believe on all fed testimony and you know it's gets so granular and minute in detail it's like these are inconsequential things compared to the way that certain certain indicators are trending but this is what they trade on and so it thereby disrupts the most fundamental coordinating cost in the economy and i mean i'll let the the true economists tell you more about how important that is but i think this is a good learning moment for the freaks out there so the the rate that bitcoin sign guy is referring

to is the federal funds rate and for you freaks that don't uh know what the federal funds rate it is it is the rate at which banks trade their reserves so it basically dictates um the price the price of money right at the end of the day is that correct like i mean the certainly the the cost of credit yeah and thereby uh the coordinating link between the present and the future and uh you know try sorting your time preference on that basis so especially when the fed funds rates at uh 25 bps for for almost a decade yeah so those were the two negative experiences and simply put they did not reconcile i was unable to reconcile them with my most vanilla classical liberal classical econ theory you know smith

bastiat ricardo mill uh hayek mises moving in that direction later but i was unable to basically reconcile it with what seems to be sound and so it led me to reopen a book that i had previously closed which was bitcoin in 2013 i must have just seen an article that said bitcoin popped womp womp and there's a lot of this thought thought nothing more of it other than to put a put a post-it on it uh and so i i re-looked at bitcoin and started heading down that rabbit hole what year is this again this is this is uh summer 2016 and so by the end of that internship that summer i had uh basically sold myself on bitcoin and felt had no had no qualms burning my bridge with the legacy financial system uh and so at that point uh i went into

senior year and had i was still swirling in the in the in the rabbit hole at that point crypto twitter didn't help much with that i mean it's it's i don't want to say it's a disease but it's uh it's addictive it was the one social media that i relapsed on i had previously cut out you know facebook instagram snapchat etc but i i found that i had to i needed crypto twitter to understand it to understand you know the dynamics of bitcoin so still swirling around I found my way to D.C. to work at a generally a free market think tank that shall remain nameless, where I studied the political and economic dynamics of Bitcoin and also monetary policy, which was the pretext for me being in that hearing that fateful day. so let's get to that faithful day uh well i never expected it to be viral uh i merely knew that oh back up back up what the hell happened like what the hell happened did you expect to hold up the

sign when you came in did you come in with no no not premeditated i made the sign in about two minutes before i held it up and uh you know it happened to be there was there was some there was some irony to the moment uh that i held it up but it was completely unpremeditated i simply um i knew that perhaps my co-workers from the previous summer were certainly watching it that they'd see it my dad also works in financial markets so i it was my high pop moment hey papa and uh and so i i simply wanted an image that i could pull up the live stream later harvest it keep it as a little keepsake but 45 minutes later i was escorted out by the parliamentarian in the hearing and that uh i i didn't know that it was viral at the time my phone was dead but when i

got back to my office all my co-interns said oh dude you're blowing up bro and uh by the way people want to give you money and there's already scammers trying to collect it in your stead so uh they urged me to post a bitcoin address crypto ethan was uh was the first i saw on crypto tours like it's my boy that's my boy shout out crypto shout out crypto ethan we're gonna diverge here a little bit talk about the first time i met bitcoin saying wait hold on crypto ethan um dude you're a stud you should you need your fire flames hung and you need you you deserve it i don't want to use such a you know charged word as deserve but go find yourself a a crypto a crypto bay

you got it bro so marty and i will wingman you oh i'll wing i tried to wingman him hard the first time we met this is a perfect segue into the first time we met that bitcoin sign guy crypto ethan and i met about a month ago at a blockchain week snake oil week snake oil week snake oil week is correct it was a monday night happy hour thrown by some telegram group that shall not be named uh a rooftop hotel ton of suits huge names of crypto pretty sure brian kelly was there pumping ripple in the corner a lot of vcs a lot of suits a lot of people that uh frankly if you're asking me uh i think they're more important than they actually are and in there i was sitting there i grabbed my first drink i was looking around

One friend that was there was Mike Dudas We were talking Somebody I was happy to see there was him And we talked for a little bit And then I saw your face From afar and I said could it be Could it be Very very recognizable

Among all the suits among all the people That you've seen on Twitter and all that bullshit I wanted to talk to you So I walked up to you and Crypto Ethan Introduced myself And that's because I truly believe that you have done more for the cryptocurrency space and bitcoin in particular let's just say bitcoin you have done more for bitcoin than any of those suits that think they're very important

and think they're actually doing good work and ico and shit have done for the whole space because you were a part of the greatest meme in bitcoin history the juxtaposition i wrote a newsletter i already read the whole newsletter i'm not going to read again it took too much time i actually read the newsletter then noticed we weren't recording for the first time around but the juxtaposition of you holding up the buy bitcoin sign janet yellen uh giving testimony that she cannot audit the fed as on tv you said you did not know this it was impossible for you to know but the ticker on bloomberg was janet yellen colon uh the fed will never be audited or something like that let me i'm strongly opposed i'm strongly opposed to audit the fed uh and the juxtaposition

of your buy bitcoin in that headline is so fucking poetic and so beautiful uh it had to be written about and it i think will live on in eternity uh because the juxtaposition is so fucking strong like janet yellen you can't audit the fed we can't be transparent i think she actually said in that testimony as well that they're very transparent but you're holding up the buy bitcoin sign behind her which is a technology that is audited every 10 minutes and is as transparent as possible and i think we're gonna look back we're gonna have gray beards we're gonna be walking around with canes drinking manhattans later in life and and you're gonna be i think you might be in a textbook one day well that's extremely charitable but in the in the words of

an anarchist friend of mine you just have to let the objective irony of the universe fill your sales and uh what a quote and where better to sail to than uh to a place where you can wage asymmetric cultural warfare unending against the central banks and here's where we get to the philosophy why are you into this so you're very you've been very philosophically charged i guess more so since your last internship that you quit and sure and you uh you are very i don't say ideological but you're very pure in your your philosophy behind this stuff so who inspires you thank you so i as i said it started with the the classical economists and the austrian school as well uh but as i go deeper uh into a more thinking more of the robust political repercussions of

bitcoin uh you know it takes on somewhat of an anti-state form so you start to look at murray rothbard hans herman hoppe um tim may uh nick land menchus moldbug you can read off your list i told i told him he's not allowed you can read i don't want to i don't want to leave anyone out uh and then there's also uh there's also on the fringe of the crypto currency space there's the free banking school george selgin and larry white uh these are these are people whose ideas i've tried my best to familiarize myself with uh yeah that's uh menchus goldbug in particular he was the subject of the first ever issue of marty's bent uh his uh bubble theory of money paper or blog post and very good very good blog post you should go i think it's on nixie but i could be

wrong it's around google it's around yeah google benches mold bug uh money is a bubble yeah yeah so then after the theory uh i really came to admire most the people that were practitioners of the theory and you know you know libertarianism has this completely fatal romanticism with their own defeat uh what do you mean by that with their i mean they just they love to lose like look at gary johnson's pathetic run for presidency i mean they people weren't ready for ron people were not ready for ron i think they understand that this system is not designed for them to win so they are happy being you know this white knight sort of riding off into the sunset for ideas that everyone just completely dumps on all the time

uh so to that to that um it's people that can distill the theory and uh sort of transact it with real politics uh rather than just pontificating that i'm most drawn to so first and foremost the uh the anarch prime or i use the i use the word anarch which is ernst junger's concept of a person who builds something and creates a a functional a functional object to express themselves rather than just the anarchist which is sort of infantile ineffective nihilistic etc so people that have really built practical applications of this theory the first one is satoshi and uh all of his predecessors way die uh adam back nick zabo uh the list goes on uh but wow what a what an effort by satoshi whether it's one person or a consortium of cryptographers and cypherpunks

i'm i'm in awe of you and in your in your debt would you call the bitcoin white paper stroke a genius uh it was this may be blasphemy but i almost seem like it almost seems to me as though it was just the logical combination of you know previous previous experiments yeah um and this is this is one of the most uh suppressed ideas i have uh and let it out and let it out and i would like uh a protocol engineer who uh knows the knows the straight dope on this to correct me if i'm wrong but bitcoin almost uh you know is is late uh it seems like it could have worked much earlier in the timeline of the internet yeah well if you look if you talk to internet protocol developers in particular so you get a 404 error if the website's down that the server's

down right and that's a web serving content serving layer of the internet i believe i'm i could be completely wrong of this but the the point i'm trying to make is that there's multiple errors there's like 402 to 404 i believe i believe the 402 error that you never see because there was never any protocol like plugged into it is the payments layer error and that like they they conceived the internet at tcp ip level thinking there would be a payment level but they never had the censorship resistant decentralized alternative and that might be bitcoin it's it's been a it's been an old idea actually friedman had the idea hayek sort of traced the idea with his statement that it would there would be some non-state money that

would be uh subtly introduced and would eventually be beyond the state's ability to co-opt or it was hayek who said that we'll never be able to fix money until we rest it out of the hands of the government that too yeah that too smart guy and we've done that and we're on our way to doing that we are on our way to that so beyond bitcoin like you're you seem like a very like you seem very dead set on becoming a sovereign individual making that happen i mean it who who doesn't want self-determination some people don't i for me there's there's no middle ground on that um i would say me too but some people don't but you know to to return to my litany of other successful anarchs i have to i have to shout out uh you know ross albrecht the silk road

cody wilson defense distributed amir taki libitcoin uh aaron schwartz rest in peace uh let's talk about aaron schwartz for a little bit for people might not know about him because that's a fucking the fact that he had to end his life because of what he did yeah i mean he didn't have to end his life but he was his he would have spent life in jail for something so minute yeah liberating liberating the libraries of mit to the web it was uh j store right the j store i thought it was a j store j store at mit i think yeah and so this dude what he what aaron schwartz basically did was download a bunch of files he could only get access to if you were paying like the university fee and students got access to this but he was open sourcing

these documents on was it bit torrent or uh to be honest i don't know and he got he got prosecuted for stealing intellectual property and wound up uh taking his life in jail because he was going to spend double life sentences i believe uh completely fucked up uh the free flow of information should be free flowing like you should not he should not have been uh threatened with life in jail for freeing information so other other practitioners of liberty i would say julie nassange edward snowden uh and then you know now that now we're in a better place because uh these these ideas can be expressed entrepreneurially because we have bitcoin so we have uh how does bitcoin make this happen we it's just a framework

for other for other sort of liberty enabling startups to exist um the decentralized exchanges hodo hodo uh bisque uh coin join dark wallet etc open dime open dime i forgot about it again you forgot about that the first time too still trying to still trying to get my hands on a cold card um azteco and uh lightning labs shout out elizabeth and uh roast beef i'd love to have you both on this podcast overdue overdue uh so it's those people that uh sort of i aspire to you know make a contribution akin to their to theirs and how do you see yourself doing this uh through building a business that enables people to become self-sovereign writing code uh i mean just covering fire for bitcoin to get out the door

i love that i mean i love that we can you know we can we can go into later uh we can talk about my conspiracy that there's actually a fifth pillar within the the the global world order which is the fifth pillar is the the faction within that subverts that subverts the the sort of mission of the state so jay clayton are you fifth pillar giancarlo giancarlo uh he's chad as fuck yeah but otherwise well these people are individuals at the end of the day right yeah you know that's what people have to realize like not all government employees are evil there but certainly i don't want to uh i don't want to rely on these people no you'd be self-sufficient so um

transitioning from the theory to you know where this takes our economy our society um sometimes i i think about you know what is the what is the medium of bitcoin and uh What is sort of the lineage it has of decentralizing technologies? So this invokes cybernetics. Marshall McLuhan has the great technological determinist text. The medium is the message. and figuring out how uh the media over which we transact and communicate influence our our very world that's why twitter is the best that's why i love twitter it's a good medium can we take a

step back and can you define cybernetics for the freaks out there cybernetics oh dear uh briefly make it quick it it's simply the sorting the way that uh digital systems uh map onto human experiences that was very succinct and very dead on um so in terms of these technologies you know the most recognized would be the printing press subverting the monopoly over theological truth of the catholic church uh we have in my view uh the golden age of navigation and private navigation uh subverting what do you mean by private navigation you know private map making companies i'm i'm a sailor so i'm a cartographic lover geek of some of some way yeah uh that was that was monopolized at one point oh oh yeah in fact in there still is uh there still is a

deep state apparatus to this day uh for maps the military has the best maps in the world uh it's called like their national like geospatial agency or something like that so you're saying our maps our maps not be what we think they are well not in many ways we're uh we're overturning that monopoly i mean it's been overturned but uh we still have we have now for example google earth i never knew this you're not going into a flat earth argument are you guys all i'm saying is that the flat earthers know the arguments for the round earth inside and out okay that's all i'm saying they know the arguments for the round earth better than you that's all i'll leave it at that so uh other other sort of subversive technologies we have printable guns of defense

distributed will this what what does this do to the military industrial complex i showed my my parents my parents were up for my birthday a few weeks ago and i don't know like we're talking about bitcoin talking about liberty they were like why like we already got on the subject we were a couple bottles of wine deep and i was like you know what like my i come from a very anti-gun family i mean i'm not anti-gun personally but i was not allowed to watch power rangers growing up because they had guns like we never grew up we grew up in northeast philly never had a gun my mom was a parole officer in north philly taking down crack addicts and shit like that people that have guns and she never held a gun she was running through the streets of north philly without a gun

risking her life i can't believe that my mom was a parole officer one time but that's legit we never had guns we moved down to south carolina the culture shock of how many people owned guns jameson lopp your neighbors were all jameson lopp basically basically like we showed up down there and i think the second day we lived there my three my three-year-old neighbor i shit you not was outside with a bb gun shooting squirrels my mom almost had a heart attack regardless with that being said we're not a gun family i am very i think people should be able to own guns i think there should be logical uh gun laws where if you're going to go buy a gun at a store you should have a background check it should be pretty rudimentary but beyond that we brought up defense

distributed in particular and i showed my mom the video of 3d printing guns and was like she was blown away they're extremely elegant by the way they're all a work of art look up defense distributed on youtube why do you say they're a work of art oh it just cody has a a uh a talent right well it plays into this whole thing of of liberty like people want to like my mom was like we should stop this we should stop this stuff's like there is no stopping us this is software this is language exactly this is so let's get into that philosophy like like at some point in the future like people are gonna be able to 3d print guns at their house and there's nothing anybody can do about it so it's either accept it and try to work

within that reality or deny it and fall behind yeah i mean it digital systems and bitcoin is a great example of this are routing around the traditional means of control but they're using language at the end of the day it's so far ahead of of whatever is on the on the law books uh and uh lastly the last sort of big disruptive that's pretty cliche i take it back uh the self-spun spectacle of social media and having individuals being in the spotlight even for a moment uh versus just accepting the the main mainlining uh cable cable news you know this is this is going to have a lasting effect on monoculture it is having a profound effect it is it's not it's not it will it is so uh so in the same way bitcoin is doing this for

financial sovereignty uh against central banking and against fiat currency um and so at this point it circles back to the beginnings of my of my theoretical foundations classical liberalism and uh you know what has uh bitcoin become it's not just bitcoin anymore we have a plethora of shit coins and so are you a maximalist i am a maximalist why is that i mean it bitcoin is the is the only the only viable the only viable blockchain in my view it has the immaculate conception i tend to agree it has the perfect monetary policy that's um But I will argue for something that may disconcert some dyed-in-the-cloth maximalists. I love Kevin Pham.

I love you too, Kev. I love Kevin Pham. But the argument he makes that ETH is a security is his worst argument because... Interesting. Because financial sovereignty, like freedom of speech, like the right to defend yourself with a gun, is a liberty that is not without cost. Financial sovereignty means other people have the financial sovereignty to launch kooky investment ideas. and uh this is you know for the same reason that we have the first amendment the second amendment you know we protect these rights because they have costs well i would argue all this stuff is

falls under the first amendment because at the end of the day it is language there you go it is written word if that that has been uh successfully argued in court um in the 90s right so uh to that i would say as a bitcoin maximalist i would hasten to denounce shit coins but i won't tattle on them to the sec yeah that discussion uh this afternoon with jw weatherman i was like i i wholeheartedly agree with you i think they will fail on their merit and in due time yeah and then and then it'll be good for us it's like hey guys we uh we were able to boo these people out of the stadium etc you know and that proves a different type of organization and different type of justice human a different type of human security

so let's get into this like we are transitioning into a new paradigm i would argue um a new way organizing society i think you feel strongly about this as well like how is the world going to change or how would you like it to change well with these technologies more peer-to-peer more bottoms up uh and keep in mind when something is peer-to-peer it removes the the point at which your activity is engineered so you know if you're using an app you know they facebook's app with those little bright red notifications they turn you into a mouse on a little treadmill it's it's nuts so um so bitcoin really boils it down we hope that it will turn out to be something that flattens human interaction and there won't be a uh

a puppet master that is controlling you trying to make you waste time and clicks and eyeballs and uh you know spend your spend your coins on junk right and that's that's what safe and i got it safe and i got into is again this all comes back to time preference too are you willing to save and think for the future i can't imagine a world where like you buy an iphone you expect to have it for 10 years but like hopefully in a bitcoin enabled world like it'll be longer i have an iphone but i have an old iphone um but what i'm really waiting for and i again my experience is outstripped by the pros in this regard uh calling on a ledger and trezor to make a phone that is designed from a security first standpoint rather than a capabilities first standpoint like the

iphone is for example i would be a buyer of that i like that uh that framing security security first versus usability yeah i i've never i saw the trade-offs thing i've never transacted uh you're going back to a nokia brick i i almost did i i kid you not i i almost did um but i would i would prefer to have less digital exposure and more security but i've never transacted bitcoin on my phone lamentably because i just don't trust it what do you mean you don't trust you don't trust it'll track you or you don't trust holding it on your phone you know there's just hidden vulnerabilities in just the operating system that's written by people that aren't bitcoin first cypherpunks right but you know bitcoin first cypherpunks could they could probably

write some code to help you dial your grandmother to wish her happy birthday and you know put like text messaging and apps into a into a hardware wallet well i think keybase is getting the software figured out you're a big fan of keybase and all uh i don't know enough about them to give an educated opinion but keybase in my mind is uh i think they have the software figured out for what you're looking for i think uh because you can do group chats and shit like that i don't know they have voice capabilities yet they may get there in the future um but if you couple that with like a trezor and their hardware capabilities i think we're not too far from what you're envisioning right now well i certainly hope so um but in the meantime uh in the meantime still

using an iphone still uh we're still mired in shit coins um it it's funny we were raised on these uh fairy tales about decentralization from silicon valley digerati uh uh and uh there's people who write books on blockchain this and that um and they're really selling they're really selling something that doesn't exist i would call it the hyper real blockchain it's more real than real it's more real than bitcoin you know when you when you find a real blockchain you're disappointed because it doesn't stream 4k and have a 10 second sync time uh and it doesn't democratize democratize uh you know advertisement revenue on the dental plan of your choice blah blah blah uh so you know conquests laws

it says any any any institution that's not explicitly conservative shall become leftist progressive etc i've not heard this conquest laws conquest conquests laws also apply to bitcoin in that organizations that are not explicitly maximalist bitcoin first will become these shit coin coiners shit coiners so at this point i'd like to shout out uh zappo and wences shout out wences for you know leaving a lot of money on the table um but this is somebody who in particular when it came down to segwit 2x and the the battle of last summer was willing to swallow his pride and admit he he may have been misguided in in trying to push segwit 2x forward in particular i mean a lot of a lot of lunacy that these uh silicon valley

people throw at us and there's they're gonna save africa they're gonna save the world they're gonna to do everything you know that's the thing that pisses me off the most is that these people these people i will save these people for these people they they think they're going to save the world they fucking never even been to where the parts of the world they think they're going to save they don't know what the people dean they don't know exactly how to help them and they don't know what the people how the people want to help themselves all they've never asked that all they want to do uh is apply fordism like the henry the henry ford uh production line to icos they do the team the white paper the saft spin it up and ship it off uh yeah i won't name names but

you know the names you don't have to you know the names you know the names uh it's all fucking virtue signaling bullshit though i'm drunk we're vodka drunk now and marty gets yeah marty gets bold on vodka drunk and oh boy but seriously like these people i'm not trying to toot my own horn here but like from somebody who's helped start inner city lacrosse program and actually gone like when i lived in chicago went deep into the west and south side and try to help these kids with no role models out like you you realize that like not throwing money at the problem does not solve these problems these are cyclical problems that need really really involved and ingrained people to fix it like sending money to these places is not going to

solve their problems they they they have their buzzwords they like they're on democracy right now you know democracy it's just a technology uh and uh you know there there are some Crypto managers Who shall not be named Who were touting liquid democracy Lately Liquid democracy We had Santiago

Siri here who's the head of Democracy Earth I respect the shit out of Santi They're trying to create Liquid democracy I think he's doing it with The best intentions I think he

he's trying to push the envelope forward to crib a quote from nick land uh liquid democracy trades on a platform of its own annihilation so if you have what's that mean if you have uh if you have a truly liquid democracy you know a referendum that's very close to the surface is do we shut down this government to which i would vote yes uh so i think that these people they're despotic and uh they neglect the benefit of spontaneous order and uh a more a more smooth space uh devoid of barriers that's just a grid like a trellis you know like what your mom's uh your mom's rose roses grow up or whatever it's just like a creeping vine on a on a grid let let it just be a clear uh clear space and have uh have people fill in as they see fit this is a great segue into on-chain

governance is it possible and does it make any fucking sense uh no comment so next question i'm gonna cut out comment from that in the post edit so i mean i i do think that uh we we are certainly approaching new forms of government but they're not necessarily on chain and they don't update in 10 second blocks we have we have a neocameralism that's sort of mencius mold bugs joint stock republic idea that is uh certainly provocative and attractive uh we have uh other experiments in in systems of government that devolve our current uh the the monolithic the uber state into smaller into smaller things so we have estonian

e-residency we got uh liberland if you're if you're interested you know seasteading uh where geographically is liberland again it is oh i should remember this better it's on the danube and it's between croatia and uh the state across from croatia on the danube slovakia maybe yeah it's and it's just like woods right it's just woods it's just woods but the the point being that uh we are experimenting with new ways of governing ourselves and uh the revolution against the super state is not going to be head-on but it will be acidic it will dissolve it will dissolve larger things into smaller things we even have tim draper acidic a uh a of yeah just a big vat of acid uh we have tim draper uh bitcoin's own uh

pounding the pavement for three californias that's pretty good do you think he's washed his tie oh the save the children tie no or the purple the purple bitcoin one it's it's great style great style i don't know if he's ever washed it though maybe it's his lucky time i mean when i went to when i went to high school i was at all guys prep school i had i wore the same jacket for four years yeah i think i washed it twice i mean treat your clothes well and uh they'll treat you well this is this is the preppy ethos you saw me wearing that seersucker at the hearing you guys can't see bitcoin that was that looks sly as fuck um so yeah we are approaching a cyber feudalist uh moment cyber feudalist moment yeah what do

you mean by that uh it will when we when we have many more smaller states will look more like the middle ages when there was a system of ordered anarchy among small city states keir martland Is this preferable? Certainly. Keir Martland is a, I guess, historian who presented, he gave a great talk at Hans Hermann Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society. He spoke about how the Middle Ages was actually a time of stability under feudal ordered anarchy.

That's sort of a Berkey and weird Berkey and a way of putting it. But some of the best literature, some of the best art, some of this architecture around that period. Yeah. So this is the cyber gothic population decline in the Middle Ages. We also had counter urbanization. Everyone today wants to live on a farm, but they can't. What do you mean? oh i mean i everyone is just sucked into the cities almost against their will it seems i say this a lot i have a love-hate relationship with the city my wife

is about to pull all her hair out she's fucking tired in new york city well you need about you can actually homestead on a quarter acre so uh feel free to go buy buy some cattle buy some pigs I brought this up, people think I'm crazy I want to own a cow get some seeds, plant a garden but you know not to commit carnivory blasphemy

carnivory blasphemy? did you just call bitcoin carnivory blasphemy? no no no, not to commit blasphemy of the bitcoin carnivory school shout out to Michael Goldstein Pierre Richard, safe dean I'm

trying to eat more red meat every day and practice sound nutrition to complement my sound money yes we do not want to get stuck in that fiat food as as safety would refer to it the industrial sludge that uh that going off the gold standards would have allowed and it's crazy to think that so what do you think you're you're younger than i you're younger than i am by a tad by a tad but you're still I feel like kids our age I'm not going to refer to us as kids because I want to stay young

I feel I don't want to sound cocky or like I don't want to sound cocky but like I feel like we are the first like hey maybe like maybe shit's fucked up maybe

we should really press this button like I have maybe it's because we have nothing to lose because we're so young and it's like oh let's just go full-fledged for this absolutely i mean this is that's sort of my mentality this is this is my strategy for you know the bitcoin bitcoin uh ecosystem all people that orbit bitcoin you are you are called to the cyber jihad that is uh hodling and uh bitcoin terrorism is real i mean don't don't don't resist these negative sounding words you know they it's they're made pornographic in our day but uh you know be in retrospect they will be looked on with

be willing to uh commit to uh cult-like behavior and uh cult-like behavior we talked about this before we recorded even the first recording i you you are fond of cult-like behavior absolutely it's it's a way to route around the algorithm that consolidates and suppresses anything against the the mainstream direction you know the the flow toward the the perfected neoliberal system and so we as bitcoiners it's our it's our duty to optimize for chaos and commit ourselves to activities that seem incredibly negative uh like watching candidly your net worth plummet by 80 percent uh but this is uh this is how you get around the control the control is optimized for well one violence uh you know you see how well ruby ridge

turned out you know that was just sort of head-on uh conflict so what happened in oregon uh yes and so the the system responds to violence well but otherwise it's just optimized for digital commerce views clicks attention and uh vapid ship and uh so if you can askew your amazon alexas uh porn hub uh your foodie instagrams and uh your marvel in disney movies and your corporate pride advertisements these these things uh the the world sort of opens up and you find yourself in a new space uh where the electric tribalism of bitcoin can spread that was powerful that was powerful it's radical would you call it radical uh

it's it's it's illogical to the the system paradigm to to the system you know they they they make the argument oh bitcoin is volatile it'll never succeed but you know we have uh we have hodlers of last resort now pierre richard leads them in uh valiantly in phalanx formation uh but so this is this is a big issue uh that you know there's some people that are unwilling to enter the cult mindset because they're uh they're timid they're just milquetoast about it and they almost they they have like that uh libertarian uh like romanticism of their own defeat where you know they they almost don't want to believe that the revolution and not to use such a cliche word but that it is so near at hand you know fiat money

is on a 40-year evolution this is close to 50 now shit we're getting close to 40 closer to 50 than 40 45 i guess exactly no the brettonwood system ended 1973 73 or 71 oh boy someone someone google it i thought it was 71 someone google it so i either way either way uh you know we we have the formations of big cracks in the system we have brexit against the odds we have trump against the odds uh and now it's it's our turn to uh to kick this can uh down the road or really more serve a ball into the statist's court that they just can't return what do you say to the people that refer to you i would consider myself in here too as alt-right terrorist or or what do i say pushing an alt-right agenda or something like

what do i say to them uh like your bitcoin is an outlet for your frustrations uh it it succinctly addresses you know many of the ills that you want to see dealt with let's dive into this okay well suppose fiat money dries up uh that also means that say there needs to be drastic fiscal scale back uh squeezes all of the colleges that are just breeding grounds you know iq shredding institutions that uh that turn out people that all think canes uh and study you know what type of uh frilly frilly subjects i'm referring to i was uh talking about the laugher curve and dumb bullshit like that i wasn't i was subjected to that as well so truly if we can uh if we can get bitcoin to its escape velocity

And at this point, I want to call on all of the free market and quasi-libertarian, even conservative think tanks in Washington and around the world. Mises, Hoover, AEI, CEI, Cato, Reason Atlas, the Charles Koch Institute, Heritage. You guys can be providing great covering fire for Bitcoin. help help bitcoin get out the door we can't just leave it up to the fifth pillar the uh the chris giancarlos and the jay and the jay clayton clayton's uh you know let's devise a a praxis on how we get bitcoin uh to to succeed here and not even not even like we're going to figure it out it it is on a winning trajectory it simply uh could use some lubrication lube's never a bad thing but no i completely agree

but i want to bring it back to like the climate of our current society or current pop culture or whatever like there's such a left right divide like the coke brothers are evil like all these left alt right like all like people just get thrown in the alt right like if you're like even like partly conservative i certainly the left will how do we get over this so is it like it like i hate saying the left versus the right because i really i really hate it but it's it's true the left will come out against bitcoin what do you mean because it shatters it shatters what is the left can we break the left versus the right is that possible uh i would say it's almost a meaningless distinction

now it's what do you mean it's the left relies upon the right the same way the right relies upon the left to secure the exclusion of libertarian politics but do you think it's It's, do you think it's correct to divvy things up like that starkly? Just like, hey, it's the left or the right. There's no nuance. There's no. I mean, I would even say that, you know, there's something in Bitcoin for the Bernie bros. if if they really if they don't take the uh the blue pill dyed red but instead realize where

uh you know the the suppressed remainder of uh the middle class etc is is being held down you know bitcoin has somewhat of a solution yeah well it has the solution which is is allowing you to save your money like because right now it's impossible yeah fix your time preferences don't be don't be corralled toward taking loans that you can't afford well it's not even fixing your time preference it's giving you something that allows you to fix your time preference because even under this system if you fix your time preference you need you need the tools exactly exactly that's what i've been bitcoin is a tool it's a tool technologies are all tools exactly it's a tool that's what i said with carpe noctum a couple weeks ago like it is

just a tool to help you save your money across time and again this is the theme of the podcast for the last couple months i think is that we're just born into this system and we don't even like know what themes to look for or like know what is we are so confused and so bastardized and so thrown into this system that is filled with conspicuous consumption and consume, consume, consume, that we I will say, I say we've been lulled into never questioning our reality. Some of us, certainly. Some of us. I'll say most of us.

Sure. On that side you know just compare the compare the the road maps for you know the evolution of the economy over the next uh say two decades between you know the bitcoin crowd and the you know the legacy crowd uh you know they're proposing you know the digital fiat currencies andrew bordo uh andrew levin and michael bordo had a proposal for the fed coin i mean this is india's going for it a bunch of places are going to try china's gone for it china's there they're they're going for it china's there china's got us they're not going to succeed uh you have their

you have their uh completely i don't know demented cheerleaders like ken rogoff harvard the curse of cash like okay ken take away all our cash see if see if it doesn't hasten the adoption of bitcoin right yeah it's like how can you seriously vie for like an orwellian cashless society like ken rogoff ken rogoff wrote a fucking book about it yeah that was that was the subject of one of my econ theses what was the conclusion of your theses bad idea uh but having said all this i still think that uh bitcoiners do need a measure of humility uh because there could certainly be a reversal and this all flies back in our face uh how do see this play now so it in the situation where bitcoin just ends up dominating the world uh in

a bad way it's just that uh we don't solve privacy so andrew polstra scriptless scripts and schnor signatures please hurry up uh but we uh we need fungibility uh otherwise we're going to have you know the southern poverty law center put you on a list uh because they struck a deal with blockchain.info and they parsed the whole blockchain and oh sorry you're non-personed uh and there's a cybernetic guarantee of your of your exclusion from the economy yeah the anointed economy and so i would agree this is this has historical precedent uh surveillance capitalism has been around since the advent of the internet i would strongly amazon just signed a contract with washington state and oregon i believe to do facial recognitionship with law enforcement

it's happening i mean china's even further further along than anyone but uh i would recommend following on twitter yasha levin he he documents the uh involvement of silicon valley in surveillance uh palantir fuck you peter teal uh he's he's a maximalist he is but like palantir what so we don't have to go into palantir so the point being the the new sort of global village if it turns out that way will have its own vulnerabilities much as much as the aztecs all got sick when uh the european arrived so you if you connect everything you know there's going to be a backlash uh sort of to the tune of uh nassim taleb's uh grievance against monsanto which is hey you're playing with these uh you're playing

with these genomes and it will have a macro evolution it will have a macro effect on on biodiversity that is completely above and beyond your ability to model uh so my optimism is against this sort of reversal would be that bitcoin turns out to be a very flat tool email for example is a protocol it hasn't dominated us yet unless you're hillary clinton and uh oh shit and so we we do have we do have reason for optimism uh but let's not let's not think it's a slam dunk uh for example i uh a person that we quote a lot uh metcalf metcalf's law on the value of networks he predicted that the internet would die in what he termed the gigalapse in 1996 okay so i don't i hate when people reference metcalf's law

so you can be smart you can be smart about it and still be flat wrong right well but yeah so but either way even even if we do uh even if bitcoin creates a second system of surveillance bear in mind there's still a current system of surveillance that is on so 1984 you know the drill uh sit in the corner where the telescreen can't see you and uh commit to being a hodler if you can afford it and uh remember that network topology is only half the story you need a social uh a social decentralism as well so you know spread spread the good word about bitcoin to your friends get it out there people this is a freedom enabling technology and the more hands it in it is in the stronger the network becomes the stronger the feed

feedback loop becomes and and then you said and then you meme about it then you meme about it then you go to take throw it into the meta you go to dc you show up at a federal reserve congressional hearing and you you hold up signs behind janet yellen and ridicule her in her purple suit yeah ridicule is asymmetric they the fed never really got a response to me it's a funny thing has anybody like reached out to you from like no i mean there were some people that wanted they were journalists but the fed never the fed never caught up with me it's a shame they should have they should have they should have brought you in and hired you to to dismantle them oh dear so let's talk about open source technology and

and self-sovereignty like you're big on defense distributed like 3d 3d printing guns like what does the world look like where anybody can arm themselves with software well uh because at the end of the day that's what these 3d printing guns are correct sure it it gives you another it incorporates another soundness into your world you know sound money uh sound diet in the case of meat maximalism uh or uh it's it's another insurance policy and it rounds you out as a civic being uh in that you don't have to outsource your personal security we're in new york state you're not allowed to own a gun own a gun here i went to college in chicago in cook county in particular guns are outlawed but it was the most dangerous city from a murder

rate perspective for for most of my tenure in college the gun the gun debate's a huge debate and it gets muddied it gets muddied i believe because a few bad apples i don't want to say they ruin the spoil but it's like i mean again this is just simple you know negative uh negative arguments for liberty we have rights protected because they have costs and you know some people are going to get burned with bitcoin they're going to get their keys stolen they're going to buy bitconnect etc i've gotten chit-chat in bitcoin i've gotten my i was on minpal minpal back in 2014 for all you freaks that don't know it was a an exchange uh based out of the uk london in particular uh that was run by a total con artist and he one day exit scammed the whole exchange

it took a lot of that took a lot of their fucking bitcoin and all coins like this stuff's gonna happen but i've never kept any coin on exchange since that day in 2014 don't do it you gotta learn these lessons don't do it uh but ultimately i just my sort of parting words to everyone would be just we're parting already oh i feel like we've been going for a while by now we're now we're 15 and yeah technically now we're in 45 after the re uh the reshuffle my my uh my message would be um and you know jill carlson uh is a friend of mine and she says bitcoin sign guy i can't be seen with you because i would say stuff like bitcoin is isharia and you are called to a digital jihad but you know let's fucking go you know the time

is here uh the declaration of independence uh has into the genesis block it has well it has the exordio which is at the at the beginning of the declaration of independence it's the when in the course of human events it becomes necessary da da da you know it's a very polite way of beginning a hot revolution bitcoin has already issued its extortio it's it was chancellor on the brink okay you know the the 80s and 90s the hacktivist fervor is dying off but you know now we have now we have a real way to address neatly many of our many of our grievances we can do this damn thing people yeah the world is uh is still very vital there's still space to play uh you can think of uh you can think of uh bitcoin and your activity within

the bitcoin space as a friedrich schiller's play drive which is where you act and you are acted upon and this is an extremely fulfilling way of being and you know you're you're here you have a front row seat for this huge monetary experiment uh go for it we have a new frontier there's an outpost they need help go uh we need help go for it um help me help you keep keep your keep that imagination and uh we're not done this conversation we're not ending it you're trying to end this i can feel it we're not ending it because we have a lot more to dive into like oh boy oh boy

bitcoin sign guy's a little drunk he said too much reika reika vodka but in honor of

i don't know the russian world cup just russia in general they've been they've been champs lately but it's funny how it all

comes together right because you have bitcoin you have defense distributed you have things like pgp again i want to hearken back to like how do we i don't want to call anybody a normie but like how do we get normal people interested in this stuff like is it an inevitability that they will be forced to become interested in it or is there a need to go out and go door to door and be like

hey you should probably think about this yeah i mean i bitcoin is a mind virus so it spreads contagiously but eventually it's as we said a technology and i do like the uh the technology analogy that bitcoin's not an iphone it's gunpowder use it or it will be used on you exactly don't don't buy treasury bonds don't save in dollars uh buy buy bitcoin this is radical though for people like how do we how do we help people get over the radical statements that we're making like is it a satoshi moment where it's like hey if you if you can't see it like i don't have time to waste on you or i don't know submit that's that's my uh my only word see what i worry about is like the climate today like especially politically listen i'm not for trump at all but

like the climate against him is just so adversarial it's like it's so blinded by visceral hatred for one singular man that people will just throw rationality to the wayside to make sure this man comes down but and that but but that i'm just applying this to trump right now like this gets applied to many situations and it's like fuck people people are angry and they don't know where to center that anger and it's like i would say bitcoin is an eloquent expression of that right i would too but people think bitcoin's like alt-right like uh tech bro yeah it's not libertarian bro it's not for the it's not supposed to be we we didn't we're not all doing this bitcoin thing just for the uh silicon valley venture capitalists to buy their teslas it's

it's bigger than that let them buy their teslas and go up in flames hey that's a fooled by randomness Nassim Taleb owns a Tesla buddy Nassim you might have made a bad decision no no I mean I there's that's fooled by randomness every time one of those uber autonomous vehicles crashes that's fooled by randomness I don't know a Tesla in particular they're the engineering of their cars there i you whole my my brother is the chemical engineer he's on the uh he's on there's a college league of electrical car racing teams and he does that so he designs electric cars race cars that look like formula one things and really all right so i'll have to defer to to him on that bitcoin sign guy you've come from a very

established that no notice i mean my my father neo neocon my grandfather cia so it it really was the uh i've had the table has been uh against me as far as clawing my way out of the the neoliberal super status mindset what do you have to say to all the haters out there to all the haters yeah uh love peace and love love yeah love will save the day i know you already gave a parting note do you have anything else you want to end on uh all uh solideo gloria but for the sun only only only to glorify god

bitcoin isn't a god amdj you heard it here first buy bitcoin uh bitcoin sign guy are we able to find out more about you uh please photoshop me into more uh pictures of current events that's all i got um you'll you'll uh you'll know it when you see it that was uh it was a very enlightening and drunk conversation thank you i'm sorry i fucked up on the first recording it's all good i owe you i owe you i owe you uh i love all you freaks for listening peace and love