TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #72: Jeff Vandrew

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Jeff Vandrew, Attorney-CPA-Coder, to discuss Distributism, self-custody Bitcoin IRAs, maintaing BTCPayServer's Python implementation, rent seeking, relearning to code, and much more. Check out Jeff's work: https://vandrew.com/bitcoin/ Follow Jeff on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vandrewattycpa Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/martybent Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

Well, hey there, freaks. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is sponsored by the Cash App, the app that's been helping us stack sats through this bear market. You guys know all about Cash App already. They've been the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. They're the first person-to-person payments app to add Bitcoin buying functionalities to their app. You can easily stack sats via the Cash App today. On top of being able to snack sets you freaks already know about the boost program as well this allows you to go to different merchants whether it be whole foods your local coffee shop panera taco bell chick-fil-a you name it there's a bunch of merchants sign up for them you can go you use your cash app boost

card and you get a little savings at these merchants so go find the cash app in the app store the google play store today download it start stacking sats get a cool cash tag get your boost card start saving money today develop that low time preference mindset hope you freaks enjoy this uh episode with jeff andrew i know i certainly did what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here for podcast number two on this friday podcast number four of the last 24 hours it's been a lot of talking i'm very excited to wrap up the week of recording with the gentleman i'm that's sitting across from me uh we have a lot to talk about i'd like to introduce you freaks to jeff vandrew welcome

to the pod happy to be here man uh thanks for coming thanks for uh taking some time out of your friday afternoon to come into the city i know jersey boys don't like coming into new york city too often so it's a hike for us we have a reflexive like revulsion to it you know the thing about like you get when you talk to like the few bitcoiners that are in jersey they're usually like in like hoboken or something that's not really being from new jersey like you know you're on you got the path train i live in like new jersey you know what i mean everything that you have in your head when you think about new jersey that's where i'm at yeah i mean i i like to think i have a part of jersey me too i i spend summers in south jersey in cape may county and that's where

i grew up oh yeah until i was 18 i lived uh right outside i went to grade school in seattle city that's hell yeah dude are you kidding me yeah you see okay yeah so my family's uh mostly from central jersey but my parents before right before i was born moved down there um so i actually grew up down there and then i moved back up to central jersey i still live at the shore uh because i can't get away from the beach but yeah i moved back up to central jersey like uh when i was 18 for school first for college and then i just stayed i've been setting summers in seattle my whole life yeah man i remember when seattle was a very different place little little single family cottages now it's all it's a lot a lot has changed it's all duplexes slammed in there now that's

crazy what a small world i know hell yeah this is all right this conversation has got 10 times better. For you freaks that don't know, Jeff is the youngest looking 38 year old I've ever met in my life. He's also a lawyer and a CPA who is doing some really cool work within Bitcoin. Before we get to what you're working on, how the hell did you come to Bitcoin? So great question. My interest first started in sound money, right? Because as you said, being 38 years old, originally Bitcoin wasn't around for most of my life. So my interest in sound money really started with an interest in what's called distributism, which for those listeners who aren't familiar, it's a political and economic philosophy based around the idea that all power should be exercised at the lowest

level possible and power should be decentralized and spread across the largest number of people or entities possible. So the idea behind it is when you have a power or a regulation that can be exercised effectively at the family level, it should be exercised at the family level. Only if it can't be exercised effectively there do you move up to a local government and then only then if not effectively there do you move up to a larger government so like in the states uh national government or a state level government so i always had a strong interest in that um and we could talk a little bit more about that i guess as time goes on but one of the things that drove me to sound money coming from that angle was the cantillon effect which i know you've had people on this

podcast talking about many times. One of the big centralizing forces when it comes to economic and political power is this Cantillon effect. It makes it hard for new actors to come in and compete. So that's what really got me interested in sound money. And then from sound money, obviously my original interest was gold, right? Like a lot of us older guys, we started there, but I always did kind of know that gold had these downsides. Like first of all, you had to store it, right? And I was never a guy, I moved around a lot. Like gold was never all that convenient for me, despite the fact that I saw the benefits of it. And obviously gold-backed currencies always have the problem that the backing always, the peg always eventually breaks, right? The bank

or the government is always eventually going to come off the peg. So at the time, I never really thought there would be necessarily anything better. And then in like 2009, like a lot of people. I heard about Bitcoin, but I just kind of wrote it off as a scammy thing that I didn't really take all that seriously. But as time went on, I really understood why it was an improvement over gold. And in 2014 is when I actually bought in and really got involved. What were you doing around this time? So I'm an attorney and a CPA, as you mentioned. So my background's very strange. uh so i'm an attorney i'm a cpa i'm a competitive bodybuilder and then i also am a programmer right i you know i do contribute to open source projects so what a what a renaissance man yeah i am a jack

of all trades master of none uh as as bitcoin goes so uh in 2014 i was already licensed as an attorney in a cpa and i was already running van drew llc which is basically it's the still the my day job now. Um, it's a tax consulting firm. So I'm an attorney in a CPA, but I'm not like a guy that wears a suit or goes to court or anything like that. I basically help, you know, my business basically helps people structure their affairs in a tax efficient way. That's what I do. Um, and in 14, when I first got involved in Bitcoin, I sort of devised a structure where you could hold Bitcoin in your IRA while still holding your own private keys, which is obviously very tax effective so that's what i was doing at that time and at that time no one cared about it 2014 no one

cared about it at all i devised the structure for myself and then i was like i'll start offering it to my clients i know how to do it right so uh i did and uh for a while that was not a popular structure and then that took off in 17 so yeah let's dive into this structure at the the ability to control control the private keys and the two or three multi-sig is the most fascinating part to me, the fact that you're able to put this away in a tax-reduced vehicle and still have complete control over it, sort of messes with my mind a little bit. How does this work? So yeah, so generally the problem with an IRA, like anybody that's tried to invest in Bitcoin either through an IRA or a 401k probably knows, they're by their nature custodial accounts,

right? So someone else, a third party has to be holding the asset for you. And in the case of an IRA. It actually has to be an entity that's licensed by the IRS. Well, either be a bank or a licensed non-bank custodian by the IRS. So that really is bad for a couple of reasons. Number one, most of these custodians just aren't going to mess around with it, right? They don't want to hold an asset like this. They want you trading stocks and bonds where they can earn commissions or mutual funds. And secondly, even if you do find the rare custodian and they are out there that will hold your Bitcoin for you, you're trusting them. That's like any other custodial solution. It's like keeping your Bitcoin in Coinbase, right? Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.

So what I did back then when I first got involved in investing it for my own retirement funds, I took a structure that had previously been applied to private real estate transactions and applied it to Bitcoin. And in a nutshell, the way it works, you still legally, to get the tax benefits need this third-party custodian, right? Licensed custodian. But there are custodians out there, again, mostly from the real estate industry, that what they will do is they will allow you to form a limited liability company. The only asset they hold title to is the limited liability company. You as the account holder are appointed manager of that limited liability company, meaning you have full control over all of its assets. And then any contributions into this IRA

drop down from the custodian into the LLC where you personally have control over them. And then, so in the case of Bitcoin, what you do at that point is typically you'd open up an account on an exchange in the name of that LLC. You don't have to do that. You could buy the Bitcoin on local Bitcoins if you wanted to, or however you want. But most people, to get the best rate. We'll open an account on an exchange in the name of that LLC, buy their Bitcoin. And then as a manager of the LLC, they have the power to transfer it off the exchange into a hardware wallet. You can do a multi-sig. I've actually talked to Unchained Capital. They're willing to take on this sort of stuff. So that's generally how the structure works. And you have

full control over it, just the same way you'd have control over all your other keys. So you know the Bitcoin's there. And what are the included tax benefits of this type of structure? So twofold. Well, I shouldn't say twofold. Depends on what you do. So you can either, there's really three different things you can do. Most people have the choice between doing it as a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. If you're self-employed and none of your employees work under 1,000 hours a year other than you

and or your spouse, you have a third option called a solo or self-directed 401k, which I'll get into at the end. So with the traditional IRA, the big benefit is if you have a bunch of big pot of money sitting in an old 401k from an old employer. You can roll it over tax-free into this setup and then invest some of that in Bitcoin. You don't have to roll all of it over. You can just roll a portion of it over, right? So that's probably the biggest driver that I get is like people that have, you know, I've got hundreds of thousands of dollars in this 401k from an old employer. I roll it over tax-free and I can allocate part of it to Bitcoin. And I've even had some people

do that because their employer allows um access to grayscale bitcoin investment trust but what but that as you know trades at a premium so what they've been able to do is get like 25 percent more bitcoin right because they sell their grayscale roll it over into this and then they buy back in at their bitcoin 25 percent cheaper um depending on what the premium is at an exact given point in time exactly not a bad deal though yeah exactly so that's one that's if you're doing the traditional IRA, that's usually what I see. People that are not looking to roll over from a 401k will usually do a Roth IRA. Uh, the Roth IRA, the advantage to that is when you spend your Bitcoin at some point in the future, let's say you retire, it's tax free. So, you know, when you buy

your Bitcoin now, when you eventually spend it, you have capital gains tax owing, uh, with the Roth IRA. Once you own Bitcoin in a Roth IRA, you've eliminated tax forever. Um, you know, in perpetuity. And then for the self-employed people that fit the example I gave before, they can do the self-directed 401k, which is even better because you can have Roth and traditional sub-accounts. So when you contribute money to the traditional sub-account, you get an upfront tax deduction. When you contribute it to the Roth sub-account, you don't get the upfront tax deduction, but you do get that tax-free forever benefit, just like a Roth IRA. ray this is uh very appealing very appealing yep because taxes are a huge problem right now

they are yeah and that you know one of the this is not the podcast to talk about this one i am a bitcoin maximalist so don't take this the wrong way but a lot of my clients too that are heavy traders like that trade in and out of bitcoins and altcoins it's great for them because they would churn like crazy uh all kinds of capital gain stuff and this eliminates that or Even if you're not an alt coiner, and I hope that you're not, if you're just trading a lot because you're a technical analysis guy, if you're a big follower of Murad or whatever and you're trying to get in and out at exactly the right time to maximize your Bitcoin, this is going to help you because you don't have to worry about, if you get out at the peak, owing a bunch of capital gains tax. Yeah. So what is the demand for this product been looking like since 17? You said it was tepid for a little bit.

then yeah no one so the 14 15 16 no one cared for a couple reasons one like bitcoin wasn't it didn't have as much mainstream appeal and then two the other thing that the other thing was the bitcoiners of that era and i was one of them right but tended to be really skeptical of anything that even like remotely talked about taxes so like i remember i wrote like an article for coindesk back then i think it was in 14 about like the it was tax consequences of some sort of bitcoin transaction and all the comments were like this guy's like a secret fed he's like working for the irs and it's you know it's not that at all i mean i don't care about people's personal business at all whether they pay their taxes or not i just provide the advice and it's you know your choice

whether or not obviously you know to follow that so in 17 things changed because there just became this mainstream knowledge about bitcoin people wanted to get involved so that's when i started really getting contacted a lot by people and one of the more fulfilling parts of it has been believe it or not a lot of people that i get are not hardcore bitcoiners they're people that are new to bitcoin really yeah so there are people that like i get to like sort of in addition to setting up the structure for them kind of introduce them to bitcoin one of the things i tweeted about recently is you know our mutual friend pierre and his node launcher um i got to recommend that to like a few clients this year that were like hey like you know i got this set up and we got through

the process like i've heard kind of that it might be a good idea for me to run a full node do you have like some suggestions about that and i can be like yeah i really think you should run a full node here's you know an easy way to do it so that's been really cool here's the way to do it in two clicks yep and a lot of them too have been uh i'd say most of my clients are over 40 um which i also like find kind of neat um i mean i definitely have younger guys that are that are interested in it as well but it's it's i get a lot of people that are like 50 years old this is their very first exposure to bitcoin and what do you think what do you think is sort of making them open to bitcoin i've been talking a lot about the decade mile marker sort of being a psychological

uh checkpoint that bitcoin has hit this year do you think that anything like that comes into play or do you think it's just yeah i think the law it's a lindy effect thing right like the longer it's around the more people will take it seriously and they're reading about it now about institutions getting involved like they're they might see on cnbc some story about fidelity or you know or whatever getting into the custody of this and they're like oh maybe this is something that i should be looking into i need to be aware of and you know they kind of fall down the rabbit hole you know they kind of see why it's valuable and if they already had a background in sound money to some extent then it's a really natural transition you know yeah and no it's crazy uh

it's crazy to see people coming around to it especially the older cohorts yeah i mean that i mean because sound money is popular among the older set and if you need evidence of that just tune into the news channels and look at the commercials for gold that are constant i mean non-stop uh on the news channels and that those shows are generally watched by the 50 plus audience so i don't think in the long term they're going to be as hard to win over to bitcoin as a lot of people think for that reason no and again like as lindy grows as blocks continue to be produced without the network going down i think it's just inevitable um and obviously people like you building tools to make it more useful it's helpful as well i'm trying so getting into it

in earnest in 2014 where's where we sit now 2019 like how far have we come from your perspective from then to now that's a great question so the biggest change to me between 14 to 19 is um lightning though the really the maturation of lightning because i always kind of assumed and i just recently heard someone else talking about this that i can't remember but i had the same thought process at the time that what would eventually happen is you know we we weren't going to be able to do all of our transactions on chain right like your cup of coffee was never going to be on chain for two reasons one the capacity issues and two just you know waiting for three or six confirmations or whatever you wanted to do zero comp never made sense to me right so

what i had always kind of figured was going to happen because i'm not nearly as smart as the people that came up with lightning um i always just sort of assumed that we'd have a we'd have centralized payment networks for the smaller transactions and then for your larger transactions you'd be doing on chain that's always what i kind of thought was going to happen and i still thought that was an improvement over the current system because unlike the current system where you can't just start up your own visa or mastercard network right because you don't have access to the federal reserve this would be an open backbone so that there would be a much going back to distributism a much larger distribution of payment networks out there that would have to cooperate with each

other so that's always kind of what i thought was going to happen and where ultimately things would go if bitcoin um actually gained adoption as a payment method rather than just a store of value and then when lightning came along i was like this is this is never going to happen this is like the most complicated thing in the world because if you just read about how lightning works it seems like like a rube goldberg machine right like 61 page white favor right yeah i was like this is this is nuts but i was very happily proven wrong i mean you know we well i mean obviously it's still in its experimental stages right now but uh the amount of adoption and growth we've seen in lightning has just been the speed of it has just blown me away it's been crazy yeah

yeah it's unbelievable compared to the adoption of say base layer bitcoin right like how much faster this has been i mean people have really only known about lightning for like a year like you know i you know i know there's been certain people that have been working on it longer than that but not most people that are involved in it yeah i think it was thrust into the consciousness during like the consensus keynote last year right yeah and at that time like people weren't really i mean you know there wasn't a lot of development on lightning at that time no you know and it's crazy to see like where the node topography is like it looks like lightning i like the comparisons of lightning to the early

internet like in terms of like connectivity and stuff like that yeah as opposed to like bitcoin at the protocol level because you look at the node growth it's just insane yep it's crazy and so you recently had a pr merge into sea lightning what were you working on so very small very minor one but i was still like um inordinately jazzed about it it was uh it was a uh you know because you work on all these projects that are your own projects and that's cool but like when you get something merged into something that's like a foundational protocol thing like sea lightning it kind of has like a special place in your heart no matter how small it is so it was actually a security fix i it was the log basically with the logging that sea lightning produces i uh patched

it so that some sensitive information is redacted in the logs as it goes along it seems pretty important it seems like a nice merge yeah yeah i mean it's useful right so like that's what i was pretty excited about some people talk that like their first merges um into like bitcoin core or a lightning protocol where like fixing a typo in a comment so i did get like i'm like a little bit past that so that that was like that was pretty cool so yeah so pretty psyched working with lightning are you see lightning only do you work with lnd um experimenting with everything um well most of the open source work that i do is actually related to btc pay server um and btc pay server supports both sea lightning and lnd and very soon thanks to andrew calamari it's also going to

support eclair um he's working on that right now so through working with btc pay i definitely see both um on a personal level i run sea lightning i kind of just get a kick out of it uh it's written in c which is like this like hardcore kind of thing so i guess i'm a little bit of a sadist so that's always what I've you know personally used but in testing I mean I do have an LND testnet node up and running just to make sure the stuff that I work on with BTC pay is you know it shouldn't make a difference whether I'm running or LND or sea lightning but I always test both just in case well let's jump into BTC pay because you're building a python implementation correct well it's already built so I maintain maintaining I maintain the python

client library for btc pay server so essentially if you have a piece of software or a web app or whatever and it's built in python and you want to integrate btc pay server for payments uh this library makes it very easy for you to do um and the way i actually became the maintainer of that library is sort of funny i was not the original creator of the library but i started um doing all these other projects yeah i predominantly code in python and i started doing all these other projects that work with btc pay and nicholas doria just kind of asked me one day he's like hey do you want to take over just maintaining the library and i was like so i was like over the moon right so i was like yeah absolutely so like i jumped in there and um you know i've made some some

improvements to the documentation and then i also uh created like a secondary easier method for pairing your app to your btc pay server so that's been uh that's been a lot of fun well i think we We here at TFTC have been leveraging your work on the site that we're building and launching on Sunday. Nice. That's always good to hear. The fact that people are using it is always the best part. And especially, so, you know, someone like me, I went to school, despite being an attorney and a CPA, I started in the computer science program at Rutgers University. Yeah, let's dive into this.

How did you end up becoming a lawyer, CPA, bodybuilder, coder? Okay. so uh yeah so i and benjamin button all one yeah yeah so back in the 90s i actually started in the computer science program at ruckers um and yep and at the time i'm as new jersey as someone could be i've never lived outside of new jersey a day of my entire life um in state tuition you can't pass it you can't pass that up now like i remember my guidance counselor trying to sell me on going to like all these Ivy league schools. And this is like the worst humblebrag in the world, but I got like a full scholarship to Rutgers. And I'm like, you're out of your mind, man. And, uh, when I see

all the student debt issues nowadays, I'm like, thank God I didn't listen to that guy. You know what I mean? Like, you know, at any rate. So I went to Rutgers, started in the computer science program. Programming was a different world back then. Uh, you know, in turn, well, it's always stays, I guess, mostly the same, but the tools were a lot different back then. So I did that for a while. And at the time, you know, when you're 18, 19, 20 years old, you don't always make the best decisions. So at the time I was working full time and going to Rutgers full time at the same time, which that wasn't a bad decision. That was a really valuable life experience. I was working as a salesman, which if you, as a first job is like the greatest thing in the world because it

carries over into so many other areas. So, but because I was like working in sales, I was like, you know what like this computer science stuff i actually have to like work at this and there's so much other stuff in college that i can just like bs my way through and not have to even like screw around so despite the fact that i was doing well in the computer science i ended up major i am finishing my degree in spanish for two reasons number one it's very easy i didn't really have to study much or anything like that and number two if you've majored in spanish and you went to college the male female ratio in the class is like 30 if there were like 30 people in the class sometimes it was 29 girls and me you know in the class and that's like appealing when you're 20

years old right so i guess it's appealing now Do you speak Spanish? Yes, I speak Spanish. I'm going to say that I speak Spanish, but when I travel to a country where Spanish is spoken, it takes a little time to adjust. What country? I have traveled to Cuba, I have traveled to Venezuela. I lived in Venezuela for three months when I was 18 years old. Ah, I speak very little.

And that was speaking Spanish on Tales from the Crypt. Yeah, there you go. I love brushing up on it every once in a while. See, it's one of those things where I can tell what I just said. My grammar was horrendous there. But it's like when I'm in a country, it comes back. Exactly. Once you're in there for like three days a week.

And then I'm fine. See, when I was younger and I was working in sales, I would speak in Spanish to the Spanish language customers. So I used to use it every week. And now I use it like, you know, like when I was in Cuba or when I was in Venezuela or I've been to Panama, a few places like that. And I will speak entirely in Spanish there. But like for the first like two days, my grammar is like atrocious. And then it like starts to come around. I know that feeling well.

I speak very poor Spanish, but I love speaking it or trying to speak it at least. yeah it's it's a beautiful language it really is yeah um it's part of the romantic languages for a reason yeah very true um so where are we oh so i changed majors yeah yeah getting back to that so i changed majors i put programming down and i didn't pick it up again for 20 years and then when i got back into when i got into bitcoin um there's a couple people that i really have to give a lot of credit to a couple of my friends one of the first friends that i made in bitcoin was pierre o'shard right and for those of you that incredible first friend to make yeah right uh and for those of you that know his background i mean he's talked about this a lot

so i'm not really doxing him or anything here um he his background is not in programming at all he was an accountant right and then got involved on the technical side much later so you know after i met him and he kind of inspired me to start getting more involved in the technical side again So that's when I really started digging back into it. And a lot of it came back, you know, fairly easily because even though the language that I mostly write in now, Python, essentially was a non-entity in the 90s, right? Python 1, I think, existed, but no one was using it. It was like an experimental thing. So the tools had all changed, but the concepts of programming had kind of stayed the same.

So I did have a leg up there. So that was what kind of inspired me to get into it. And then I'm actually an alumni as well of our friend Justin Moon's Biddle Boot Camp. Shout out. Doing incredible things. I saw he just passed 100 students officially. Yeah. I mean, he's doing great work there.

And so are the students that have spun out of that boot camp. It's amazing all the different stuff they've done. Yeah. They're making very big contributions all across the space. People have contributed to the Node Launcher from there. People have contributed to Jewel. uh just a ton of other projects the raspy blitz project uh yeah just really uh will clark who maintains the grpc python library for lnd came out of there yeah what uh what was your experience

like during the boot camp was really good um you know i was in like the i think the first co the first paying cohort so he did like an unpaid one as like a test i wasn't in that one i was the first group of people that actually paid to be in the class um and yeah i mean justin's a great teacher um i also know justin personally we've uh hung out a few times he's a great guy really interested in helping people learn um unbelievably patient with people you know really uh i had a really great experience in the boot camp and that's how i actually got yeah my first contributions to btc pay um we're like he encourages people in the boot camp to like do a project and my project was i created the quickbooks integration for btc pay server

and what's that been like that's been cool uh you know it was a really good first project because it wasn't too huge of a project it was something i could sort of dive into and really get it done in like a few weeks and it was a good way to warm up getting back into the technical side after having been out of it for 20 years um you know to learn even just like the tools right uh so for instance i went through all the different tools that i used to put that together when i finished it and almost none of them existed in 99 so like even sqlite which is the database excuse me that doesn't run on sqlite it runs on redis um redis didn't exist back then python wasn't really used back then i mean vim which is the text editor that i used was probably one of the only things

that was uh still around still was around back then yeah so that was a really good way to sort of jump in and it fit my strengths in that um one way you and i are very different is i know you always have a very strong interest in ui ux stuff i recognize it as incredibly important i do not like working on it so like i like being in the back in the back end away from the user like the users and all their problems right like i like being like like in the back end so this was a entirely essentially back-end projects there's almost no front end of this at all it's integrating the two back ends together so that was a really good fit uh for the type of stuff that i enjoy so it was a fun project to work on what's it like re-approaching uh development

engineering after 20 years away was it uh were you anxious nervous getting into it i don't know that i was nervous were you just like i need to pick this shit up and get it done i was like yeah I just need to pick it up and get it done. There is definitely the pretender syndrome, right? Like, it's like, I still probably wouldn't, like, just go out and say, oh, I'm a software developer, right? Because, like, you know, it just doesn't feel right to say that. But, yeah, I mean, it was actually kind of, in a way, easier than I thought. Only because these modern languages are so high level, which, for people who are listening who are non-technical,

high level means it has a higher level of abstraction away from the computer, that they're actually much easier to write in than the stuff that was around back when I was first doing it. So that was a pleasant surprise. Yeah, I've messed with Python a bit myself. It's powerful, man, the things you can do, especially with API calls and stuff like that. Yeah, you could do so much with so little code,

and you're so, like the other language that I write in far less frequently and I'm far less talented in is C, and they're kind of opposites, right? C, you have to manage your own memory manually a lot of the time. You have to think about stuff like that, where with python you don't have to think about the physical computer at all you can really just think about things in the abstract and get it to do what you want yeah um no again it's like i am i'm like more visual i do not have the patience to to work on code that's the that's what it is

yeah that's my problem i can't stare at a computer screen and stare at lines of code i don't know that i could do it as a job because i don't know that i would have the patience to do it and work on what i'm told to be working on like i i have the patience to do it only because i only work on things that like i find interesting because i don't do it to make money um so that's sort of the i guess probably the only reason that i'm able to do it is there anything more interesting to work on right now than bitcoin no i don't know i'm thinking it's uh that's what i had james o burn in here earlier and this is actually a and we've recorded an episode and we got into a conversation and it's actually a common theme actually interested to hear your thoughts on

this like a lot of guests that have come through the studio have said that bitcoin has provided optimism that wasn't there before um its emergence like is this similar feeling to you yeah on you know a lot of different ways um so let's jump into it the the first of which i guess goes back to at the very beginning of the recording here i spoke about you know sort of being a distributist and that's sort of for a lot of the late 20th and early 21st century was sort of like a hopeless feeling right because everything is centralizing more and more um let's let's jump a little bit more into distribution yeah um so you were saying don't ever let decisions that could be handled at certain levels or be the family uh local county state yep national government or like some

examples of how this would progress and where you would stop a decision from going to the next level sure so uh school is like a great example of this right like school would be the distributist outlook on school would be you want that decision to be made at the family level right uh because families should be capable of determining the ways in which they want their children to be educated as opposed to the local government level or increasingly you know from a distributist perspective the department of education is like the worst thing in the world because how that's you're moving something that should be at a family or maybe community level and you're moving it all lay up to the federal government level which is as far away from that as you possibly could go

yeah this is where they're uh designating pizza sauces vegetables exactly right things like that and and the other you know reason that distributism is kind of close to my heart is you know i'm a small business person and one of the things from a distributist perspective is not even just government but economically businesses should be organized in such a way that the smallest business unit that can provide something efficiently provides it. So something like a corner store, you know, a distributist would want that to be family owned, right? Because it's perfectly economical and efficient for, to have a million different corner stores owned by a bunch of different families. That might not apply to your electricity utility company, right? But

when possible, you want things to be managed at the smallest level possible. It increases freedom for everybody, because that's what this is really all about. The more that you centralize an industry, and we've seen this with banking, right? People getting debanked. If banking was less centralized, less people would be getting debanked for just purely political or belief system reasons. So Bitcoin's given me a lot of optimism in that regard, because when we're talking about returning to sound money, we're not going to have that Cantillon effect anymore that favors the incumbents over the upstarts right that's that's a killer man like if you're trying to do something new and you got to deal with incumbents and these people have all these built

in advantages they're not competing with you on an equal level and you know one of the things that I like the most about uh Safedine's work is one of the things he's talked about is when when we last had a sound money system in the 19th century the average company had like this number is wrong but it's directionally accurate like 17 employees or something it was way less than than it has today um so i'm hopeful that we can move to an environment with a more distributed number of businesses uh across across the economy and i think you know going back to something that you and i have spoken about earlier the other reason this makes me hopeful is we've seen a rise in socialistic attitudes across the world. And I think unlike a lot of people, I actually think

this, uh, belief in socialism, if you're a young person today, even though I'm certainly not a socialist, uh, is entirely reasonable because if what you knew of capitalism was the cronyist sort of corruption of capitalism that we have in today's day and age, then, you know, based on that knowledge, it's entirely reasonable to say, hey, I think socialism might be a better solution, especially since these younger people did not, you know, I saw the last decade plus of the Cold War, most of these young people did not, right? So they don't even really have that as a frame of reference to turn them off to it. So we really need to have a better, fairer system in order to cut the head off the snake, I guess, so to say, so that this is not so appealing to such a large

number of people which is one of the reasons why like when people talk about socialism i try not to get into the whole uh just like ranting and raving about you know deaths and how terrible socialism is and stalin even though all that stuff is true it's just not persuasive to young people it's a lot more persuasive to say hey i hear what you're saying i hear why you're frustrated your frustrations are in fact very reasonable but here's a much better solution to that problem yes your prescriptions off a bit right let's push you down this this path exactly when you see when really bad atrocities happen whether they're communist or the nazis or whatever it's because people were pushed to their limit they were told to base when they would raise concerns and were

basically told to screw off and then they felt like the only other option was these horrible authoritarian systems right so that's what i really you know i have very hopeful that with bitcoin we can avoid that sort of thing yeah and the way you avoid that right is opening markets is making them as free as possible and exactly bitcoin is doing this and we've used this example here the last few weeks in particular but my co-host on rabbit hole recap mad odell providing liquidity to the bitcoin rabbi when he was selling his yep his children's books that's an example of nobody has permission uh there was no a like regulatory agency stepping in the middle asking for information about those two opening the channel,

so they just did it. It's two individuals, two entrepreneurs that want to work together, have agreed off the network that they will work together and just simply were able to act, and nobody could stop them from doing that. And that's a real free market, unlike when politicians talk about the free market,

it's usually just like a cover for favors to already established players, right? Like, you know, implementing a regulation in such a way that it favors the established players over the upstarts. That's usually what, you know, passes for free market nowadays. Let's talk about your area of expertise, tax accounting and the software in that industry. Yes. So they sort of prevent free market from emerging in this area, correct? Yeah.

I mean, QuickBooks has essentially a monopoly in the United States on small business accounting software. I mean, larger businesses use their own use their own software oftentimes, but particularly Intuit on the accounting side, there are some other players and it would be easier for people to get in on that side. it's the tax side where it's just so hard because the tax code is so complex. And the thing people forget about is it's not even just the federal tax code. If you're going to put out tax software, you have to comply with, well, there's 40, 43 States have state income tax. So, uh, 43 different state income tax codes. So there's that by its nature means that it's going to be really hard for a new player to get involved and these tax software companies there's uh there's only like three or four big ones now intuit being the biggest uh there are a few others

they just successfully in fact lobbied uh congress right to not to not allow the irs to provide free tax filing how's that how's that how can you block that they just i mean they have the ability to do So it is wild. Not that I'm expecting the IRS to come out with some crazy software, but it's just like. Well, they've, you know, I don't know like how far along they had gotten, but for years now they've talked about a system like some other, the, not the current commissioner. I think it was the commissioner before, um, said he favored a system like many other countries have where, so right now when your employer files your W-2, your mortgage company files

your 1098, all that stuff, that's all electronically filed with the IRS, even if you get the paper copy, right? So the IRS theoretically should have that in all their systems. So you could have a system where you just logged into the IRS's website and most of the data was pre-populated. And a lot of countries already have that. And, God, I think it was Shulman, the last commissioner, who was speaking about that, like, no, that's eventually where we're going. But I guess not based on, you know, what we've seen over the past couple months. how taxes are so goddamn complicated it's like have you seen the meme going around on twitter like me like how to or it's like a meme it says me you know like talking to the government you know exactly how much i own they're like yep and they're like are you gonna tell me like nope you have to figure it out and if you don't get it right you can go to jail yeah like why is it so hard it's well the thing is i mean the meme is a little misleading as it works for individuals

right I mean that the government basically does know what you owe just based off the documents that have been filed on your behalf and that's why like a lot of these tax software providers like into it I think has a thing for your phone now where you can just snap photographs of all of the forms and it just pre fills everything for you and you're good to go where it's really complicated is for self-employed and business people what's deductible what's not how to depreciate things things of that nature and that's just a product of the fact that individual industries and companies lobby for all different things and if you want to

do something to make the code simpler the problem is it's going to create winners and losers and the losers are going to lobby to not get that thing changed so that's just you know that's unfortunately just the nature of it yeah the nature of it sucks pretty hard um yeah not a big fan of i mean somebody's starting a business and trying to figure that out especially bitcoin or touches bitcoin it's like holy fuck one of my hopes and this is probably a little a little bit pie in the sky and utopian is that maybe over time if bitcoin takes off we move away from an income tax-based system more to a property tax-based system i think that's fair if you're going to have taxes i think that that's fair and it's less um it's less of an invasion of privacy right like i'm not saying

it's not invading your privacy at all it is but i do think it's less because income tax is extremely uh privacy and i don't know if invasionary is a word but i'm going to use it anyway um because you're really have disclosing all the financial transactions that you're involved in kind of right and it creates this panopticon where the government's watching your bank accounts and and you know all this sort of stuff whereas like a more of a property or transaction tax-based system a lot of that stuff would be public anyway um you know like for instance property transactions are all public. I'm talking, when I say property, I'm talking about real estate at this time, you know, that's all public record anyway. Um, so I'd rather move to a tax system,

you know, based, I think more on that, or even a sales tax is less privacy killing for that reason too, because the merchant collects it, right. And the merchant doesn't have to take all the merchant needs to record is the sales price, right? The merchant doesn't have to report your, your name or your address or anything like that yeah yeah no it's always befuddled my mind why we never attempted like a consumption tax regime over an income tax right yeah i mean the main the argument against the consumption tax is that it's regressive and that poor people consume a larger percentage of their income yeah and therefore they kind of they're the losers in the move from consumption to um their way from income to consumption but i think if you paired

it with a property tax type system um which could be based on land values it could also be based on natural resource consumption on land there's a lot of different ways you could do it i think it might offset some of the regressive effects of such attacks yeah i think we need to do something i think we need to change it up a little bit i don't know i don't know if we're going down the right path we're two years away from uh tax receipts being less than the interest owed on the debt um that's as that's as much of an entitlement and spending problem as anything else is that like social security are you expecting to well you're self-employed like i don't i don't plan on seeing social security that i'm contributing to right well i mean we

self-employed we still have to pay into social security so i'm in the same boat yeah um you know i don't know it's gonna be my if you if you told me that i had to guess what they're gonna do with social security i would think that they'll start means testing it and that's how they'll end up saving it what do you mean so uh and i'm not saying this is that i support this or it's a good idea so right now the idea behind social security is everybody pays in everybody collects right like it doesn't you could be a billionaire you could still collect social security because you've been paying in all these years that's what i think out of necessity if this is again guessing not hoping is eventually going to change is there'll be some sort of thing where if you

have so much other income or so much in other assets your social security will be reduced or eliminated so it'll become more like a it'll become less like a pension program which is how it works now and more like a welfare program that would be my my prognostication uh i would not be surprised if that comes to fruition at all yeah that seems because the all the alternative would be, uh, raising taxes and, you know, politicians tend to look at this stuff in terms of like what the largest number of people getting angry and people will get angry about changing it to a means tested program, but less so than taxes that they're going to taxes. They get hit with immediately changing it to means testing. They don't get hit with for 20, 30 years. Cause they

won't, what they'll do is they'll say, okay, everybody who's already collecting social security is not subject to the means testing it's the young people that are going to get you know the shaft yeah couple that with a declining birth rate and uh immigration policy is sort of in flux right now it's a weird generational thing you know i read something really interesting about birth rate uh it's just as a little bit of a tangent but i just i just saw this i just saw this yesterday the study was done one of the things that we're always told is this crisis is Japan, right? Because their birth rate's low, Japan has zero immigration. So how are they going to support, um, how is the system going to be able to continue to function? Two interesting

things about that. Number one, it seems to actually be running fine. Um, like there's some weird stuff going on and that there's like, there's some small towns where you can like get houses for free if you're willing to have a kid. Um, but it's not necessarily the worst thing in the world. But aside from that, the interesting part about this study was Japan's birth rate is actually not low by industrial country standards. I should say it's in wedlock birth rate is not low by industrial country standards. It's actually high.

It's only that they have essentially zero out of wedlock births in Japan, which is the difference in birth rate. I don't know what to make of that, but it's very interesting. Well, there's less people getting married. And we talk about the Japanification of the world on this podcast a lot

because Japan is a perfect example of a central bank that started QE in the 90s, has been doing it for a couple of decades. but and i don't think this has anything to do with monetary policy but there's also like a culture in japan where it's like millions of recluses who just like yes literally do not peer out into the world they just live in seclusion by themselves and i don't think that's necessarily unique to japan in the modern world because you see it's to me it's not all that different from people that are behind their computer all the time chatting instead of going

out and seeing their friends right i think it's just the natural one of those is a natural evolution from the other yeah that's it's funny um but back to like the bank of japan like they like it seems stable but they own like 75 of the etf market well that i think is not yeah let me be clear yeah that end of it i don't think is sustainable like the central bank uh investing in the stock market yeah well yellen thinks we should be doing it soon a lot of people think that we should be doing it soon and that i guess is i guess you can think about your perspective on that uh if you think that that is a good thing because it's accelerationist uh so i've heard that argument so yeah no there's a lot of accelerations out there that's why people want to secure the bag

with andrew yang right that you get your thousand dollars a month by bitcoin and uh some people think that's the ultimate solution right well somebody well they do and i i can see him winning i know it's a long shot right now but i can see him having like a similar trump trajectory where and it sort of fueled by a perceived well it's not even perceived it's a palpable uh injustice that was served after 08 with the bank ballots we basically had socialism for the people that caused the crash now this is an overt socialism for the people who are affected by it they're gonna be like we want ours we want to get our back let's secure it i think he'd actually have a better shot in the general election for that reason that not to be too political but the

democratic primary is not at all similar to the republican one um and that there's a lot more money involved in the democratic one from very centralized sources corporate america unions things of that nature wiki leaks prove this yeah so exactly right exactly so it's much easier for their party elders to shut out an insurgent than the republican primary where there really wasn't a whole lot they could do about it yeah well i think i think gang's gonna force the issue that man's on a tear right now to get out in front of as many people as possible he certainly is yeah it'll be interesting to see whether they um implement this two-tier debate structure to keep him off the main stage right if you've heard about that yeah yeah they've been talking about it

in veep a couple times too okay um but i probably won't vote anyway so it doesn't matter um to me at least i think it's all bullshit uh is that is that a bad this is somebody who's younger than like looking at me like he doesn't care about the politics no i don't think that that's bad i i i see the arguments on all sides for that i definitely respect people that don't vote and i also respect people that say hey yeah it sucks but i try to pick the least lesser of the evils and then there's some people that just say yeah i vote i vote for unrealistic candidates just because i feel like i have a voice that maybe eventually the more people that choose to do that what was once considered unrealistic or not mainstream

becomes to be considered more realistic or mainstream. I don't know the answer to which one of those things is better, so I respect everybody's kind of opinion on that. Yeah, that's what James and I were touching on this too. What does the future world look like, especially if we believe in the sovereign individual thesis that governments become smaller, maybe return to a more distributist-like world

where people are able to store their wealth in Bitcoin and therefore decide what they pay into and buy into. That's a really good point. And one thing I want to touch on because you just brought it up and it triggered something in my head. One of the big pieces of optimism, just going back before I address

your most recent question here, your earlier question about what has it made you optimistic about? One thing I heard that I've always thought and the only other person I've heard talk about it is actually Masir on your podcast. How absurd it is that we expect like a dentist or a lawyer or a gardener or whatever to like have to invest in the stock market just to be able to have any sort of reasonable store

of value. I mean, that's bonkers, right? Like expecting, I mean, that's nothing against, it's not that I'm saying these people aren't intelligent. It's just that they're focused on other stuff. you have to be focused on like your main job. You don't, you're not able to like study markets and figure out how to invest the best way possible. That's crazy. So what you're left to doing is some people actually can be good at it, right? They're, uh, despite having a job outside of

financial services, that definitely can happen. Or you have to hire a retail financial investment advisor. And most of that industry is not very good, right? Because if they were good at it, they'd be work they'd be millionaires themselves right or they'd be working for whales they wouldn't be working with mainstream clients so it's one of the more unfair things we see out there and there are a lot of big winners namely the financial institutions in that regard but there's your average person is a big loser and if they had a store of value that wasn't like the stock market i think they'd be a lot more a lot less likely to make such a big dive into the market. It wouldn't be a necessity anymore. You'd be able to just save

your money and retire. Yeah, forced chase for yield. I don't think that's advantageous for anybody. No, and it's why we get all these crazy bubbles, right? And you know what I mean? The stock market, in my opinion, is essentially entirely driven just by the central bank. I actually don't think the stock market communicates any valuable information at all. I think it's just like a wacky thing based on where the central bank sets the rates and we're just constantly inflating and popping bubbles at this point. It's not to say the stock market couldn't be a valuable communicator of information in the event that we had a sound money system. I think that it would for two reasons. Number one, the price levels would not be so radically

affected by interest rates. And number two, the quote unquote dumb money wouldn't be in overwhelming the quote unquote smart money. So you'd have a much more effective sort of communication of pricing there did you see the uh the impossible burger ipo yesterday i heard about it i didn't follow it very closely i'm just like so i'm so disgusted by like this whole war on meat thing so you know i'm not i i talked to michael a lot goldstein and i'm not 100 carnivore like he is but i'd say 90 of my daily calories come from meat and eggs, right? So I'm pretty close. I do eat vegetables, but I recognize that your main health food, the main driver of your health is meat, right? And it bothers the hell out of me

that basically we've got this war on meat going on predominantly, in my opinion, because plant based food just has a much higher profit margin. So they're able to lobby for, you know, for instance, government standards that favor basically vegetarianism, right? I mean, look at here in New York City uh was like two or three weeks ago I think I remember seeing on the news they're eliminated meat out of schools every Monday right I think they're doing meatless Mondays in public school here I don't know if it's meatless Mondays I think public schools are just disavowing meat in general yeah I mean that's a whichever it is I mean that's a great example no hot dogs and some other type of meat they're definitely not not allowed I think it's no meat

altogether on Mondays now they're doing in New York City public schools which is bananas that's not good for the kids but the people the crazy part about it is the people that are implementing that policy probably do think that it's that they're legitimately doing a good thing you know never attribute to malice what you could attribute to incompetence but the reason why they think that is they've been um propagandized as such by people that do know better right there are people that do know better that are put put out all this bs information basically to increase their own profits which is bad right and they're able what what makes it bad is they're able to use the government to enforce it if they weren't using the government to enforce it whatever the market

would sort it out but they're using the government to enforce it and that's slight side tangent that's why i think one of the reasons we haven't seen a larger clamoring for set for sound money is that people who are disinterested in south sound money meaning that they would actually be hurt by it banks the financial industry uh the media operating at the behest of people who would be uh you know disincentivized to sell money they propagandized us all to believe that inflation is not a problem right inflation subdued exactly we're trying to get it up actually and the meat made me think of this because if you look at things that actually matter we've had crazy inflation beef being one of them believe it or not hogs beef if you look at the charts so i used to

I worked for a managed futures fund back in the day and that's like FinViz going FinViz.com. You can look at the, the heat maps there, the, the futures. If you go to the futures commodities in particular or livestock in particular, you'll see, uh, what are they called? Beef cattle and lean hogs are like on an exponential up into the right. All right. From 1972. Right. When we, when we went off Bretton woods, that's where it starts. The same thing with housing education, like all those things we've had rampant inflation we just hide our inflation by the massive

technological process we've had as i've said before you can now afford five tvs but you can't afford a house to keep them in right right whereas in 1960 uh you could only afford one television right and you might have had to wait a few years to get it or whatever but your wife stayed home from work and you could still afford to live in a house and educate your children and retire and everything was fine. And that's why I actually think that a lot of these social justice movements that tend to demonize earlier eras

and not that there weren't problems in those eras, right? I'm not saying that. But the reason we go so excessively in terms of demonizing them is because we don't want people to really know how much better stuff was in a lot of ways back then. Like if people really knew like in 1960 how much easier it was just to be a working class person

in 1960 versus today, i think they'd be very very very mad so what they do is they propagize propagandize against those eras and at the same time divert people's energy and attention that would be normally on these economic issues into sort of these bizarre social justice issues yeah i mean that's been another theme here on this podcast is like the the incorrect framing in the mainstream of what our problems are exactly it's red versus blue it's not actually hey money is the root of all evil money is money makes the world go run around stop worrying about the politicians worry about the money is my viewpoint just think about all the people that support political candidates or

parties or whatever that work directly adverse to their own economic interests solely for like these weird social reasons right you know what i mean and most of that starts with the media they just make one particular political position or group um socially unpalatable and then just basically due to peer pressure you know what i mean like you all these people end up voting a certain way regardless of what's good for them well it's getting to a point especially on the left where like the the venn diagram of which you have to fall into to be in the party line is getting so outrageous that it's like all right you guys are getting a little crazy here it is crazy And what it's interesting to me is we've seen what I wonder is, is Europe like ahead of us or are they just different?

Because in Europe, the reaction to that has been just all these new parties have come up outside of the mainstream, which I view as a positive. A lot of these parties that have popped up in Italy, Spain this past week, Eastern Europe, that are basically completely challenging the left right paradigm altogether. it wasn't a comedian just uh elected in ukraine or something like that yeah elected as president in ukraine yep yep so we have a italy has a governing coalition and i'm not saying that they're perfect so don't like go crazy on me at twitter with a bunch of facts i'm just using this as an example um italy has a governing coalition of left right populist parties and their main governing principle is left versus right stuff is stupid you know what i mean we're way beyond that And one of their other principles that I find personally appealing is GDP is a stupid measure.

Why are we setting economic policy based on GDP? Our KPIs are way off. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, let's think about this debt-fueled society. GDP and CPI as sort of benchmarks that we— Crazy. Right? Absolutely bananas.

Because first of all, this might make me sound like a leftist a little bit, but isn't a better measure of the economy something like wages or happiness? Yeah. No, I know. Like, it sounds silly, but like, yeah, I mean, you know, if you create an economic system that through, let's say, excessive regulation that favors incumbents, GDP grows like crazy every year, but it creates a system where you just have a bunch of peasants slaving away for one company that runs everything. I don't think most people would think that's good, but that is a really easy way to jack up GDP. Setting policies that allow incumbents to become more and more profitable probably is going to raise GDP faster than policies that promote a freer market with more competitors might take more time for that GDP to grow. I'd argue that's still a much better society it's closer to something that I would want to live in so I actually I've come to referring to this on Twitter as GDP maximalism so

unlike Bitcoin maximalism I am not impressed with GDP maximalism to the point where when I see a report or read a statistic about GDP I completely ignore it I'm like yeah we did this and GDP did whatever totally ignore it's like growth for growth's sake it's like you should not want growth for growth's sake

let's think about efficient growth let's think about sustainable growth let's think about building things that last decades into the future my favorite example this is chicago and the city of chicago is notoriously corrupt and uh i've never been able to prove this with fact but it's a pretty well-known rumor in chicago that there are a lot of potholes in the spring after after a long winter snow and salt and all that and every spring summer in chicago is like gridlocked in traffic because they're fixing these these potholes and the the theory is that they're using like mid mid-grade gravel just to like keep a job uh job coming back every year instead of using like something that would

not break for a decade or two they're just using lesser quality to ensure that there are jobs next year right yeah because in that i mean i obviously i have no idea whether that's true but it certainly makes sense because the contract the contractors i'm sure our donator our donors excuse me to all the political campaigns of the guys that award the contracts and then the unions obviously are going to like that as well because it gets their guys you know uh it's it's like the keynesian thing where you pay people to dig dig holes and fill them back in i think that's the uh you dig holes you put money in bottles you bury them yeah yeah yeah that's a good way to stimulate the economy and the problem with it is like the worst problem is that eventually that bubble bursts

right like that's the bigger issue like it always eventually bursts and then we're just in this horrible like you know crazy situation and oftentimes as we saw in 2008 when you try to reduce the impact of that burst you don't address the underlying problems and then that just makes the next bubble bigger and you've seen that i mean it's like countries that let their banks fail like iceland came out of the 2008 much better because they just basically iceland kind of just screwed everybody and said you know this is what's going on like you got yourself in trouble and by the way i'm sure their reaction was not perfect i'm just using it as an example but that i think we missed a huge opportunity in 2008 to just wind down all of these banks that were

insolvent well i'm trying to remember i think i believe we talked about this before we started recording about boomerang by michael lewis that was yeah yeah yeah so like if you freaks out there like want to get a good example of what iceland did that's like the first chapter of this book but he goes it's what we were talking about like this this book is all over the world so it goes from like uh iceland greece italy uh ireland uh california jumps in the calpers and stuff like that but it's incredibly illuminating and um in iceland yeah the story of iceland is is asinine what happened like they their bankers went ape shit for like four years oh it was bizarre yeah they had these banks that i mean for those that are unfamiliar like they had these online banks

that would offer these crazy interest rates on savings accounts and because they're in the eu like other eu countries could get in on it so like if you lived in like you know you might live in a european country where the your savings account these are made up numbers or might it pay three percent you could open a savings account at some iceland bank where they were paying like seven percent you know what i mean like so they had all kinds of like crazy and then obviously the investment policies that you'd have to engage in in order to pay that rate of interest like it was just a crazy scheme they had going on there and it was all interconnected like from and again highly recommend this book easy read michael lewis is incredible author it's very good storyteller

but it really highlights the interconnectivity and the the interconnectivity of the global economy and then the delegitimacy by which a lot of these countries entered the eu and a lot of what like our current system is built on like italy and greece arguably should have never been allowed in the eu uh goldman sachs helped them cook their books for their debt to gdp ratio and every it was like a secret that everybody knew but it was willful ignorance on all sides you know one of the i'm gonna get some heat for this on twitter but uh one of the best books that I most enjoyed about the eurozone crisis is uh Yanis Varoufakis's global minotaur and he I mean Yanis is a Marxist so I certainly don't agree with his policy prescriptions at the end of the book

but he does a great job of describing the underlying problem I felt and that's a fundamental balance of payments problem between the smaller southern economies and the larger northern economies and this you know the cooking of the books that you mentioned was willful ignorance on all sides right it wasn't like germ uh greece wasn't trying to like scheme germany into getting into the eurozone germany very much wanted greece in the eurozone so they'd be able to uh not have such a strong deutschmark and be able to ram imports down uh greece's throat and ultimately when it all blew up get a really good deal on greek assets right i mean that that was the point of all this it was these northern european countries exploiting the southern

european countries and the southern european politicians being too short-sighted and or stupid to figure out that this was the ultimate goal and playing along with the book cooking and all that because in the short term joining the eurozone helped them out tremendously because they got access to borrowing at much much lower interest rates when the eurozone was new greece was able to issue bonds at rates that were roughly similar to like german rates right so if you were a politician and you were only looking to four years out they're like man this is great we're gonna we're gonna get all this money we're gonna be able to borrow so much cheaper i'm not gonna have to raise taxes or whatever the case might be but now you know people in those countries are paying a

very steep price for it you just came from one of those countries greece in particular i did what was it like over there uh greece is a beautiful country i had a great time uh i am kind of like uh i'm like a very much into hellenism so like i i enjoyed that aspect of it very much um one of the things we were talking about earlier that i saw that was very interesting i got the first one of the first days i was there there was a protest going on and i got handed a flyer and i was like oh i sorry i don't speak greek and she's like oh i got an english one she immediately handed me the english one and it was an anti-central banking uh uh protest that was going on right in the square there uh and the translation was kind of interesting because the closing line i'm sure this makes more

sense in greek but was like earth for humans only so it's like that's like the closing line of the flyer but most of it was uh the anti-lizard people too yeah i guess i don't know what the deal was with that but that was very interesting and the other two things that i saw that were close to my own heart i guess where i saw a building that was decorated with a slogan that said uh greece take the brexit road get out now and i saw another building that was decorated with uh a sort of a mural that said ngos get the hell out of greece i can get down with this too um i can definitely get down with those two slogans was this a central bank rally that they aware of bitcoin were they completely unaware of it there was so much going on i didn't get a chance to ask her it's like one

of those things were like boom you got your flyer they're moving on to like the next person yeah so I was, uh, I was not able to determine that. I didn't see Bitcoin anywhere when I was there. Like I didn't see any businesses or anything that were accepting it. But I mean, here in the States, you could come to New York and go your whole time without seeing, uh, a business that would accept Bitcoin or a Bitcoin ATM or anything too. So yeah, I don't, I don't think it's necessarily, I very rarely run into them here. Yeah.

We have like, there's, we have like a Bitcoin ATM company in New Jersey now, but it's like i went to one of their locations to like check it out and the atm was not working so i couldn't i couldn't review it because i promised matt odell that like i was like oh i'm gonna go check this out like i'm gonna like tweet about it um because it was like the one location that wasn't near me and it's unfortunately it was not working so that was kind of a bummer dicks um i've never had a bitcoin atm experience yet for as long as i've been here i've never used one i've never used one when i was in las vegas i saw them right because that um this was a while ago i was in vegas but that there's a burger joint out there that has like a slogan where you're like you get

a heart attack by eating there or something do you know what i'm talking about i don't i've never been to vegas okay yeah it's it's uh it's in old vegas on fremont street i think and i believe they like they're like into bitcoin if i remember correctly like so they have like a bitcoin atm and everything there hopefully i'm telling that story correctly i think it's them that had that but yeah bitcoin seems sort of natural for vegas right vegas is like the wild west it's like super unregulated yeah so like i could definitely see that being the case they're usually a lot of those western states not california oregon and washington but like before you get that far west or really compete like so before i got into bitcoin the main area of my tax

consulting practice was trust law and with trusts you can see those are the states that are always competing to have less regulation on the trust business to try and draw more business so probably the premier trust jurisdiction in the united states right now is nevada because they've been very aggressive with that other ones that are big on that are like alaska south dakota wyoming the outlier is delaware um delaware always holding strong delaware always does yeah hold strong and it seems to be very similar with not necessarily bitcoin but cryptocurrency in general right we see like caitlin long in wyoming all the stuff going on out there for better or worse um if they're really trying to get in on this hard so i could definitely see that being

something that nevada takes an interest in it would seem to really fit their state ethos very well yeah that and then the uh the clientele of vegas in particular poker players seem to be drawn to bitcoin pretty pretty naturally and you've got people that fly in from all from all the world too so they probably find it somewhat appealing to not necessarily have to change into dollars um like when i was in i uh the biggest gambling resort i've ever been to which made me think of a perfect market for bitcoin but their government probably won't allow it is macau have you ever been there never been to macau okay so i went there when i was in hong kong and macau makes las vegas look like so i'm actually from atlantic city area originally

so i'm not saying this with malice vegas makes like atlantic city look small right like vegas i mean i've never been to vegas i can't speak ac uh ac is not the the uh premier destination right so vegas sort of the the same way that vegas makes atlantic city look is how macau makes vegas look macau i stayed in the venetian macau which was the largest hotel in the world at the time they have basically a shopping district in the in the venetian the size of a mall that is open 24 7 you could go buy a rolex at 2 a.m in this place like macau is just unbelievable my room that i stayed in in macau was 2500 square feet what the hell with my friend like it's just unbelievable anyway you have all these rich people coming in from mainland china

they need to change their currency right because people from mainland china love gambling but they need to change their currency interestingly macau doesn't allow gambling in the casinos in their own currency they make you change to hong kong dollars macau has a yeah mac macau's currency is the pataka which is a pegged currency to the hong kong dollar but even though they're pegged you cannot gamble in the casinos won't at least when i was there casinos won't take it they want afraid of losing its peg or something i don't know what the situation is and what's really interesting is if you like if you're on the street the stores even in the casino will not accept patacas they want hong kong dollars and but if you're out on the street and just like

you just pay a merc like one of the coolest things in macau is there's a street for all the carnivores listing out listing out there that's known for jerky every kind of jerky you could imagine all these little family owned stores it's so cool and each like family owned store has like their own recipes and stuff for their jerky and you buy it in these giant like two foot by two foot squares basically and then you just kind of like tear it off and eat it so if you pay with hong kong dollars in there they give you your change back in patacas it's it's like uh going to costa rica using dollars and getting a you get their currency back yeah so any at any rate yeah like gambling seems in general whether it's las vegas or macau seems to be a natural fit although

in macau the chinese government probably has enough influence that they wouldn't uh be too crazy about that yeah you want to let's see other monaco is probably more would be more receptive to it i would imagine yeah you would imagine right because monaco doesn't have their own current they're they're euros yeah yeah i think monaco's on the euro and they're pretty liberal with their gambling there they let you do yeah i think monaco is very uh liberal about everything i think that's why like uh everyone tries to you'll see this a lot where like rich europeans will try to get citizenship in monaco because there's like i think there's no taxes it's either no taxes or very low that's a common common european thing to try and do

or very hard to do we need to get back to that here in the uh the united states of america what citizenship to uh get rid of taxes yeah just like bring taxes down a little bit oh yeah of course you know yeah make it a little bit competitive well look how much tax policy drives people's decisions um how many people retire to florida just for no state income tax and state income tax is nowhere near as big as federal right so imagine all the you know benefits we could see with with uh less federal tax on things like investment businesses you know stuff like that all right back to bitcoin like do you think bitcoin provides the opportunity like does it provide that bargaining chip for us to be like hey if you're going to tax us we have to we have

to sort of accept the menu of taxes that you're giving us or do you think that that sort of view of how bitcoin can change the dynamic between individual and state is a little overblown what what i think is most likely is that it change it's going to make collection of income tax harder and therefore will move the tax system more towards property and consumption taxes that would be that would be my guess which i think is a net positive um and and probably just less taxes overall less taxes less services provided by the government overall but a move in that direction because for instance a sales tax um even like the the perfect analog right now and this is something where i have some experience let's say you're a business that's a very heavily

cash business like a laundromat or a corner store so the government can't necessarily know that you're cheating on your taxes just by looking at your bank account. What they can do is they can look at your inventory. So they kind of can tell from your inventory, if your inventory is much too high a percentage of your sales, they know that you've been not reporting stuff and that you've been short on sales tax, right? So systems like that, when you've got Bitcoin, which is similar to cash and that it won't necessarily be easy for the government to trace, I think they'll move to those sorts of taxes where they have an audit ability that isn't necessarily dependent on the banking system if that makes sense that does it does um that's the world that i want to

live in and i hope comes to fruition so let's talk timeline here like uh where is bitcoin now compared to your expectations when you first got in and where do you see it going in the near to medium term? So I'm, well, there's a couple of ways to answer that question. Adoption wise or tech wise? Both. Okay. So adoption wise, I would say it's like pretty much where I thought it would be. You know, I don't want to act like I'm an Oracle and I, like I knew, I knew we were going to be exactly here, but it's within the range of what I thought reasonable at the time going forward. You know, I hear people talk about a lot of different predictions on when we're going to get like adoption and or hyper Bitcoinization. And one of my less popular opinions, so I want

to make it clear that I don't wish for this. I just think this is that it's going to be slower than a lot of people think, because if adoption really took off, right, really took off to the point where it was a threat to the dollar, the government in the United States would peg and would peg to the Bitcoin or to gold or to whatever to stop that takeoff. And the reason why they would do that is even some people will counter that argument by saying, well, they would lose their ability to inflate, which is such a powerful tool. Why would they do that? Well, if they sense that they're going to lose that tool anyway, they'd rather peg, they'd lose the inflation tool, but at least they'd still be able to spy on you, right? Because if you use Bitcoin, it's much

harder to follow the flow of funds than using a bitcoin back dollar bitcoin back dollar is no less or no more private than the current dollar we have today it's just sounder so in the event that that started to happen the first time that would happen in the future i think that they would peg they'll eventually break it right like like has happened historically every single time that we've had a peg to gold or something like that but it may take a few cycles of pegs and broken pegs before we have a system where bitcoin is just the currency is the unit of account exactly right rather than bitcoin back dollars yeah no i could definitely see that and so that's what safety says like the most bearish case for not bearish case for bitcoin or maybe a bearish case for

bitcoin is a gold right as a gold standard or a bitcoin standard yeah or well also central banks competing with bitcoin a monetary policy right which just would be an omission of like the peg would be like all right we're gonna try to compete but exactly i'll be able to in the long run right because then you'd have sound money competing with sound sounder sound right exactly i would say sound monies of varying levels of soundness competing with each other exactly it's what you'd have yeah yeah um that's great it's it's fun thinking about these things i have a lot of fun thinking about these thought experiments and thinking about the future so that's another thing being optimistic it's fun being optimistic it's fun thinking about the future like we talk a lot

about we talked a lot earlier about the chase for yield and you're really not able to accumulate capital like one should be able to yeah and again like i've said this on this podcast before bitcoin is going to change us more than we change it and yep sort of changing that mindset from conspicuous consumption to capital accumulation time preference man right yeah like i mean just think about that's another thing talking about optimism that I'm very optimistic about. People's time preference today is like insane, right? We live in this debt-fueled, extremely high time preference society. And when you live in a debt-powered society, the only way that these businesses can make money is by encouraging high time preference, right? Because they need spend,

spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend until the bubble pops. I mean, that's the only way to really do it. So all the messages that we get from media, academia, are all these very, very, very high time preference messages. And one of the things that I found most uplifting about Saifedean's book is when he talked about all the other things that a shift to low time preference affects. Things like art and culture and food and, you know, tend to all improve for the better.

Don't tell that to some of the mainstream media pundits that listen to this podcast. I know, those guys always, like, a lot of, well first of all obviously most mainstream pundits haven't read his book but one of the things that he i feel like he gets criticized most about um is or and he's actually even told me this are the chapters on uh like he did a chapter on like food and diet and things like and things like that and uh art and you know all that sort of stuff that he's talked about um those tend to be almost i think the easiest i don't want to say easiest targets in that they're

not good arguments because i think they are good arguments but those are the things that usually get focused on by like mainstream pundits that don't like his writing uh they tend to jump right after that no but i think uh i think there's a lot of credence behind saves uh rationalization for these for these beliefs because at the very least we have correlation right i mean like that a lot of i mean look at cio for an example yeah there you go what cio has turned into think about what that has turned into 90 of our listeners have no idea what we're talking about so i'll just i'll briefly say what's going on there like cio um which is where i went to elementary school used to be this nice little community of cottages um more or less cottages you know you call them

cottages you call them small homes whatever everybody a little house little yard um and if you were i'm not from philadelphia but marty is so if you were from philadelphia like marty was and let you know i don't know your background specifically but if you were just a regular working class philadelphian uh it was not out of the ordinary that if you saved your money you could buy a little cottage down in sea isle and that would be your summer house for your family right i mean yeah so my grandparents started like in the 50s my grandfather is going to sound terrible to all you bitcoiners out there but my grandfather was the president of the iron workers union in philly and that's what he started renting a house in sea isle like in the 50s you

could just be a blue collar worker like that and you could end up with a house in sea isle if that's what you're either save for it but if it's what you really wanted and it was a nice little place it'd be small but it would have a little yard and you'd be able to walk to the there's no place in sea aisle where you can't walk to the beach um and uh you know that's how it would that's how it would go nowadays sea aisle is all multi-family buildings slammed into like the tiniest tiniest spaces all there's barely a single family house left in the entire island and they sell for like 600 000 and they're terrible material they're horribly built yeah yeah it's i mean i love seattle to this day i love it but it is sad to see like it has like blow like seattle that small

island economy has blown up into this like yep uh sort of a small emagulation of and the and easy credit that we have it always had a large uh seasonal population right but it also had used to have a decent year-round population yeah like dennis township's repuffing right holy you just that's where i'm from man like that's like yeah dennis township is the town where i were until i was 18 i lived there yeah um but yeah so you used to have like in places like sea isle um this you did have like you had a nice balance you had some year-round people there they're gone man because if you live in that area you don't work for you're not like a banker working for one of these rent-seeking industries because down there they don't have that right your work you're just

like a working person for the most part if you're down there and if you're a working person you can't afford to live in c-isle the only people that can afford to buy homes in c-isle are people that work in these rent-seeking industries in no offense but philadelphia or new york right um they're the only people that can come down and buy it so like the year-round population has collapsed to the point where c-isle closed both of their schools in the past decade the i went to the catholic school there the catholic school actually closed more than 10 years ago and their public school is even shut down now in sea isle because they just they don't have any children yeah yeah no it's crazy to see how much that's changed just in my lifetime i can't

imagine you um it's uh it's wild because i ain't i've i was born there in 81 and i lived there until 99 before i moved up further north in new jersey and uh did you go to ocean city i went to wildwood catholic catholic i'm doxing myself so hard right now because i can no it's okay you can leave it in it's not a big deal uh i'm so like compared to most bitcoiners because i'm a lawyer like you have to be public about it like my face is on my twitter like everything is pretty jacked too so i think you could uh i think protect yourself yeah but yeah while a catholic high which was uh also closed down so let's give you an idea of like it reopened as a much smaller school privately run it's weird the diocese shut it down because enrollment got so low and then a bunch of

private citizens reopened it as a private catholic school but it's way smaller than when i used to live there yeah yeah that's crazy to see how cape may county's changed in general like overall yep yeah yep yep yep and like a lot of economies there's been winners and losers the people that have won big time in cape may county are the realtors right yeah and nothing against them i mean they're not creating the system they're just exactly they're making money that the only way they know how but yeah yeah no that's the other thing it's like people want to point at people and be like you're the problem you're the problem it's like no and that's the again going back to polarity of our politics right now red versus blue like again i think that's a misguided framing of

the problem yeah um that's crazy it's crazy it's great to see cl people doing great thanks man um was not expecting you to be from ci when uh i didn't know that man it's the the weirdest this is only the second weirdest one i've had in the past couple months when i was at the mit bitcoin conference um last month uh i met a guy from iowa and the so dennis township that you talked about where i originally am from it's that's the township and then there's several constituent towns that make up the township so i'm from south seville um the i met a guy from iowa at the conference the only place he had ever been to in new jersey in his entire life was seville tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny town because his college roommate was from Seville I mean I didn't know

him because he was a lot younger than me but uh yeah like what a wild story of all the I mean New Jersey for those listeners who are overseas or not on the east coast New Jersey's got like nine million people it's the most densely populated state in the union exactly and the part of the state that Marty and I are talking about right now has less than a hundred thousand it's tiny yeah um and the only place he had ever been in new jersey it's the most geographically remote part of the state as well um and the only place he had ever been yeah was uh was seville wow what a fucking small world it's weird the people you meet in bitcoin man the weirdest part is like you go to these things this has happened to you i'm sure way more than me i've had people just

say oh i know you from twitter i recognize you from twitter yeah that that that is always it's still weird to this day where people are like oh you're marty from tales from the crypt i'm like yeah yeah you know you listen to my podcast oh my god yeah it's cool man that's again it's like it's wrap this up like we're an hour and a half here but like bringing it all together like bitcoin provides this common mission and that's why i'm into it like again like going back to like providing optimism like i love being on this common mission with people of like-minded values and good people i've met some of the best people i've ever met since i've gotten more involved in bitcoin uh and i mean that like very very sincerely like that sounds trite but i mean it very sincerely

so many and like three that really stick out to me that have just helped me so much um you know just get back into the technical side pierre like we've talked about for the reasons we've talked about justin moon who we've talked about and then the other person that i just want to shout out before we uh cut off here is uh you know nicholas doria when i first started getting back into development and i wanted to work with btc pay server i just kind of slapped this thing together and he reached out to me and was like hey like here's like a bunch of things you can do that would make your contributions like much better and i was so grateful like you know for that like bit of help that he gave me in getting back into it and you see stories like that in

bitcoin all the time it's just it's amazing how helpful and kind frankly bitcoiners are to other bitcoiners we're so toxic though yeah i know that's the we're toxic that's the the um the stereotype right but i think once you're in the club it's the total opposite well there is no club either it's like once you like that's actually a really good point once you break through like just like the ad hominems of toxicity and actually like speak to the people that are being called toxic like oh you're actually a normal level-headed dude i think a lot of the reason for the toxic stereotype is just that so much bitcoin related communication takes place on twitter and the nature of twitter like you got 280 characters people just say there's not a lot

of nuance on twitter so i think that's probably part of the reason a lot of nuance a lot of cloud chasing a lot of uh yeah a lot of uh attempts at ego boosting and stuff like that exactly exactly right jeff it's been a pleasure over an hour and a half uh cool man where can we find out more about you how can we help you work on what you're working on and uh yeah so if you're uh well you can follow me on twitter my twitter handle like sucks i apologize it's at vandrew atty cpa um if you want if you're interested in maybe holding bitcoin and ira while holding your own keys you can go to vandrew.com v-a-n-d-r-e-w.com that's my website you can learn more about that there uh and then you know my github my github name is just jeff vandrew jr uh if you want to

check out the projects i'm working on if you have any improvements or comments or contributions you want to make you can find all my stuff there well jeff it's been a pleasure man thanks again for coming through likewise mine thanks a lot like i said uh it's great to see people from seattle doing well people from dennis township doing well thanks um peace and love freaks