TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #76: Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum, to discuss how Alex ended up at the HRF, how authoritarian regimes use digital panopticons to control their subjects, why Bitcoin is such an important project, and why we can't mess it up. Checkout Alex's speech from MCC: https://youtu.be/CyieujRFk3g?t=13786 Follow Alex on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gladstein Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this week's sponsor. Probably already know what I'm going to say. You already know all about them. The Cash app, the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. The first P2P payments app to let you freaks buy Bitcoin. They're also helping you save money at local merchants with their boost program. When you get the boost card, you can go to Chick-fil-A, whole foods your local coffee shop taco bell i believe domino's is on there well as well the list goes on it's only growing um on top of this uh you can easily send money to and from your friends i've actually had a lot more friends ask me to cash at them recently over other alternatives

which has been been cool to see um and if you guys are buying bitcoin and stacking stats on the cash app as well you can send that out to a personal wallet once you're ready to take your personal financial sovereignty into your own hands. So go to your local app store, either the Google or the Apple app store, and download the Cash App today. Hope you freaks enjoy this episode with Alex Gladstein. I know I certainly did. Alex is fighting a really good fight with the Human Rights Foundation and the Oslo Forum. And I think he's got a very, very strong message. So I recommend you listen to this episode intently and and take the words of advice from alex uh to heart because this is uh this is a battle

for freedom at the end of the day enjoy what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a rainy monday uh deep in the hell week already it feels like blockchain week started uh friday night it's only monday afternoon and it's been a it's been a long weekend already for me uh my guest today has had an incredible weekend he gave one of the best speeches at the magical crypto conference in my opinion i'd like to introduce you freaks to tree strategy offer at the human at the human rights foundation uh and the oslo forum and also a guest lecture at the singularity university alex gladstein alex welcome to the podcast great to be on thanks for having me

Well, thanks for coming, man. Again, going back to your speech, I was telling you earlier, I was fanboying a little bit. You provided some of the best introductory content to normies, I believe, on Saturday with your presentation at the Magical Crypto Conference. We're going to jump into that, obviously. But first, as is par for the course here at Tales from the Crypt, how did you find your way to the Human Rights Foundation, working on Bitcoin in particular? Yeah, so my background in human rights dates back to 2007 when I was still in university and I was in London working for the Liberal Democrats as a research assistant and studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies. And I put in an application for an internship with some new organization called the Human Rights Foundation, which had been created the year before, which was focusing at the time pretty heavily on Venezuela and Cuba and other kind of human rights issues in Latin America. And I got the internship and spent a few months that summer there putting together backpacks of outside information and movies and books, which would then be smuggled into Cuba. because in Cuba the government does not allow you to have any books that they don't approve of ahead of time so you can't have anything that's not kind of in their particular you know philosophy so we would we would send in stuff like Animal Farm 1984 we would send in movies like V for Vendetta and I remember putting this together really

vividly this was the time of like you know burning cd you know cds and dvds and we would put together what looked like somebody's, like, basically CD collection, Britney Spears and Bush and whatever, but in reality, around the little sort of transparent ring in the middle, we would write in very small font, like, what it actually was, and it would be, you know, whatever it was, like, some Woody Allen movie or Braveheart, etc., The Matrix, etc., and these would go in with my colleagues who were Latin American, so they could totally fine go to Cuba, and they would meet up with folks in their homes give them this stuff and then it would be accompanied with like a Spanish language kind of like some sample questions and our kind of contacts there would

host these little three four person meetups where they would watch the movie and then have like an open conversation about what that meant and this was something that was looked upon very favorably by the civil society community and the underground library community in in Cuba eventually as the years went by satellite technology became a little harder to like control and now today you have this like paquete system which was really well covered last summer in a in a wired uh big cover story uh i remember this story yeah folks like smuggling a satellite receiver basically download everything on spanish netflix or whatever and then they they put it on a hard drive and they basically pass it around the community and people take off what they want they pay for it so the work we were doing is

a little outdated at this point but it was quite vital at the time and it gave me a real sense of how you know information is power uh no and especially in these countries where information is subdued and suppressed it's interesting to see how the black market sort of routes around it and this this example in particular the paquetas yeah the paquetas yeah this is like a essentially a you know again a hard drive that would contain like you know contraband or forbidden information and you know from cuba we ended up bringing some of these folks to our first oslo freedom forum sort of event that we held in norway in 2009 which was meant to be like a gathering point for all sorts of troublemakers and dissidents and whistleblowers

and we had some north korean defectors there too and they were like hey we're doing something really similar we're like smuggling information into north korea using balloons um can we trade notes do you guys want to you know team up help us out so a few years later we started to go to south korea to meet them and assess their needs and bring philanthropists and technologists and media and journalists to understand like what they were working on and why they thought it was so important this led to a wired cover story and a lot of amazing media coverage i think that the story was done by andy greenberg one of my favorite journalists who actually covered a lot of bitcoin's history um i think he was like the court one of the court reporters in like the dread pirate

roberts case right so andy ended up going out there and interviewing all these folks and going on the ground you know in that region and he did this cover story that i think was called something like um you know the plot to topple kim jong-un with a thumb drive or something like that and it was just this incredibly vividly detailed report on how north korean refugees you know gather at the border in China and at night like you know send things over this river into North Korea where they where these flash drives filled with movies and books and stuff would be sold and distributed and traded and this is like a very popular thing that happens there and it's it's only grown in in its phenomenon since so that that's something I worked on quite a bit at the Human Rights

Foundation and then over the years we started to do more like hands-on digital security training for journalists and activists and dissidents. We'd team up with folks like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Tor Project. They would come out to our events and meet journalists and activists from different countries and talk about how they could be more safe online, encrypted messaging, VPNs, stuff like that.

And then over time, inevitably, I had been introduced to the concept of Bitcoin around 2014 by Brock Pierce, who I was on a houseboat with at Ephemeral, a festival that takes place off the in the sacramento river delta a houseboat with brock pierce it was fun yeah it was great so he he kind of got it on my radar and that summer uh mark anderson wrote this piece for the new york times which i tweeted about then i thought was super really well done and still to this day it's one of the best articles in the mainstream

media about bitcoin i mean i don't know what he's doing since then on it but it was really well written and it really captured my imagination but i didn't really put two and two together until 2016 when a guy named Bill Tai who was in Bitcoin from the very beginning and was mining in his apartment in Palo Alto in like 2010 has been been around for a long time he was the one who introduced Richard Branson to the concept of Bitcoin and this is why Bitfury has that thing on Necker Island that's like the you know cryptocurrency conference there so Bill had made that connection and and bill was on the board of bitfury and bill said hey this was like september 2016 and he said i'm on this um involved with this organization maybe there's something we

can do together to help people who who are in like broken economies or something like that so we ended up putting together just a small program at our at our freedom forum you know that following spring and i remember being uh shocked because this was in may of 2017 so the bitcoin price was going from like you know twelve hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars to two thousand dollars kind of while we were around sitting around that week in norway and it started to get on a lot of people's radar you know initially sort of like this week sort of like this week or sort of like december 2017 or whatever but it was very exciting and and it was so convenient that we actually had bill there and and i think you know there was some initial interest there and then that that

kind of led me down the rabbit hole where in the last two years i've tried to work to understand how the Human Rights Foundation can help people through our work to help them sort of access the world economy, to help understand how Bitcoin can be a tool of liberation and to maybe work with organizations and companies to do some like research in the field to help understand why and how people are adopting

this new financial tool. Yeah, now you mentioned Mark Anderson's piece in the New York Times being one of the best mainstream media pieces. I was like, yeah, I agree. And I was like, but after thinking about that for 15 seconds, you wrote probably another one in Time magazine earlier this year. That blew up and really drove home sort of the benefit of Bitcoin from a human rights perspective. Yeah. And I had the benefit of hindsight of a lot more years of watching it succeed. But it's funny, I'd been working on that piece for a few months with the encouragement of a few friends of mine.

and I write frequently in the mainstream media about general human rights issues and my friends at Time were happy to run it they were excited so it happened at the very nadir like the very bottom of it was like Bitcoin was like 3,300 bucks or something at that point and I think one of the reasons it was it went so viral is that people were kind of bummed out and they were like ah this is like this is what we're actually in it for you know no it was in so let's jump into what you talked about in that piece in particular right it's uh basically it's it's yeah like bitcoin as a as a liberation tool from broken economies from dictatorship from financial surveillance from price fixing from hyperinflation uh from restrictions on your bank account on

withdrawal limits all these things which you kind of may notice as like individual phenomenon they're all part of this like financial repression like idea right that government's used to control people and I say this in a non-conspiratorial way like I'll just put this out there I'm like a someone who believes in good governance I'm like a fairly proud American I think our government does some really great things in the world I think we have some problems but generally speaking I'm not anywhere close to like an anarchist or even really a libertarian I'm more of like a progressive person um but i just witness so many crimes happening and so many injustices happening on the financial side that human the human rights community the progressive communities for some

reason kind of just doesn't really think about or doesn't look at you know we've of course looked at like corruption um but you know who owns money and who creates money and who gets to control money is something that i never even thought about even after working in this field for like many many years until until i sort of saw it through the prism of bitcoin right isn't it crazy because money is uh it's the root of all evil money runs the world it's it's sort of the center of everything in culture and uh music uh sort of pop culture stuff like that it drives the world it's always talked about but until bitcoin people really haven't questioned sort of the essence of money and what what it is right and it's interesting because when i was writing the piece for time i

was thinking about how both in the 90s and 15 20 years ago and again like 10 years ago sort of this sort of online digital freedom cypherpunk folks had been trying to explain why privacy digitally was important right trying to explain why pgp was important um you know folks like phil zimmerman john callas some of these like legends right they worked so hard john perry Barlow all these folks with EFF like trying to fight to explain why we needed to have privacy on the internet and we had already gone through numerous narrations of of why encrypting our communications was a good thing right not that you know unlike the establishment when they were first confronted with the idea of secret communications they totally missed the point

it's not that bad people can all of a sudden communicate or the dictator can suddenly communicate with his accomplices no the whole point is that the million people that live under the dictator can all of a sudden now communicate without the dictator knowing right that's the real point of encryption so we had already gone through this narrative of like hey everybody here's why like communications privacy is really important on the internet and the EFF and so many other organizations have already gone through the hoops on that and shown us how to argue that right and it just seemed so interesting that we were now going through the exact same thing again just with money in the same way that it's important for us to have digital communications privacy it's

important it's even more important for us to have digital financial privacy i was listening to a podcast the other day and um maybe it was a few months ago and there was a british journalist who studies sort of money and and payments and he was saying something that i thought was that was really pithy and he said that sort of our spend or our spending habits say more about us than our words right and i think that's true right so if you care about your privacy and you were somebody who fought for encryption or you thought it was cool that people could now use signal or wicker you should be really interested in bitcoin because if you're not you know we're going down this road where money as a technology is evolving from metal money to paper money to uh you know credit cards

that represent the paper money to our phones which then operate that system to now social media companies which are going to be the future of centralized digital money and that's going to be a nightmare for our privacy and and you need to think about how this really amazing community of global brilliant people are building a decentralized digital money that has privacy potential major privacy potential and i know we're not there yet but seriously like the door's been cracked open for this possible world where like in 20 years your family and your kids and future generations might still have financial privacy and if we fail i really think we're screwed because i mean these people are so thirsty for your data and so if we do fail uh there's already

examples that exist in the world that uh have sort of uh come to be because of a failure of fighting for freedom and china being the main example and in your talk on saturday you touched on weibo and how that platform in particular is the least data uh data net wechat in particular wechat yeah i mean look when i in the time piece i tried to break down briefly some examples for people to understand how this could matter for folks so one of course is surveillance right so we look at china we look at how most people in urban china hundreds of millions of people potentially more than a billion people every day if you look at some of the data coming out from Tencent you know using this app every day and just to explain to the average sort of maybe

American who's listening this thing is like as if you're Amazon and Netflix and Google and Chase and Foursquare and and email and Instagram and all of it is in one app right so it's kind of like you're using Facebook or whatever but Facebook's got Venmo in it and you never leave the app right so it's got this incredible ability that companies don't have here in the U.S. yet thankfully to create a perfect sort of digital footprint of your life. Sounds like a panopticon. Well I mean in some cases that's the goal right I mean the Chinese government would like to have a pretty full knowledge about what its citizens are doing in a granular way so that it can use big data analysis and machine learning and AI essentially to sift and sort

through all that data to disincentivize and punish if need be any potential dissenters and reward loyalists right that's the whole idea is to create this climate of self-censorship and to create this climate where the most loyal people to the communist party are really rewarded in such a way where you would never think of even saying something against the government and there was that amazing quote from 1984 that i that i used in the presentation about at the magical crypto Khan about how, you know, the only thing you owned was the few square centimeters in your head, right? And that's really, you know, the truth in some areas of China today, right? Especially in other, and it's not just in China, this has been, this has been done before without technology.

So, for example, in Mao's China, or in North Korea today, or in communist Cuba, you know, in very repressive environments, even pre sort of modern technology, governments were able to use informants and spies uh to monitor the population you know we know about the stasi germany right the east german dictatorship there one out of every 50 people apparently was a spy so what this has allowed governments to do is to like basically uh make that process so much more efficient so rather than having like one out of every 50 people walking around kind of trying to listen and rather rather than like sort of relying on people who could be like patriotic in a real sense and decide to not spy now they don't have to do that because they can rely on you and something

that you've all know a harari that the author says which i think is really spot on is that these algorithms these things like we chat or even facebook or amazon you know collectively they know more about you than you do like when you're watching netflix you don't need to he says this is funny like you don't need to sit there and argue with your wife or whatever about what you want to watch it knows what you want to watch it's showing you could argue for an hour but it's showing you right there like you know four square or whatever the you know you don't need to know what you want to eat it'll tell you what you want to eat so think about that in the hands of like a repressive government right um so kind of this is this is where we are in china and that was one

example i wanted to to bring because if we could start to like have a global neutral financial network where we could transact uh you know in a way that would be more difficult to achieve that marriage of financial and personal information surveillance that's like really good for humans another example of course is hyperinflation so whether it's the zimbabweans or the venezuelans or the folks in somaliland a small country in the horn of africa or in iran this allows people to have access to a currency that the government can't just print more of arbitrarily i was uh even though i've been following this uh sort of process for four years now in venezuela i was still shocked to see the price of a cup of coffee priced in bolivar bars from 2016 2017 2018 like i

thought it was bad in 2016 already it was i mean it started a few years ago but in this again this isn't a new phenomenon like i think the world record for hyperinflation is hungary in the 1960s or something like that um i mean this has been happening in the 20th century you know dating back to pre-war germany right so so we have many examples of this and again this is this is a particular lifeline for someone under that situation okay then you might have sanctions and here's what might get interesting for americans because look again i'm like fairly proud to be an american etc but like we do some dumb stuff abroad you know why should the average young iranian entrepreneur who definitely didn't vote for her government why should she not have

access to be able to buy apple equipment or to not be able to transact with friends abroad I think that's bullshit you know oh I do know like I've had uh Iranian expats come study in America and I've taken classes with them and I've had Iranian friends at points in my life and they're some of the nicest people I've ever met and it's just I think that's who I think of when I think of the sanctions is the people that I've met personally uh Sina kid my age like and and there's compelling arguments for us to focus on smart sanctions meaning to focus on individual criminals as opposed to broad populations and bill browder has done some amazing work with that with the magnitsky act so it makes a lot more sense right i'd encourage you to look into that but

generally speaking bitcoin gives folks an escape valve from like arbitrary sanctions on their population and another example that i think is really really relevant from from my work when i'm looking at helping people who are civil society organizers or ngo leaders in like difficult regimes let's say in russia um you know what does putin do when you are a human rights watchdog or an independent journalism organization and he wants to like restrict your movement restrict your ability and he shuts down your bank account i mean he's got control over that he can't do that anymore i can now send bitcoin into russia there's a lot of local liquidity you know what i mean and those folks can turn that bitcoin into local money and and that that is something that is that is

starting to happen in so many countries around the world so this idea that like governments can restrict the flow of finances to civil society organizations uh especially if we have if we're teaching good operational security to folks and they understand how to most efficiently turn bitcoin into local fiat i mean that's a lifeline for sure right no and the lightning network torch proved it like we went from wales to iran to israel almost went to um almost went to gaza after that 30 000 feet in the air right right um so that one i think is key and then the last example i mean there are more but the one that i thought was always strikes me as really important is this idea of identity.

And I know we can go down a side path here, but basically, in a country like Burma, the government has an incentive to sort of delete people off the record. So it's this highly nationalistic regime which tries to scapegoat minorities, like Muslims, for example, right? So we have a situation where

the Burmese military dictatorship basically deletes or, you know, purposely loses or destroys the records of citizenship of Muslims. Like, I have a friend of mine, this happened to her, right? And she was a political prisoner from the age of 18 until 25. She spent seven years in prison in Burma, and then she escaped. And she was able to visit one of these camps that basically the Burmese government has forced into existence by uh you know pushing chasing the the muslim minority rohingya population out of the northwest corner of burma into bangladesh over a river and there's all these amazing photos on the internet of how brutal this is right all these people stuck in

these camps what is their justification for this uh it's just hyper nationalistic jingoistic you know persecution you know getting everybody excited about nationalism it's like this buddhist nationalism there and they're preying on religious minorities. Every dictator needs an enemy. Every dictator needs a boogeyman. So the boogeyman of this particular regime are the religious minorities, not just the Rohingya Muslim groups, but the Karen people and all kinds of people all across Burma. So the government's like super intense about destroying these people. So these folks have been like, you know, taken off the identity system and they're now sitting in Bangladesh in a camp and they don't have a passport or an ID, right? I've asked her like,

you know did most folks there when she visited did they have you know paper ids and stuff but no was there internet access uh in the camp intermittently yes are there markets in the camp meaning do people come in and buy and sell things of course bangladeshi's coming and buying sell things every day in any refugee campus happens right people come in buy sell things leave there's like a market that develops of course in places like jordan and lebanon where there's massive syrian camps or in kenya where there's massive camps of somalis there's like a lot of this market activity going so you could easily start to think about with the proper education we could have a situation where you can have a rohingya family that doesn't have a passport

id has no way of making a bank account but if we can get them a cheap burner smartphone with access to the internet you and i can send them non-kyc bitcoin on like a bread wallet and they can then take that to somebody who's particularly enterprising and let's say in the market who realizes damn i can make like a nice cut if i accept bitcoin for goods and services and all of a sudden you've got like a little market going and this would allow us to completely sidestep the entire messy corrupt slow foreign aid process we could just go peer-to-peer with people and they don't need some passport they don't need permission from a government that to me is like one of the most compelling parts of bitcoin and it's very compelling right because there's i mean

foundations typically get a lot of slack for for not being the best allocators of the funds that they receive correct so that's yeah and look i think most people generally in the foreign aid business are are you know have noble intentions but when you have a system whereby there are so many middlemen and you know at a at a base level it's like if you're a foundation the gates foundation u.s state department whatever you're trying to help somebody abroad you've got your bank you know so it's already it's you then your bank then swift or some sort of global coordination network then the bank of the person you're trying to help and then the person i mean you've got like four or five different degrees of separation here probably more right whereas like we're talking

no degrees of separation we're talking a direct peer-to-peer uh person address we'll send you funds right it's that yeah exactly and we can coordinate it you know peer-to-peer on messaging so um and and this is not something that that currently uh governments are are looking to stop which is kind of an interesting idea to play with on its own but you know a friend of mine was saying that um you know when she visits china today which of course would be one of the governments you'd point to as like the most draconian when it comes to digital communications that she can receive you know like non-kyc bitcoin onto her phone and then within minutes you know be shopping it and trading it on these wechat groups and then get renin before it like the liquidity

is pretty easy to come by there and you're starting to see that it's not just in let's say advanced uh technology societies where that's possible but in in many different places i mean i've been doing uh a podcast series like an interview series with adam levine over the last few weeks for for his show and we've been interviewing people from all these different countries and learning a lot i mean so cool you should definitely check out this this this upcoming series that's coming out speaking to people from nigeria uh yes we interviewed folks from nigeria iran uh the philippines india hong kong slash china um and venezuela and and we were talking to them about like how first of all why did they get involved you know some of them are

researchers some of them are businessmen and women some of them are entrepreneurs some of them are educators like you know why did they get involved um how how do folks access bitcoin and why and it was so interesting i learned so much i mean some a couple teasers would be like because i want you to listen to to the to the series but just a couple teasers would be that i mean it's amazing the bitcoin dominance in these countries and like i'm not like i love bitcoin but if something came along that was better i'd be like on it you know i'm here for the the freedom aspect of it but to to understand the network effect that it already has and that this is like 90 95 percent bitcoin in these countries so i mean that's something to think about if you're like how can

I help well I mean you probably probably should start by seeing how we can make the existing infrastructure better right and then the other thing that was really interesting was understanding this idea of like liquidity time so for example again if I send like non-kyc bitcoin to you you know whatever two three confirmations half an hour it's it's it's it's with that other person right how how long does it take from the moment that it hits their wallet and is confirmed to when they can be holding local currency in their hand or in their bank account right and and this is like 15 minutes for some of these countries even less for some um and you know it sounded like no more than even like a day even in particularly difficult countries uh like india

where they're really cracking down on cryptocurrency it sounded like you could do this generally speaking within a business day and i mean that's just extraordinary i mean especially when you think about how long some of these wires and western unions and international international kind of money transfers take to process and we're doing it in a way where no one has the opportunity to say no we don't really like you so we're just not going to let that one go through you know so we're not only doing it faster and more in a streamlined fashion but we're also doing it without the opportunity for crony censorship yeah and it's like something you touched on earlier is like china and russia they have the ability to stop these transactions pretty pretty easily if

they want to via tracking they can censor at will do you think bitcoin is like obviously it's playing catch up against these systems are you uh are you optimistic about where it is on its path compared to what we're fighting right because like obviously like we just said like china is the on one polar end like this is the worst case scenario that we could end up in and we're actively fighting against that future outside of china i think there's some there's a couple different viewpoints here right i mean i think you can take the point of view that with a defensive technology like bitcoin it's always going to be easier for individual developers to kind of like stay a little bit of ahead of surveillance so that's

one potential outcome right and people like adam fiskor who created wasabi wallet like they tend to have this philosophy like oh like he's like within a few years this is going to be very very difficult to trace right um on the other hand you have others who are like don't underestimate you know massad or you know the nsa or the chinese government like don't underestimate them right so we have this kind of like some people who are a little more optimistic some people are a lot more pessimistic about let's say government's ability to restrict us from sending each other Bitcoin. And I think we need to consider all views. All of them are viable. All of them are possible. I think there is a world where Bitcoin can be used to grow in

certain ways, but becomes practically unusable because it's either the risk of owning it or using it is so high. And I think we need to do whatever we can to kind of make that world not a reality, right? Yeah, no, you yelled at me over the weekend via Telegram that we can't fuck this up as Bitcoiners. Yeah, it's been really amazing to be at the magical crypto conference. Usually I speak at events where you know that aren't crypto events where people are you know don't know very little they know very little about bitcoin or any sort of cryptocurrency right and I'm trying to explain to them you know what it is what are some of its attributes are why it exists how it functions etc um so to get to speak to an audience of some of the most sort of world-class builders

of bitcoin was really fun and also other projects too like I think other projects are awesome like all about Monero and Zcash I think private money is really important not necessarily because I think people are going to use it all over the world but but especially because like we need all kinds of cutting-edge people working on private money and hey at least at the end of the day they'll keep the Bitcoin people more honest and you know keep them more on schedule right so to come together with this community was super fun I think everybody's kind of like into civil liberties and at their heart if they're actually there for for an ideological reason if they're into bitcoin or or monero or zcash obviously they care about privacy and they don't

they don't like the surveillance state right so it was fun to hang out there and uh you know do do a talk that hopefully gave uh folks some insight into what would happen if they screw up and just looking more into kind of what's happening in china uh again the world's largest country this isn't some black mirror episode this is this is something that's happening it's not just happening in china this stuff's being exported all over the world so that's what i wanted to get into um so two things one first like you said it's uh becoming like to the point in china where like if you interact with quote-unquote undesirables you're gonna hurt your social credit score and so you're just basically would be the social credit score creating pariahs uh in society

which is scary which is scary thought yeah and just to note on that i mean we should be under no illusions that that's something that's happening kind of en masse across the country in a unified cohesive way but it is something that's being experimented with in certain cities and by certain companies and it's absolutely something the chinese communist party would love to see across the country so while while we need to take everything i think coming out of china especially in the english language with a grain of salt because you know there's just you know a lot of um uh sort of conflicting reports about exactly what's happening i think what we do need to know is is what their intentions and goals are which they've been quite clear about

you know and that that's that they want to have things like that happen they want to have people who are who are low on on social credit let's say uh not be able to access key financial services because that allows them to run a regime which is protected by self-censorship as opposed to active censorship it's way easier if all of your citizens are afraid to rule if they're not afraid it's very difficult to rule arbitrarily right so i think that's kind of the goal there and that's something we hopefully don't have to don't ever have to see in in other countries no then second point going back to your point about china starting to export this uh this is one thing that you mentioned and talked about briefly in your presentation but belton road uh

one trillion dollar investment project uh to basically export this technology to countries around the world latin america africa in particular um so 100 trillion dollar project 400 billion of that has been deployed one trillion dollar project yes one trillion dollar yeah and to give you like some historical context so the marshall plan which rebuilt europe after world war one in like today's dollars i guess was some would be something like 120 billion dollars right so the chinese government has already given out 400 billion dollars in investments and loans to like more than 100 countries all across south asia central asia middle east africa latin america and now europe right and i think that's the kind of the maybe the most chilling part for people who are from

america or europe because we think oh it can't happen here even when i show them stuff about look this like ecuadorian government there's this amazing new york times investigation into this about how the ecuadorian government in south america is you know using chinese technology to surveil the population, and you've got... Did Correa let that happen? Yeah, so basically it started under Correa, and look, I know that the current president, the current leader of Ecuador

is actually much better on human rights than Correa, much less authoritarian, but still. I mean, as we know, even in open societies, like think about the Brits or the Australians, they're like super intense about creating a digital police state, even in democracies. So it's something everybody needs to be worried about.

But when you look at some of these other countries too, like Zambia, like, so I have a friend who just went there. When you get off the plane at the airport, at the Capitol, everything's in Chinese, all the signs. So there's like, there's like quite a lot of this neo-colonialistic kind of like Chinese infrastructure and loans sort of system being set up all across the world. I mean, Burma is essentially a colony of China at this point where they harvest all the, you know, teak and rubies and all kinds of resources, uh, and they abused the local

population. Um, but even, but, but to get into Europe, I mean, the fact that like Italy and Greece, uh, Switzerland, I mean, Italy was the first G7 country to be a part of this thing, the Belt and Road, um, Switzerland, Monaco is allowing Huawei, you know, to build their 5G network. Right. So, uh, all these countries in Europe are about to like basically auction off the rights for the building and the construction of the 5g networks right all in the next 18 months this isn't something happening in five years happening right now and you know you talk to some telecommunications officials in these countries and they're finding it very hard to steer their decision makers away from the chinese companies they just have better tech they're ready

to deploy it now why not right and it's difficult to argue why not what's well what is the pitch is a pitch like you're going to be able to surveil your old population could argument no no it's that like there's tremendous business pressure to to launch and set up 5g for commercial interests in all countries i mean it's a i know there's some health concerns but generally speaking which obviously should be explored more but generally speaking the idea is we're going to have gigabit speeds on our phones on 5g networks right and it's going to totally change the way that like public infrastructure health you know networks payment networks all this stuff kind of works right now i can tell you if you care about your privacy and civil liberties you don't want the

chinese communist parties like apparatchiks building your 5g networks because they're going to build it in a way that's very uh you know let's say malicious for your personal privacy hey you should one example of a chinese police woman wearing terminator like glasses where she could literally just like look through them they're electronic and and read people's social credit score as she's walking by yeah and and and some of that again is like an experiment at this point i think the new york times did a story that was that was pretty good where they were saying like at this point some of this stuff's more kafka-esque than orwellian um but certainly that photograph is of a policewoman who a year and a half ago or so was testing such a device

now i'm not sure if it was certainly at the time like working at scale i mean maybe today it is but at the time the idea was that they're testing these technologies so that when they're police officers and they're i think at this point they're up to 700 million surveillance cameras in china so the goal was to be at a billion by next year by 2020 so there'll be almost as many surveillance cameras as people in that country and the goal is that these cameras are like integrated in some way across a standard where like when your face comes up or your movement your gate like comes up that that you get sort of identified and then you know they can easily you know figure out whether or not you are a potential troublemaker or not i mean that's clearly the goal i mean we don't know

where we are in the implementation of that but in some places a lot closer to reality than others And this is this street-level facial recognition tech is what these other countries are buying, like Latin America, Africa, et cetera. Like whether it's, again, Zambia or Ecuador or Panama. I mean, that's what these countries are buying. And these European countries seem pretty excited about surveillance. I mean, I told in my magical CryptoCon talk about this story of the Danish banker that I met last week. And she couldn't explain why she wants to know everything. Yeah, I had this conversation after giving a talk to a bunch of like telecom and banking folks from Scandinavia. And in the Q&A after she was like, well, I don't think we have enough information about our clients. And I was kind of like, well, like, what else do you want to know? Like, is there a limit? Is there a line that you would not want to cross with regard to collection of personal data about your clients? And she couldn't answer me.

i mean again these people are so thirsty for your information and your data and even if they're good people individually it's like the banality of evil thing they just want it all um because they think it's going to result in a safer society and that's this like huge misconception but they really want it all and they will take it from you if you don't fight for it well i think bitcoin is a um an incarnation of the fight for that freedom but going back to the exportation of this chinese technology you were alluding that there are western companies helping them do this too yeah no it's pretty stunning how's this happening one of the things we do at the human rights foundation is go to south by southwest every year and we try to put together some programming to

intrigue the sort of creative tech classes that go and if you haven't been it's awesome you should totally join us next year we're probably going to do some programming along these lines of like how bitcoin and cryptocurrency are maybe like providing some lifelines to folks around the world but anyway uh this year we decided to focus on this issue of the prison camps in western china and we brought in someone who escaped from these camps his name is tahir amin he's a uighur muslim minority guy and a couple years ago he had gotten out now he lives in the united states as a refugee and we put him on stage and I got to interview him

along with like two journalists who'd been kicked out of China for reporting on this issue and it was a pretty stunning, you know, revelation I think for the people in the audience who had no idea this was happening. I mean, there's probably one,

1.5 million Muslims in these prison camps and nobody seems to know and what was so crazy is that Dahir was profiled by the Times a couple months ago and, you know, before he left, his DNA had been sequenced, like taken from him, right, cheek swab or something like that, and the Chinese Communist Party is building this huge DNA database of all these Uyghurs, and, you know, this was broken, this story was broken in the New York

Times, and I got to ask him about this on the panel, and look, you know, we can call it conspiracy theory, you can call it whatever you want, in my opinion, these sort of theories need to be, it needs to be proven by the Chinese Communist Party that they're not doing these things, But a couple examples of what he gave as to why they would be doing this. I was like, well, why are they collecting all your DNA? So he kind of gave two reasons. Number one is organ harvesting. So you know that the Chinese government does a lot of organ harvesting of prisoners, things like that.

This has been in the news for a long time. I did not know that. Yeah, so you can just look up organ harvesting China. Like it's common knowledge that the Chinese government harvests organs from prisoners and things like that and sells them around the world. Well, in the United States, what's a liver cost? What, 800 grand? like this is a very lucrative industry right and and there's not a whole lot of regulation around the space um so this is something you can look up i mean there's like british government american

government all kinds of government reports on this now what was what was horrifying to me to learn was essentially that what tahir told me and again you know you can look this up and figure it out if it's true or not for yourself i'm not sure i think the burden of proof should be on the chinese government not on us um but essentially what he says is that he's got sort of like testimony and um like kind of eyewitness evidence that what the chinese government is doing is providing halal organs okay so they're like rich saudi and emirati princes and royalty and rich folks who when they get sick they want a muslim liver or kidney or whatever and they're willing to pay double so they're willing to pay like two million bucks for like a muslim organ

right and they buy them from the chinese government who harvests them from the the prisoners in xinjiang i did not know now it's it's the you'll never be able to forget it it's like this jarring idea and you know is it is it happening i'm pretty sure i mean i'm trying to figure it out but it's certainly something i could use some more help on so if folks want to dig into that that would be great um but it was stunning for him to say that and of course like the more obvious thing is that if you're a chinese communist party official and it's you can basically like put your freaking um thumbprint on a screen and then order an organ essentially from the prison camps like that would be pretty convenient right so he's got that's his like first reason for why they're doing this

the second one was even more sinister and he's basically saying they're creating a bio weapon that would kill all the uyghurs but not other people and i was just like okay i mean that sounds pretty dystopic but is it really a bio weapon that could what that would basically target it would target folks with like certain characteristics right and not others we'll see what i when that's his theory i mean again we're getting into like stuff that i don't i don't i'm not going to say this is happening or not it's what he told me but again i think that the burden proof needs to be on the Chinese government to basically come out and say they're not doing this because because I don't know dude they've got millions of Muslims in prison camps and what

they're doing is cultural genocide what they do is they take the men and they put them in the camps they take the wives they marry the wives off to Han Chinese men and then they take the kids and they change the identity of the kids to Han Chinese so they're literally doing what they did in Tibet they're doing cultural genocide you never hear anybody talk about Tibet anymore I mean tibet's like a done deal the chinese government was victorious in tibet so what they're trying to do is do the same thing in xinjiang to the uyghurs and they're using this highly advanced technology to do it right and a lot of that at the end of the day it rests on financial surveillance right so again we need to come up with uh ways to preserve uh our financial sovereignty and our

financial privacy um or else i'm afraid folks that the slippery slope ends in prison camps i'm just afraid that that's where it goes it's it's shocking to me too because even 60 70 years after the facts 80 years after the fact now or yeah 60 70 years after the fact now after the holocaust and like the the trauma that's brought up with that we have a genocide going on in yemen we have these internment camps in china and it seems that the world is is sort of a little bit quiet about the modern day genesis kongo yeah yemen xinjiang what's going on in north korea is disgusting to me like as an american is like the fact that america we should be helping the many people we're financing their it's a disaster they're it's a famine officially right it's a

disaster it's hard to know but i have some friends who just went there and um we should be trying to help save these people as opposed to support the Saudi dictatorship and MBS who are horribly corrupt and evil. But you know, we do what we do. So look, I'm not, I'm not in the politics game here. I'm not trying to blame or point fingers, but I would remind folks gently that no matter what side of political side you are in the United States, that both Democrats and Republicans have been super guilty on this one. I mean, like Hillary Clinton was taking tons of money from the Saudis. And you go back to George H.W. and W. both loved the Saudis. You know, Obama wasn't wasn't much different. And now you have Trump. So like no matter where you are politically,

I mean, dude, they're all they're all going to take money from the Saudis. So the important thing is that we as like nonpolitical folks, let's say, stand up and speak out. And it was kind of alarming when Jamal Khashoggi you know the Saudi journalist and and writer was murdered I had met Khashoggi he was a guest at the Oslo Freedom Forum last year and it was stunning for us to hear about what happened but even more stunning was like a couple weeks later there was like a big business conference in Riyadh right and this was an opportunity for like business is like American businesses who don't have any you know they're not voted on by the American they're not trying to like deal with foreign policy they're just trying to sell their products

they had an opportunity to take a stand and basically say no you know we're not going to support the saudis and they didn't do it they claimed they did but like a bunch of them went anyway you know and and i think what what what this industry the let's say they will call it the crypto industry regardless of what project you're working on like i mean i hope you're working on on bitcoin or something related to bitcoin but regardless of what you're working on like you need to be very careful about what conferences you attend what you support what you're building like don't build a smart city which is a euphemism for a surveillance city don't build a blockchain project or a cryptocurrency for a repressive government

you know don't build something that's going to be used to create a database for people don't build a blockchain project that's going to be like storing all this data for like vulnerable people on it that's not a good idea don't do any of these things you know build build things that can help preserve our privacy and our data and money sovereignty this is really important and It's an opportunity for you all to take an ethical stand where our political leaders are failing, right, and where our traditional business leaders are failing. Well, that most importantly.

And then second, when these governments and corporations are able to harvest our data, they're terrible at storing it. Like you pointed out Equifax. You pointed out that was it India or China's DNA program that had a breach where everybody's DNA is on the market now? like it just from a from an opsec from a security perspective like the the world that bitcoiners are trying to world to build excuse me just probably makes more sense and in uh this big spreads out risk idea that we should be all uploading all our data and sharing it all over

the world has dire consequences a colleague of mine mentioned this today like was it strava um the kind of like fitness tracking app that decided to like put all the data onto this like big global heat map and again as an american this was interesting because apparently what had happened is that uh what was visible was like exactly where u.s military bases were yes see that's like in the middle of the desert you'd see all this activity so regardless of kind of where you are like like this is a bad idea like let's not have this like massive like sort of like neon sign that's displaying where we are and what we're doing at all times um this tends to be a bad idea and and it matters look it matters for for money i think kind of primarily because that's kind of like the

infrastructure for a lot of of the way we network and communicate as as humans but it also matters for other stuff so look i'm here to talk about bitcoin but you know i'm also really interested in zero knowledge cryptography i i hope there's a day where you know my data on my phone can be sovereign to me and i get to disclose who gets to see it or sell at my pleasure to whatever companies i want as opposed to them just taking it and just you know doing whatever they want with it you know whether it's my location data financial data health data you know and maybe these like lightning based apps um can kind of like show us the way to maybe a near future where that can be possible um i hope so uh and again there's like a lot of there's a tremendous amount

of responsibility on folks developing this stuff and they're not getting a lot of they're getting no mainstream media support they're being attacked by the mainstream media um generally speaking within the crypto industry they tend to be black sheep like they're doing it for their principles generally speaking i mean there's certainly some bad characters even in the bitcoin space but like generally speaking these folks are like kind of ideologically committed and a lot of them are making less money than they could be you know working for google or whatever and they need our support right and and they need like they need our moral support financial support emotional support whatever um because they got to build this stuff because if we don't have

like reasonably scalable usable financial privacy we are toast yeah i uh i would concur with that and so things like what willow burn and casa not together separately are thinking about like web ln and and using uh basically hardware node to act as a digital passport is something that's really appeasing to me it's something like you said you only disclose and release information when you want to uh you basically go around using cryptography saying hey i want to interact with this site all right i'll let it see yeah and it's there's several people who've talked about this idea i think jack mallers did on on one of peter mccormick's podcasts but this idea that like maybe like your lightning id essentially would be kind of like your avatar right like like it's how you

would use to interact with video games or whatever and you could build a reputation with it but it doesn't have to be linked to your personal information it could be an avatar um but but that's such a compelling idea to me right and it's something that i think i'd love to see more iteration on it's a brilliant idea you can build multiple yeah reputation exactly a bunch of nodes you have your gamer node you have your finance node you have your yeah and i just look at the end of the day you get a lot of pushback from people being like oh well like you know if we have anonymity or pseudonymity or whatever like the world's gonna end or you know all these bad things are going to happen and again we saw this argument happen before with the rise of the

internet and and the rise of private messaging i mean did the world end like like is it much worse off than before no in fact like it's it's it's i think arguably demonstrably better on like nearly every front um i think open systems that allow people to do things uh you know according to to their own you know rights and abilities are so much better than closed arbitrary ones where you need to ask for permission for everything and where your rights can be taken from you i mean i think a quite simple um parallel on this would be like the idea of like the open democratic society versus uh the totalitarian one or the dictatorship right like if you were to ask a young person like a child you know what's more safe the society that has like all the guns and

all the rules or the one that has like a lot less rules and a lot less guns and people kind of do their own thing you know the child would usually say something like oh i'd rather live in the one with a lot of rules and a lot of guns and a lot of police but that's not the way it works it's counterintuitive like basically terrorism and corruption breed in like very tightly controlled societies um like syria for example obviously whereas like much more open societies even though they have flaws but like let's say like switzerland or united kingdom or japan or whatever costa rica they tend to have a lot less of those problems because they're open right because there's like social trust and all sorts of really cool attributes that come out when we have freedom

right so this sort of idea is is holds with knowledge as well right we used to all live under like controlled knowledge environments where um you know before the printing press especially like only a handful of people could control knowledge right and then the evolution of the technology of information went from the printing press to the telegrams the radio to the television to now the internet and now it's like everybody can hold all the information in the world in their pockets tremendously important and you really see this come out in places like north korea like this is amazing and it holds again i think for money right and that's like the big question and that's what i believe but you know we aren't sure yet because we're at the brink it

just happened just a couple years ago right but now we can have decentralization of money we can distribute money and hopefully people can all get involved with it as opposed to like some arbitrary elitist group being in charge and i think that this idea um that we can all kind of own our financial destiny or whatever uh won't trigger more criminals won't trigger more bad behavior in fact i think it'll lead to less corruption peer-to-peer interactions and a more market-based sort of digital economy i think will lead to better decision making for humans maybe i'm wrong but that's my that's my my my working thesis at the moment no i would agree and this is actually a great segue into uh the end part of your speech from saturday where you

analogize bitcoin uh as a modern day peaceful manhattan project right so you're talking about you think this is going to change sort of the dynamic of how people work together like nuclear theory like nuclear war theory changed game theory on the geopolitical level forever like now everybody has nukes like it's most likely that nobody's gonna launch one because the world would end like that game theory if we get bitcoin to a point where it's ubiquitous and out that creates a new game theory too where it's like hey but it's a peaceful one it's a more peaceful game theoretical situation we'll take that in two ways one is that um it is cool it's sort of like this peaceful Manhattan project where like all the smartest people are without coercion coming

together from across languages from around the world to build this like sovereign arguably hopefully private money project like that's amazing but the second part is it does have those geopolitical effects and this is what we're observing right so in the same way that like oh now there's like deterrence and you know owning a nuke like arguably may prevent violence and there's all these interesting ideas right in that geopolitical field now like governments are faced with like what do we do like what would happen if we banned bitcoin i mean there would be economic consequences for that it's not like when a government just bans the internet or shuts it off i mean there are economic consequences for shutting off the internet obviously but they're

much more grave and immediate for shutting off an economic network right that connects their citizens to the world so the longer that governments don't attack the harder it will be for them to do so in the future as long if these businesses across china and south asia and africa and the united states i mean if they become more and more and more legitimate and more and more tied in to the way that people do things they'll be a lot harder to root out and if a government decides to go all draconian uh you know to all go just like let's torch it all you know um basically it'll drive out a lot of innovation to competing economies and i just don't believe in this world where 180 or 90 governments somehow one day agree like miraculously oh we're all going to ban

bitcoin at the same time we're all going to make possession illegal like they're not going to do that there's going to be three or four random island nations that are going to say oh we're actually going to keep it open we're going to be open for business over here and y'all can come here and we're going to we're going to we're going to take advantage of all that entrepreneurship and all that innovation so it's just not going to happen i don't even think it's going to be like island nations like the u.s and china are in a trade war right now i can see one trying to dick over the other and just be like fuck you we're going right and this is why bitcoin at the end of the day is so much more than a technology i mean it is but it's it's way more than that it's

this incredible socio-economic phenomenon that like is going to change the way that that nation states deal with each other uh is going to change the way that you know businesses deal with each other and is going to change the way that nations and and individuals interact when it comes to money um and transacting value and storing value and that's kind of um really why i think it's very exciting to live at this time i mean if you're a believer that that that this is something like uh whether it's it's sort of the printing press or this steam engine or um you know something that like transformative for society um then we're kind of you know at this brink where things are gonna be different later you know and i think we have all the reasons to believe that that that's

true and that that kind of where we're headed is very if not exciting at least uh mystifying you know definitely mystifying and inspiring again this is something i've said a lot last month in particular but it was like bitcoin has provided a common mission for for people around the world to sort of join forces and i wake up every day with a sense of purpose like writing yeah doing this podcast and it can be very inspiring and you know look i try to do my best to stay relatively even-handed it's difficult because i think i'm very excited about bitcoin but i wanted to ask you um what could go wrong like what if bitcoin really succeeds and what if all of a sudden in the near future or in the mid near future we have the ability to

transact seamlessly in any sort of denomination to anyone on earth or anyone connected to the internet without having to reveal our identity i mean what like i just want to play with that for a second to appease all of our critics let's say or to take to perhaps give them the benefit of doubt that they're actually right um what is your have you ever thought about that like what do you think what are the bad things that could happen and i'm asking you this so that we can start to think about how we can prevent those things from happening right yeah so if we don't get sufficient fungibility i think we could easily remake the systems we're trying to run away from that's number one right so if we don't have if coins can be tainted and tracked too easily

yes that's now how does that relate to light like what if all of the transactions are happening on second layer that's uh it's good for us it's good for us but i mean you know we have to make sure that um governments and companies can't monitor the lightning network with with ease you know we have to make that really hard for them yeah that's the uh cnl big conspiracy that matt matt odell my co-host on rhr is always talking about he thinks they're they there's a potential for ellen big who has i believe 50 of the top 100 biggest lightning network nodes uh just sell his uh services to the highest bid well that they they're trying to become as connected as possible to the network to be able to track it right um so uh on lightning in particular you have these

channels open with most of the nodes you can probably so what's the way to defeat that folks is for all of us to start getting involved right now that and then use tor use tor as well so we we've made our lightning network node uh it's running through tor now but another thing with that is we need bitcoiners to run tor relay nodes as well like we're we expect bitcoin to um to leverage tor we need to uh we need to contribute to tor to that network as well I think this is interesting because that is a fear, you know, the fear, especially I think from, and you hear this from folks, certainly folks in the Monero community who are more concerned, but like that Bitcoin will become a surveillance tool. And I think what's kind of interesting to me is that we have this idea of like voter apathy in the United States where like, eh, my vote doesn't count. Like nothing I can do can make a difference.

Well, it couldn't be more different with Bitcoin. like you need to go you know every everything you can do personally to whether it's used tor or add to the decentralization of the network makes a difference right yeah no and then on top of that so like adding to the decentralization and so i like to deal in a between decentralization and robustness so like robustness i think of uh the ways in which you can send bitcoin and i think that's an imperative uh problem to tackle as well and that's what i wrote about in the bent this morning was tx10m blockstream satellites recent uh announcement that you're going to be able to send bitcoin transactions via mesh network and propagate it via satellite so you never have to

touch the internet which i think is huge a good plus like if without that stuff that type of stuff internet service providers would definitely be able to censor the network if they were ever yeah i mean it's amazing i mean and we need to work on infrastructure but we also need to work on design and usability and maybe that's a good seg into the open money initiative and some of the work that the human rights foundation is proud to sponsor that uh jill carlson and alejandro machado and jamal montaser are doing by doing design research uh going into the field in this particular case and working with venezuelans who have escaped from venezuela who are living in colombia and trying to understand how they are sending and receiving transactions with family

like how they're accessing money around the world and it's pretty amazing that they're doing this with an eye towards design and usability and i think that's key because at the end of the day if it's just a small group of people you think of like something like pgp like if it's kind of hard to use and kind of a pain it can only have a limited effect right so if it's easy if it's just like a swipe and if it's done with usability in mind then that's how we can really get this thing going so you're um definitely happy to point you guys to that direction yeah check out the open money uh project shout out to alejandro machado tftc alum um but i pulled up my app i'm not checking text or anything i want to show you the zap app which i think is a huge step forward in ux like

running a lightning work node in particular like i've set up the tftc.io website a couple weeks ago we launched it and we're trying to make it like a closed loop bitcoin system running on lightning and bitcoin obviously um but it's if before this app in my mind like i would have had to be at my computer at all times managing channels right um and and being to be in a central location to do that the zap app has made this experience leaps and bounds better you scan a qr code you're immediately connected to that node and i had to run errands the weekend we were launching the site so i was on the go and i was able to open channels create liquidity on the go it's very easy and you're talking to somebody even though i'm a bitcoin or been to bitcoin for a while

i'm not the most technically apt uh bitcoiner and yeah and look hopefully the open money initiative folks and other projects like it can help us understand like what people actually need in these broken financial systems that we can provide them stuff that that the average non-technical person can use and make a difference in their life i mean i think that that would be something that i would be happy to hang my hat on like already we've we've uh started to collaborate with local bitcoins um and started to talk to them about some of the challenges that people in venezuela for example face and accessing it it's not like super mobile friendly for example so like if we could do more of that if we could if we could work with them and we are uh through

the open money initiative doing that um hopefully we can get easier access to their uh you know peer-to-peer, you know, peer-to-peer marketplace through mobile, and that would be a really cool achievement, so I hope to, like, replicate that around the world with some of the work that I'd like to do, you know, at HRF moving forward that I hope you all can get involved with and check out at hrf.org or write to me on Twitter at Gladstein, G-L-A-D-S-T-E-I-N, or by email if you want at alex at hrf.org no and definitely definitely reach out to alex if you guys are interested in any of this but like from uh i forgot what i was gonna say from a ux perspective um oh so uh i think replicating uh tendencies that people are already used to like topping up minutes

on a burner phone or something like that uh some especially in uh countries where that's usually poorer countries where that's more common stuff like that replicating those experiences but for bitcoin so that's why companies like azteco and get bitter in europe uh appease me because it's a sort of simple ux where it's hey give me money provide an address and you get bitcoin no we need it like at the end of the day folks are all too eager to trade their freedom for convenience we just have to know this this is like a sad human trait right so we need to make sure that the stuff that preserves financial sovereignty and privacy you know that this bitcoin tech is easy to use like and is simple to use and is a swipe and not something we have to

look up some id and log into this thing and do this other thing no it should be really simple because it needs to compete with wechat basically at the end of the day like if if if bitcoin globally is going to be that like day-to-day uh financial uh way that you interact with people it's gonna have to be really freaking convenient and what's giving me hope is that it actually could be because it could be faster than any centralized option like when you watch how fast lightning works right you get glimmers of this right i mean obviously it could be a lot better for for for for privacy um you know we know that but again like people don't really care about that so much they care about speed are their friends using it is their network effect is it fun so

people making this stuff have to really think about what did what what made like early facebook and like what made instagram a few years ago and what made like what makes twitter now and you know like in its golden age i would argue and like what what makes we chat right now so awesome we really need all of that into this bitcoin architecture and in these bitcoin and lightning apps is so critical or else just not enough people are going to use it it's like one of the problems with signal it's like you try to make like a group chat on signal it takes like five minutes it's ridiculous i love signal but like come on man like that that stuff's got to be better than the centralized solutions that's the only way we can ensure that hundreds of millions of people will

get on board right no i agree um i'm optimistic i think it's getting better um and it takes time like we need to build out the infrastructure that's like another big theme on tales from the craft is like patience is key in my opinion it is things are a lot further than i ever expected them to be at this point but also you need to have that you can never be complacent you you've got to have that sense of urgency especially when the stakes are as high as uh we've been talking about for the last hour now like the stakes are the stakes are very high like they and you described this in your talk on saturday like there's two roads in that one chart where you were you describing the uh centralized digital money yes it ends inevitably in something like

wechat like it ends in some sort of like all-encompassing app that is like your social network and all your other apps in one and it provides the government a super easy way to track everything that you do and control your behavior you need to own up to that that's reality that's going to happen now we have an escape valve we have a alternate reality that was provided to us by satoshi nakamoto and we need to do what we can with it and you know if if we don't give enough attention and investment and tender loving care and whatever you know it's just it's not going to work out so well for us i fear why uh what do you think people are so afraid of governments and afraid to to that's the notion or the belief that i have is that a lot of people think oh why even

attempt to to take these guys on and take take freedom back into your own hands well governments have usually a monopoly of violence in their particular territory which of course is intimidating but i think people just need to look at history of humankind and understand that people have forced governments to do things they didn't want to do i mean there have been many amazing peaceful democratic revolutions which have brought power to the people at the expense of tyrants and kings and military hunters there have been incredible innovations in technology again ranging from the printing press uh to the telegram to uh the internet which which have basically forced the hand of governments even though they control um the means of violence so like technology can be

our friend here if we use it the right way and we have to because as as sort of you've all know harari has pointed out like most technology is very amenable to authoritarians like most technology that seeks to collect and analyze data at scale whether it's you know ai big data analysis whatever you want to call it automation etc like that's going to be used to kind of like keep the status quo where it is but there's other kinds of technology too that can give us sovereign money and give us private money and give us ownership over our own data and give us a way to privately communicate with each other and give us a way to have decentralized access to the internet and and give us a way to have seamless you know anonymous payments and that's the stuff that

i think people that care about human rights and democracy need to be thinking about um you know people complain a lot about democratic erosion all the time whether it's in obvious countries like turkey or hungary or you know the philippines or whether it's here in the united states but like at the end of the day to properly prevent the erosion of our you know republic you know basically constitutional republican democracies from sort of fading into authoritarianism we need to be able to check their power right and we need to be able to own our stuff and you know own our rights and property and money and data and i think bitcoin gives us a pretty exciting foundation to kind of put this idea of liberal democracy on life support at least for another

few decades because it's under threat man it really is and that's another uh beautiful thought you just incited my head too is like bitcoin allows you to act on on these like so occupy you made me think of occupy wall street during your last spiel like occupy like i remember i was i was a freshman in college just coming out of high school yeah this is the real occupy wall street exactly so like people i remember the intensity of zuccotti park and right how how intensely that was covered in the emotions behind the people that were very much were involved in occupy wall street and like nothing got accomplished by occupy wall street the way you can physically like take over your own stuff and remove it from the control of elitists and

bankers so this is but it takes action like how do we get people to act how do we education and you know again i mentioned this to you earlier but you know someone came up to me the other day was like well maybe you all shouldn't be talking about this maybe you're blowing our cover right but at some level i disagree i think we need to spread the word uh you know whatever we don't need to go tell tell we don't have to go tell the governments but we need to tell the people and this is important for me because i work with all these you know anti-corruption journalists and investigative reporters and dissidents and activists and i want them to at least know about bitcoin i want them to know it's an option i want them to know what's happening in the bitcoin

ecosystem i want them to know about all these exciting conversations about the importance of private money i want them to know where we are with the surveillance state and and i want them to be like up to speed so that they don't fall behind you know i want them to have the edge informationally educationally on corporations and governments i'm curious have you observed that some of these people from more oppressed countries sort of get bit way more innately um well they get quicker yes so like for example i was sitting down with my friend even mawire who's like a super well-known uh democracy advocate from zimbabwe and i sat with him and i talked with him very briefly about hey there's like this decentralized digital money that your government

can't like control or debase and you know instead of being like well like i've heard it's like a scam or whatever like most americans or europeans immediately say he was like oh that's really cool tell me more and i you know said a few more sentences and he was like you know what like uh i'd love to learn more because that is that has literally destroyed my country and he actually took out from his shirt a necklace that he wore and he he showed me that he wore a dollar from 1980 uh from the zimbabwean economy on his neck and he said that all the a lot of the activists in the zimbabwean movement wear this as a sign of what their economy used to be before their government hyperinflated it out of existence and that to me was like really powerful so one of the

one of the first guests on Tales from the Crypt was a man named Zah who I used to work with at Barstool Sports and he's from Zimbabwe and he explained to me he lived through that hyperinflationary scenario just the government robbing all of your stuff that well that like the thing

that led to that was they kicked out the farmers they confiscated their land and then well and this helps folks understand that like authoritarianism and tyranny you know are completely connected to money and to the economy i mean we talk about this idea of separation of money and state right za was talking about like the black markets that developed in money like he paid his high school

tuition via in cattle like that's when his cattle and gasoline turned into like the the most used currencies when the the crisis was at its height which is crazy to think like you're paying for high school and cattle it's it's definitely bad for a authoritarian government to be able to control the means of production of money with no checks and balances and and this is what you know people make fun of the fed a lot and i think we need to definitely like you know be very careful with that and and and sort of like criticize what they're doing and hold them accountable but at the end of the day it's actually like good that the president of a republic cannot like arbitrarily just tell the fed what to do right and you'll see this in any we see our president trying to do that

via twitter like and it was amazing i i was observing this a few months ago where trump was basically like hey like we should we should do more quantitative easing and whatever and it's it's very good that he can't just do whatever he wants and and i'll never forget this conversation i had with a turkish friend of mine this was maybe five six years ago and he was telling me that at the time the vice president of turkey had been caught with a money printing machine in his basement and this isn't like we can make jokes about oh well the u.s government his basement because the house got like raided by the house got raided by like insurgents right we're not talking about a metaphor of like oh like we we go and we print more money like federally you're

talking about he had a money printing machine in his house in his like basement and he was just like printing a bunch of money so that's the level of direct control that these authoritarian regimes have over money and what what you need to just envision is like as he's printing that pressing that button and printing those bills he's just stealing from everybody who's saving right like this is what's happening it's literally their savings is being just slowly eaten away right that's a that's a very heavy entrenched power that bitcoin is they can't do that anymore but like are they going to go down quietly no they're going to strike with a vengeance i think eric vorhees said this the other day on twitter where he was like they're going to be curious at first

and then they're going to push back a little bit and then they're going to be pissed you know and We haven't reached that level yet. I mean, only what, three, four countries in the world have claimed, you know, without enforcement, of course, but claimed to ban Bitcoin. Like, we're not there yet. They're largely either not threatened, they don't care, or not that interested.

In five years, it's going to be very different. So we need to, like, batten down the hatches and work hard as we can right now while the window of opportunity is open. Yeah, luckily the average age of a politician, at least in the United States, is like 63. So it's like, I have hope. And hopefully, I mean, what we can hope is that young politicians, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, and my goal is to hope to convince some of the more leftist and progressive politicians that Bitcoin is friendly to them because it allows them to help break this monopoly that's arbitrary of elitists and sort of Davos-like Wall Street folks over money.

My hope is to try to sit down with them and explain this to them so that they can be more open to this because I view this as a very democratic, progressive force, right? And I think, you know, obviously someone like Andrew Yang seems to seems to be open to that. But like, I don't see any reason why why any of these young sort of very liberal in American terms, I guess, politicians. I don't see any reason why they why they should be against Bitcoin. I know why they would be unless we got involved and tried to have conversations with them. I know that some. Why would they be? Why would they be?

Because I feel like if we don't get out there and have meaningful conversations about what Bitcoin is and what it represents, It can be easily misconstrued as some, like, very right-wing libertarian, you know, thing with, like, people who have tinfoil hats and want to end the Fed. You know, like, I think the Ron Paul movement, you know, is pretty not helpful for, like, most people when we're trying to convince folks about, like, how money systems should be. It's not the most convincing argument. He's not very convincing for many different reasons, including foreign policy. I think there's a strain of thinking in the Bitcoin land, which is unfortunate. And there's some high profile folks out there who say and think this way. But I mean, you've got Bitcoin promoters out there who are like unabashed supporters of Putin, for example.

And I just think this needs to end. Like, you don't have to think anything about the U.S. government. You need to separate that in your mind from understanding that Putin is a brutal dictator who murders journalists and kills anyone who disagrees with them. and we have copious evidence of this and he's murdered so many people in Chechnya and Syria and in Ukraine and this is a guy

who's just totally bent on destruction and if you believe in Bitcoin you cannot support Putin. I don't think you can do that with a moral conscience and yet there's like quite a few people that I've met. Maybe not quite a few

but certainly a few high profile ones in the Bitcoin space who seem to be like chummy with Putin. Really? Not cool. No, it's not cool at all. like putin's a fucking scumbag he's a statist he's a dictator basically i'm not gonna name names but think about it as you follow folks on twitter and as you you digest their podcasts and just just

this is a red flag i mean this means that they aren't pro-freedom in the end they might be anti-american but they're not pro-freedom these are two different concepts right no that's like that's the uh like these people when i push these people they're basically like the reason we like bitcoin is because it'll end the dominance of the dollar in the world i'm like okay to what end like so the chinese or russians take over exactly that's the scary like gray area where it's like i'm not anti-american i'm not i'm not i mean obviously i'm not anti-american i fucking love america i live in america i will fight for america till the day i die i just think that the world would be more efficient the economy would be fair but these are folks who hang out in america enjoy

american liberties and then they go trash america you know and that's something that like just needs to be addressed yeah i think you need to be like a responsible american citizen and understand that our government is causing great havoc in the world in certain areas and we need to like try and push her push our politicians and business leaders to not do those things and as americans we should use our rights and liberties to like be in solidarity and help folks abroad and promote the bitcoin network and work on bitcoin because a lot of folks in the world you know can't openly do that in the same way right so let's like use our liberties but let's be very clear that like if you if you are interested in the bitcoin project and in financial privacy and in financial

sovereignty you are you know welcome to the anti-authoritarian club let's put it that way which means that you need to really be careful about like folks who are warm or favorable to whether it's the russian authoritarians or the iranian authoritarians or the chinese authoritarians like any authoritarian is bad and you know this is something that christopher hitchens basically coined uh was this idea of like principled anti-totalitarianism doesn't matter what religion what geographic location what language anyone who's like a hardcore dictator it doesn't matter what politicians they support doesn't matter they fall on american foreign policy you should be against them a hundred percent a hundred a hundred thousand percent like so this drives me nuts with

the code people has putin has poisoned journalists with like nuclear the the worst um excess of this is code pink right so code pink uh picks and chooses so they're like against properly rightly uh like let's say america's role in yemen but they're like fighting and they're like against any sort of positive potentially like anything we could do to help venezuelans like like they're they're taking over like basically uh you know they're they're they're trying to basically say that like any sort of attempt to support venezuelan opposition is somehow like american imperialism and there's nothing more arrogant than that like these people are fighting their own battle for freedom they don't need like code pink to tell them that they

don't deserve it you know there's these literal youtube videos you can watch of interviews on the street in dc of venezuelans getting yelled at by these like white american gringos right like you and me who are basically standing there being like no like you know we should continue to continue to support maduro the socialist like you know like just you know your your guy's just a crony for trump or whatever this just couldn't be further from the truth right so this is really really frustrating so i think like if you're into bitcoin and you're into like financial privacy and freedom be very careful like that that means you should be against all dictators they're all bad being uh ideologically ideologically consistent uh is important try i mean it's very difficult

to do but like i'm certainly not perfect but you got to try you know no and it goes back to what i was saying earlier about like my my iranian friends like when i think of like iran i think of them i think of those individuals when you think of russia what about the palestinians when think of russia i think about my boss dimitri who is a russian and he talks about how terrible it was living under the soviet russia and like that's who you think like and that's what i hate so much is that politicians in general politician any politician any country whether despotic or free like america like i just think they never have they're like i i think politician as a mechanism is outdated for today's society um and it's just a naturally centralizing force that that role of

politician at the end of the day like bitcoin is going to be this tool which is going to remove the power for these governments to make arbitrary decisions i mean again just think about the palestinians like uh they're very restricted in what they can do uh their banking and finance movements are very controlled right this is going to be a tool for them too so i think anyone using bitcoin needs to understand that anyone being repressed by anybody is going to be benefited by the spread of this network just like the open internet yeah and i think it just what we need now at this point is more people to have the courage to step up and and join the fray right and i think that's why educate build whatever you can alex i want to i want to ego stroke you right now like i

I do think that's why I like your pieces that you put out in time and your presentation from Saturday because it's legit. I can send that to my mother-in-law, to my sister-in-law. This is why Bitcoin is important. And that's something that they emotionally connect with. I think the framing that you have for Bitcoin's freedom enabling perspective is… I think Bitcoin as it is today, you know, like the, the, the token, the protocol is, is the key thing, but it's, it's, it's actually more of an idea, right. That we can all rally behind, um, which, which goes beyond the value of it today in us dollars. That's important for

the network security. And it's important because we need to like on-ramp more people and have more adoption and you know have it be a more safe and stable ecosystem but at the end of the day it's this idea that people can be financially sovereign and that people can be hopefully eventually financially private and that we can have like a really powerful tool uh against the Orwellian surveillance state how exciting is it being a part of it like this it's invigorating waking up every day writing about the stuff like being at the four like you said during the manhattan project that was the smartest minds in the world like picked by the u.s government bitcoin is just naturally coalescing just coming together right it's really exciting and and i try

to share it with as many people as possible and i'm sure just like you i come off as annoying or whatever uh but i hope folks get it and i know that it took look it took me a long time it took me many many months to understand probably seven or eight months before i started to really start to click and i have to give a shout out to andreas antonopoulos because he really helped me understand all this if you just listen to enough of his talks and videos you'll start to really get this what was your biggest hurdle initially well the the biggest hurdle is that at the beginning there's no good educational materials and it's all about blockchain and what is a blockchain and you have to work through all this stuff and for like a person who's

you know used to doing kind of like wikipedia style just research it's very confusing there aren't many great educational materials a lot of the more technical materials are too confusing for the average person um and a lot of the like for the average person stuff is not bitcoin specific and sends you down like a rabbit hole of something else you know so i will say like at least right now it seems to take a lot of commitment and interest to to actually start to grasp bitcoin uh in in that deep way and i'm hope hoping that we can create better and better and better educational materials so that that time commitment can can be decreased so that within several weeks or days or whatever folks can start to really understand this because that's that's

going to be key no i i completely agree that's why i think things like the open money project like working on the ux even not even the ux of using it the ux of explaining it and that's like a problem i've been trying to solve but like marty's been and this podcast is how do you distill this message and it's not easy but i think we are getting better at it uh as a quote unquote community um and i think for reasons that you just described uh being more specific not talking about blockchain talking about bitcoin let's talk about bitcoin yeah you want to talk about other stuff great we can like separate that out but this deserves its own conversation and i believe for the reasons we've laid out over the last hour and a half plus uh that this is

worthy of your time and that even if you don't end up working on this project that at least learning about bitcoin i think will help you understand a little bit more about how politics and economics works about how monetary policy works uh about hopefully how systems and networks change and maybe gives you a little bit of optimism i mean it really does give me a little bit of optimism that there's something that we can do collectively peacefully as humans to help challenge surveillance and authoritarianism it does give me that right no and it gives it gives me that tune and going back to what we were touching on earlier like like is like you were we were you were asking like worst case scenario like how can this turn

into like a bad future like i don't think it can because coming to understand bitcoin means that you you have more personal responsibility you understand how your life is affected by these systems more innately and and you are able to make better decisions off of that so if you have a collective understanding about bitcoin you have a collective basically you have a you have a population that is able to make better decisions about how their life is affected right i mean i think it's i wouldn't go that far i think it's going to be really difficult to get it right and there's a lot of ways we could screw it up i mean primarily by ignoring the whole thing but also by not doing the right things with regard to fungibility and privacy

and usability there's a lot of ways we could go wrong but it could only be better if more and more people get involved in it and i hope that's what folks do so i hope anyone who's interested in the human rights uh aspects of this uh gets in touch and we can jam and uh hopefully make something happen well if any of you freaks are listening to this you want to make something happen don't be shy don't be shy dm come at me come at them um i'm ready you have to go to the coin center dinner tonight i'm gonna go to the gala and support coin center because they do awesome work and even in open societies like america we need non-profits to protect our rights and prevent regulation of free speech and private uh property well don't tell beauty on that

he won't be too pumped about that but no it's um alex thank you so much for coming through man real pleasure thanks for having me on dude dude not even for coming through thank you for doing what you're doing um my pleasure and again i like when we're talking a lot about education i think the pieces that you put out uh just from a from an educational perspective are great for people trying to get introduced to bitcoin you really drive home why it's important especially your talk last saturday and your time piece like really get to the core of why this shit is important well i appreciate that and i hope more people can join and get involved and keep spreading the word because most folks in the development world the humanitarian world the human rights world haven't

really thought about this at all there's a lot of work to do so i think everybody can play a little bit of a part i do as well so start annoying everybody to start thinking about this alex um final final here uh-huh um final word of wisdom parting note for the freaks obviously get in touch with you anything do you got coming out in the future that we should be paying attention to um last spiel yeah sure i'll i'll do something fairly selfish uh because i have the opportunity i run a conference called the oslo freedom forum which is coming up at the end of the month got a lot of awesome bitcoiners coming like like jimmy song and elena from casa uh jerry brito from coin center um but but the real uh amazing part of the event is that we have all

these activists and dissidents coming from tough political environments all around the world the tell their story and the program is all live streamed so you all can watch it for free at oslofreedomforum.com on may 27 28 29 i guarantee you'll learn something you'll be challenged you'll be provoked you'll be triggered um you'll be enraged you'll be inspired but come check out our content and hopefully you can come to one of our events you know we're starting to work in some of this bitcoin and crypto uh programming and thematics into our human rights programming and we have upcoming events later in the year in places like New York and Taiwan and Mexico City

and even in Johannesburg. But I hope it's interesting for you all. So oslofreedomforum.com, check it out and you might find it exciting and hopefully interesting. That'll be happening the week after Memorial Day, a day that serves to remember the people that fought for your freedom. So very, very precious.

That's right. Pay attention to the ones who are fighting for freedom around the world today. Exactly. That's a perfect note to end it on. Peace and love, freaks. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Alex.