The Breakdown - Bitcoin Doesn't Care About Your Politics: Why Bitcoin Has More Ideological Flexibility Than We Think

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Falling down the proverbial bitcoin rabbit hole tends to lead people to ask deep questions about the nature of the economy and society. Today’s Breakdown guests are all professionally trained to ask those sorts of questions as philosophers.  NLW is joined by: Andrew Bailey, Yale-NUS College @resistancemoney Bradley Rettler, University of Wyoming @rettlerb Craig Warmke, Northern Illinois University @craigwarmke The three form a research collective called Resistance Money and are working on a book about bitcoin’s use helping individuals overcome infringement by states and other institutions.  On this episode they discuss bitcoin’s ideological flexibility and situate it in the context of the larger political landscape. -- Earn up to 12% APY on Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, GBP, Stablecoins & more. Get started at nexo.io -- Enjoying this content?   SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1438693620?at=1000lSDb Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/538vuul1PuorUDwgkC8JWF?si=ddSvD-HST2e_E7wgxcjtfQ Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ubHdjcnlwdG8ubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M=   Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW   The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.com  

And if what we're saying about Bitcoin is right that it has enormous ideological flexibility, all you have to do is have a commitment to the goodness of empowering individuals against institutions. Well, then Bitcoin's very well positioned to find new proponents and adopters, no matter how political realignment unfolds. I view that as, if I may, bullish for Bitcoin, if we're right that it is not just libertarian technology, but individual empowering technology. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, January 27th, and today we are talking about philosophy and why Bitcoin has more ideological flexibility than we give it credit for. A few weeks ago, I saw an article on CoinDesk called Why Bitcoin. needs philosophy. It was by three professors, Craig Wormke of Northern Illinois University, Bradley Rettler of the University of Wyoming, and Andrew Bailey of the Yale News College in Singapore. These guys have a little research collective that they call resistance money and explore the philosophical dimensions of Bitcoin and other types of issues. Now, the TLDR on this Coin desk

piece was that a lot of important questions in Bitcoin are about values, ethics, and the world we want to see, which are questions they argue philosophy gives better tools to engage with. I thought it would be fun to have these guys on the show for a longer-form discussion about where philosophy fits in Bitcoin, how much ideological flexibility there is in Bitcoin, and what it all means for the coming regulatory battles we might have to fight. Kick back and let's get deep. Enjoy this conversation. All right, Bradley, Andrew Craig, welcome to the breakdown. This is going to be a really fun conversation. I am quite sure of it. Agreed. We're excited to be here. Yeah. Thank you. This is fun. I don't think I've had three, three people on the show at the same time. Actually, since like the very first dabbling with this show I did was like 2018 doing a live stream video with a bunch of people. So this is a fun, a fun thing to return to. I guess let's just start by having each of you kind of quickly introduce yourself and place yourself roughly in the

Bitcoin context. On my screen, it shows Bradley, Andrew Craig in that order for recording. So let's just do it that way. So we're not talking over each other, I guess. Yeah. So I got into Bitcoin late 2013, early 2014. I think right around the time that Coinbase came out. One of my colleagues in grad school was talking about it. And he had sent a money order to someplace in Russia to buy it. And so he started telling me about the technology. He sent me a link to the white paper. And the first thing that I thought of, I grew up in Singapore for a couple of years. And I remember going to Lucky Plaza and watching foreign workers send international remittances through Western Union and just pay absolutely exorbitant fees. And sometimes the money wouldn't

get there for a while. And I remember thinking, we could send money internationally for a few pennies. That's amazing. I want to learn more about this. And so I did. And then I bought some. And then I told Andrew. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while. I just held it and kept up with the price, but not really much else. Awesome. All right. We're going to come back to that. I think there's a lot in there to unpack for sure. Andrew. Brad told me about Bitcoin. and the thing he told me was NGU technology, and that was my first exposure, as it is for many of us. I think the next step that I took was teaching about Bitcoin and about money in general. And I found that whenever I mentioned it in the classroom, students paid more attention.

So I come to realize that I've got to learn more about this and go deeper than just thinking this is a speculative bet. And that is, that's my way into the rabbit hole teaching classes, interdisciplinary classes on money coming from. from the perspective of philosophy, politics, and economics, and helping students understand what's going on here in the Bitcoin space. And then we're off to the races from there. Awesome. Craig, and tell us your story. Sure. I got caught up in a debate on Facebook about whether Bitcoin was a bubble in 2017, late 2017. And actually, it was one of my colleagues who was arguing that it was a bubble.

And Brad was someone who asked, just kind of innocently, I think baiting, someone like, well, how do you know it's a bubble? And in this question, it actually really puzzled me. And so I wanted to know whether what Bitcoin offered the world was something that would justify the rising price. And so then in early 2018, I started to try to understand how all the pieces fit together and how it worked. And that's when I started to write some papers in 2018 and 19. Amazing. So let's talk about how you guys came together, how you started connecting, you know, and how you guys

collaborate, because I feel like it's a cool foundation for this conversation as well. Yeah, we've known each other for over a decade. Andrew and I were friends back when he was in undergrad and I was in grad school. And then Craig and I applied to Ph.D. programs the same year and met in the live journal message boards of the day and sort of kept in touch after that for a while. And it was in 2019 at a conference that Craig and I were both giving papers at. I got the email of the list of papers. And Craig's paper was, what is Bitcoin? And I thought, wow, someone's writing on Bitcoin. And it's someone that I already like and know. So Craig and I spent most of that conference talking about

Bitcoin. And Craig suggested towards the end that we start up a Gmail chat with Andrew because he and Andrew had been corresponding already. And so the Gmail chat began and then kind of grew from there. And most recently, we decided in 2020 to start actually writing, not just talking about Bitcoin. And we pitched a cryptocurrency article to a philosophy journal called Philosophy Compass, which gives these big survey overview articles. But it quickly became clear that we wrote 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 words. This is more than an article. Guys, we got to write a book. So that is the current project now is thinking through a long-form treatment that's really just about Bitcoin. There are enough books about crypto, about blockchain and so on. But our interest is mostly on Bitcoin. And we see that

as a distinctive. Amazing. Yeah. I want to come back to this. I'm intrigued just by the like seven words or so that I've read about how you guys described that. But I want to guess, like for the sake of kind of diving into the meat of the conversation, let's talk about the article that you published on Coin Desk, I guess a couple weeks ago now, why Bitcoin needs philosophy. For people who maybe have it read it or even if they have, what's the thesis? What prompted you to want to write this? I had coffee with a student who asked me, wait a minute, you're a philosophy professor and you want to talk about Bitcoin. Why? And,

I wrote down a few bullet points after that conversation, shared them with Brad and Craig, and I'm like, okay, we got to write this up. And we want to write something that is not just for academics. So that's the immediate origin. One thought that we started with was that Bitcoin is a bundle. To really understand Bitcoin, you can't just be a computer scientist or an economist or a system designer thinking about how incentives influence human behavior. You've got to think about these things together.

Philosophy is this bundle of tools that are. are pieced together in a unique way to serve and empower individuals. And what we noticed is that philosophy bundles, too. Philosophers don't just look at one kind of evidence or data, for example, lab results or proofs from mathematics or our own intuitions or best guesses about what's morally right. Philosophers tend to be all in. They tend to try to integrate as much as possible from the best science of their day, from their best guesses and intuitions, and so on.

And then when we put those together, we thought, well, actually philosophy and Bitcoin, they seem to be natural partners. In fact, Bitcoin is a bundled phenomenon. And that's exactly the sort of thing that philosophers like to do is to look at these things from a very broad perspective, drawing from as much evidence as possible to understand and to evaluate. And you can see this from the fact that for pretty much any discipline or activity, there is a philosophy. of that activity. So philosophy of economics, philosophy of art, philosophy of education, philosophy of music, you can just put kind of anything in there. And there's a way to treat that thing philosophically. And so we thought, why not a philosophy of cryptocurrency or a philosophy of Bitcoin? Another aspect of Bitcoin that lends itself, or at least discourse about Bitcoin

that lends itself to philosophy, is that there's a lot of normative claims of value-laden claims. So people don't just give you the technology and say, here's what, here's how Bitcoin works. And they explain UTXOs and everything. They say, this is a good thing. You should participate in this. And philosophy deals with should questions. We distinguish different kinds of shoulds, the moral ones from the pragmatic ones and so on. And then we try to bridge from the descriptive to the normative by giving sort of linking principles. And so that's something that I think Bitcoiners use a lot and could stand to learn a little bit more about. Yeah, I think one of the things that stood out to me from reading this is it is very true that part of falling down the proverbial rabbit hole is grappling with the questions of values that this,

particular technology and network bring up, right? And these things then become kind of implicit or codified or conventional wisdom, conventional values in some way in the community around some of these normative judgments about what's good or bad. But it's not necessarily, people don't kind of walk that further to actually ask those questions. And interestingly, because there isn't the language of discourse around it, it becomes hard to have debates. Just by way of example, I asked the other day on Twitter, were there Bitcoiners out there who, on the one hand, were Bitcoiners and convinced that there were real problems with sort of a never-ending stream of money printing, but at the same time still thought that

UBI or UBI like policies were the right idea in context. And in some ways, I think that this is almost like the type of value exploration where without the underlying framework or tools to discuss the values implicit in this community, in this asset, in this network, or whatever it is, it's hard to, people kind of retreat to a set of positions rather than a set of principles that they can apply to different positions, which is a very long-winded way of saying that something I thought was fascinating about that article. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of ideological Ivy that has grown up within the Bitcoin community. And what I mean is that it is in some sense

intertwined with what Bitcoin is essentially and how it works and what it does. But it's, it's disposable. And Bitcoin doesn't need it and doesn't require it. So some of the unarticulated normative judgments in the Bitcoin, community are good ones, and some of them can be dispensed with. You know, some of the good ones, so here's a thought experiment that might be helpful to figure out what some of the good ones are. So suppose we were to engage in this experiment, we'll call it money behind the veil. So suppose you were taken behind a veil.

and once you got there, you wouldn't know who in the world you were. So you could be a Saudi Arabian print, Saudi Arabian prints. You could be someone eating garbage out of the slums of some third world country. You just don't know. You don't know anything about where you are or who you are or how much money you have or what kind of financial infrastructure there might be. But you have this opportunity behind the veil. And the opportunity is to construct.

from scratch a new form of money. And what would you want it to be like, not knowing anything about who you are? And I think this kind of thought experiment, it could reveal something kind of deep about the relationship between money and the relationship of injustice and our financial plumbing. So you'd want, I think, there'd be easy access to the financial plumbing. But I think in particular you'd want two more things. You wouldn't want there to be insiders next to the monetary spigot who could reap the money as it comes out unjustly. And then you also wouldn't want these checkpoints on the financial superhighway with the power to block people from interacting or blocking certain transactions.

And so you'd want, I think, to some extent, some censorship resistance, and you'd want the monetary supply to be maybe automated or at least consistent and fair. And I think in these two ways, Bitcoin got this right and the Bitcoin community has this right. But they're not right about everything. Do you have some examples in mind? Well, I don't want to go on talking too long, but I mean, maybe Brad has something to say. Well, yeah, I think I'm perhaps more outside the mainstream Bitcoin thinking. So, you know, back in 2013, when I got into Bitcoin, I considered myself a libertarian. Then around 2016, with the rise of the popularity of Bernie Sanders, I started really reevaluating

a lot of my philosophical commitments about the role of government in people's lives. And I started thinking that government should do more for people, not less. And so I held on to my love of Bitcoin, but I stopped thinking things like governments are bad, central banks are bad. I think you can still really like Bitcoin and believe, in fact, I tweeted this today, and believe modern monetary theory. So I read the deficit myth a couple weeks ago, and I found myself liking it. And I found myself thinking, yeah, this basically describes how the central bank works. We pay taxes in US dollars. And so this describes how US dollars work. But I still think that there should be a way for people to save outside of this financial infrastructure.

So I think you can like both US dollars and Bitcoin. I don't think that the dogma of a lot of Bitcoiners that Bitcoin needs to replace all fiat currencies is one that we have to accept. I'm not saying it's wrong. I don't have arguments against it. But I haven't seen a lot of good arguments that Bitcoin has to replace it. And then there's even more things on the fringes like, you know, against vegetables and against abstract art and things like that that I don't buy into

either. Brad, you sound like a fiat academic. So I think it's an interesting question because this comes up all the time in the context of new people coming into the space. So what values are actually intrinsic? What are sort of norms that are important to keep? And I mean, I think that the point of opening up the debate, at least for me, is I would have a hard time, I think right now with conviction, I could with conviction go through the list of

beliefs commonly held by Bitcoiners and kind of rank order or rate where I fit or how close I am to the mainstream versus how much I disagree with. I would have a harder time, I think, saying these values are kind of orthogonal and exogenous and easy to leave behind versus. is this is something that's really intrinsic and important, you know. There are a lot of folks, I think, who would say that there is sort of contradiction. I guess one of the questions that I have, Bradley is a follow-up and anyone can answer too, is let's just walk down this path because I know you wrote an article about the progressive case for Bitcoin. Does, you know, does this sort of space that is open for kind of a non-libertarian ideology to still appreciate, you know, does this sort of space that is open for kind of a non-libertarian ideology to still

appreciate aspects of Bitcoin, is it a different way of looking at the context of Bitcoin? Is it an appreciation of a different part of Bitcoin? And what I mean by that is, you know, just to take a very reductive example, I could divide the world of Bitcoiners roughly into the camp of the sound money part is the thing that matters most versus the censorship resistance part is what matters most. Now, there's plenty of people who would argue they are inextricable, right? So I'm not getting into that, But more, like, I think that I actually, you know, I've spent a lot of time watching and observing this, that there are kind of two different camps of people in terms of where they place their highest value. So I guess, like, you know, is it, is that, does that create the openness that it has these different aspects? Or again, is it something more that's about the context in which it operates and the assumptions thereof?

I think one of the cool things about Bitcoin is that it doesn't matter to Bitcoin who buys it and who has it. and who believes what, Bitcoin will continue to operate as it must operate. And so regardless of the ideologies of the people that hold it, it's going to continue to do what it does. So you don't have to worry about a takeover by liberals or central banks or something like that. Bitcoin will just takeover of Bitcoin. I'll call this episode the liberal takeover of Bitcoin. They can try. It would be very expensive and they would very likely fail.

Yeah, owning enough of the Bitcoin wouldn't do it. You'd have to own the hash power, and that would be incredibly expensive. And pretty much, you know, in the end, your money would not go very far because Bitcoin would be devalued, et cetera. Jameson Lopp would fork it then. So, yeah, I think you could divide people into those camps. You could also divide people into the camp. And maybe this is a camp that is a camp that I don't. I find myself in is I think it's good to have a money that is censorship resistant, but I don't necessarily think all money needs to be censorship resistant. I think it's good to have some sound money, but I don't think that all money has to be sound money. So I think it's good that Bitcoin exists, but I don't think that Bitcoin has to exclusively

exist. It can operate the way that it operates along with other currencies that aren't sound and currencies that aren't censorship resistant. And so people have a safe haven to use Bitcoin for activities that they might not want people to know about, like, you know, buying presents for your family. You want to keep it a surprise. So you use Bitcoin. Or maybe you can think of other activities that are even more ones that you'd want to

keep private. And similarly, with sound money, it might be good to have a currency that's inflationary, and it might also be good to have a currency that's deflationary. Then I think there's also the issue of the context. I think that Bitcoin is good in different ways for different kinds of people in different circumstances. So what I use Bitcoin for might be very different than what someone in Venezuela uses Bitcoin for or what someone in Belarus uses Bitcoin for. And I think that we would do well to focus more on particular circumstances

where Bitcoin can help than to just give general arguments about why Bitcoin is the best money of all money. And I think, to be fair, I'm not saying that nobody's doing this. Plenty of people yourself included have people on podcasts or write articles that detail how Bitcoin is helping a specific group of people. And I think the more that we can do that and that we can show how Bitcoin applies in various circumstances and how it can be used to promote economic justice in various circumstances. We'll draw more people in. We'll help more people see the good features of Bitcoin. Andrew and Craig, I guess I want to explore this just a little bit more. One of the accusations often levied against Bitcoin is that it's an incredibly narrow intellectual space, right?

For the, at least in terms of the community that puts it. How wide do you think the band for these sort of assumed normative judgments within the community actually is? Is it as intolerant of different ways of approaching Bitcoin as it is accused of? Or is it more kind of a byproduct of the social amplification of extreme voices? One way to think about that is to think about the role of libertarian thought in the origins of Bitcoin and its current social implementation, for example, on Bitcoin Twitter. And I think this central strand of Bitcoin thinking sees the battleground as individuals. versus states. That is the central defining conflict that we need to pick a side on and then empower the side we like. So empowering individuals against states. Now, I actually don't accept that framing as

true to reality. I think it's a little bit more subtle. I think that the battleground we're seeing now is something more like individuals versus institutions. And that includes private and public institutions. So I have in mind not just nation states or cities, but also churches, schools, private banks. And once you see it that way, then I think it starts to sound much less exclusively the libertarian. Libertarian is worried most of all about state encroachment, but much more capacious and who can accept us and indeed who should accept this, a need for a technology that empowers individuals against institutions of all kinds. So that's my initial thought about how to frame this question. I think Andrew is right. And I think it's also important to point out that this line, this dividing line between states and corporations is itself become fairly porous. And Operation Choke Point in the last several years, I think, bears this out, where states or governments or government agencies would put pressure on corporations to shut down people's bank accounts, block their transactions, and so on. And you might think that someday corporations like Facebook might be just as powerful as several states.

That day might be today. Yeah, that's right. That's right. For some states, that's already true. And so this harkens back to these kinds of hybrid nation-like companies like the East Indian company. But in any case, I think there's a tendency. like Andrew said, to view Bitcoin specifically as a kind of stateless money, as a kind of libertarians dream. But when you throw corporations in the mix, which also have a lot of centralized power and which we need to protect ourselves against, and you throw in these kind of nation-like corporations, I think what comes out, the other side,

side when you look at Bitcoin through this kind of clear lens is an institutionless money or a leaderless money. If that's the idea, then Bitcoin will not sit very easily with maybe any very specific view, a philosophical view about how the world should be. And the band of a philosophical view, that are compatible with Bitcoin might be quite wide. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a purposefully extremely dense question to unpack. And part of, I think, my interest in this is, well, a couple things. One is, I think from kind of a larger context, we're going to spend a lot of time in the foreseeable future relitigating and kind of trying to redefine the roles of what different political

perspectives are. And what I mean by that is that the GOP has been obliterated in anything that resembled what it was 20, 30 years ago, right? By the force of kind of just a populism, right? And the Democrats have been less systematically dismantled, as was made clear by the fact that Biden won, I think. However, it's still going to be a lot of grappling for identity. And within that, there's going to be a lot of assumption making, I believe, about what different people would or should believe on the basis of what other things they believe. And I think sometimes there's going to be this question of how much of a band to explore and find common ground or unexpected ideological alignment is, I think, an important one.

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A small context that caught my attention a couple days ago was when Congresswoman received to leave and a number of others, they posted, they published basically an open letter asking for us not to fight, to basically to fight the temptation to expand the surveillance capacity of the state in the wake of the January 6th protest, riots, whatever, the capital, the capital explosion of January 6th. And that took a lot of folks by surprise, I think, because they wouldn't have anticipated or wouldn't have expected it from that particular set of sources, because they are viewed as archetypal sort of far progressive left of the Democratic Party who want a radical expansion of state power.

The interesting thing is that it's not actually unclear why their perspective would be what it was, which is that the communities that they represent, historically disenfranchised communities, tend to be the ones who suffer most under new surveillance regimes, whether they're meant to or not, right? And so you have this very different kind of genesis that gets to the same point of not wanting more surveillance. And I wonder kind of, you know, when I think about things like what I think about Bitcoin, and part of what excites me about it is how many different types of people's lived experiences could you start from, without any assumption or knowledge of their politics and kind of work up from Bitcoin being a powerful,

useful, frankly extraordinary and a historical technology and opportunity. And that to me is this interesting, I guess I'm fascinated by and very kind of focused on these political, not neutral, because that's the wrong word, but these political open spaces, right? The middle of the battlefield where you don't know what's going to happen because genuinely a bunch of people could find themselves there unexpectedly and have a very different type of conversation. I'm interested in Bitcoin's capacity to encourage that rather than to just fortify another flank. I think exactly what you've said about surveillance and about their communities being particularly harmed is true of the banking infrastructure. I think the communities that they represent have been harmed by things like redlining, things like credit ratings, and the difficulty of obtaining a bank account, of obtaining a credit card. So the banking infrastructure is largely under state control, or at least it's very heavily regulated, and it's led to or exacerbated wealth inequality in a pretty huge way. And I think that dismissing Bitcoin because you want this to remain under state control is to ignore an opportunity that you have to maybe try to write some of these injustices and to get.

get some more equality to insist that an institution that has caused the harms that the banking institution has caused is, I think, just a little short-sighted. So that's the main point I try to make in the essay is just how much people have suffered because of the way that the currency has been run, the way that banking has been run, and suggest some ways that Bitcoin could help. And that is a place I think people can meet in the middle, like you talked about. At least so far, the people running the liberal media have not seen fit to publish it. I think I've sent it off to eight or nine places by now, and they've been resistant.

So I'm not sure whether there's anything in the essay that they don't like or whether there's just so many submissions that it's not getting in. But there's some reason, I think, that pro-Bitcoin articles aren't getting in and that those places tend to be publishing anti-Bitcoin stuff. And I don't know what the reason is, but I have suspicions that it has to do with libertarian origins. Nathaniel, one thing I heard in your comments from a moment ago is a prediction of political realignment or shuffling around coalitions, the GOP and its collapse being just one piece of that prediction. And if what we're saying about Bitcoin is right that it has enormous ideological flexibility, all you have to do is have a commitment to the goodness of empowering individuals against institutions. Well, then Bitcoin's very well positioned to find new proponents and adopters, no matter how that political realignment unfolds,

whether there's a new political party that replaces the GOP or the DNC gets split up as well, and the Bernie faction moves in one direction and the centrist move in another and so on. So I view that as, if I may, bullish for Bitcoin, if we're right about it, that is, that it is not just libertarian technology, but individual empowering technology. Well, and I think that in some ways, part of the interesting challenge, it is fascinating to hear, Brad, the difficulty you've had getting something published along these lines. I wonder to what extent this has to do with, I guess one of the questions that the left, more than, particularly has to grapple with is the role of the individual in the ideology that they want to put forward, right? Because, again, we're kind of in the phase where we're more or less trapped by the 20th century's versions of these conversations. And that's totally understandable because that's just

the way we are as human beings. But in some ways, the left has, I believe, not yet really been able to articulate a version of progressive ideology that simultaneously allows for the sort of the expanded role of the state they want, or at least the changing role of the state they want, to be more proactively and positively engaged in the lives of a kind of different socioeconomic group than is usually hit, while still kind of articulating a vision for where individuals fit vis-a-vis these institutions. That feels like a challenge to me. And I don't know if you guys disagree with that or not, but it feels to me like that is one of these central questions about how any sort of realignment on the left will go. I agree. That does sound like a challenge. I would be guessing, but at least in my own

story, I hear something like Medicare for All. And I think, yeah, people shouldn't die because they're poor. And so you have these principles and then you have to try to work out a coherent political philosophy from them. And yeah, that certainly does seem like a challenge. And it's one that I don't think has been put forward yet, or at least I haven't seen it. Maybe let's bring it down from the 80,000 feet that I love to live at, just in case people are sick of hearing about the political realignment of the left,

which would be reasonable. A couple of things in the Why Bitcoin Needs Philosophy paper that I thought were interesting is you almost like you kind of posed it at the end a number of possible interesting philosophical inquiries around Bitcoin. And two that I thought were interesting is basically is a Bitcoin transaction speech and basically kind of like the morality of coin joins or moral liability around coin joins as compared to the moral liability around U.S. dollars. I would love to hear just kind of a little bit more about those or perhaps other examples

as just kind of exemplary of the type of philosophical inquiry around Bitcoin that could actually be really valuable in helping figure out, you know, where, where kind of an individual stands on a lot of these issues and potentially valuable in terms of helping explain it or communicate that to new people. Sure. So about the speech question, so technically a Bitcoin transaction is a chunk of language. It's a formal language, but it's still a language. And so I think that a Bitcoin transaction is speech in much the same way that a text message or an email is. You know, we only see the user-friendly sort of symbols and characters when we send a text message. But underneath, there's an underlying protocol that uses, you know, more complicated kinds of.

of formal symbols. And the same thing is going on in a Bitcoin transaction. And so like a text or an email, a Bitcoin transaction is a digitized speech and it's encoded in a way that satisfies the rules of a particular protocol, in this case, the Bitcoin Consensus Rules. And what this means is that Bitcoin users are, in a sense, communicating with each other through speech. And so there are consequences further down from this.

So, for example, I think this is important for maybe some of these regulatory questions that that might come up in the future. So what are Bitcoin nodes? Well, they're, in a way, the network's grammarian. who are rejecting chunks of language that fail to follow certain rules. But they also serve as curators on the network whose store and update Bitcoin's growing ledger. But I think the most important part that might come out of this

is the role of Bitcoin miners. So what miners are really doing, and they're competing to publish the next chapter of transactions. And so what miners do, they don't primarily mine. Mining is in service for their primary aim, which is to publish. And I'm not a lawyer, and I would hesitate to say too much about the relation between publishing and Bitcoin mining as publishing and the free press clause of the First Amendment. But there is such a connection, and it wouldn't surprise me if this kind of connection would be important going forward, especially in these debates about whether Bitcoin miners should be liable for the transactions that they publish in their blocks. So speech acts always have a speaker and they have hearers and they have content and they have a certain force, whether it's a real.

request or a command or something like that. And if we think that Bitcoin is speech, we have to answer some of these questions. And as Craig pointed out, there may be pretty high consequences to deciding one way or the other. Is the user who initiates the transaction the speaker, or is it the minor who publishes the transaction? If it's a transaction that is bad, who's morally responsible for it. Usually we know who the speaker is. In this case, it might be a little trickier to figure that out. And that could be relevant to analysis vis-a-vis Section 230, whether the liability and the part of the publisher can be bypassed to the person who posted the transaction of the MMPO in the first place or not. Yes. But again, not a lawyer. Yeah, and this is absolutely the context

where this is going to come up. One, there's that larger, this is emblematic of a larger conversation that has to do exactly with sort of the which parties are responsible for what in the context of sort of the internet world that we live in. It's explicitly a part of the conversation around the Stable Act, which was introduced last year, right? One of the thing I'll add is any listeners who are curious about this should read Craig's paper, what is Bitcoin, where he is not just that Bitcoin transactions are like speech being asked. added to a book. He argues that they, in fact, are speech being added to a book and that minors are publishers. It's nothing less than the sober truth. So if Craig's paper is correct, then this

isn't just a good analogy. It's actually the sober truth that regulators should attend to. At least one of the proponents of the Stable Act seem to, without argument, assume that the minors are the ones who are responsible, at least legally responsible, for the speech act of the transaction. So, Rohan. Yeah, Rohan Gray said something like, if you don't want to be held criminally responsible, then don't mine a currency that might allow you to do something morally wrong. I can't remember the exact context of it.

But there's a substance of philosophical question about who is responsible. I don't know, Craig, if you think that your paper agrees with that or if there's some more subtlety there. So Rohan's view strikes me as overly strong, but nothing in my paper would decide the question one way or the other. It seems to me that Andrew is right. I mean, why have we for so long taken Section 30 to be an intuitive way to deal with? a platform like Twitter's responsibility for the people who tweet. I think the comparison here to Bitcoin and the transactions that the users want to put on the blockchain is an apt one.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, getting back to kind of or connecting the dots between our earlier conversation, I think one of the reasons that it is hard for some Bitcoiners, I think reasonably to be happy about the idea that there's kind of a big open or ideological space is that their engagement with folks who are the proponents of things like MMT get to this place where people are assuming that minors should be responsible for things that are happening. And it's such a fundamental disconnect that it's hard to carve out or find even that common space, even if you're assuming good faith engagement, which I feel like a lot of people did with Rohan in specific. Yeah, I think in order to engage in these debates in a healthy way, it's important to be able to decouple certain views that needn't be coupled together. And so, you know, someone like Brad, he's Brad an example, who's sympathetic to MMT, needn't think that Bitcoin miners should be held liable for the particular transaction, transactions that they published.

I mean, these two views just they don't imply each other. They don't make the other one more probable. They're completely logically separable. They just happen to show up together with some frequency, and that's the mistake that we make. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's a really salient point. I would say that I spend a lot of, a lot of my frustration is about disintent, like, about everything in the world generally.

If you look at things that tend to frustrate me, it's very often ideas that tend to be roommates that actually like have nothing in common necessarily, you know, they just live together a lot of the time. Do you have one, you know, at the tip of your tongue that you like to share with us? I mean, right now the thing that's most frustrating for me is the inability of people to separate the idea of tether being an opaque operation that they don't really like how it runs or don't really understand how it runs. And separating that from the idea that somehow the obvious reason that Bitcoin's price has been going up is tether manipulation. Like these things are so like, you know, I mean, again, it's a little bit different because it's not kind of core ideology. It's just sort of like these big random leaps.

But that's definitely the one where I've been thinking about the disentanglement recently. Yeah. Here are these two views, which imply that Tether is bad, so therefore they go together. Yeah. And that's very frustrating. I was just thinking of other Twitter battles that I've watched. My thoughts about how to disentangle things and maybe use philosophy to make distinctions. One thing that comes to mind is debates between Bitcoin Twitter and macroeconomics Twitter

about the nature of inflation. And sometimes the economists make fun of the Bitcoiners because the Bitcoiners don't know the fancy terms and don't use the terms the way they think, that the terms ought to be used. And what I see is there's actually a deeper value judgment difference, which is something like, well, what kinds of goods should I want to have more of in the future? And my hypothesis is that how you answer that question, which is a question about the good life, It's about what makes life worth living, what we should want, what we should want more of in the future. How you answer that question will inform what kind of metric you'll use to measure inflation.

Does the good life consist of fast food and sheet pot, as Professor Michael Saylor asked in one podcast? Or might it include things like growing in mind and health care, education, housing? If the good life actually includes those things for everyone, that will make a great deal of difference to what metric will want to use to measure inflation. So I see this value difference that actually underlines these little Twitter battles. And I wish we would pay more attention to those than the surface flare-ups. I think that's actually a very salient point around inflation specifically. It's one where so I generally think that, well, let's put it this way.

It is unbelievable to me how exclusionary financial media is. This is one of the very few things that absolutely everyone has in common is our interaction with the financial system, right? Everyone has to participate in some way or another. And yet, the entire history of financial media is designed around acronyms that exclude exactly to your point and definitions that should you not know, you're disqualified from participating. and the delegitimization of your own lived experience.

And it's absolutely fucking wild to me that it's been this way for so long, that somehow systematically people have been convinced that they don't or shouldn't have a stake in an interest in their own financial future, regardless of who they are. And I think that is part of what hooked me on this space is the wrecking ball that, Bitcoin creates for that for many people who find it. And it's an individual wrecking ball on a first level, right? Where people are invited in to consider these questions. And they are no longer

told that they shouldn't consider these questions if they don't have the right definitions. And so I do think it's an important point. I also think just more specifically to your, the inflation example around the basket of goods. It's a fascinating example of where the there's an underappreciation potentially for just the common sense of lived experience, right? It's like, well, the things that I spend the most on are the things that are, like, I can't get away from things like college, things like housing, things like, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so why on earth would these things, which have gotten extraordinarily more difficult to achieve a cumulative or whatever, not be considered part of this important force that we keep track? of as potentially damaging to society. And by the way, when you start to feel back, what is the thing that each of these things

have in common? Will you buy them on credit? And so all of a sudden, you're at this position where it's like, I feel like what the promise being handed to me as a citizen is this may be more expensive, but don't worry because there's more financing available at a better rate. And, of course, it brings up lots of questions. So I think it's a great example of where these sort of these things. you know, kind of get fraught before they start, perhaps.

Yeah, and this is not a purely econometric or technical question. This is a question that everybody can and should engage with, as you say, lived experience. We know what we want out of life, and we all have ideas about what the good life consists in. And I think it's worth our time to bring those into view explicitly whether or not you can speak intelligently about M2 and velocity and CPI and so on. One of the things that I see most often, and it was one of my favorite things about doing this show, is sort of the number of messages I get from people who are on this journey of learning and want to dig deeper into these things, right? And it's like, I mean, just the velocity of money thing is it's something that is, it feels like an abstract concept, but you can start to grok it. And it explains a lot about why we haven't had inflation as sort of, you know, CPI defined.

for a while, but it also helps explain once you understand it. It's like these things that sort of unlock knowledge. And I like the idea that there's spaces now because of the capacity of the internet to foster independent media and independent media voices where those things are back on the agenda as sort of valuable and viable as a learning place. But I want to make sure to talk about your book. I feel like we've probably explored some of the pieces of it. The short sentence that I read was Bitcoin as a tool to resist corporate and state overreach. It sounds like that it may be kind of focused on this, or I guess let me ask it as a question. Is the starting point this question of individuals and institutions?

Institutions, if they are in charge of the supply of money as a central bank, if they are processing transactions as a credit card company or, again, a central bank, or some other payment network, there are central authorities. And these central authorities, by virtue of their position as the main node on a payment network, They have certain powers that they can abuse. So they can shut people out. They can shut whole countries out or companies in other countries. They can block particular transactions or they can block certain kinds of transactions.

And there's a real question about whether, given that this is how the world works, is it a good thing to have an alternative? And so one of the book's main question is to answer this question, is Bitcoin an overall good thing? And I think we have to admit that there are some tradeoffs. There are always tradeoffs, and Bitcoin isn't perfect. How dare you? I know.

But there are real things to say in favor of Bitcoin. as a way to counteract the overreach of both states and corporations and, you know, the state corporation tag team that can sometimes team up against ordinary citizens. And so what are those ways? Well, Bitcoin, even though it's not wholly private and anonymous, it gives us some degree of anonymity or pseudonymity. And that can be a good thing. If, If, for example, you're a woman in Afghanistan who wants to divorce her husband, your husband, but the husband has sole control over your paycheck. Having a kind of more private and maybe even censorship-resistant form of money is a good thing.

And so there are lots of different kinds of people for whom Bitcoin will not just be a little bit more good than bad, but a great good. And I think when you factor in these people worldwide, Bitcoin is overall quite worthwhile to have. One thing that many commentators have noticed is that this having cycle enjoys way more financial infrastructure than past cycles, Fiat on ramps and off ramps, the availability of regulated financial derivatives and so on. What I think of our book as doing is adding intellectual infrastructure. It's uniting philosophy, politics, and economics, and bringing them to bear on Bitcoin in a way to help people who want to go deeper than just, should I buy Bitcoin?

But is this good for the world? And if so, for whom? And in what ways? Using the best tools we have from these academic disciplines. So we're hoping to contribute to that intellectual infrastructure. You know, podcasts are part of it, books and blogs and so on, and Bitcoin Twitter in a way, actually. I guess, oh, sorry, go ahead, Brad. Oh, I'll just add my view of our book, which is that Bitcoin has a few unique features.

Even if they're not unique to Bitcoin, the bundle of them is unique. and the book is organized around these unique features. So it's privacy, censorship, monetary policy, and financial inclusion. So we wonder what private money gets us, what censorship-resistant money gets us, what money that is easy to acquire gets us, what money that has a predictable supply schedule gets us, and then what it costs us. what are the costs of having this private money? What are the costs of the censorship-resistant money, et cetera?

And then we weigh these costs and benefits against each other to try to come up with an overall assessment of the value or disvalue of Bitcoin. And it should be no surprise that at least for now, you know, we haven't written the book, but at least for now we're leaning towards a positive evaluation for the reasons that Craig said, that Bitcoin at least serves as a nice competitive check against currencies that don't have these features so that people can go to Bitcoin if they need to. This sort of bull market is clearly characterized by the institutions are finally here, basically.

Paul Revere has been screaming about this for three years, but it's finally happening in a meaningful way. And I wonder if there is, you know, we talked about a lot of the values of Bitcoin, the values that Bitcoiners have, are some of those more at risk in the context of a Bitcoin ecosystem that is shaped, animated, driven much more by institutional buying patterns? Or are those values sort of wholly separate from the whims of institutions, even if they're, all they care about it is as a financial instrument. I think it's an important question, and it will become more important if the present trend continues. One thing Bitcoin's taught me is to think adversarially.

So suppose someone wanted to undermine what we've claimed are the values promoted by Bitcoin, what would they have to do? So let's say that the grayscale trust came to own an appreciable fraction of the total circulating supply of Bitcoin, 20, 30, 40%, what could they do? How exactly, in very concrete terms, how could they change Bitcoin to make it so that it can't promote individual liberty and decision-making at that very local level? And I think when you think about it that way, Bitcoin actually turns out to be remarkably resilient. It's extremely expensive to change Bitcoin. And this is a familiar point that the Cyber Hornets,

are jealous guards of their mother and their hive. And even if Daddy Barry had 40% of the Bitcoin supply, that wouldn't do the trick to fundamentally change Bitcoin or to keep it from being able to promote individual, individuals against institutions. It seems to me that the only of the four pillars that I identified, privacy, censorship resistance, financial inclusion, and monetary policy, The only real dent, I think, could be made is in the financial inclusion part. And only for a while. So as institutions are getting in and getting out and realizing gains and things like that, and the price remains as volatile as it has been, it's hard to recommend to people to put their last $50 in,

that they might need next month or the month after that into Bitcoin. I don't want to tell them to keep it in U.S. dollars, but I'm hesitant to recommend Bitcoin because of the short-term volatility. As institutions get in and stay in, and I expect volatility to decrease. And at that time, I think the financial inclusion will come back in. So right now, it's financially inclusive in the sense that it's very easy to go to the grocery store and put a few dollars. bills in to a CoinStar machine and get some Bitcoin. But it might be prohibitive because of the risks that you have to take. And I anticipate that those risks will go down over time. And, you know, and so far it's been always a good idea to hold long term. It's just not always been a good

idea to hold short term. So I was trying to tell my sister for a long time to get just get some get some Bitcoin. And what it took was a huge bull run in 2017 to convince her that she needed to get into Bitcoin at $18,000 per BTC. And then it went back down to $3,000. Now, thankfully, she didn't need the money that she had put in and she hadn't put in very much. So she just sort of laughed as her Bitcoin was worth a seventh of what it was when she bought it for a long time. But someone who might have relied on that money would have had a much harder time. I think what I hear you saying, Brad, is that there could be a tradeoff here between financial

inclusion and, let's say, censorship resistance or one of these other values that we think Bitcoin can promote. So when institutions enter at scale, that might increase financial inclusion in this sense. Bitcoin is more usable. Let's say you're using blue wallet and lightning. It's more usable as a day-to-day currency, the payments application of Bitcoin. And in that sense, is more available to everyone, even those who cannot afford, like your sister did, to wait for three years for the price to come back around again in a favorable way. So the arrival of institutions at scale could enhance the utility, the practical means of exchange utility of Bitcoin. And yet it might come at a cost of censorship resistance as institutions push for more regulation, more oversight, more surveillance of trading activity and so on, especially at the fiat. off-ramps and on-ramps.

Yeah, and it could also be that there are aspects of financial inclusion that weigh against each other. So it's easier to buy Bitcoin, but it's also easier to sell Bitcoin, which makes the price more volatile than it would have been, which makes it riskier, which means that some people, for some people, it's not a good idea for them to put certain dollar amounts into Bitcoin. Yeah. One of the worries I have with the coming of the institutions is that we'll have a kind of two Bitcoin problem. So there will be regulatory pressures on institutions to weed out UTXOs with shady, shady provenance.

So you'll have blacklisted Bitcoin and whitelisted Bitcoin. And so, yeah, that there would, in this case, be a trade-off between inclusion and censorship resistance or privacy, for that matter. And I don't know exactly what to say about this. I mean, my guess is that this would be very difficult to enforce in my hope is that the very people who are buying in. and inspiring people at these institutions to buy are the same people who grasp the importance of Bitcoin's censorship resistance for the rest of the world. I mean, I think especially in a country like our own

who values freedom of speech and just freedom generally, we would want people in other countries to be able to have a, an exit from currencies which are overseen by totalitarian governments and irresponsible central banks. So, I mean, it's a worry, but I'm also optimistic. Love it. Well, listen, there is a lot more to dig into here, which I kind of think is the point of what

you guys are trying to say, that these things are worth discussing, worth debating, and worth using the tools that have, have been. been built over a very long period of time to explore exactly this type of questions to do so. So I really appreciate you guys all taking the time to hang out here. I'm very much looking forward to this book and excited to see how you guys continue to bring philosophy into Bitcoin and vice versa. Terrific. Thank you so much.

Enjoyed it. Thinking back on that conversation, there are two things, I think, are a fascinating reflection of one another. On the one hand is the question of what space there is for the political left and political progressives in Bitcoin. Part of this may just be a question of our terms, as in our designations of left and right lump economic and social issues in a way that is massively constraining. Still, most people don't associate the left and progressives with the Bitcoin community. Ultimately, however, as intense as some Twitter communities can be, Bitcoin doesn't care about your politics, so it doesn't

feel to me to be a huge concern. A more interesting and relevant question in some ways to me, is what place there is in the modern left for the individual. Progressives in the modern left are in the middle of trying to redefine their role, redefine their ideology, and in the process, expand the role of the state into people's lives. This doesn't necessarily have to be at the expense of the individual. A state could theoretically decide to spend less on corporations and power structures and more on helping foster individual pursuits, entrepreneurship, etc. All of this matters, obviously, in the context of a new administration from the left coming to power. It matters because these questions are going to matter in the context of how Bitcoin and Crypto as a whole is regulated and considered in that process.

I think at the risk of getting heady sometimes, taking a moment to zoom up and zoom out and go to these big questions, these philosophical questions can be really important. So I hope you enjoy this very different type of show. If you didn't, don't worry, we're not going to do philosophy shows every week or anything, but I at least had fun and I hope you did too. Until tomorrow, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.