The Breakdown - Satoshi’s Unappreciated Marketing Genius, Feat. Dan Held

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Satoshi Nakamoto is often recognized for his technical genius in solving the double spend problem. He is also widely revered for his willingness to walk away from the protocol to make it stronger, something no other entrepreneur who has created anything on the scale of Bitcoin has ever done.  What people discuss less often is Satoshi’s marketing instincts. In this illuminating conversation, serial bitcoin entrepreneur Dan Held argues:  Satoshi had strong instincts about how price would drive bitcoin adoption The bitcoin white paper document was a marketing pitch aimed specifically at the cypherpunks  The competition between bitcoin narratives is something that gives the protocol strength The competition to shape bitcoin's narrative is truly free and open to all

Very much, I think Satoshi is a marketer at heart. He understands this. He understood that the narrative would be propagated primarily through speculation. I think that took incredible foresight to understand human motivation and to understand that he could tap into that one element of humans, greed, and use that to market Bitcoin and that the price alone would market Bitcoin. I would say Satoshi is very much a viral marketer. He understood how to propagate narratives at an incredibly eloquent and simple way, which tapped into human greed and then to get the early people to help him build it, basically tapped into their sentiment around what cash should be. Welcome back to the Breakdown's Free Ideas Festival, a 4th of July exploration of ideas with potential to shape the future of the economy. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Wednesday, July 1st, and this is day two of the Free Ideas Festival. To many, Bitcoin is inevitable. But then again, many who have been around for a long time, who have seen how many different forces have tried to compromise or kill it, have a slightly different take. Dan Held is a serial Bitcoin entrepreneur and is currently in BD at Cracken after they acquired his most recent company interchange. He is known for his excellent content on Satoshi's history,

on Bitcoin narratives and on so much more, and recently he released a thread about Bitcoin's, quote, decentralized marketing department. In this conversation, we talk about how narrative construction and competition in Bitcoin is an incredibly powerful force that shapes how new people enter the space and how they engage with it when they do. Far from Bitcoin marketing not mattering, these narratives, as Dan will argue, can actively delay, block, or obstruct the advance of the protocol. I guarantee you that after listening to this, you will think about Bitcoin marketing in a new way.

All right. I am here with the man, the myth, the legend himself, Dan, what's going on? Hey, thanks for having me. Doing pretty well. How about yourself? I am doing great. excited for the 4th of July coming up. I'm excited to talk about some big ideas. And so I'm doing this thing basically that I'm calling the Free Ideas Festival, which is around July. forth, and it's about ideas that I think have some capacity to really shift economics or shift systems that we live in. And you had this thread recently that was all about Bitcoin marketing and the decentralization thereof. And I think it's a really interesting jumping off point, something that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of Bitcoin as much as maybe we should.

So maybe by way of kicking us off, what's the TLDR of this idea and what was the goal of the thread for you? Yeah, so I'll start with the goal of the thread before I go into the TLDR, but the goal of the thread was I felt like there was this mismatch in Bitcoin of expectations over what marketers do. I think they kind of get a bad rep with the Bitcoin community as sleazy salesman types, when I don't think marketing is that at all. I think marketing serves a very important function.

And so my thread was an attempt to, you know, to kind of clarify. what marketing did, what functions marketing does, how it works, and why it's relevant to Bitcoin. And the TLDR is that Bitcoin has a decentralized marketing team. There is no Bitcoin, you know, HQ marketing team. There's no Bitcoin Foundation marketing team. Bitcoin is composed of all of us. Every single Bitcoin are out there talks about Bitcoin, tells people about Bitcoin, markets Bitcoin through content that they create. And so each one of us are part of that, marketing team. And so it was a thread to cover that and to dive in deeper as to the functions of marketing. Awesome. So I think that two of the things that were worth level setting and tweets

that I'm going to pull out specifically, I think that the stakes of the conversation are really important too. And you articulate this. And there are two stakes. The first is that there's missed opportunity. So you argued some bitcoins argue that Bitcoin will dominate because it is the hardest money ever known. It forces people to understand it better and educate themselves. And you said, bullshit. Most came in for speculation and the ones who got or stayed here saw content. You don't automatically get it. So that's one key part of the stakes is this missed opportunity. The second is where it can cause actual harm. So you said bad marketing can hurt Bitcoin. The P to P cash narrative led to a civil war, billions of misallocated capital, hundreds of dead companies with

disenfranchised employees and builders, and created conflicting and damaging expectation that eroded Bitcoin's growth trajectory. So let's talk about those stakes, I guess, or just, you know, what inspired you to write about this? Yeah. So I've been through three Bitcoin cycles. So I was there early 13, late 13 and 2017. So I've seen a wide, I mean, Bitcoin evolved from, I mean, this was before CoinDisc existed. I, you know, the industry was a dozen people in San Francisco. Like, it was tiny. Early 13, there was barely anyone into Bitcoin.

And so I've seen Bitcoin evolve from like, not even just hobbyist. I would say smaller than that, like a really, really small group of people. Evolved from that to this big mainstream sort of thing over the course of eight years. And when you see something evolve like that, a lot of the, I think, early people that were participants have these cultural values, these beliefs, and they're a little bit afraid of how the change occurs. They're a little bit afraid that, oh, this won't be like it was when there's only 12 of us, or this won't be like it was when there's a thousand of us.

And so there's this hesitancy to embrace this professionalism in the space because they perceive the professionals as, you know, more corporate or more, you know, they're not there for the right reasons. I think you can do both. I think like there are professionals who also respect Bitcoin for what it does and what it provides. I mean, after all, Bitcoin has a value prop of being immutable and hard to seize, you know, with an amazing monetary policy. So, you know, they're marketing those core value props of Bitcoin. They're not necessarily like perverting any early narratives or early cultural values. So I think there's a little bit of a disconnect there where a lot of these earlier types just feel that these newcomers don't respect every single cultural element.

And because of that, it is not as pure as the original sort of community. So I think that's part of it. When we look at waves of adoption of Bitcoin, like I said before, I've been through three, the tops of the market are defined by the speculative nature of how people are attracted to the rising price. And Satoshi actually hypothesized this before Bitcoin had any value. Satoshi hypothesized as the price goes up, people become more aware of it. And in turn, buy an expectation of that value increasing. Essentially, he's describing FOMO.

And so as the price continues to rise, more people buy into it, and the visibility of the price becomes higher and higher, as more people write about it and talk about it. And so the peaks are set by speculative enthusiasm. So the peaks of adoption, and these cycles are set by speculative enthusiasm, but the floors are set by hoddlers. So hoddlers are the ones who truly believe. They're the ones who go, okay, you know, I might have bought Bitcoin because my buddy told me

about it and I wanted to make a quick buck, but I read the Bitcoin standard and now I totally get it. You know, people don't automatically understand Bitcoin. It requires you to challenge your assumptions over government and money and everything else in this world. I mean, money is a core foundational part of that. And so to challenge that, most people don't want to wake up. They don't want to pull open their phone, flip through Instagram, and then challenge

every assumption that they have about their government. That's just not an enjoyable activity. So the floor is, you know, why Bitcoin's price doesn't go to zero during these bare markets is because there's a core group of convicted believers who might have come into the speculous, actually not might have, a wide portion, a wide majority of them come into these speculative bubbles, but the ones who stick around are the ones who believe. And so I perceive that Bitcoin's marketing can both accelerate. So if we market Bitcoin more effectively, which just means being more conscious about it,

and each one of us are trying our own version of it. So there's not any necessarily better or worse way to do it. But when we go about marketing Bitcoin, if we start thinking about it, just even thinking about it, I think it's going to help. We might make those peaks even higher. And also we might make those floors higher, too, which means in the next bear market, maybe we don't have that 80% drop that we normally see. maybe it's only 50% because we converted so many of those speculative traders into believers

by delivering them content, whether that's in podcast, video, or written form that resonates with them and teaches them why Bitcoin's valuable. So I think it's super, super interesting. And I want to add a little bit more granularity to this conversation now as we discuss what we mean when we say marketing because I found that there were like really two different dimensions to marketing that you were discussing in this thread. The first is finding resonant messages, and the second is actually building funnels, building communication funnels.

Maybe let's actually take the second first. Could you describe the Bitcoin marketing funnel as it is right now? Yeah, so this is going to be somewhat of a subjective interpretation, and other people can define these layers in the funnel differently. But a funnel describes a user journey in terms of them evaluating a new product service or protocol, which is Bitcoin. So at the top of the funnel, you have something called awareness, which is them just knowing that this product service or protocol exists. From there, they go through increasing layers of engagement.

So it goes from awareness to like consideration. Oh, okay, I'm aware of Bitcoin. Well, now, maybe I should buy Bitcoin. And then further down the funnel, you have things like, okay, I'm going to sign up for an exchange account. Okay, I'm going to buy the Bitcoin standard. Okay, I'm going to buy Bitcoin for the first time. okay, now I'm going to DCA. And then as you increasingly become more and more engaged as a Bitcoins,

you know, you'll run your own full node. You'll have your own, not your keys, not your coins, no manage your own private keys using like a Treasurer with like a CryptoStele backup. You know, all these things represent the user journey of becoming a pre-coiner all the way through to becoming a hardcore bitmoiner, a hardcore hoddler, if you will. So each stage, that's where I meant that it's subject. each stage can be defined by, you know, different individuals differently.

But generally what we're talking about is someone moving from not having Bitcoin to having Bitcoin and really believing in it. So one of the points I think that you were trying to make is that this funnel, it's okay for different people to have different interpretations of or focus on different aspects of Bitcoin at different stages, right? You were kind of proposing some of the more popular podcast, for example, as sort of almost like the intellectual gateway drugs, right? And whereas some folks critique those podcasts for oversimplifying, your point was like, look, you've got to create a big tent. I mean, is that an accurate depiction of what you were saying? Yeah, I think that's very accurate. A lot of bitcoins, and I understand where they're coming from because there's a lot of nuance missed by some of these podcasts. who broadcasts Bitcoin to a wider audience, their objective is to get a pre-coiner into Bitcoin.

If you give them the full pitch right off the bat, that's a little hard to convert them. They're trying to get someone from the top of the funnel, which is like awareness. I've heard of Bitcoin into even considering Bitcoin. So I think a lot of the more like deeply convicted Bitcoiners, they see that and they don't perceive that as they kind of, they feel a little bit like it's misinterpreted. interpreting Bitcoin or it's not adequately representing Bitcoin. And that's why I positioned it more as like, look, they're taking them through different stages at the funnel.

There's great content creators in Bitcoin who are much more in depth. We're further down the funnel, that's something that you would recommend to your friends is, oh, there's this great medium article, there's this great podcast that covers a more nuanced topic about why Bitcoin's important. And so it's more of a relay, if you will. I don't think there's, it's pretty hard for someone to take a pre-coiner to coiner all by themselves. You know, it does happen, you know, depending on your content, you could, you can take a lot of people into different stages.

But there's very few people who are full funnel where they stay at a very high level, but then also go really, really granular into like different aspects of how Bitcoin works. Because as you know, and most of the people listening to this know that Bitcoin has a ton of different elements in terms of how it works. And, you know, the game theory, the monetary policy, the history of money, all these things are incredibly nuanced. and important, and it's important because it's what Bitcoin's about. But, you know, you don't, it's like going on a first date. When you go on a first date, you don't want to tell them everything about your life in the first date. You hit the major points and you want to get them to the next date, right? You want them to understand more about you and give them your value props in terms of who you are and, you know, how you guys might mesh together. So you don't want

to give them every single nuanced story about how you and your buddies did something dumb in college on the first day. But as these individuals progress through the funnel, they will progressively get deeper and deeper into content that tells them more about how Bitcoin works. I think it's particularly salient now because we're living through a narrative moment where there are a lot, a lot, a lot of people who agree with Bitcoiners diagnosis of the problem, even if they're not sold on Bitcoiners' diagnosis of the solution, right? There's a reason that the Money Printer Go Burmeme is totally transcendent across FinTwit, not just Bitcoin, Twitter. And I think that kind of extending the point that you're making is if you force everyone who agrees with

you on assessing the problem to immediately agree on assessing the solution, you're going to lose out on a lot of folks. I think that's a really great point that you brought up. When we market Bitcoin, we are selling someone a solution. We're going, hey, Bitcoin solves your problems. But many of these people don't even know they have a problem. Money Printo Go Burr was a great meme, and that transcended across multiple different sub-sectors of finance.

You know, the crypto community, macro folks, even mainstream, you know, like you've got Wall Street bet, our Wall Street bets, a subreddit dedicated to more day trader types. But with Bitcoin, we forget that we need to define the problem before we sell a solution. If someone doesn't know they have a problem, then when you sell them a solution like Bitcoin, and they're like, I don't really understand why I need that. And so, and unfortunately, that takes like a little bit deeper dive of them to like, oh, okay, wait a second.

My government's printing all this money. Well, what's going to happen to my money? And with Bitcoin, you know, if we better position Bitcoin to where as soon as they start to question their money, that Bitcoin looks like an attractive alternative, then that's really good because we're aligning ourselves with that. We're making the mental leap from going, okay, I understand. a problem to immediately going, okay, Bitcoin's the solution. And so, yeah, I totally agree. Right now is a very relevant time period to bring up narratives, Bitcoin marketing, how to

propagate narratives, how to generate content that resonates correctly. You know, I think this is the right time to have this discussion. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors. vested by over 4 million customers, including top financial institutions. BitStamp is built on professional grade trading technology. Their platform is powered by a NASDAQ matching engine, and their APIs are recognized as the best in the industry. Download the BitStamp app from the App Store or Google Play, or visit bitstamp.net slash pro to learn more and start trading today.

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Download the crypto.com app today and enjoy these offers until the end of September. So this is the second part of the thread, was you sort of had the building funnels part and then the finding resonant messages part. You know, you and I share a real interest in narratives and how narratives evolve and how memes sort of reinforce or are part of narratives. How have you seen the Bitcoin narrative evolve over this time? And in particular, I guess I'd love to catch up with you because we haven't talked for a while on how you've seen the narrative moment over these last few months during this period of economic turmoil. Yeah. And by the way, you were.

a good influence. I mean, you were a phenomenal influence on how I perceive narratives and how I think about narratives in Bitcoin. You and you and others. So I wanted to give you a hat tip there just to kind of call that out. In regards to how narratives have changed over time, you know, I think, as I mentioned before, Bitcoin is largely perceived as like a very risk-on asset, an asset that is sort of very speculative in nature where most people hear about it during the runs. And it's interesting to see the narrative shift a little bit. Quite a few of us throughout the years have called Bitcoin Gold 2.0. And we haven't seen that narrative really pick up steam by like the big institutions. A lot of the big institutions have been distracted with

blockchain tech for the last, you know, for like 2015 through 2018. We're very distracted by blockchain or smart contracts or stuff like that. More enterprise level, you know, database solutions. But over the last two years, we've seen the Bitcoin is a gold 2.0 narrative really pick up steam from not just in the Bitcoin community, but by these institutions. And that's an important shift because as Bitcoin grows, you have to change everyone's mind in the world about how they perceive their money and what Bitcoin represents to them. And to see this, this meme start to propagate in those circles is incredibly exciting to see. to see Paul Tudor Jones talk about Bitcoin being gold 2.0, to see Bloomberg publish a research report saying Bitcoin is the new gold.

These are incredibly important validation moments when, as Bitcoiners, we all realized this a long time ago. But it takes time for this narrative to propagate and permeate into the consciousness of these older institutions that, you know, where change happens much slower. So I consider this a phenomenal, phenomenal moment for Bitcoin. I bought Bitcoin in 2012 because my investment thesis was that Bitcoin is Gold 2.10. And it's largely trended along that. Of course, there is other narratives in the meantime. We've seen a lot of people talk about how Bitcoin's a peer-to-pure cash sort of element where it's more useful as merchant payments.

And we haven't really seen that validated by the market. We don't see much activity there. And so, you know, we have all these narratives that Bitcoin can represent. You know, a lot of people go, well, they go, hey, it's not. I think some people push back on like, oh, marketing for Bitcoin because they're like, look, you can use Bitcoin for anything. And I understand where they're coming from because I'm a libertarian. And look, I'm from Texas. And I was a libertarian before I found Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin was the perfect money for me, right? And I feel that a lot of people go, how dare you prescribe a narrative for a protocol? You know, it's code. You can't tell me how to use code. And I'm like, cool, cool. I get it. Like, look, I'm a libertarian too. You can, you're free to use it as you wish.

But it's kind of like someone building a tank and then you going, well, I want to, I want to use it for ride sharing. And you're like, you're free to do that. It's, you're free to do whatever you want with this open protocol. What is just a really silly way to use it. And it's really disingenuine to propagate the narrative that it's useful to, to be a ride sharing vehicle when it was special purpose built as a tank. and I just that's where you know we are a decentralized marketing team and everyone is free to market

Bitcoin as they wish but I do feel like a lot of people push what their hobby is into what Bitcoin is and you know putting the product hat on which my background I'm in BD now but my background's in product of marketing putting a product hat on you know you're like well okay I only have one shot or I have very few shots to convert someone in Bitcoin and when you give them a narrative or when you give them a pitch, if you get it wrong, then they're permanently misaligning their expectations. And that's what happened with the P2P cash narrative, the spin Bitcoin narrative, was that when we dug into that, when we, you know, I was there when we would, I was there when we cold pitch people at blockchain. Info with, you know, Nick Carey and Roger Vera at a dinner

table, you know, like, I've seen, I've seen us try to try to really shoehorn that narrative in. And it just doesn't fit. It doesn't solve a problem that most people have. Yes, if you want to buy items on certain dark markets, having something immutable is a very useful tool. But that's a very small percentage of Bitcoin transactions, and it's grown increasingly smaller. So all we have to do is look at on-chain data to validate that hypothesis that, oh, it will solve this payments issue. It really doesn't solve that problem for most people. And so I feel strongly that, you know, if you'd like to use Bitcoin for payments because you feel that that's fun to do, then you should do that. Telling people that's its most useful thing it can do and showing them a really painful way

to pay for coffee, you might have just permanently turned them off from Bitcoin for the next five years. So it's not just about big marketing. So there's no technical, proper way to market Bitcoin. There are ways that are more right than less right. If you choose a very, very less right one, then you might. might actually damage Bitcoin. And that's where I think a lot of Bitcoiners don't think through it that way.

They're like, oh, it's additive. If I market Bitcoin as Gold 2.0 and a cheap PayPal, that's great because it's two value problems. And I'm like, wait, well, no, it doesn't do one very well. And also, you have to lead with a pitch. You can't pitch two things at once. They're not really additive. They're actually subtractive.

And it's not like Bitcoin won't be useful for payments someday. It definitely will. And it's useful for some payments now. But first, you have to have a large percentage of the population holding Bitcoin. The volatility has to drop. The user experience has to get better. All of these things take time. And I've been around for eight years.

And I'm actually really surprised how slow the U.S. and Bitcoin has been. Here's a great example. What the hell is an unconfirmed transaction? Like, as in Normie, imagine seeing the word unconfirmed transaction. That's not that, yes, that is technically what it is. but does that really convey to the user what state their Bitcoin transaction is in? Yes, it does, but that's a much more clinical way to think about it. We must think about the feeling that someone feels when they see the word unconfirmed.

And so, you know, to see how Bitcoin's U.S. has barely progressed, and this applies to every cryptocurrency in the space. I think most have a pretty poor U.S. And so I don't really, you know, when they talk about, oh, these U.S. problems will be solved quickly around different ways to spend Bitcoin. I'm like, I'm a little bit dubious as to how fast that might happen. Yeah, I mean, I have a few follow-ups. One is I can validate the this causes actual harm because I was in Silicon Valley at the same time as you. And while you were thinking about it as digital gold, that was not the predominant narrative. I think to your point,

it was, that's when Square was just starting and Venmo and like there was all these other payments things. And to me, when I was introduced to Bitcoin, and I, like, heard about it early, right? I was advising a company that went through Ycombinator the same class as Coinbase. It was introduced as another thing to pay for your cup of coffee, like, with when you were pitching an investor, which is fundamentally boring. You know what I mean? Like, it just didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what it was. And that's not me blaming that narrative for me not getting into it, right?

I could have dug deeper as you did. However, it was by far the dominant and, frankly, I think, very distrash. distracting narrative when I was coming into contact with it in Silicon Valley in those days. And there's a lot of reasons for that that are way beyond the scope of this. But I think that it's just, you know, it took me a couple years to get back to it after that. And that's a good validation of, I think, what you're saying. What's more, I think, maybe even to just build on and maybe go after this payments narrative just a little bit more because we can. I think that the legitimate part of it that is valuable for some people, particularly outside of the U.S.,

is censorship-resistant payments. But that's very different. that's not buying your coffee at Starbucks in a more convenient way, that's paying for something that someone doesn't want you to have, and not just because it's on dark markets, right? Dark markets to us could be something very different if you have a different economic context and a lot more controls. But that's not really a payments narrative.

That's a censorship resistance narrative. That's very, very different. So again, you're still distracting from what the actual point is, even when you're talking about what type of payments that could potentially provide a real significant advantage around. But I guess that, like, the third part, and maybe the one that I wanted to hang on here, that there's something really cool about this, the idea of, I mean, Bitcoin marketing almost

becomes a pure capitalist experiment in the best idea truly winning, right? It's a market for marketing. And I think that, you know, we talk to, we tend to talk about the block size wars and things like that, only in the context of, of sort of which companies have or which, you know, which assets have the biggest market cap and how that's changed and, you know, industry dominance, all of which is true. We don't talk about it. just about how thoroughly the ideas have won, you know, and those ideas, which started as quote-unquote marketing or narratives, have become totally ascendant. And I think that for anyone who is frustrated with different people contributing ideas, it really is. I mean, if you have any

sort of libertarian tendencies, this is about as free a marketplace as you can get because there's, it just proves itself over and over that the best idea of what Bitcoin is, like, wins out in the end. I think you phrased that phenomenally well. It's, yeah, this is an iterative. process, it's a constant A-B test of narratives. If your narrative is a very popular one and it resonates with people, then that becomes a narrative. Bitcoin doesn't set its own narratives. Human beings, which interact with the Bitcoin Protocol, describe Bitcoin and how they feel about Bitcoin and why Bitcoin's valuable to everyone that follows them or everyone that they're connected with across different social media channels. And that in turn shapes their opinion. And then that opinion

shapes other opinions. And then it becomes reflexive. Or these other individuals who now are into Bitcoin, they generate opinions in content, and that changes opinion. So it's this constant echo chamber where different narratives are propagating back and forth. And ultimately, yeah, you're right. It's a pure capitalist, pure libertarian ideology of may the most resonant narrative survive. May the most resonant narrative be the one that's heard the loudest and propagated. And so when we look at success in Bitcoin marketing, a lot of Bitcoiners go, oh, well, it's only proper if you do long form, really detailed content. And that's where I wanted to challenge that and, you know, give a hat tip to the ones at the top of the funnel who perform a different function than the ones at the bottom.

Yes, I very much respect the long form content. And I've had incredible journeys reading that content or listening to that content or watching that content. But that's where, you know, when we look at Bitcoin's narrative, this was sort of a, you know, part of this tweet storm as well was sort of a warning call, a warning, you know, raising the alarm to these great Bitcoin. that I really admire and really appreciate their long form of deeper content and go, hey, if you don't help define Bitcoin's narrative at the more macro, easy to digest level, then you're not part of that conversation. You're not part of the conversation with millions of new corners. You're very much adhering and talking to already converted bitcoins.

And that's fine. You don't have to be, we each play a part, right? But just want to make them aware that if they were frustrated with these more top of the funnel folks, that the only way to change it is to propagate your own narrative, to come up with your own version of Bitcoin and describe it. And maybe if you describe it well, then you'll be heard. And kind of one more piece to round this out on that. I think as well, Bitcoiners go, well, I don't want to, you know,

when they look at YouTube channels, they'll go, I don't want to make a thumbnail image, so the static image on a video. I don't want to do anything that looks cheesy. And so part of my tweet storm was covering what is good versus bad marketing. And with part of that, I go, if it works, it's not bad. If people engage with the content and propagate someone's content, that means that message resonated with them and they're responding to that, which means that maybe that's

the best version of Bitcoin's narrative out there. And so when, you know, I feel that they kind of complain about different tactics where they go, oh, X, Y, Z influencer did something I would personally consider unsavory. And I'm like, well, did the tactic work? And they say, yes. I'm like, cool. So it doesn't matter. Like when we look at, and this is where I think Nathan, you being from Silicon Valley,

you have an experience out here, you'll understand some of this where I think a lot of people don't know this. And these are great examples of how big tech companies were built on, I guess, more gray hat techniques. LinkedIn spammed all of your email content. But that worked. And LinkedIn is now a multi-billion dollar company. You had Airbnb. They initially posted on Craigslist to take some of that demand from the market and pull it into Airbnb, which is against the terms of service. And we see these examples over and over again in Silicon Valley of very, I would say, aggressive and gray hat techniques that work. And at the end of the day,

do we want Bitcoin to win? Do we want Bitcoin's narrative to get out there? The answer is yes. And we can't do it by tying our hands behind her back and going, oh, I think that the thumbnail image is cheesy. Like that's just like arbitrarily, it's like this subjective arbitrary gating mechanism that we only reinforces a specific type of marketing for Bitcoin. And I think it's just kind of silly. And I feel like these great Bitcoin content creators, they should they should kind of look up and understand a little bit bigger picture as to like what other narratives are we fighting and how do we win? Well, and I guess I would only add to that because I agree entirely that if you look at folks who have the highest distribution footprint, they have not shaped, let's put it this way. Over time, the image of Bitcoin and the narrative of Bitcoin hasn't been closer to where they started. Where they are has gotten closer to the narratives of Bitcoin and the image of Bitcoin that are commonly held and consensus, right?

It is, they are not immune from that. Whatever techniques they use, Bitcoin content creators get closer to Bitcoin, the deeper they go. So it's kind of a, it's probably just a worry that's unfounded in general. The idea that any individual could be big enough to shape the narrative ineffectually, I think, is perhaps a little bit overblown of a concern. But I guess, you know, by way of wrapping up, last thing, and, you know, I've heard you speak and I've, you know, read everything you've written for a long time. So I have a sense of what your answer is going to be.

But let's talk about Satoshi's sense of marketing. Would you argue that Satoshi had a better sense of how the idea of Bitcoin and the narratives around Bitcoin were going to interact with the real world than perhaps we give him credit for? I think he understood how difficult of a problem it was going to be. I'm not sure if he knew exactly how to do it. I think there's a quote from Satoshi that says like he goes, I think, I'm paraphrase. in here, so I'm probably going to miss the mark a little bit, but I believe he said, you know, I think this would be attractive to libertarians, but talking about how this all works is bloody hard.

It's really tough. He's right. I mean, he does a really nice job of distilling topics down, and it's actually really impressive for someone to have his capability to get so deep into the weeds. You know, he built it from scratch, but to be able to zoom all the way out and tell people about it. He actually does a decent job back in, I'd say, you know, say a pretty good job in 08 to 2010 and describing it. You know, he has to, it's not an easy task, especially in the early days, because like all of our, my content was formulated based on other people's content, including Nathaniel's.

And so there's no, you know, when we talk about ideas and narratives, it's pretty hard for a narrative or an idea just to come out of nowhere where someone was in a cave and, came out with this idea. I mean, we all build ideas on top of other ideas. So Bitcoin's marketing has gotten incredibly better over time because we get to build on top of Jameson Lopp, on Safedine. You know, we can build on top of their marketing and we compress the narrative, make the narrative a little bit more polished. We create different narratives for different groups. This all changes through time. And so I think Satoshi would very much recognize that this is important. You would recognize that it's hard to do. And when we look at,

how he acted as well, he tried to stay pretty neutral when it came to Bitcoin, which I think was a phenomenally, you know, it's hard for a creator not to prescribe something for something that they've built, not to prescribe a narrative for something that they've built. And I think he was very reserved in his own opinion as to how Bitcoin could work. He basically covers all the different narratives of how Bitcoin could function. He describes it as a precious metal. He also describes it being used for micropayments. And I think that was Satoshi. saying like, look, I'm not going to push the community one way or the other. I'll let you guys figure it out. I think we very much see design decisions that show that Bitcoin, you know, I say

Satoshi, I think Satoshi very much understood its value props, that it's immutable and that it's hard to seize and it has a phenomenal monetary policy. I think he understood those extremely well, and those are like the two core value props of Bitcoin, and he kind of left the rest up to the community. And that's where when we read the white paper, the white paper is a marketing pitch. The white paper is a, that's a piece of content marketing that Satoshi was using for the cypherpunks. The cypherpunks don't care about Austrian economics. You don't want to hear Satoshi rattle on about a hard cap and what the monetary policy will be for Bitcoin and why that's important. In fact, the monetary policy and the 21 million hard cap isn't even included in the

white paper. And when you hear about the white paper, purists go, oh, well, it says this or that, we should look at all of Satoshi's writings to understand his motivations, etc. But when we look at how the white paper is crafted, to me, that reads, this is a piece of content marketing. Satoshi was trying to convince the only people that would have cared, which are the cypherpunks, you know, if he had blasted this out on a CNN advertisement, its conversion rate would have been 0.000,000,000,000, 1% because no one would have cared about that narrative. But the cypherpunks did. And so he wanted to capture their attention and get them excited about what he was building. And that's why he uses words like cash, because cash doesn't mean cash in your pocket. It means finality and privacy,

which is what the cypherpunks cared about. So that's why he titles it that. He's trying to get them excited. He's not titling a peer-to-peer cash system for the wide world. Again, this is a white paper. How many white papers have you read before you read the Bitcoin white paper? It's not a frequent thing that we do. So very much, I think Satoshi is a marketer at heart. He understands this. He understood that the narrative would be propagated primarily through speculation. I think that took incredible foresight to understand human motivation and to understand that he could tap into that one element of humans, greed, and use that to market Bitcoin and that the price alone would market Bitcoin. So I would say Satoshi is very much a viral marketer. He understood how to propagate

narratives at an incredibly eloquent and simple way, which tapped into human greed. And then to get the early people to help him build it, he basically tapped into their sentiment around around what cash should be. Love it. Well, I think that's a perfect conclusion to a really excellent conversation about a topic that I think is fascinating. And, you know, we always talk about just how different this is being built than really anything in modern history.

And the marketing and storytelling around it is another part. So, Dan, thanks so much for hanging out today. I had a blast. Thanks for having me, Nathaniel. Reflecting on that conversation with Dan, I just love the idea that Bitcoin is just in free markets business. Numerous people like Dan Tapiero on this show have made note of how Bitcoin is really the last free market. And I think that that extends even to how things like its narratives are constructed, right? There really is a perpetual battle going on to define, to explain,

to make sense of, and to tell the story of the future of Bitcoin. And in that battle, the best ideas win. In fact, I think you can make a strong argument that over and over again, the best ideas have been able to beat out even the best funded ideas. And that's something really powerful. So anyways, guys, I hope there was some good food for thought there. And until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.