The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency by Finn Brunton

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency by Finn Brunton Finnb.net

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast oh my gosh why does he always say that i don't know because it's the intro of the podcast anyway guys uh you know the drill.

Get yourselves over to YouTube.com so you can watch the video version of this podcast. Because the video version, in Swedish we call it version, the video version of it you can watch. It's really cool technology. You can even watch it on your phone. It's amazing. It's 2020 now. There's all sorts of cool stuff can watch. It's really cool technology. You can even watch it on your phone. It's amazing. It's 2020 now. There's all sorts of cool stuff like that. Or, you know, if you just like listening to the auto version,

you can do that as well. You can go to the CBPN, refer to your favorite friends, neighbors, relatives, even give it to your enemies. Like, have your enemies listen to it. Maybe they'll become better people, and then you can be friends again with them. Never thought of that, did you?

Neither did I. I just brought it up. So anyway before i segue again we always have the most wonderful guests on the christmas show um i can't think of a time where we didn't have the best guests let me see no there wasn't a time ever we always had the best guests and uh brilliant authors brilliant minds and today we have another one. This gentleman is so smart. He's brilliant. That's how brilliant and smart he is. Finn Brunton. He's the professor at UC Davis. That's how smart he is. He is the author and co-author of several books, including Spam, A Shadow History of the Internet, Obfuscation, A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest, and Digital Cash, The Unknown History of the Anarchist, Technologist, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency.

So this is going to be fun to have him on. Welcome to the show there, Vin. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. That's one hell of a long title, Digital Cash, the unknown history of anarchists, utopians, and technologists who created cryptocurrency. You can get it on Amazon or other places. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs.

Yeah, so I'm at finnb.net is my home for everything. And it's got links to all the books. As you say, many of them, you know, we're living in an age of super long book titles. So many of them have, but one of these days I'm going to have like a masterpiece and it's just going to be called, you know, money or plans or something. One word, monosyllable. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, just to give give you guys i was having some fun

with finn in the pre-show where we loosen everybody up and i i said man have you ever you ever thought of having a book title that's just like one syllable words that's kind of where that comes from yeah we're like you know back in the 1700s like everyone would have their book titles be like you know the something something or the tale of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and like we're going back to that now. Yeah. Mine's just going to be book. Yes.

There we go. That's the ultimate. Yeah, totally. So what's your book about books? So, so this, this book is, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. No, that's okay. Go ahead.

No, I, so this, this book is about, in some ways there's a little bit of a bait and switch because you kind of see the title or, or the way it's been presented online. It's like, this is a book about Bitcoin and it is, but Bitcoin really only appears in like the last quarter. It's actually a book about trying to understand how the, the technologies that made up Bitcoin and all of these other cryptocurrencies that we talk about now, blockchain systems, all that stuff, those technologies actually go back decades. And that when we look back at them and also understand why the sometimes very unusual, sometimes very strange reasons why people wanted to build these technologies then we can understand a lot better why things like bitcoin are the way they are you know like what what choices made them into these particular

tools that we have now that's what intrigued me about the book i saw the title and i'm like this sounds really interesting because i'm familiar with cryptocurrency but i like the history aspect of it like how do we get here why do we do the things we do and what led us? Plus the title kind of looks like I should be on Anson or something. So there's that. The cover art, I was so happy about this because normally you get like a tech book. It gets a very kind of techie cover. But a lot of this book is about like kind of cultural mutants who are trying to create like a new visionary world. So we got this really psychedelic uh covered this by an

artist named joey colombo who does this incredible work where he takes entirely currency and he cuts it up with like an exacto knife and assembles all these new pictures out of it so that's really currency that's that's mapped out there on the cover of the book yeah yeah he's super i really encourage i think he's at like j.columbo on Instagram. I really encourage looking at his stuff. He's really, really cool. That's really neat. So, and this speaks to what you, so basically let's get into the book. Like how do we get, how do we take us from the beginning one and stuff like that?

Or maybe, you know what, can you start with maybe tell us why you wrote the book? Like what intrigued you about it? Yeah. Yeah. Start with maybe tell us why you wrote the book, like what intrigued you about it? Yeah, yeah. So I'm a historian of technology mostly, right? So what really interests me is not just like talking about how a technology evolved over time or how it was made, but also trying to understand why it came to be, kind of when and how it did. Because you can usually understand a lot more about both history and

technology by looking at things that way. So I wrote my first book on spam, right? Like on, you know, everybody's least loved part of the internet, you know, spam email, spam, all that stuff. And in the back of my mind, and I was finishing it up around like 2008, 2009, which was right when the earliest days of Bitcoin were starting. And one thing that I kept noticing that stayed in the back of my mind was spammers have one big problem, right? Like they've been able to overcome

all of these other like tools for stopping them from spamming. But they have one big problem, which is once you've hooked a sucker, how do you get the money out of them, right? Like it's one thing to sort of trick someone into sending you a bunch of money, but where do they send it? And how do you get that money without creating a legal paper trail that,

you know, is going to connect up to you? Basically, right? It's like the classic, it's one thing to rob a bank. It's another thing to get away with it. So I noticed that spammers and especially especially these kind of very high-tech spammers who are doing these ransomware attacks, right? Where you download some malware and it locks up your computer and then won't unlock it unless you pay them something. They were starting to try to do these payments in Bitcoin. And I was like, that's really interesting.

This is this kind of new experimental currency. But, you know, I always look like the, some of the earliest drivers of any new medium are pornographers. And like, you know, it's were like, that's what they keep. I'm like, mom, hey, can we get movies? They're like, it's where all the porn is. And you're like, I want them more now. Yeah, exactly. And especially when you look at a lot of digital technologies, when they enter the consumer space, digital network technologies, one of the things that you see is that pornographers tend to be like drivers of industry for like, they had to come up with payment platforms, right? Like, you know, they had to come up with ways that people could securely pay for stuff online in large volumes, they had to come up with, like really sophisticated ways

of distributing images and streaming video and like doing all these like there was a lot of inventiveness there so it's just to say that like i always look to uh what we might think of as like shadier areas of new technologies because i think you can often see a lot of innovation happening there and the moment that i saw that like spammers and malware people were trying to figure out how to use bitcoin i was like hmm this really suggests this thing's like, something's really interesting is happening here. And then I worked on this book with my colleague, Helen Nissenbaum, called Obfuscation, which is all about how to hide your data. Basically, it's all about privacy. And as I was working on that, I kept running into the same people back in the 80s and 90s who were trying to figure out how to make being online more private.

And one of the things that a lot of them were deeply concerned about is how do you make monetary transactions private? Because there's a huge kind of hidden danger there that we don't always think about. Every time you pay for something electronically, you're identifying yourself, you're identifying where and when you are, and you also might be producing a lot of data about what you bought. And that's like actually a lot of power. So I started to see like a lot of those people in the eighties and nineties were trying to figure out like,

what does a private transaction system look like? And then I realized, Oh my God, these guys tie into Bitcoin too. Like it's all coming together around this thing. So that's really where I realized, like, I think I need to just write a whole book about this. You know, my friend was on the small team that built the iphone andy grignard oh wow probably seen him in a few movies and one of his tasks during the whole thing of building the iphone i think it was a team of like 10 or 12 uh was he had to test the phone for porn like he had to make sure the browser would download porn properly and he's the first person to watch porn on an iphone because well you know he's working right he's gonna do but they had to test it because you know i don't know maybe steve jobs was a you know

needed to do whatever i don't know he's a jerk yeah uh so anyway but uh you're right i mean that's really the driver for it um so i know that one of the big things that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was really being used for early is I remember the story of Ross Albright. He was the Silk Road, Darknet marketplace, and that thing turned into like a huge drug thing, man. Yeah. I mean, it turned into huge. I think he was doing like a billion dollars or something

yeah it was it was an enormous industry yeah and uh i saw that and just went holy crap and uh i think he's enjoying jail right now but uh that's his business um but uh let's see his net worth was 28.5 million at the time of of seizure, and that's the Bitcoin they were able to track. Yeah. Not bad for a guy running a business out of a public library on his laptop. Oh, yeah. This is like, it was crazy, man. And here they were running just drugs internationally.

If I recall, there was like a billion dollars in the transactions that went through it or something like that. Just crazy stuff. So you really feel like the reason. And I know the guy, there's a dude who created Bitcoin. And was Bitcoin the first cryptocurrency? I mean, it's, you know, it's the first one of real significance, basically. Like, you know, if I can put on my kind of like pittantic historian hat for a second it's like there were you know a bunch of previous versions of things that were kind of assembling the parts that more or less make up

bitcoin in different ways they had names like you know bit gold and b money and like all these different sorts of experiments but bitcoin was the first to really link all those parts together. It solved a couple problems by how it used these technologies that no one had ever solved before. But, and I don't think this can be like overstated, it also came out at absolutely the perfect time. Yeah. Right.

Like people have been proposing digital cash projects for a long time in lots of different ways. But Bitcoin came out at like the nadir of the global financial crisis. like people have been proposing digital cash projects for a long time and lots of different ways, but Bitcoin came out at like the nadir of the global financial crisis, right? Like, you know, end of tail end of 2008 Halloween night, right? This moment, in fact, there's like a detail encoded in the Bitcoin, like the Genesis Bitcoin block, which is a reference to the text of the headline in the Times of London

that was like a second bailout for banks, you know, like this like financial emergency. So it's suddenly this thing that says, hey, we're not just like a transaction platform, right? We're not just something you can use to buy and sell things. We're also a new form of money. And we're coming out in the middle of this giant emergency for like all existing forms of money. And then you combine that with the fact that it really presented itself as an enabler for new kinds of commerce, you know, like people, it was one of the first really functional viable versions of a digital currency that had said in like, I think the fourth bullet point or fifth bullet point of the white paper, this can be anonymous. You can like, you can conduct yourself anonymously using this. And so people really started to like,

think about like, that's a great driver for adoption is being able to say like, hey, you can do anonymous online financial transactions using this tool, and it might help you weather this crazy economic storm, right? Like those are really good contexts for getting people to start like, you know, transacting for driving its use. It was interesting to watch the rise of it, and I kind of got it right away. I mean, I didn't fully understand the science behind it, but I got that it was a disruptive currency. I thought it was great because, you know, the way you could trade over the Internet and buy and sell stuff.

And I, as a young boy, as a young man, what story is this? When I was like, I don't don't know 18 or 19 i started studying to be a stockbroker and i was going to go stockbroker which was a bad time to do it because right it was right after black monday black tuesday black monday um and um and uh and so i learned about you know money policy i own a mortgage company for almost 20 years so i understood money policy the federal reserve I understood everything about it. And so to me, seeing the nature of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was great because I'm like, this is a currency that could disrupt governments.

I mean, just overthrow everything. And you just watch the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve start to crap a brick over cryptocurrency it's pretty interesting and then i uh i hung out with brock uh pierce in california and he was going out and giving seminars and got a chance to meet him and stuff this is before he was uh voted onto the board of the bitcoin foundation um and then he's speaking of crazy standards he's running for president now so that's kind of weird wow yeah news to me i don't know what he's been smoking out there in puerto

rico they all moved to puerto rico because it's like a tax-free haven i guess after the hurricane um so that's kind of interesting but this probably fits in your narrative of you know all the all the weird stuff people do with cryptocurrency but it's really neat so give us more about your book well that i mean for what it's worth what you just said actually fits in more than you would think because like a big part of kind of the the that what the book is sort of about is realizing just how far out and experimental the like agendas and goals of the people who built the technology really were, you know, that like, it's one of the things that makes it especially fascinating is that it's not it's, it's a technology where,

where people weren't just making it because like this works better, you know, this is more efficient. This is et cetera, et cetera. It was instead like, this is a way that we can transform human society forever, right? Like this is a way that we can remake the world through this system. So part of what I like follow in the book is the sort of the way that these different agendas keep weaving together. And basically one of them is like, we can ensure a, we can basically stop a totalitarian future from happening if we can build like private transaction tools and platforms, right?

And these are some of the people I was talking about a little bit before, right? Yeah. Yes. They're kind of people who are looking forward from the seventies, the eighties and being like, oh my God, like a, a, like, you know like a digital network transaction tool that is not private, that's going to be a lever for dystopia, right? And again, just like we were talking about, it's both something that generates all this information about you and where you are, but also, and this was something they all foresaw in the 80s and 90s, if you have real-time

information about what someone is buying, you can make it so they can't buy it, right? Like you can, you know, they could already envision something where if you wanted to run a like totalitarian society, then a great way to do it would be to have total control over the like electronic point of sale system where if you want to buy a book and you're on a list as not being able to buy certain books, it will just decline your card as you try to make the purchase. So they said, okay, we've got to head off this

like totalitarian dystopia at the past with private transaction tools. Then there's the second group, which takes that in a way more extreme direction. And these are the cypherpunks. And the cypherpunks are kind of a political spectrum in the 80s and 90s, but they're all people who share, who understand how important it is to get powerful encryption tools into everybody's hands, right? They understand how dangerous it is that electronic surveillance can be enabled. They want to figure out how to disable it. But some of them see this as the first step towards the destruction of like all existing order, basically, right? Like the notion is, I mean, most notably, this is this guy, the crypto anarchist named Timothy May, who outlined his vision of the future over and over again, which was basically, we start by

having everyone get strong encryption, we build like digital cash platforms, we build like anonymous or pseudonymous marketplaces. No one ever needs to know who anyone else is, but we can trust each other's reputations, blah, blah, blah. We create like tax havens around the planet. You know, we like draw everyone into this alternative economy that's totally untaxed and conducted in anarchist currencies. And then everything just collapses.

And then presumably like it all works out to that this is the this sounds like the prenup i had in my fourth marriage it's really amazing like it's super like it's it's uh it's very extreme and one of the particular reasons for why it's important to remember may is that he along with being like a real kind of cheerleader and torchbearer for this whole movement, was that he, among many other things, created like sort of hoax of what he thought the future could be like, the system called BlackNet. And BlackNet was going to be this like anonymous information trading digital marketplace. And BlackNet was a direct inspiration for both WikiLeaks and the silk road right like

may in a lot of ways kind of created you know the 20 teens um they're created like kind of big drivers for it so that's kind of group number two those guys seek that inspiration from him yes yeah yeah they really like and assange was like in the cypherpunk scene he was on their mailing list like he wrote back and forth. Ross Ulbricht credited Timothy May and his ideas for like what he saw the Silk Road. Because for him, the Silk Road was just the starting point. The idea was you'd start with this marketplace. And then every transaction people did on it would kind of teach them how to like operate in black markets outside of state control. And it would sort of be this like accelerator for eroding away,

like, you know, governments effectively. So that's, that's group two. And then group three, which is in some ways the strangest group of all, they share a lot of people with the, with the cypherpunks, like they all kind of knew each other. And they were the group in which almost every key person in bitcoin was somewhere in this mix of this group and they were called the extropians i love that all these people give themselves these super cool sci-fi gang names you know extropians yeah right it's like they sound like they should be you know mining the asteroid belt or something and that's

what they wanted to do they also sound like they had bicycles instead of harleys like i don't know yes no they were they were very like california cyberpunk you know kind of very health focused probably teslas yeah yes yes exactly but right so their and their thing was that they had kind of had this whole like philosophy and theory of history, which was basically that technological innovation results from an economic system that is as unregulated as possible. Like systems that create like, you know, bubbles and like out of control phenomena. That to them was a good thing, right? They were like, any attempt to manage or like regulate investment is going to interfere with the ability to innovate new technologies. But their particular like long-term goal, and this is what is fantastic about them, was we want to so accelerate the speed of technological innovation that there are a series of breakthroughs which make it possible for us to live forever. Like we can see where this technology, right?

We're real. We can see where this technology is going. It's going to make it so we can like upload our brains onto computers or we can like, you know, like embed our minds onto cloned young bodies or we can you know like for that yeah yeah right like it's doesn't it sounds kind of incredible and so their their idea was if we can create them the tools the financial mechanisms that can accelerate innovation by creating this kind of economy that we envision it will basically like spit out all of these transformative technologies that will make it so we can live, you know, in space like gods forever, you know? So they were, they were kind of the ultimate, like radically committed people. But again, like all of their kind of

particular ideas about how they would design money to make this machine happen. All of those end up turning up in bitcoin in one former and wow it was just like that that perfect it's like napster just hit it out of the park and boom or something i don't know facebook or whatever um yeah that's really interesting to me um because because you kind of wonder how it all came together and then and then you see the the the thing of it too where it's you can invest in Bitcoin just by owning Bitcoin, which circumvents the stock market, circumvents the Fed. I mean, I just looked at it and went, holy crap, this could bring down some governments. You know, if the U.S. government, this U.S. government, you know, has its debt based in the dollar and being able to sell that thing to every country around the world.

And evaluation, you suddenly make that thing worthless and we got some problems, baby. And then China, I guess, figured it out, you know, fairly well on that this could be definitely a problem for them and their evil plan of social credit networks and stuff and so they they shut all that down yeah it's a really i mean one of the kind of interesting things about seeing how all this is played out is seeing the ways in which stuff like this can also be incorporated in a lot of ways right like and that's

kind of one of the one of the really interesting things about watching how it's all kind of been working itself out is seeing how there's still communities that have these very radical convictions, right? That we're adopting this because this is going to be the driver of this anarchist transformation of the world and then there's a lot of people who are like we want to create a bitcoin trading form that will

abide by know your customer requirements and will you know like treat this as an asset that's taxable and like become a kind of a new version of like a foreign exchange speculation market and sort of seeing part of what i feel like you've been able to really see in the Bitcoin space over the last while has been a lot of like tension between like these different groups who all kind of have a different idea of what this is actually supposed to be, you know? Yeah. And then you've got governments that, you know, are trying to regulate it,

control it, you know, step in and try and, you know, give oversight. But, I mean, that's where you lose the democratization and the power. I remember I love the anonymous factor of it because, like, I remember I think it was 2013 or something, we read stories on a company called Shit Express. And basically what you could do is this guy had, was it 2014? This guy somewhere in, I don don't know i think he's in china now but he i think he was in like you know yugoslavia or one of those weird foreign countries

in europe and you could bitcoin him 20 bucks and he would mail a little uh tub of of of horse poop filled with horse poop. And you could even tell him what sort of instructions you want to put on it, like, you know, F you or whatever you deserve this or, you know, I hate you, whatever. And he would mail it through the postal service and the people would get it and they'd be totally anonymous. You know, they wouldn't know that they came from this company and so man i did that to so many neighbors it wasn't even funny with barking dogs um but i loved it because they would never there was like no way like even they got an attorney and sued the company there's like no way they could figure out uh it was me i don't know me there was but i mean you know he's in europe

i mean yeah that thing out and um he's been i think he's still't know if it was me, but he's in Europe. I mean, you can't sit on that thing. And I think he's still doing it. But it was pretty funny. I mean, I actually sent one to me because we tested it to review it. And, you know, it's a little Tupperware. And, you know, it's got a little thing on it, you know, saying FU. And you open it up, and it's a whole thing of poop so yeah it's but see this is the thing right is that like one of the other things that i feel like

a lot of uh like the early cryptocurrency had to kind of struggle with was how many of its initial uses were like things that were taking advantage of the anonymity in various ways you know um including actually one of my personal favorites which is still an ongoing thing which is um assassinations right so the reason why i assassinations are your favorite thing well no so i should explain the reason i say it's such a light-hearted way is that um there's this whole scene on uh the so-called dark web right on like you know tor onion sites and stuff where you can find these sites where people are like you know hit men for hire and you pay in bitcoin and they're all the reason why i find it hilarious is they're all scams because taking advantage of the anonymity thing they're all these like sort of you know incredibly like you know they have

this great like graphic design where it's all kind of like you're getting in touch with Jason Bourne and putting out a hit. Hitman R Us, call today. 100% guarantee. By the way, we're not the FBI. Wink. Yes. It's really not that far off from that. Wow.

I love the idea of someone being like, well, yes, this is how it happens now. And they're sending money to some Macedonian teenageronian teenager who's gonna buy a new motorcycle you know or whatever but you know what i'd do i'd have a site set up where i would get your money and then i'd be like okay blackmail time yeah you need to send me more bitcoin or i'm going to the feds um of course i don't know that could reverse i don't know but yeah i mean they just busted that one kid recently who hacked all the twitter accounts yeah yeah like 17 or something yeah and uh i guess some people sent him money um and uh yeah it's it's crazy you know some of the legal stuff that you can do um but uh i don't know it's, you, what you're telling me was, you know,

I've always heard Edward Snowden harp about how, you know, we need to be encrypted, but, you know, it sounds like you talk about how there's a future that way that can get out of hand maybe. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there's, I think it's possible to find like a good middle way though, you know, like the, the the sort of you know that the hard part with a lot of the like pure crypto anarchist projections is that they always they always assume that the government is just going to give up you know like everyone's just going to be like well you know like this technology is very advanced so i guess we'll just you know fold up shop and you know sell our office furniture and leave. But I think there's, you know, for me, the kind of one of the really important things

is to find a way to, you know, without having to like sort of say like, basically to not say like it has to be full crypto anarchist or nothing, you know, because I think it's actually really socially important to be able to have strong civilian encryption. The kinds of ways that people can basically be abused in situations where you permit too much oversight, I think that is incredibly dangerous. And, you know, one way that I like to think about this, just to get like really practical for a second, is like, to look at how poor people who receive benefits, for example, in New York State, right? Like you don't get cash, you get like a card, and the card has a kind of money on it that is only useful for certain things, right? So, you know, and on one level, you can be like, okay, I can see the point of that in some areas, but it's often really arbitrary. And so it ends up being like you can,

you can't buy prepared food, which means that like, if you have like a rotisserie chicken, right, that's like the cheapest protein in the grocery store, that's a loss leader, but you can't buy it because in the database, it is prepared. And also like that data is constantly surveilled, and it can play a role in like whether or not your kids get taken away like it's it's a huge amount of power so now i need to stay away from that history chicken at costco no exactly it's like it's so like and then like imagine that being given to you know like the like i always say like when you're thinking of the implications of a technology imagine it being given to your worst adversary you know, like I always say, like when you're thinking of the implications of a technology, imagine it being given to your worst adversary, you know, imagine this being given to like

the crummiest, most exploitative payday loan corporation. And they're like, you know, we'll give you this cash advance in this digital form. And then part of the terms of service are, we get to sell your data to anybody. And we will like decide that certain things will be more expensive so that you will have to buy from like our you know sweetheart deal companies or whatever like it it could get really really really bad so that's part of why i almost want to say like you know let's let's steer away from the crypto anarchist idea because i think that turns it from like hey we could make people a lot more free into we can only make people more free if we destroy everything you know so it's like to kind of have like an incremental stage there i think is anarchy is free i guess yeah

yeah yeah fucking no rules and it's the purge run with it yeah um there you go yeah so so that it's interesting to me you go through a lot of different things hash cash big gold b money r pal crypto credits the black net uh a lot of people are trying to figure out this thing um and uh you know now there's like so many different cryptocurrencies like i can't keep track of them like i lost track a long time ago me too yeah and like coin and um you know one of my old friends uh michael errington uh took over um started an investment thing and i think he is he uh xrp is what he invested in and started a hundred million dollar fund in um and then that crashed but i think he bought uh he bought some news uh thing that does news for for uh i think it's coin or something coin gold or something he bought some news outlet for that um but it's interesting to me how many different things are and then and then how

cryptocurrency went from you know being a bitcoin monetary thing to the blockchain and i confused everybody everyone's like what i thought we're doing some money here now we're doing account like what the hell's going on i thought we were making money and now now now ibm's involved and they want to they want to i don't know do inventory or something on our shit what the fuck is what and then bitcoin splitting there's big cash and there's yeah i don't know it's crazy man it's crazy yeah and what was interesting to me is so many people could always have invested in the dollar i mean you know you can buy t-bills or invest the dollar in the stock market i guess

um but it doesn't have that wild beautiful speculation that bit that bitcoin did you know yeah people are like yeah man but at 600 you know i know some at 600 fortune unfortunately i sold it before it went to 20 grand and uh you know and then it goes down again i got friends losing their shirts and i got other friends you know uh you know that are bitcoin millionaires and stuff um and so it's been an interesting journey to watch where do you see the the future of, of all this going? Does it, what's the future of cryptocurrency and everything else? That's a great question. No, it's, it's, I mean, so I, yeah, yeah. Well, I should, I should say like, you know, I am,

no one should ever take investment from advice from me on anything ever, you know, lawyer disclosure right now. Yeah. from me on anything ever. You know, the lawyer disclosure right now. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you understand that this guy is like not a pro in this area,

et cetera. But I would, I would, I would say, I think there's, there's a couple of different directions that the future is going to go in, in my estimation. One of them is just as you say,

right. Blockchain is, you know, is, and has already become its own thing. And I mean, that's partially because, you know, in a really weird way, the creation of digital cash, the creation of Bitcoin involved actually having to solve an even harder, weirder problem than, like, how do you create a digital coin that people can transact. And that harder, weirder problem was, well, the only way you can make that digital coin is if you have a system where all of, you know, a huge population of strangers who don't know each other can all trust one another through some kind of mechanism that everyone owns what they say they own and that everyone is transacting what they say they're

transacting. And that's this like huge distributed app and only ledger, which is the blockchain, right. That you can like a system where everyone can be certain that stuff is being added to this ledger and never altered or changed after it's added, you know, like, and that actually is like an,

a kind of an amazing tool, like something where you don't need to rely on any other institution to timestamp something to be able to provide proof of ownership. So blockchain is going to keep on being its own thing, you know, its own way of like doing logistics, doing ownership of all different kinds. Like there's some really interesting blockchain applications for everything you can think of from like deeds to,

I mean, speaking of prenuptials to like to you know contracts and pre-maps and like all those different kinds of things like having a kind of distributed notary system is actually like sounds very boring but is extremely powerful oh it's great but then i hired a notary the other day it cost me like 40 bucks i was like what the hell yeah yes yeah because it's actually really like it's kind of a hard problem to be able to say for sure that like you know this document was like you know certified as having and in fact um something that gets overlooked a lot but um my colleague amy whittaker like tracked down the fact that the earliest blockchain has nothing to do with money. It was created by scientists because they were like,

when you're in the sciences, right? Like it's really important to be able to say when people go back and like check your data that like, you know, I'm not messing with the numbers. This happened this day. This happened that day. These experiments happen in this order, whatever. So they've got this whole system of like paper notebooks that are specially designed. So you can't like swap pages or cut pages out, things like that. So the scientists were like, well, what do we do about this digitally?

And they basically invented the blockchain. And they had this whole system where you could like digitally stamp your scientific results. And then so everyone could collectively verify. And this is true they published a um uh like a an ad in the lost and found section of the new york times i think like once a week that would have like the cryptographic key for everyone to be able to type that in and be like okay all of this is still accurate you know so it's to say that like there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with that kind of system but getting back to the money part which is obviously kind of the sexier, more exciting part. Like, I think my personal guess over the longer term is that the period when we had,

if you lived in one country, you kind of had one currency that you used. We think of that as just the way it is. But that's actually a pretty recent invention. And most of human history is like people dealing with a whole mix of different kinds of money, you know, that would range from like certain kinds of like you know, debt to like letters of credit to bills of exchange. They had all these fancy names, like all these weird documents that were their own kind of money. Some kinds of money would be on paper.

There'd be different kinds of coins from different countries, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the reason I say all that is I think that's what the future looks like. The future looks like the past. It looks like a situation where we have a mix of like, you know, territorial currencies, right? Like the US dollar, the Euro, the whatever. And then also kind of different kinds of cryptocurrency vehicles that we use for different purposes. I highly, highly doubt that the future is Bitcoin for everyone, you know, the one and only thing. Instead, I think it's going to be like Bitcoin for this purpose, Ethereum for this purpose, like some kind of who knows what, some weird point system. We already have like all these different currencies we use in the form of like Starbucks cards and airline points and miles and minutes and all the rest of it. So just imagine that like proliferating with like more of those kinds of options for everyone.

I think Starbucks just announced they were going to take, I thought I saw an email recently, they were going to take different types of currency or different ways you could pay for your Starbucks cards or something. I was like yeah i was like okay whatever man you guys really want to sell some coffee um but yeah that keeping a list of everything you do and how you do it um with with blockchain i think my my uh let's see it was my fifth ex-wife used to keep that uh she used blockchain to keep track of everything I'd ever done wrong. And then she could always go back to like, in May 4th of 1999, you left the toilet seat up. But it's going to be interesting to see how it goes and where it goes. And that's really where I kind of faded out a little bit

because there were just so many Litecoin, Dogecoin ethereum xrp and and then the splitting and then i'm just like i don't know man i'm just gonna i'm just trying to get some dollars right now so i'm just gonna work on that part yeah yeah um but i know my friends were into like all of it and there just got to be so much of it that like you could start making up coin names right now and i'd be like yeah that's yeah yeah yeah totally you just you just be like you could start making up coin names right now. And I'd be like, yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. You just, you just be like, you know, about Bob coin, Bob coin is doing really well right now. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

But I don't know, but I probably, there's probably people right now looking at Bob coin on the podcast. Where's Bob? Bob coin. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Maybe I can get in on that. that you know maybe there's like a you know yeah how's mining doing these days bitcoin or just you know cryptocurrency mining and stuff well i mean cryptocurrency mining is an evolving area right like the the kind of you know i know a lot of people in the bitcoin space and and so i i it hurts me to say this, but in a lot of ways, like the, the original Bitcoin mining system was clearly a bad prototype, you know, like never, like there's a whole lot of flaws with choosing that specific thing, which we can now, without getting into too much technical detail, but we can kind of see that in terms of how it's become this like monster energy hog right like it's the system that needs colossal amounts of electricity to do nothing right like the problem like it all it produces is heat and then like a verifiable level of difficulty and nothing else is achieved by this it's so insanely wasteful

but so there's a bunch of um and it's also something that has become very centralized which was a whole big kind of concern early on, but which now everyone just kind of deals with the fact, like just lives with the fact that there's like this mining, which was supposed to have been like spread out. So that like people were competing on a more level playing field has now really been centralized into a small group of mega miners in places with like very cheap electricity. But the kind of cool thing is that people are coming up with new ways to think about how you do that verification of trust, right? So there's lots of different ways now to, you know, quote unquote, mine for coins. And not all of them involve, you know, just racks and racks and racks of chips, you know, like taking megawatts and megawatts and megawatts of power. So people are coming up with some very cool ways where, for example, there's kinds of coins that are evolving now where your buy-in to the coin is that you give some kind of resource to the whole coin community. So maybe it's something where you can, for example uh give uh space on your

computer that other people can store pieces of data in whenever your computer is online and you have this kind of distributed storage system and then in return for that space you get the ability to like get some coin and then you can use that coin to buy space yourself or to like do some you know or to like trade it with other people or buy other stuff with it so there's some very cool ways to think about like how could we use sounds like multiple marketing coin where there is well tears yeah there's there's a lot of you know i mean for me and i don't mean to say this in a light-hearted way but like as someone who like does a lot of history related to like scams and crimes and things like that like one of the hilarious things about cryptocurrencies has been that like every financial scam that has ever existed has been replicated in cryptocurrency at least once you

know yeah ponzi schemes pyramid schemes every kind of like you know like boiler room like junk bond hustle like it's all been all been recreated there. I don't know if it's miners looking for things aren't working out for them anymore, but in the last two weeks, I've been hustled by two guys, one on Instagram, which kind of came out of the blue. I'm like, why are you pitching me Bitcoin mining and stuff? And then another one was on LinkedIn, and it started out with

just a real idiot conversation like do you know what cryptocurrency is i'm like dude have you fucking read my bio and it just it just like he just i go yeah i do i've you know i bought i have some i have coinbase and and uh and uh there's not much in it, so don't bother going looking, people. I think it was like 80 bucks or something in there. And, of course, tomorrow if Bitcoin goes to 20 grand, it'll be like $100. Yeah. And then the next week it'll be down to 70. But they were hitting me up for, near as I could tell tell some sort of thing where they wanted me to give them money and they would mine for it and then i'd get money back because they were

posting these posts from proposing customers like i made an extra three grand with joe and uh i was like what and there's one guy on Instagram. He'd taken and, like, if you looked at his Instagram wall, he blocked out, like, huge blocks where he put up, like, 20 photos across, and they all looked like, you know, his blockchain wall. So I don't know. Is that, like, a new scam going on, whether he's a blockchain dudes or not blockchain, but Bitcoin miners, or they're not making money anymore so they're trying to hustle yeah small time people i i don't know about that exactly but i've seen a bunch of

examples of basically people sending messages that are that sort of trick people who don't know or understand much about bitcoin into thinking that like, basically, well, so there's this classic old fashioned American scam called the money machine, right? Where the idea is that like, someone shows you a box, you put a piece of blank paper in, they crank the handle, and it spits out like a $20 bill. And then you sell the person that for, some big chunk of cash, and then you abscond from town and are never seen again. But I've seen a bunch of Bitcoin come-ons by email that have all kind of taken that form, which is basically give me some money and I will run my magic mining machine for you. And then I will sell the Bitcoin on your behalf and return all of this cash to you.

And it's guaranteed 15, 15 000 return on your investment or whatever yeah it's it's kind of like i just saw it i just smelled it out as soon as i could i'm like i'm like you're not making money doing this so you're making money kind of teaching it which you know it's like it's like you always see the people that are like i have a course on linkedin you're like because you can't make money on linkedin yes yes well no're going to teach me how to make money on LinkedIn by making a course. That's all I want to be on LinkedIn. Yeah. I see what's going on here. Carlton sheets. Um, the, uh, so yeah, it's, it's an interesting, uh, thing, uh, in, and, uh,

an interesting world. And I guess you go through it in the book and document all the weirdness, the craziness, the insanity. It's, it's been, it's been a lot of, it's by far my most fun book that I've ever written. Like it's, it's got so much strange, amazing, true stuff in there. Yeah. And, and it's probably not going to get any less crazy maybe in the future.

Oh no. I mean, well, I think, I think, you know no i mean well i think i think you know these aspects of of you know bitcoin and blockchain and so on like there's elements of them that are definitely getting kind of institutionalized and regularized and stuff like that like the you know the the big concern on the part of people that i i met from uh the u.s treasury was not even necessarily that it was going to like destroy the dollar but that there was going to be contagion problems right they were basically worried that it was going to like destroy the dollar, but that there was going to be contagion problems, right? They were basically worried that like, if there is like a huge speculative bubble around Bitcoin, then it'll start like sucking money out

of the existing economy. And then if the bubble pops, then there might be like financial panic that that would set off in other areas. But they're now starting to like sort of be like, okay, everything's kind of moderating and settling down and meanwhile you're getting these situations where like huge central banks are like we're interested in issuing our own cryptocurrency or we're interested in using blockchain to manage our like settlement system between our banks or whatever like so that part of it is probably going to get very normalized but i think the cryptocurrency landscape as a whole is just going to keep

getting stranger you know like it's it's there's a lot of potential in the technology that has not been halfway unlocked yet and see i understood investing you know i used to do day training and stuff and so i had friends and like your blockchain is gonna go to 100 000 in the next year you know when it hit 20 and people are you know people getting really stupid with it and and they're like uh yeah we're gonna start having the bear market people come in and we're start realizing like a market and i'm like you guys don't understand once these bear market short sellers show up and can start playing the the short put game with the stocks and bitcoin stuff they're gonna regulate this fucker down

where it's not going to have wild swings anymore it's going to yeah it's going to get stability because they make money on both sides i mean i you see it on the stock market every now if you understand um uh short short selling and everything else in the stock market i mean there's always a guy you know there's always a guy on one guy in the bear side and there's always a guy on one guy on the bear side, and there's always a guy on the bull side. Everyone's fighting over it, and that gives you kind of a form of regulation, if you will. So I'm like, I don't think it's going to 100,000. It may be nice because my 70 bucks would go to 150 or something.

Have you seen the John McAfee tweet that people have been retweeting? I'm trying to remember what it was. It was like four years ago or something like that i'm trying to remember like i can't remember the exact timeline but like i think four years ago maybe yeah someone asked him basically bitcoin to a million and he gave a date he was like four years from now which was a couple days ago he said bitcoin will be at a million. He was like four years from now, which was a couple of days ago. He said, Bitcoin will be at a million or I will like eat my dick on live television or something like that. And now people are like retweeting that to him being like, so, you know,

um, I'm a Kathy. That dude, that dude is one of those, uh, that dude is one of those guys that they should have had in the eighties when they were like, don't do drugs.

This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs a testament to the power of cocaine and weird designer pharmacy yeah god knows god knows what he was doing down there in fact i i don't even know if he's still wanted for murder um i'm not sure what happened. Every now and then he tweets out some crap where he's like, we're hiding in a basement in France because the CIA is after us. Yeah, I'm watching something on him right now. He's wearing glasses and he's in some Samba's room that looks like it's green screen. Why power corrupts. I don't know, dude. Get off the, what the hell is this going to do this?

I think he was running for president for a while too. Like, you know, who knows at this stage, but anyway, it's just to say that, like, I think there's, you know, like, I think you're right that we are seeing like as, you know, you know, it's the classic thing, right? Like as, uh, you know, a financial, like a new financial vehicle and new asset class, as it comes into being all of the smart people and the smart money come into it. And one of the things that really happens is it starts to like settle down, you know, and like lose a lot of those opportunities for,

you know, crazy, just as you said, crazy swings and speculations and stuff. Yeah. And, and I, you know, that's what happens. you you you see you know like i live the dot com era where i was day training during that thing and that thing was crazy because it was real easy to hit a home run but uh every time that was real easy to lose the home run and uh but uh for the most part i mean you could just wake up at 7 a.m and hit whatever new tech tech thing was hitting the ground and, you know, pick up 50 grand in like 20 minutes on that thing. And I remember I put my mom in AOL, and she took it all the way to 100 grand.

Wow. You know, AOL, that was back when it was splitting like five times every two months or something. Yeah. And so, you know, there's's all that so it'll be interesting to see the way it goes it definitely has calmed down and the hype seems to have gone away you know there was a time there when it hit 20 grand where like everybody was talking about it yeah and i guess i'll have to watch my emails it was it was just weird i've never had anybody hit me up about bitcoin mining or investing in it or anything like that.

You know, back in the day when reviews, people would be like, hey, do you want to review some Bitcoin mining things? And I'm like, dude, that's a lot of work just to set that stupid thing up. And I don't really care. And then, you know, you got to deal with, you know, which is higher, the power bill or what you got out of it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's not really viable for like the individual miner anymore like it really is like a conglomerate scale sort of thing i had these yeah

and i had these guys now i remember i had these guys that were calling me up and they're like yeah we get this thing where everybody uses their computer and you basically like rent space at our bitcoin mining facility to you know like, like you said, you use your computer and your thing. And I'm just like, yeah, man, I know what a Ponzi scheme is. I've seen that. I know that's working. Yeah. I saw the Fort Cox movie or whatever it was.

Yeah. The, so crazy stuff. So anything more we need to know about your book? What's in it? Well, I would just, the last thing I just want to mention because it's what's in it well i would just the last thing i just want to mention because it's kind of it's the thing that surprised me the most in writing it and i think it surprises people the most in reading it and it's a hell of a lot of fun is that

that extropian group that kind of third wing of people trying to build digital cash who had such an influence on bitcoin right their particular goal was to create a future where they could, you know, become these immortal, godlike, space-faring, like, beings. And one of the challenges that you face, if that's your goal, is, well, what if you create all the groundwork for the future that you know can happen, and then it kicks in just after you die? So the solution was to have yourself cryonically frozen. So there's a whole section in there about being cryonically frozen and about like how many people in the history of digital cash are like in big tanks in like outside of scottsdale yeah you know immersed in liquid nitrogen yeah um wow it's like

a bunch of key digital cash people are all kind of like now on ice like waiting to be brought back in the future and i just like i find that so fascinating that is like i can't yeah i can't see here's the thing too though i wouldn't want it in scottsdale arizona fuck that somebody kicks that plug out of the wall you know that place is 120 degrees i used to live in vegas man i know what scott stills like i'd be like i you know i'd want that up in what's that seed place that they have where they have this oh yeah yeah that would make sense right put it in like this svalbard like vault you know yeah in the arc circle but if someone's back i mean they kicked the plug out of the wall you know know, for a while, you know,

when the thing is that believe it or not, that has happened before, not with this place, not with the Scottsdale facility, but in the history of cryonics there's been a couple situations where they had a whole setup and then they like ran into a bunch of financial trouble and like their power got cut off. And then you had these amazing legal cases where you had to figure out is this like negligence and violation of contract or is it murder because like the person did this thinking that they were going to like live again you know and like people fighting over

that stuff in court like it's pretty nuts but yeah that's crazy because you're like they're not dead but they're not coming back for a refund so yeah well they think they are but are they really yeah yeah exactly like how do we account yeah yeah that sounds like uh that sounds like a like a materialistic form of what religion calls heaven like yeah you know that's that's the problem with whatever's the religion you know they always want cash up front because you know god's always broke, according to George Carlin. He always needs money. He's all powerful. He's a really smart guy.

He created the universe, but he's always fucking broke. I think he gambles on the horses a lot or something. But he's God, so I don't know. I guess he doesn't know which horse is going to go, even though he's God. But that's his problem um and uh but you know they sell you this real estate you know this this this say you know if you're scientology you get like a planet mormons you get like a planet and then uh and then if you uh you know there's heaven and hell and three layer cakes or whatever i know don't know, three levels of hell, which is, that describes my seventh ex-wife.

And they were good people. And then, so you got this, you got all this going on, but the problem is knowing returns from dead going, hey, man, I want my money back. Can I get that back? It's the perfect deal. There's no inventory. You're just selling a visible real estate.

But that cryptocurrency or the crypto or keeping people in the cryogenic chambers, that's crazy, man. Did they put Michael Jackson, one of those, at the end? Or are they burying him? I don't know. I think he was staying in one yeah i mean i think he was yeah he used to he used to stay in a hyperbaric chamber yeah which is like one one of those ones

where they like that you have very low ox it's like being at a super high altitude so that you have like and actually it's something like certain like super hardcore athletes do i guess too because the idea is right that it's like you sleep at like, you know, 15,000 feet and then you live at sea level and you have this like huge boost of energy or whatever. I keep my penis in one at night so that even though I'll get old, my penis will still be really young. I don't know what that's about.

Sounded weird in my head. Strange, yes, yeah. So there's that those of you who are interested you can go to uh i don't have a joke for that anyway uh so give us the dot cons where people can look you up on the interwebs uh order your book up and read it up yeah yeah so i'm uh i'm at uh finb find.net um the new book is called digital cash and then a crazy long subtitle. But if you just search basically digital cash or like fin digital cash, it'll like bring it up.

And, yeah, there's also a really good audio book version too, actually. Oh, there you go, an audio book. Yeah, for being stuck in traffic. Didn't this just come out on paperback? I should know that. Maybe I'm thinking of another book. Yeah, I know that paperback was on its way. I don't know if it's out yet. Yeah, the paperback is out. Okay, awesome. Yeah, I haven't received my own copies yet.

But yeah. Call somebody. No, the paperback is out. There's a hardcover book. There's the audio book and the kindle you can take and get i think it's really cool i gotta look some more at your at your uh cover because that's all like cut up money that's crazy yeah yeah no joey colombo is he's a he's a genius and like his work is uh it's like it's almost all currency he does it by hand, and it's so cool. Yeah, it's really a trip to look at. Well, it'll be an interesting book to read.

Everyone go check it out. Thanks to Finn for being on the show with us and sharing his wonderful knowledge and brilliance. So order his book up on Amazon.com or support your local booksellers. Also, if you want to see the video version of this, you can go to YouTube.com hit that bell notification and you can go to thecvpn.com or

chrisfosspodcastnetwork.com thanks for being here stay safe and we'll see you next time thank you for having me thanks for coming