Unchained - Reflections on the 10-Year Anniversary of the Bitcoin White Paper - Ep.90

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

For this episode on the eve of the Bitcoin white paper's 10-year anniversary, Nathaniel Popper and Paul Vigna, reporters who cover Bitcoin and crypto for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, respectively, and who have written books about it, discuss wide-ranging questions regarding the first cryptocurrency. We explore why it succeeded where previous digital currencies failed, what role the financial crisis and Satoshi's disappearance played in its success and how it compares to the development of the internet. We also look at the "blockchain, not Bitcoin" debate, the scaling debate and the merits of on-chain governance, and how scandals involving centralized services such as the Equifax hack and the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica breach will affect its development. Finally, we discuss its potential as a global reserve currency, potential abuse of crypto assets by bad state actors, and whether and how regulators can regulate decentralized technologies. Plus, Paul and Nathaniel give their thoughts on the next 10 years. Thank you to our sponsors! Abra: Click this special link for a free $25 in Bitcoin! https://www.abra.com/unchained Onramp: http://www.thinkonramp.com WeTrust: Donate in crypto and have your donation matched by WeTrust through Giving Tuesday, November 27! http://wetrust.io/unchained Episode links: Bitcoin white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Nathaniel Popper: https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper https://www.nytimes.com/by/nathaniel-popper?8qa Digital Gold: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062572066/digital-gold/ Paul Vigna: https://twitter.com/paulvigna https://www.wsj.com/news/author/7296 Age of Cryptocurrency: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250081551 The Truth Machine: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250114570 Edward Bernays' Propaganda: http://www.igpub.com/propaganda/ CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz's speech discussing how they would prosecute illegal prediction markets: https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/opaquintenz16 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get big results in no time by visiting thinkonramp.com. The topic of today's podcast is the 10-year anniversary of the Bitcoin White Paper, which is tomorrow. Here to discuss are two reporters who cover crypto, Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times and Paul Vena of the Wall Street Journal, both of whom have written books about Bitcoin and Crypto. Nathaniel wrote Digital Gold and Paul co-authored both the age of cryptocurrency and the truth machine with Michael Casey, also a previous guest on the podcast. Welcome Nathaniel and Paul. Thanks for having me.

Hi. I'm just going to start with a really broad question. Ten years after the Bitcoin white paper, what are the main thoughts you have about Bitcoin or crypto in general? Well, let's see. Nathaniel, do you want to share what you're going to be writing for the 10-year anniversary? I don't have anything planned currently. I guess maybe I should get going on something. But I, you know, I mean, I think in the biggest picture,

it's sort of been more successful, obviously, than anybody could have imagined when that white paper came out and the first people were reading it. But I think it's sort of gone in all these different directions than I think the white paper would have indicated. So it's sort of been successful, but in different ways than I think people might have anticipated. And, you know, the ways in which things go and take their own form and go in their own direction is, I think, one of the most interesting elements of it to me. Yeah. One thing I think is very interesting is

people like to compare Bitcoin to the internet. And they always talk about the dot-com boom. And I think what they kind of miss about that is, if you think about the birth of the Internet and the birth of Bitcoin and then track their timelines out 10 years, well, the birth of the Internet was the late 60s. So 10 years on from the Internet, the late 70s, nobody had heard of it. It was still basically a project in a lab. The difference with Bitcoin is that Bitcoin went viral. And it became this sort of phenomenon and it became this big thing. And I think that's why people kind of compare it to. the dot-com, boom. So I think that brought a lot of expectations with it that weren't necessarily fair. I don't think 10 years on from Bitcoin being born as an idea, you should have expected this thing to become a fully-fledged, you know, we can argue about what it was supposed to be. I mean, personally, I think it was just supposed to be digital cash, what it was supposed to be.

I don't think that 10 years on it necessarily, that you could have experienced. it would have been that fully formed and done and ready and it's out there. But I also think that because of that mania, that a lot of expectations got heaped on to it. And I don't think it was, I just don't think it was necessarily fair to have some of those on. But they existed. They were there. You had this big speculative boom. And now everybody, now there's, you know, however much money is involved in this sector right now is involved in it.

And people have expectations of it. So I think it kind of like what in the Aal said, I think it kind of because, you know, became more than people expected, but not exactly what people expected. Yeah, actually, I'm going to ask you about that in one second, but I actually also just want to answer my own question a little bit because what you were saying about how, you know, this comparison with the internet 10 years afterward, nobody had heard of it. Like, obviously with Bitcoin, the internet already existed, you know, and so I feel like that's partially why the timeline got sped up.

And then the other thing is that when I just think back to the very beginning where, you know, This white paper was quietly released on this mailing list that nobody cared about, very obscure. And even on the mailing list, not that many people were interested in it. And then here you have, you know, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the white paper, you've got fidelity saying like, okay, we're going to allow, you know, we're going to enable institutions to trade it. You have this new venture with the international continental exchange, you know, backed that's coming online. Goldman's investing in Bitco.

like I feel like there's this kind of crazy validation that just I feel like is so unlikely that anybody would have predicted back when people were paying $10,000 for two pizzas or sorry, 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. So I was curious actually because for both of you, I know that you kind of covered, I think like financial things before. So I was just curious, you know, just as reporters, how does Bitcoin compare to what you'd been covering before previously? Well, I mean, I had been covering markets before that. So, you know, the market threw crazy and they're up and they're down and certainly back when I was doing it, I mean, you know, from like 2005 to 2013 until I found heard about Bitcoin, you know, saw a lot during that time. So it's hard to say that it's not hard to say.

Bitcoin is definitely unique from what I was doing beforehand. As big as what I was doing beforehand was. You know what I mean? The financial markets are obviously a huge global story. But they're a very different. I mean, Bitcoin was just like nothing I really experienced before. And I doubt it's like anything I'll ever experience again. You know, kind of have this front row seat at something being born.

It's something just kind of coming together organically on this global scale. It's sort of underworld, but it's also sort of Silicon Valley. It's a rebel currency, but it's also this big tech innovation. just all the aspects of it. And they were kind of the things that once I grasped that, that was immediately why I wanted to write a book about it. But I think it's just, it is like nothing I ever was around before in terms of a story to tell. Yeah, I mean, I was covering actually similar stuff, financial markets, Wall Street.

And I think the biggest sort of difference from sort of reporters viewpoint for me was, was that there were kind of institutions and authorities in the things in the markets I was covering before. And you sort of knew where to go to sort of get good data and sort of get good views, people with historical knowledge of things who put things in perspective. And I think one of the things that's been so hard for reporters with Bitcoin is that it's not at all clear who is in charge, obviously, because to some degree, nobody's in charge. But particularly early on, it was just so hard to know who you could trust and not, not, you know, just sort of who had a good perspective, but who even was, you know, there was no, there was no background. People didn't have reputations on the line so that

they could, you know, somebody could come in and lie about what was happening or what they were doing. And they didn't have as much to lose as somebody who, you know, covered the financial markets and had a job that they would lose if they were lying. People didn't have jobs in 2013 in this space. There was nothing to lose. And so it was therefore sort of much harder to know who to believe. And I think sort of trying to piece that together over time has been really hard. It continues to be one of the hardest parts of this job. It's just, you know, who can you trust?

I relate to that on so many levels. So going back to what Paul was mentioning, Bitcoin is something of a Rorschach test. As Paul mentioned, he thinks that when Satoshi wrote the white paper, he was proposing digital cash. I mean, obviously it does say that, you know, in the subpoital of the white paper. And now people maybe, or at least now the more likely narrative that you're going to hear is that it's digital gold. some people also really push this motive of like using it to transact outside the legacy financial system or to evade their kind of oppressive financial regimes or capital controls. So what do you think is, yes, what do you think is the main value proposition for Bitcoin?

So I'm, I'm a big believer in the idea that the one place where this has really had a sort of functional application is in the dark markets. I mean, I think, you know, it's funny. My book is called Digital Gold. And I think some people have sort of assumed that meant that I bind to that narrative that it's this thing you can invest in and it's a reliable investment over time. I think it's not particularly good at that. I chose that title as this more of a sort of storytelling element than a statement of what I think Bitcoin is. But, you know, it's terrible at holding its value. I mean, it, you know, it goes up and it goes down. I think, I think in terms of that sort of the digital gold use, like the online money investment, I think it's more like just a new digital lottery,

where you can, you know, or new digital gambling parlor, where you can bet on this thing and hope it goes up and hope it doesn't go down. But it does both of those things. So I don't think it's particularly good at being digital gold if it wants to be digital gold. I think the one place where people have really used it to do things is, you know, to buy drugs, to pay ransom. And that's the one sort of enduring usage of it. And obviously, you know, you'll hear a lot about why it's maybe not good for that because police can track it. But the reality is it's pretty good at that. Yeah, people get caught when they're sloppy, but it works for that. Whereas, you know, a lot of the other things that people talk about, you know, remittances, investments, sort of, you know, some of the more

sort of blockchain-centric things of tokenization, they just haven't really worked. They haven't really taken off. So to me, and part of what interested me in the story of Bitcoin was going back how how tied in the success of Bitcoin was with the Silk Road and a lot of the kind of darker uses of it. And Paul? Yeah, no, I agree. I agree, Nathaniel. And I think the interesting thing is you look at Silk Road, you look at it used in sort of the drug bazaars, if you want to call it that, not if you want to call it. But I think what it did show is that Bitcoin did actually work at the one thing it was initially designed to be, which is digital cash.

I personally think that was the best goal for it, and I think it's still the best goal for it. As constructed as it exists right now, I don't think it is a particularly good store of value. I think any of the benefits that it does have as that that people talk about are completely outweighed by the volatility, the speculative trading around it, the fact that it can go up or down in such. wide, wide arcs. I don't think it's a good store of value right now. It could be a good store value if it had use as a currency, and if it sort of had a daily underlying utility beneath it, if you had X amount of dollars passing through it every day because people were using it as a currency, that would give it a base. That would give it something to build a store value argument on top of, but right now it doesn't have that. Right now, I really think all it is right now is a

speculative asset. It's a betting market, really, on the price of Bitcoin. I mean, I think that's all it is right now. That said, we're talking about 10 years of something that, as I said at the outset, is probably going to take a lot longer to build and figure out exactly what it should be. So I don't think that that's all it ever can be. But I really think its best use would probably be as a form of digital cash. And if that doesn't happen, I don't know that it is ever really going to become a good store value. I actually think on a long enough time scale, it can be, which is why everyone talks about hoddling all the time. You know, if you think of the Bitcoin ledger as sort of like this digital real estate and you grab a piece of it, you just sort of hold on and wait for the price rise,

I think that's what people are doing. You're right. Obviously, there is volatility year to year, but I think a lot of these people, especially the wealthy ones you got in early, they're the ones who, I think are like, oh, wow, I turned my like a million into, you know, 100 million and, you know, whatever a year from now it's going to be, or not a year from now, a decade from now, it'll be a billion. So I actually wanted to also ask, and we're just sort of level setting for the rest of the conversation. But I'm so curious, just along the way, as you've been reporting, what are some of the biggest things you've changed your mind about? Bitcoin. Yeah, when it comes to Bitcoin. I mean, I will tell you honestly, the very, this was, I guess, early 2013.

the very first time somebody suggested to me that we should write about Bitcoin, I flat out said no. I said no. What year was that? It was 2013. It was early 2013. I had heard about Bitcoin. Wait, was it Michael? Can you see?

No, it wasn't Michael. No, okay. It wasn't Michael. It was somebody else. I forget exactly who. Michael, I will say, too, I was a little bit ahead of Mike. I was maybe a couple of weeks ahead of Mike in catching on to the fact that this was a good story. And now he's all in.

And now he's all in, yeah. But my first reaction was that the word Bitcoin should not even be associated in any way, shape, or form with the Wall Street Journal. To even put it on the Wall Street Journal's website, would have was a mis. I swear to God, I'm not kidding. That's what I thought. I thought that it's a mistake. That's a very snobby attitude. Well, listen, I didn't think it was legitimate.

I thought it was a scam. I thought it was a con. And I didn't think that we should be giving it any credence. So the biggest thing I changed my. I'm being honest with you. The biggest thing I changed my mind on was Bitcoin itself. It didn't take long, by the way. That makes sense.

What about you, Nathaniel? Yeah, I mean, I certainly for the first year, I think I was in a similar place where I felt like this could just disappear at any time. And it took me, I think, a while to believe that this had any staying power. And, you know, I think for me, I probably, it's a mark of my similar snobbishness. It was kind of hearing, hearing, like, the first academics and some of the first serious VCs in Silicon Valley who had really dug into the code and who sort of felt like this was, you know, there was something really new here. And, you know, I think for me it was some of that institutional validation, people who had some of that. some history. I mean, for me, so much, I just find it very important to be able to have people who have looked at things like this that haven't worked to see how this is or isn't working.

And it took me a while, I think, to be convinced of that. I mean, I think since then, you know, I think my opinion is constantly shifting about like where this could be useful more. broadly. I mean, you know, I think that there is some germ of a new really interesting idea, but what that means more broadly, I think I'm actually constantly still kind of reevaluating and changing my mind. And, you know, is it going to have some, some, is it going to really break out into the world in some broader way? You know, I think we've talked about the fact that I don't think it really has yet. And, you know, I think I'm honestly,

frequently kind of changing my mind on how likely it is that that will happen. Yeah. I'm with you on that, in particular, how it will happen. So let's walk through some of the main historical events in Bitcoin's life, starting with the moment that the white paper came out, which was in the midst of the financial crisis. Do you think that was just a coincidence? And also, do you think that Bitcoin,

would have taken off if it had been released either earlier or after? No and possibly no. I definitely don't think the timing was a coincidence. I think from what little we do know of Nakamoto, we believe he had been working on it for a year. So I think he has said that he started in 2007 working on it, and I'm sure he was probably thinking about it beforehand. So I don't think he came up with it overnight.

I think he had been developing it. He had been building it. It seems fairly reasonable to me to suspect that he saw what was going on in the world and saw this as an alternative to the system that he didn't like. I'm assuming he didn't like it. And he got it built and put it out as soon as he could because he saw what was going on in the world. I think the timing was definitely deliberate. In terms of whether it would have made it or not, I mean, that's impossible to say. But what I do think I can say with some confidence is I think the fact that it came out when it did and what was going on in the world did help it without a doubt. I think people were obviously hurt by what had happened. I think a lot of people had suffered. I think people were fed up. I think people were open to the idea of some kind of an alternative. And here comes an alternative. And I think a lot of people were open to it.

And I think a really underappreciated aspect of the Bitcoin story is the degree. to which it is a social movement, the degree to which people were disgusted with what was going on and were looking for something to latch on to and latched on to Bitcoin passionately. And I've said this a few times. I think Bitcoin is essentially the third big reactionary movement to the financial crisis. And I think the Tea Party was one. I think the Occupy movement was another. And I think Bitcoin was a third. I think to a large extent, it is as much a social movement as a technological movement, and that absolutely is because of the financial crisis. That's interesting.

What about you, Nathaniel? Do you think it was a coincidence? Yeah, that all sounds right to me. I mean, yeah, I mean, when you think of the financial crisis, this came out right after Lehman went bankrupt, but, you know, the problems had been going on for months already, you know, the problems at Bear Stearns. And so, you know, there was a lot of time for people to start. sort of see what was what was evolving in the banking system and the problems there in order to get

this thing out in response to that. And so I think, yeah, that was probably a pretty conscious response to the crisis. And yeah, over time, you know, this has just played into, I mean, a lot of the audiences that have bought into this have been people who were, you know, disenchanted because of the because of the financial crisis. So I think that really did lay the groundwork for it. Yeah, I have had a few sources tell me that that was one of the reasons they were motivated to learn more about it and why they latched on and started working in the area. But I wouldn't say it's as many as you would expect. So that's kind of an interesting question. But another question, do you guys think that Bitcoin would have succeeded even if Satoshi hadn't disappeared?

I think it's been, I think that that has definitely helped Bitcoin. I mean, the anonymity, the sort of whole nature of Satoshi, I think has been enormously helpful to Bitcoin and has sort of ironically, unexpectedly kind of increased, I think, the trust that people have in it because, you know, because there isn't a person there with all their human frailties that you can kind of attach this to and attach those frailties to Bitcoin. And it sort of made it a blank slate that I think people could attach their own, you know, visions, ideas to. And Paul, what about you?

I think, I mean, you're definitely right about that. I wonder, though. I really do wonder, I think Nakamoto disappearing, while it does kind of leave Bitcoin open as this thing for anyone to kind of reinterpret as they desire, I also think when he left, you know, you can start marking, if you want to talk about the Bitcoin industry sector community, whatever you want to call it, losing its focus, I think it started there. And I think once he left, you ended up with a lot of people competing to make Bitcoin, to reshape Bitcoin in their own image.

And that eventually turned into the scaling debate and the scaling war, and you had a big fight over it. And I think that, I personally think that kind of hurt Bitcoin. I think if he had stuck around, you would have had a more cohesive vision for what this is supposed to be, even if he had remained anonymous or not anonymous. And I don't know. I tend to think it was more of a problem than a benefit, Nakamoto disappearing. I mean, you know, on the sort of leadership question, I think that, that there have been a lot of problems that have come up because Bitcoin hasn't had, you know,

a leader to sort of guide it. And I realize a lot of people in the Bitcoin community thinks that's a good thing and that those problems are good problems. But I think it is worth noting that when Satoshi left, there was a leader. And it was Gavin, Gavin Andresen. And I think Gavin did a pretty good job of keeping everybody together for the next two or three years. I mean, Bitcoin was a pretty kind of coherent community. And I think, you know, Gavin was, I think, a pretty good sort of open source leader in being willing to recognize

his own failings and, you know, letting other people win arguments. You know, he wasn't at all, you know, he called himself a benevolent dictator in the same style of Linus that, you know, the head of Linux. And I think, you know, it was really when when Gavin sort of stepped back that I think a lot of the problems came forward. So I think, you know, there is, you know, there are problems that come when you don't have leaders. You know, as I mentioned, I think a lot of people sort of think those problems are good problems for Bitcoin. They're kind of a challenge that Bitcoin has to overcome. But, you know, I think those kind of challenges really started more when Gavin stepped down than when Satoshi did.

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and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. Yeah, yeah, I actually want to return to this governance question because I do agree with you that, yeah, I think since Satoshi did have this successor, which was Gavin, like that sort of

kind of prevented this power struggle from taking place. And then afterward, I think Gavin did not really appoint somebody. And so that was when the political issues took over. So one other question is there have been. been obviously many previous attempts at creating a digital money. Obviously, many of them failed. In fact, they all failed prior to Bitcoin. But Bitcoin itself, like there have been, you know, all these price crashes and there have been all these people who've declared it dead and there's all these attacks from people and there's forks and these other blockchains and everything.

But why do you think Bitcoin has survived and not just survived, but, you know, as I mentioned earlier come from nothing to being worth, you know, $6,000 or whatever it is today? I mean, I think one, one simple answer for that is it's pretty well built. I mean, for what it is, for what its core function is, which is allowing two people anywhere on the planet, as long as they have an internet connection, to exchange value directly without an intermediary, it works. I mean, it does that. If I had a wallet and Nathaniel's a wallet and I wanted to send them five bucks, I

I can send them five bucks. I mean, that absolutely works. And I think that's, it's built well to do that. I think it's built, I think another good feature of its software is that it is self-sustaining. I mean, he built it so that it could run, using air quotes, you can't see them, but, you know, on its own. Obviously, there are people running the software, but essentially the network runs on its own. That aspect of it also works. And I think those two things together are a big reason, why it survived. And I think those are a big reason that people saw so much potential in it and we're willing to put in the time to try to make it better or put in the time to try to come up with an alternative that was even better. And you see that, you know, communities come around to do

that. So I do think it's, I do think for what it is, I think it's a very elegant system. And I think it works well. I tend to, I focus maybe more on the sort of like the community element that that Paul mentioned earlier. You know, again, I think Bitcoin survives as long as people want to use it and want to support it and want to plug into it. And I think, you know, the idea that it's this decentralized thing, also, you know, the open source element of it, but also going back to Satoshi, the idea that there is no leader. There's no sense that somebody else is in charge gives everybody a sense that they

really have a stake in this. And, you know, that sense that people have a stake in it, they're willing to sort of invest in this. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it just makes people want to use it and makes people want to keep using it. Because once they have them, they want them to be worth more. And, and so they, you know, it sort of turns everybody into, to marketers for the whole thing. And I think, you know, just getting people to market your product for you is, is brilliant. And, you know, to some degree, it's also, you know, what Ponzi schemes do. You know, once somebody's bought in, they want it to keep going because they want to keep benefiting from it.

And, you know, it got those sort of incentives right. I'm not necessarily saying it is a Ponzi scheme, but it kind of shares some of the things that make Ponzi schemes work. and that's just getting people in who want it to keep working. Yeah, I had a small thread about that in my TEDx talk, and I saw that. I think it was Kyle Samani on Twitter tweeted something about how Bitcoin's like a Ponzi. It might have been Ari Paul. I forget. It was one or the other.

And like people got really, really angry. But you're right that it does have that element. Paul, what were you going to say? I was going to say, you know, I think sort of piggybacking off that, I think another aspect of this is the fact that for what, Bitcoin is, it really does kind of fit in with the way we live our lives now. Our lives are lived online. Our lives are lived digitally. Through that, we are able to communicate around the world. I mean, I'm old enough to know that when I was growing up, my friends were all people I knew in town. Maybe, you know, I didn't have pen pals, but, you know, if you knew anybody in another country,

they're probably a relative or a pen pal. And now kids are growing up and they have friends all over the world. because they're online. Their lives are digital. Their lives are mobile. And I think Bitcoin really fits in with the way our lives are going, the direction that our lives are going. And whether or not it ends up being Bitcoin, I do think that eventually there is going to be an accepted kind of internet money. I just think that that is, you know, again, I think that's the direction we're moving in and something is going to fill that need. It could be Bitcoin. It could be something else. But I think that's another reason why it works is I think people sort of intuitively get it because of the way our digital lives have evolved. We're going to discuss decentralization,

Bitcoin as a global reserve currency, and more. But first, I'd like to take a quick break for our fabulous sponsors. Unchained listeners can receive $25 in Bitcoin just for getting started with Abra at abra.com slash unchained. Abra's all in one exchange and wallet lets everyone, everywhere, and securely invest in crypto with 28 cryptocurrencies available and the Bit10, the first easily accessible crypto index. With as little as $5 a month in Bit10, you can invest in an index of the top 10 cryptocurrencies, professionally rebalanced every month. Get started with $25 in Bitcoin at Abra.com slash unchained. OnRamp is a full-service, creative and design agency that has helped numerous companies,

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If you want your crypto donations to go farther, go to we trust.io slash Unchained. and donate through November 27th. I'm speaking with Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times and Paul Vena of the Wall Street Journal. So there was this period when the mantra on Wall Street was blockchain, not Bitcoin. What do you guys think of that idea now? And what do you think the impact of blockchain technology applied to existing industries will be compared to Bitcoin and crypto assets? Do you want to go first, Nathaniel?

That's a good one. I think it's, I mean, I think one of the difficulties that I'm having with, you know, the whole blockchain conversation as a reporter is that it's, it's really hard to tell, you know, what are the sort of blockchain elements that somebody is putting into place and whether those elements are really the thing that is making this new system that somebody's creating work. So, you know, like, I think one of the sort of biggest announcements on this front has been, you know, Walmart sort of forcing its suppliers to use their kind of closed blockchain to trace food. And I think, you know, it's just going to be really hard to tell how much they are just, you know, they've just updated their databases and now have a database. you can have distributed databases before the blockchain. You could have people updating databases from different places before, and it wasn't a blockchain.

Now, that may not be, Walmart may not have had that, and they may just be bringing something like that into play. And it's, it's really, you know, boiling, you know, really narrow, honing in on what is the blockchain element of it? What is this that distinguishes it from another kind of database and determining whether that is the thing that makes it successful rather than just somebody, you know, creating a better database. I mean, I think at minimum, Bitcoin and this whole conversation is clearly making everybody reevaluate their databases and put money into it because it seems cool now. And so I think

stuff will come out of that, you know, companies will have better ways of tracking information. And that's probably going to be big and may be big in the near term. It's just going to be really hard to tell how much the blockchain element of what they're doing is the thing that makes it different. And I think, you know, it's going to be useful to try to come to some agreements that we're going to have to figure out ways of determining whether it is, you know, really a blockchain that's making a difference in these contexts. But I do think, you know, there is real, I'm not one of these people who says blockchain doesn't matter, you know, that it's just all hype. I think there is something valuable to distributing databases, finding a way to kind of create consensus around

databases. There is something valuable and new there. It's just really hard to tell, you know, how much new and blockchain is really in there. Yeah, you know, it's interesting too, because I think it really kind of gets to the very heart of what all this technology is about. And I think that that that blockchain, not Bitcoin mantra started coming on. I think it was around 2015, probably on Wall Street is where I first heard it. And I think at the time they thought, uh, maybe there's something here. You know, we don't want to deal with Bitcoin, but we can take the underlying code and we can rewrite it and make it our own thing and we'll save some money on the back office. And this is going to be easy and let's do it, right? Bitcoin, blockchain, not Bitcoin.

coin. And I think as they tried that, they realized that it's actually a lot harder than they thought to use this technology in a centralized, within a centralized infrastructure. And I think that's really kind of the heart of it. There is definitely something valuable in this technology. There's definitely something that it provides that we have not had before a level of transparency that I think is really important. But figuring out how to do that, within industries that have been built for generations and generations upon centralized infrastructures where that information is not always shared, that information is not always open. That is a real point of friction. That is a real point of contention. And I think the banks figured that out quickly.

They thought that they would just use it and they'd save money in the back end. Oh, we can make everything digital and we can record it and it's faster and cheaper and, you know, we'll fire some bean counters. that'll be great. And then they realized that actually to do it properly involved providing a lot of information that they had never provided before, they didn't want to provide. And I know a lot of the early blockchain efforts, they fell apart because of that because of the transparency and what the banks didn't want to share. And now they've all kind of gone through an entire second generation of trying to figure out this technology and doing it in a way that that information is still protected, even within a permissioned blockchain, even within a closed-loop blockchain.

And I think they're starting to get there. But this is going to be a really interesting thing to watch, and this is going to play out over very long time, is can we start to have a marketplace that is based more upon decentralized practices and infrastructures, whatever words you want to use, as opposed to the centralized ones we've always had? And that's a lot about just changing people's mindsets. And that's probably more difficult than the technology, frankly.

Yeah, I said this in a recent episode where I answered listener questions, but I think ultimately blockchain technology applied in existing industries is just sort of fundamentally not revolutionary in the sense that if you're just making what they already do more efficient, then it's just, you know, they're going to continue doing what they're doing. Whereas with Bitcoin and crypto assets, you know, you have these like user-owned leaderless networks with this crypto asset that's incentivizing behaviors on the network. We haven't seen that before. However, I do agree with you that, you know, I don't know if we can say for sure that those will succeed. Like there has, there's been this idea put out there.

And there are a lot of projects that are trying to get such a network going. But, you know, it's not clear yet how it will work or if it will work. Let's move on to governance, which came up before. That's obviously been this huge point of contention in Bitcoin, which we mentioned about the scaling debate and stuff. So what lessons do you think are to be learned from that? And then leading from that, there are all these blockchains that are trying to do on-chain governance.

What do you think the prospects are for those? I guess going back to that, you know, this kind of taps back into that question you asked about where have you changed your mind. I mean, I think one of the things that's amazing about Bitcoin is how, you know, you It has kind of survived. I don't know if you could say thrived, but survived the lack of leadership. I mean, I definitely thought that, you know, that sort of civil war was going to kill Bitcoin or lead to some new leadership. You know, somebody taking over the miners insisting on new developers.

I think, the way I understood the incentives, I thought the miners had more control than they did. And I think, again, this goes back to the community element and the fact that users really did seem to like this leaderless structure that the new kind of group of core devs after Gavin has brought in. They like the idea of this leaderless movement and sort of push for it and, and kept Bitcoin sort of the software under the control of the core developers without a clear leader. I think it's worked a lot better than you might have expected or, you know, it's kept its following better than I might have expected. But, you know, that has come with a bet that, you know, moving really slowly is going to be a good thing. And, you know, so far moving really slowly doesn't seem to have hurt Bitcoin that much relative to other cryptocurrencies. But I do wonder if at some point that's going to become a bigger problem if some of these things move faster and do kind of start working and being able to do more than Bitcoin can.

I mean, you know, right now Ethereum is still kind of confronted by a lot of the same scheme. scaling problems, a lot of the same issues with growing that Bitcoin is. It hasn't figured that out, but they're working very quickly to solve that. And, you know, and as are many others, and I just wonder if some of those succeed, will Bitcoin still kind of keep its place? You know, will slow development still be the best option? So I think that's still an open question. But, you know, I feel like on these governance questions, you just, you know, it's one of these areas where I, I, I'm sort of humble enough to say. I've learned from expecting one thing and seeing a different thing enough times

that you just really don't know how these things are going to work out. Yeah, Paul. Yeah, it's funny as you were talking to Nathaniel, I was thinking about it. And one thing that really just randomly popped into my head right now is there's a guy named Edward Bernays. I don't know if you guys ever heard of him. Do you know who I'm talking about? I'm not there. Okay.

So I'm going really far afield here, but I promise you I will come back. He was a PR man in the 1920s, and he was kind of one of the creators of the modern public relations industry. And he wrote a book called Propaganda. And his whole point of the book was that democracy without leadership, democracy is complete chaos. And you have to have people in charge. And in his mind, propaganda was a tool to be used to keep people, to keep control and to keep democracy from just spinning out into chaos with a million people with a million opinions. You had to have a way to control people's opinions.

You had to have governance, what he was really talking about. I think Bitcoin can survive without having one person in control or even five people in control. But what it does need to have is, and any of these projects, You need to have a clear vision of what it is, what it's trying to achieve, and you have to have people dedicated to making that happen and who have the skills to keep that on target. And those people can change over time. The tools can change over time. But there has to be some idea of where this is all going. And I think Bitcoin, after Satoshi, certainly after Gavin, I think it's splintered on where it was going and what it was going to be. And that was a problem.

And I think that is a problem. And yet, Bitcoin survives. Bitcoin is still here. It's not going anywhere. But is it ever going to be anything? Is it really going to grow? And I think that's going to be interesting over the next year because now you are starting to see the institutional interest form, right?

You're starting to see it become real things. Fidelity is going to start trading it. They want to have a trading desk. And you have the backed project. But is anyone going to buy it? Is anyone going to be interested? Are they building anything that is going to be valuable to people? Are people going to be willing to buy this for any reason other than speculation?

I don't think we know what Bitcoin is going to be yet. And I think that if you don't have a group of people dedicated to that and building that out, then it's a problem. So I don't think you need a dictator, but you need to have somebody who's dedicated to building something valuable. Any project that doesn't have that, I don't think is going anywhere. no matter what the governance mechanism is, you know, however clever it is that I come up with. Yeah, I look at some of the governance chains and I wonder if in a way, you know, they've recognized this fundamental issue, which is that I do think these networks are sort of like like little mini political economies, I guess you could call them or something. Right. Yeah.

Where like people have compared, you know, the formulation of governance for any particular one of the particular one of the, these crypto networks as like formulating a constitution. Obviously famously used that. But I've heard, you know, some lawyers I know in this space say that watching the governance issues play out reminds them of what they learned in law school about, you know, the founding of the country and stuff. Sure. But then I do wonder, oh, if they do succeed in, you know, formulating governance via the

blockchain, then are we going to end up in these situations where the U.S. is sort of in right now where you sort of like veer from one. direction and then like the next the you know the opposing party gets control and then you veer in the other direction and back and forth but I guess we're a super long way from seeing whether or not that will happen yeah I mean look do you have people that are dedicated to whatever the vision and the goal is and are willing to work towards that or do you have people who are interested in their own their own wealth their own you know using it for their own purposes and are they bending it to that one's a good governance, one's bad governance.

Right. Yeah. Well, we'll see. And I mean, I think it's worth like this, this sort of goes to one of my main questions at this point, which is, you know, all this is we're sort of talking here about whether these blockchains and the tokens on them can incentivize people to certain kinds of behavior. And, you know, the governance conversation, you know, can these things be. governed by voters, you know, some sense, people making decisions on blockchains as a result of incentives you've set up. And I think one thing it's sort of worth recognizing at this point is, like, there is very little evidence that the incentives use, that you can set up incentives right in order to create the behavior you want, to create the governance system you want. I mean, that, like, doing that is so far from from where we are today.

And, you know, economists have been studying this for decades, like market design. How do you create incentives to, you know, to get the behavior you want? And it is so hard, even in a kind of human governed system where you're just trying to control for one, you know, one element. You know, there have been markets, there have been markets set up for, for, you know, kids. kidney liver transplants and for charter school entry. And those are really hard to get right in a kind of very limited sense. So the idea that you're going to set these things up and create incentives and then everybody is going to behave the way you want them to is just like really, really hard to believe. Because we can't do that in the real world. It's never really

been done in the crypto world. The only thing the incentives have worked for so far is you give people money to hook their computers into the network. They will hook their computers. into the network. That's what the incentives in Bitcoin and other crypto currencies have done so far. And that's a pretty like crude incentive. The idea that you're going to like get specialized enough that you can, you know, create the incentives so that people will do this as developers and they won't, you know, these other people who are stakeholders will be able to vote on. I mean, it's just like, these are really complicated systems and we have very little evidence that they will work. Yeah, this is why I always laugh when I think about how so many people before the,

before any of the big hard forks said, oh, like, we'll all just upgrade because everyone will go along with the main blockchain and then Ethereum happened, the doubt hard fork happened. And obviously that did not occur. So I actually want to switch to decentralization. You guys may not have read Carlotta Perez's book, but it doesn't matter if you don't or hadn't technological revolutions and financial capital. But in it, she talks about how new technologies generally enter and become successful at times when the previous technologies have matured and the downsides of that technology has become evident. And so obviously in recent years, we've seen stuff with centralized services being prone to hacking and manipulation, like with the Equifax hack

and the Facebook Cambridge Analytica examples being some of the most notable. On the other hand, you know, as we've just talked about, like, decentralized services are not necessarily easy to get off the ground and make successful. And then on top of that, people have to, you know, for instance, like become their own bank, manage their own security. And so far, people have been, like, pretty happy to sign away their rights for convenience. So how much do you think these issues we're seeing with centralized services could kind of like help the growth of Bitcoin? Or do you think that people don't care enough? I'll, I can start and say, that I think that it will not matter at all.

It will not help Bitcoin at all. People want services that work. And if your service doesn't work, if it doesn't work better than the competitor, I don't think privacy is going to be the deciding factor other than for, you know, 0.05, 0.5% of the population. You know, there's, there is a kind of group that wants to use signal that, you know, wants to use PGP mail that, that, that, even that number is, is, is, is, you know, like that, that technology has sort of failed to take off.

It's amazing how even in the privacy community, people can't get, you know, other people sell encrypted, send encrypted email to them. So it's just like, I think, you know, there is a, there's an audience for that. It's tiny. And other than that, like, you don't have a better product, you're not going to win. You don't have a product that works better. It's not going to win. I just don't, I don't see people.

I mean, I think people distrust Facebook and may move off it to other kinds of services, but they're going to not move off to decentralized services. They're just going to move off to things that sort of seem a little more trustworthy to them. Right. Yeah. You're absolutely right. And it comes down to define better. To most people, better is going to just mean faster, easier, more intuitive, you know, something more convenient, fun.

Right. So if you're someone out there listening to this and you think privacy is a big issue, issue and you want to build a better Facebook, make it better in terms of privacy and make it better in terms of usability. Like, it has to be both of those things. And if you did that, then yeah, maybe you could have it work. But if you built something that is really secure and private and no, you know, North Korean hackers could ever get your information out of it, but it sucks in terms of the user experience, no one's going to use it. No one's going to use it. So this next question is a little bit long.

It deals with regulation. But I happen to see this speech that one of the CFTC commissioners, Brian Quintence, gave recently. And he was kind of dissecting how the CFTC might regulate some of the illegal activity that might happen on these decentralized networks. And he kind of talked about how there are different people who, for instance, so the example he gave was like prediction markets. where there might be illegal prediction markets. And so he broke it down into the people who contributed to that market, which would be the core developers who created the protocol. So like in the case of Augur, that would be, I guess, the Ethereum developers. Then he said miners and users of that protocol. So minors and users of Ethereum. The third group was the developers of the smart contract

code. So I guess that's the developers of Auger. And then the fourth were the people who create the individual prediction markets. And then he said that the appropriate question is, whether these code developers could reasonably foresee at the time they created the code, that it would likely be used by U.S. persons in a manner of CFTC regulations. And he says, in this case, the code was specifically designed to enable the price type of activity regulated by the CFTC and no effort was made to preclude its availability to U.S. persons. So in that case, a strong case could be made that the code developers aided and embedded

the violations of CFTC regulations, and so the CFTC could prosecute those people. What do you make of that interpretation and how do you think regulators can and should regulate smart contract code that is just sort of running on its own? I will say for myself, I am not nearly enough of an expert in the law or smart contracts. I know, although I think, you know, you've been hearing that kind of thing from lawyers for a while. So the fact that people are so surprised by it is to me a little surprising. I mean, you know, he kind of, he kind of narrowed in on a very specific question, which is you, you didn't just create the system that the contracts run on, but you created the

contract. And, you know, you sort of goes to the most extreme example. You create a contract where you can plug in a name and say, if X person is killed, you know, by this date, you know, this contract will pay out this, I think it's like who wouldn't expect that law enforcement would go after the person who wrote that contract. I mean, you know, even if there was no specific law governing that, of course people would. Of course, law enforcement would try to go after that. They would try to find a way to discourage people from doing that. I think if you work backwards from that example, you know, if you create a contract that allows you to bet on something that you're not allowed to bet on in the United States. I mean, of course law enforcement's going to come after you.

And they're going to, I mean, they're going to, they're going to try to stop this. Maybe a judge will ultimately decide, you know, that's free speech and you can do it. But it's just, it's going to have, like, law enforcement's not going to let, you know, some market that's illegal in the rest of the economy just exist over here because, like, the underlying market is somehow decentralized. You know, If somebody wrote that contract, they're probably going to be responsible for it. And if they're anonymous, you know, or they're operating behind a VPN, you can probably imagine that law enforcement is going to try to figure out, you know, where the VPN's coming from, what the real IP address is, who that person is. So it doesn't seem terribly surprising to me. But again, and I think you've seen a lot of lawyers out there saying that they expected that this would happen.

So I may be missing some of the nuances, though, though. So I'm not a lawyer and I don't know smart contracts all that well. All right. We're going to do actually like sort of a lighting round through the last few questions. Do you guys think that Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency could become a global reserve currency? Yeah, if it's called the U.S. digital dollar, sure. But only if it's a digital version of the U.S. dollar. I mean, no, I think at some point you really will have effectively digitized national currencies

and one of them will be a reserve currency, whether it's the dollar or the yen here or whatever. But I mean, do I think an independent cryptocurrency like Bitcoin will ever become the world's reserve currency? I have a harder time seeing that. I don't want to say no because, you know, anything can happen. But I have a kind of hard time seeing that. Yeah, it's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet on it. But, you know, it's possible, but it seems very unlikely.

Yeah, I think it could happen, but just not in our lifetimes. Like, we will definitely be dead before it happens. That's what I think. So in general, there's just like a lot of shadiness in the space. You know, we've seen all this concern about tether, which is currently the most popular stable coin, but it's not clear whether or not it is truly fully backed. And a lot, I see a lot of behaviors that, you know, it's not like outright fraud or scams, but it's probably stuff that regulators don't necessarily have the resources to catch.

So what do you think can be done to prevent or stop such behavior? Well, look, I mean, to completely stop it, nothing. I think, and that's one of the things that I think regulators are going to have to learn to live with is the fact that when you're talking about these kinds of decentralized systems, when you're talking about there's essentially no barrier to entry to come up with one of these scams, you're not going to be able to effectively squelch that 100%. But what you can do is you can put up a set of rules. for law-abiding people to follow and expect them to follow it.

And I think you're seeing that. And I think what you're going to end up with is sort of a two-pronged market. One, which is made up of businesses and users that want to follow the rules and are willing to do that. And one of people that don't want to do that. And I think the first one will be the larger. The second one will be the smaller. And you're just going to have to deal with the fact that both exist. Yeah.

I actually think the market is already like that. Yeah. I mean, real markets are like that and you're just going to have it a crypto version of the same thing. Yeah. So the other thing I want to ask about sort of leading off from that is we're starting to see bad state actors like Venezuela and North Korea and Iran trying to use crypto to evade sanctions or raise funds or whatever it is they're trying to do. So what negative effects do you foresee that this technology could unleash in the world? I mean, I think a lot of it is kind of more of the same of like the kind of bad behavior that already exists. So, you know, money laundering, those sorts of things is definitely possible here. I think I still think the sort of scariest things going on around this are that really weren't as easy in the old world are kind of ran. ransom kidnapping, murder kind of stuff.

I mean, that's the part that scares me the most when you hold your own assets. And, you know, it just was a lot harder to send a ransom payment 10 years ago. And it just got to be a whole lot easier. And, you know, it wasn't impossible before. You could send a suitcase full of cash, but somebody needed to take the cash to deliver it. And that's not necessary anymore. And to me, that's still the scariest stuff that, you know, that goes beyond, you know, Iran and North Korea. They were able to do a lot of this stuff before, like, they had digital banking capabilities that got around the United States.

But I don't know. That's a stuff that kind of scares me the most. I'll tell you what I think is the scariest. And I don't think this is realistic. but in a very dystopian way. The scariest thing is that a government, a big government, say the United States, will figure out how to digitize their currency and will figure out that if you do that,

you actually can have an incredible amount of control over how people spend that currency because you can track everything, because you can know where all the money is going and where it's flowing. And you can have a government that was not necessarily, and now I'm not talking about the United States, but I mean, say you had a government that was not dedicated to the rule of law and was not dedicated to allowing its people the maximum amount of freedom without, you know,

any civic harm, you can have a government that could use this currency and really control what their people and citizens do. And to me, that's pretty scary, actually. Theoretically, it is not infeasible at all. I mean, it certainly could happen. Yeah. In fact, that may be precisely why we always hear that China is really interested in doing a digital yuan. Yeah.

I mean, if you had a government that didn't want their citizens to buy cigarettes or didn't want their citizens, you know, you can really, now, will you get a black market? Of course you will. But you can have a government come down pretty hard on things that they consider important. Yeah. So speaking of Asia, obviously we did see that crypto took up. in a huge way in Korea, where I think now something like 30% of Koreans have bought crypto. So based on either observations that you made reporting on what happened in Korea or just anything else that you see going on in the space, what do you think it will take to make

Bitcoin or any other crypto as it widely adopted? Like we keep talking about how nobody's using it. What do you think it will take to make that happen? I think comprehensive and smart regulations in the United States. I don't think we have that right now, and you have a lot of regulators. So I think actually have very nuanced views on this. I think the regulators in the U.S. have really caught up and they're smart about it, but you don't have a comprehensive set of regulations like you have in, say, Japan.

And what you end up with is a lot of regulators trying to figure it out on their own. So I think that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is just the user interfaces. I mean, you still don't have a way to get this out to people that it becomes very easy for them to use. And until you get that, I don't, you know, that's what I think it would take, at least in the United States, to really kind of send this mainstream. I mean, to me, you know, beyond any of that, you just need something where this is useful, like where money that's outside the control of the centralized entity is useful, right. I mean, that is useful and the people will use it for that. And that's real.

I mean, that shows that this can do something that other money can't. But what else is this useful for? I mean, I feel like for, you know, I think the two things that seemed the most convincing to me at various points were remittances and micropayments, and neither of them have gone anywhere. And that may be because of scaling, maybe because of user interface. But, you know, it's not that, like, you can send money not that expensively in a lot of these places. Or if it is expensive, it's even more expensive to do it with Bitcoin right now. And, you know, from smaller countries of smaller currencies.

But, you know, you just, I feel like you just have to find somewhere where this is useful to people. I mean, it's useful to speculate on because it goes up and down a lot and you can make money doing that trading on it. But, you know, again, those are the two things that I heard about that at various points seemed realistic to me. And they haven't happened. And I don't know what will be the thing that will happen or if there will be anything that happens. But it's definitely not inevitable that it will happen. I mean, I'll say that. Like, you know, going back to some of your first questions about the Internet, like everybody, one of the things that I always come back to is that, like, everybody loves this comparison to the Internet.

and the fact that, you know, the Internet's kind of sucked early on, and so it got to be really good. So that means that, you know, Bitcoin, you know, which sort of sucks early on is going to get good. I mean, the thing that people don't recognize is there are a lot of other technologies that sucked early on that continued to suck and then they died. And I feel like that's a very plausible path for this. It's not necessarily the only path. But just because something like isn't useful early on but has a big. big ambitions doesn't mean those ambitions will be fulfilled. The fact that the internet worked

is, you know, probably more the outlier than the sort of normal path that these technologies take. Yeah, I love it. Beta Max lovers would agree with you. One other thing I would say on that point is, you know, an interesting thing is you look at credit cards, right? And credit cards, look at what credit cards offer to users in terms of loyalty points, rewards, the fact that if a transaction is fraudulent, you can get a charge. Exactly. Chargerbacks, which is supposed to be this great thing that everybody's going to move to Bitcoin for. I love chargebacks. Right. Exactly. So it's, you know, in an open marketplace of payment options, Bitcoin has to out-compete those things. And it has to have enough pros to it.

And right now it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, I just want to throw in my two cents, which is I think it's going to take off in investing or in games in some fashion because already, obviously, we did see like this sort of, you know, disruption of VC with ICOs. So in that way, like, you can already see that this is useful for something in the finance realm. And I also think that there are a lot of gamers who see some use for, like,

crypto goods and other things, and those people are already used to digital money. So that's where I'm looking right now. All right. So one of the last questions I want to ask you is so far we've had all these people in the space talk about how crypto can democratize access to finance. But so far, a lot of what's happened is that people who got in early just have become very rich. So do you think this is all talk and we'll never see democratization come out of this, out of crypto? Or do you think down the line we will see crypto helping to address issues of financial access and income and wealth inequality? I really don't know.

I will say I hope so. I think it's a really good, again, I'm talking about goals. I think there's a really good goal to strive towards. And I think the potential is there, but it's a really big issue. It's a really big question. And again, you have to have people involved who not only have that vision, but can understand how to make it happen and then be dedicated to making it happen. And that's just, that's big.

That is really difficult to do. So I would love to see it happen. I just don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's going to depend on it working. And I think, so to me, the immediate question is like, is this going to be useful to people and usable? And it's, you know, again, it is currently sort of available to a small elite. But, you know, I think the other, you know, one of the elements of the sort of, the

way maybe inequality is built into this is that you do have to understand technology. Certainly now, you have to understand the technology to make it work. And, you know, when people talk about using it to democratize things, they talk about, you know, creating better user interfaces, but it usually is some more centralized service where you lose the decentralized element of it. And I guess the question is, can you get a kind of service that is useful to people who don't understand technology well, but still somehow takes advantage of the decentralized elements of this? Until then, it's only going to be available to people who have kind of technical expertise, and those people are going to tend to be the people who are already powerful and wealthy,

and it's just going to make them more powerful and wealthy. And I think that's what you've seen so far. So it's certainly a journey to get to a different place where it's kind of moving in the other direction. Yeah. I think it is so easy to make money. We'll have to find people who are not motivated by greed to do this. Okay. So last question.

I'm going to make it easy for you guys. Instead of only asking for predictions, I'll let you ask or I'll let you say what your biggest predictions are and or your biggest questions for the next 10 years about Bitcoin or crypto in general. Wow. All right. Think about that for a second. For the next 10 years, I guess maybe taking off from the first 10 years and where people were at the beginning of this is that, you know, there are all these kind of slots that people,

these kind of accepted narratives of what's going to happen. And I feel like probably my main prediction is that they're all going to be wrong because I think a lot of the accepted narratives of where Bitcoin was going to go 10 years ago, you know, and those five people commenting on the cryptography mailing list, like those were really smart people. And, you know, they all ended up being wrong, Except maybe Hal Finney, but maybe not. But like people just don't know the unexpected ways that things evolve and the, you know,

the sort of chaos and the way that, you know, this little push here throws something that pushes something into totally unexpected direction. So, you know, I think playing into my own sort of uncertainty, I think my main expectation is that, that it's going to continue to evolve in ways that probably most people aren't anticipating. You know, I think, I don't know about predictions, but I think the things that I would look out for over the next several years to 10 years, whatever, is, you know, people love to talk about currency and the three characteristics of a currency, right? That it's a unit of account, means of exchange, and a store of value, right? All right, Bitcoin is not a unit of account, you know.

It's not going to be. it is not currently a means of exchange. It's not being used as that. So now you're at the point where people are pushing the store value narrative. That's going to be really interesting to watch over the next year or two years to see if that goes anywhere. Because if that doesn't go anywhere and the others don't go anywhere, then I don't know what Bitcoin's future is. All right. Well, we'll leave it at that and I will sidestep my own question about questions and predictions. For listeners who have not read the white paper, I urge you to do so. I actually really love this white paper. I don't understand everything in it, but it's pretty interesting when you read it.

So if you've never read it, definitely look it up on the internet. Paul and Nathaniel, where can people find you on Twitter or the internet or, you know, wherever? Twitter is easy. It's just at Paul Vigna. P-A-U-L-I-G-N-A. My stuff's on W-S-J-com. Books are on Amazon. It's pretty much it. Yeah. I'm at Nathaniel Popper on Twitter and my email's, my email address is there, the book is there, New York Times, all that. Okay.

Great. Well, thank you both for coming on Unchained. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Nathaniel and Paul, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. New episodes of Unchained come out every Tuesday.

If you haven't until ready, rate review and subscribe. on Apple Podcasts. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. And if you're not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, I highly recommend you check it out and subscribe now. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Rayleigh Gallup Polly, Fractual Recording, Jenny Josephson, and Daniel Ness. Thanks for listening.