What Bitcoin Did - How Bitcoin Will Destroy the State | Erik Cason & Jesse Posner

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Erik Cason is the author of Cryptosovereignty & co-founder of Vora. Jesse Posner is a an engineer, formally at Coinbase and BitKey & the co-founder of Vora. In this episode, we discuss why Erik and Jesse believe the modern state has already collapsed, why Bitcoin is the only shot at reclaiming sovereignty in the digital age and how philosophy, law, and cryptography intersect. We also get into the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies and how this growing financialization of Bitcoin could lead to a liquidity crisis and reflexive market crash. Finally, we talk about building tools for freedom, the founding ethos of Vora, and why the fight for privacy in both money and AI is a civilizational imperative. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/ BLOCKWARE: https://mining.blockwaresolutions.com/wbd Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Erik Cason: https://x.com/Erikcason or https://primal.net/erikcason Jesse Posner: https://x.com/jesseposner

Mathematics is fundamental to freedom in the digital age. We're having this march towards hyper-bitcoinization, which is not just going to change the nature of the monetary system and the economic system and the legal system, but it's also going to change culture. The state thinks it can co-opt Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is co-opting the state. This is the only chance that we have for freedom in this sort of digitally dominated world. Is Bitcoin, is cryptography, is self-sovereign data. If people haven't been vigilant about how they're going to secure their Bitcoin,

they're very quickly going to find that they don't actually have any Bitcoin. There will be a liquidity crisis at some point in time, and it'll be clear that there's not enough chairs for everybody to sit down. Frankly, the cowardice and spinelessness that most people have because of living inside of a slave system in their whole life, the very idea of standing up and say, I won't do this anymore, is very radical to most people. This is the path and this is the decision we must make if we want to have any possibility of a future where we could actually be free.

I don't know what we're going to talk about, guys. I want to try and recapture some of the magic from last night. Yes, that was fun. That was amazing. But maybe we should start, Jesse. You've not been on the podcast before. How did you know this guy? Well, we met back at Coinbase.

My first day of work, 2016. Eric was part of the onboarding process. And we immediately started talking about philosophy. Carl Schmidt, Heidegger made a very strong connection right away. And we've been good friends ever since. Was it like classic Eric where it was in at the deep end, the first sentence he says to you? Oh, yeah, totally.

And I was completely down for that. I was like, yes, let's go. So in Quoting Base at that time, What was like the general vibe? Were you the weirdos in the room? It was actually, it was pretty cool in the early days of Coinbase. I mean, Eric was there earlier than I was, but when I joined, there was still only about 100 people like in the office.

And there was a lot of like misfits and weirdos and, you know, people who, you know, coin or Bitcoin hadn't really gone mainstream yet. So it attracted a pretty eclectic, interesting mix of people. And we had amazing lunchtime conversations and everybody, would hang out together. And so it was a pretty cool vibe at the beginning. And how did you end up there? Because you were a lawyer before that, right? Yeah. So I practiced law for almost 10 years. And in 2013, I came across this article in Bloomberg about that the central banks were studying Bitcoin. And I had heard about Bitcoin, but the fact that they were paying attention to it made me

really perk up and want to look into it more. I was already interested, you know, as a geek, Even though as a lawyer as a geek, I liked open source and bit torrent. So I was interested in that technology and I was working as a lawyer representing tech startups. So read the Satoshi white paper was just immediately captivated like this idea of a decentralized ledger seems impossible on its face. How the heck does this actually work? And so I tried to learn a little bit about hash functions and public key cryptography

and got enough of the concepts where it started to click. They got really obsessed. And then I started taking on clients in the industry. But I was still doing the same boring corporate paperwork that I was doing for like the non-crypto clients. And so I felt like I really want to get into the future of law. Code is law. I started learning about the cypherpunks. Like this is how we're going to secure human rights in the digital age is not just through law, but through engineering.

And we need to translate these political. and legal principles into code. And I really got inspired with that idea. And so went to a programming boot camp, learned the bare minimum of 12 weeks of training. Here's how to do Ruby on Rails and React. And this is what a hash map is and managed to sneak into Coinbase, hardly knowing any code or engineering in 2016. And they were actually interested in my legal background because they wanted me to translate to the lawyers, like how some of the compliance systems work and sort of facilitate that.

So for the first two years at Coinbase, I was on the internal tools team, which was basically just team miscellaneous. And just got the work that nobody else wanted to do. I was working on the admin pages. But during that time, I started studying cryptography. and I made good friends with somebody who was on the crypto team at Coinbase. And he started to get into cryptography and we did a hackathon together and we would stay after work, whiteboarding. And I was studying Dan Bonaise classes over the weekend.

And he ended up switching to the key management team where they were responsible for cold storage and the key generation ceremonies. And then he brought me over shortly after. And that's when I really leveled up in terms of security, cryptography, multi-party computation, and that kind of work. So you were doing all the custody tools at Coinbase? Yeah, custody. We worked on a threshold signing system that was actually a precursor to Frost, which is something that later spent a lot of time working on with open source development.

But it's a way of, you know, at Coinbase, the kind of classic way of managing the keys is something called Shamir's Secret. where you take a secret and you split it into shares. But we needed this very secure process and operationally heavy process to do that because the secret starts out generated on a single computer and then you split it. But if the secret leaks at that beginning point, then you're totally screwed. So we'd have this very elaborate process with a Faraday tent. We'd have two brand new laptops. We'd flip a coin to figure out which laptop we're going to choose to generate the secrets on.

to defend against supply chain attacks. We'd open up the laptop, pull out all the networking, even the speaker, because data can be transmitted over audio and everything that wasn't a necessary component in the laptop, and then generate the shares and a very elaborate process. So the next generation of that was being able to use multi-party computation where you can generate Shamir shares that start out split, where for the entire life cycle of the key,

So there's not one single threat point in creating the secret. Exactly. And even when signing, you don't have to bring the shares together. So for the whole life cycle of this private key, the private key itself is never computed as a single piece of data. That's cool. And so, like, at this time, you were just screaming into the abyss about Heidegger. Like, how did you two? Like, why are you two friends? Like, what happened? Well, Jesse's the one that really set me off on Heidegger. Because, funny enough, at the very beginning of my philosophical journey, I was like, smart people have obviously thought about these questions before.

So like, let's find some smart philosophers. And it's funny because actually the final chapter in my book is based off this essay. But so I pulled a book off the shelf that my ex-wife had that was Heidegger's, the question concerning technology. And I started it. And I was like, what is this mumbo-jumbo? Like, none of this makes any sense. This is ridiculous.

So I went and found some other philosophers. And then when Jesse brought Heidegger back, I was like, oh, like, I should look back into him. And that's when I had enough of the scaffolding of philosophical language that I was like, oh, okay, like this is actually really substantial. And so we just kind of started viking about different philosophies and would have lots of really incredible esoteric conversations that really influenced pretty much every essay that is in my book because originally it was just a whole series of different essays approaching philosophy and Bitcoin.

So that was the first philosophical book you'd read? The very first one was actually the Sacrament of Language. on archaeology of the oath by Giorgio Ambigen. Because, like, the question that really hooked me was, like, how the hell is the computer actually keeping its oath in a way that it can't break? And, like, why does a computer... Why is a computer capable of doing this

when, like, man is no longer capable of doing this? So after reading Ambigan, that hooked me really hard on philosophy. Also, very hard, but in a different way. Like, he just consolidates so much information in each paragraph as opposed to using, like, really esoteric words. And from there, like, there was just a whole different fractal of different philosophers that led me to, like Carl Schmidt, and through reading all of these different philosophers, I started to realize, like, Bitcoin is this profound event in human

history where we're really having a full revolution of returning to the law in the way that the law was supposed to be as, like, really a protocol that nobody controls as opposed to there being a single sovereign that can always overcome the law. It's funny because I literally, just before we recorded this, I recorded it with Aaron, and she was talking about the age of Aquarius and, like, Bitcoin coming at the very start of And it kind of fits into what you're saying there. Like, I thought it was going to be a real gear shift going from that interview to this. But, like, Bitcoin is this, like, fundamental change in, like, human existence that happened at the start of the age of Aquarius, which I now know what that is.

Have you always, Jesse, have you always got, like, the kind of philosophical implications of Bitcoin? Or did that take you some time? It took me some time. I mean, I've been obsessed with philosophy ever since high school really interested in the question. of consciousness, of the law, of, you know, what is the nature of our reality. And then I went to this college, St. John's College that was very philosophically focused. And I read Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Heidegger and many, many philosophers. And so it's been a deep interest of mine also into law school, Rousseau, Locke, political philosophy. So I knew a little bit about

like when I got into Bitcoin learning about the cypherpunks, learning about the crypto anarchist manifesto, but I didn't really know how to link up the philosophy that I had studied to Bitcoin until I met Eric. And him introducing me to thinkers like Agamben, that was a huge transformational shift in my thinking because Agamben was a student of Heidegger's and built on his work.

But he also radically questions the state of our legal system in a way that kind of shook me when Eric started to explain this to me and I read Agamben's work. And one of the main features of his idea is that there's this emergency power, you know, that Schmidt talked about that is implicit in all constitutional legal systems and oftentimes is explicit. So like in the American Constitution, there's the idea of martial law or ways in a time of emergency, the normal legal order can be suspended. but that we've entered into a period of a permanent emergency suspension of the legal order and that, in fact, we're in an extra legal, extrajudicial emergency paradigm

where the legal order is not actually in place. So why is that? When did that happen? What is the key moment where we went from being in like this rules-based system to being under constant martial law, essentially? So originally, you know, the emergency, it was very clear to everybody where it begins and where it ends. Like if there's an invading army and the law just can't function, the courts can't function, it's pretty obvious like the normal order is suspended.

And then that ends and is over. But once we established like the CIA, post-World War II, the war on drugs, the war on terror, these ideas of forever wars that have no clear beginning and end, and then that combined with the Patriot Act, with permanent mass surveillance, Guantanamo Bay. All of these are examples of emergencies that will have no end point and create a permanent exception into the law. So would you argue then that like rule of law is no longer a thing?

To some extent. You know, I don't think there are areas where it is functioning. But there is particularly when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to due process. there is a giant loophole that is glaring and is not functioning at all. And had you come to that realization while you were a lawyer? I didn't come to that realization until I met Eric. Okay.

And then that's when the light bulb went off and I was like, uh-oh, this is a huge problem. And the only chance we have of actually addressing it is Bitcoin. Huh. That's interesting. And so like, Eric, when did you? When did you sort of realize this and realized Bitcoin was like the only hope in that? Pretty early on in my brain, like I realized that there was this really substantial thing when I think it was all the way back in 2013. Then I learned that there were some people that were essentially laundering money in and out of China, like using Bitcoin.

And I was like, for my undergraduate, I had studied capital control systems and like how they function in the East Asian financial crisis. So the fact that I could get money in and out, I was like, this is really weird. Like, money's not supposed to be able to do this and why can Bitcoin do this? And as I sort of got deeper into studying it, I was like, oh, so like it's a non-monet, it's a monetary system that isn't controlled money central point. This makes it fundamentally different. It's backed by energy.

And like, as the cog started to go, I was like, oh, this is like something really profound. And I need to pull on this thread. And so it was this kind of haphazard random walk into philosophy where I was just kind of grabbing at whatever threads I could. And as I pulled them, I started to realize I was getting into this. entangled knot that while I couldn't actually like untangle the knot it led to all of these really interesting threads that I just started writing various essays every time that somebody would say something stupid on the internet that I needed to you know critique and slowly it started to become kind

of a larger corpus of work that is still ongoing to today and like I hope at some point I'll have a much larger philosophical assertion to make which I feel like I'm getting my head really wrapped around it and it's really through having read most of high to substantial work. So I've started to realize that, like, this is inherently a question of what does it mean to be? And specifically, what does it mean to be in the modern age where we have the internet and this totally new digital topography that, like, it was never expected to actually be a territorial space. And because of that, it's also part of why the legal system breaks down in this system. It's because, like, there was never any expectation of what digital forms of

law would look like or how that they would function because we're so used to a law. land-based topological system where, like, there's actual physical space to do stuff. And so if, like, how do we get out of this tech dystopia then? Is it like Bitcoin is the only way, or is there a more traditional path to get out of this? I fundamentally believe no, there isn't. And I think this is where I'm very pedantic about, like, the state has failed and collapsed in itself, and we exist in some form of tyrannical governmental systems. And I think only when people start securing their digital rights with Bitcoin and cryptography,

that we can start building the new political system that is gonna be the one of the future. And I think that that is a very terrifying and existential idea to most people. And so when that's presented, they flee from it because it's such a large and radical idea that they've never thought of before. But when you say we live under tyranny,

like, what do you actually mean? I mean that, like, right now, for the sort of dissident dialogue that I have, like, I could be black-bagged and vanished, and there would be no pathway for me to have habeas corpus. and that, like, I could be living on some dungeon out in the middle of the ocean forever. And, like, those were powers that were implemented at the beginning of September 11th that we have now had into this continuous emergency that's been going on for more than 20 years.

And so, like, Bitcoin is championing Trump a lot at the moment in terms of, like, changing laws around Bitcoin. And, like, you guys are building a Bitcoin company. It's surely better than, like, the alternative. But, like, do you think there's any hope left in, like, the political regime? I personally don't. And I think that we'll come to those conclusions. as it goes further and further. Because it's important to understand

that the legal system is inherently an apparatus of violence. And that's how it gets its work done. And I think at this point in human history, we can all acknowledge that violence isn't the fundamental tool that we want to use to create agreements, but very much in the Rousseauian idea of that there is a social contract,

we should be able to consent to it. And none of us have consented to be surveilled for all of our lives, and particularly as we're going into this digital panopticon, there's a very real chance that we could go into a system where we are always being surveilled, we're always being appraised, and at any point in time that information could be used against us, and it's extremely dangerous. And I think very few people are aware of how dangerous it actually is. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place

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That's river.com forward slash WBD. This episode is brought to you by Blockware. Would you rather have one Bitcoin today or two in a few years from now? Silly questions. While Bitcoin mining is a tried and true method to accumulate more Bitcoin, and over a few years, it can even outperform a normal DCA. Blockware's mining as a service enables you to start mining Bitcoin without lifting a finger. Blockware handles everything from securing the miners to sourcing low-cost power and configuring the pool. They do it all.

With multiple data sensors across the US, Blockware is the most reliable mining partner in the industry, and mining is one of the most efficient ways to acquire Bitcoin. So click the link in the description to get started today, and if you tell them what Bitcoin did sent you, you'll get one week of free hosting and free electricity for every hosted minor purchased. So click the link in the description or head over to blockware solutions.com. It's also interesting, like, the way that the surveillance has kind of progressed since like the Patriot Act, where it was like the NSA doing surveillance. It's now big tech companies doing the surveillance on behalf of the government. And like how that actually ends up playing

out, I don't know. Like I feel like at some point, people have to wake up to the idea that you don't actually have to live under a system where you're constantly surveilled. But do they ever wake up to it is the question that I don't know the answer to. Yeah, I would beg to differ. And I think that's sort of the most dangerous idea is that there's this idea that the masses suddenly awake and are like, we can finally achieve what we want. And I personally have a vanguardist theory of that like, we need to rely on the most ideological, advanced individuals to push forward a dialogue of understanding like, hey, using cryptography

is really important to secure your digital rights, using Bitcoin to actually have access to monetary sense. system that can't be deprived from you for any reason is extraordinarily important. And I find it really upsetting that so many people that identify as being left liberals reject the idea of Bitcoin simply because it's being embraced by individuals like Trump. And the truth is, is Bitcoin really is for everyone. And with the sort of work that the Human Rights Foundation is doing and seeing how distance are fleeing from tyrannical regimes using Bitcoin is an extremely important point.

So to me, I think that the politics of the future, if you will, is going to be one where we start asserting and realizing that we are beyond state-based politics and we have entered into a new age of digital politics where we can actually create a global monetary system that everyone has access to and that eventually becomes a political system that everybody can secure their rights through. But I think the HRF examples, like a perfect example of what I'm trying to say in the sense that like the people who are using Bitcoin to escape tranical regimes or like fund things that are not allowed to be funded by like this is the woman doing this? What's she called? I'm unfamiliar with her.

She's in Afghanistan basically teaching women in a school in Afghanistan using Bitcoin. But like these projects have cropped up because they're under incredible like tyrannical regimes, whereas people are walking around San Francisco aren't. Like we're here right now and like not in the same way, at least. You might say it's tyrannical. So like how do you wake those people up to this? Like how do you get the masses interested in Bitcoin? Or even actually, not even just interested in Bitcoin, but interested in not constantly being surveilled.

I think that those ingredients are actually already there. We've seen this tech lash where people become, like the masses have become very suspicious of Google and Facebook and the tech companies. And people are starting to feel that fear and anxiety of, wait a minute, what's happening with my data? Am I being tracked? Is the camera on my laptop watching me? Yeah. Like that is starting to be pervasive in society. And I think the problem is that people just don't know.

know where else to go. I think if we gave them an option, they would take that option, but we can't just not use Google or we can't just not use chat GPT. These are fundamental tools of being productive in the economy. And I think people feel trapped like they have no choice. And that's one of the reasons we founded our company, Vora, is to create this other option, not just for using Bitcoin privately, but also for you. using AI privately or cloud data privately, that we're going to have this self-hosted, self-sovereign server rack that you have in your home

and you control your data. And you don't have to be super technical and you don't have to sacrifice user experience. So I think if we can give the average person the same level of UX that they expect, the same productivity tools that they have, but in a way that is private. And along with that,

we're having this march towards hyper-bitcoinization, which is not just going to change the nature of the monetary system and the economic system and the legal system, but it's also going to change culture, that everyone in the world will know Satoshi's name in the same way that everybody in the world understands the concept of human rights, and the concepts of human rights is grounded in political philosophy, it's grounded in Locke, it's grounded in Rousseau,

and that's become sort of baked into the collective consciousness, we're going to go through the same shift with Bitcoin where the cypherpunk ethos is also baked into the collective consciousness, and everybody understands that their freedom is dependent on Bitcoin and on cryptography. So I think we're in the midst of this shift right now, and all the ingredients are in place that we're going to be making this transformation into a completely different way of relating to these systems.

Yeah, it's funny you say the AI thing, because that is probably, like, you meant, Eric, you mentioned the digital panopticon. AI is going to be at the absolute center of that. Like, it's the amount of data that scraping from everyone using it is insane. Like, people are sharing their dirty secrets. They're like literally everything is going into these machines. It's being stored forever.

And at the same time, it's like a massive productivity boost. I use it all the time. I know I'm putting information in there that I probably shouldn't, but I'm just like taking that. basically to get the benefits right now. And so, like, how do you make it private? That's one of the things that I really struggle with, because there's things out there,

like the project, what's it called? Open secrets that are trying to do that. And I've used it, it's good, but it's not as good as chat GPT. And, like, people are going to go to, like, the best model. They're not just going to, like, not everyone is going to value their privacy in that degree.

So, like, how do you take it from being, like, a slightly worse alternative to being as good and actually being able to store your own data? Well, this is actually where stuff starts to get really interesting, is because when you actually have the private data and you're able to share it through perhaps methodology such as homiformic encryption, you can actually put so much more data in there

that's not going to be polluted or self-censored in a way and then use that to do collaborative computing around it. So I actually think that, first of all, like we're going through the S curve of AI acceleration right now, which is why it's almost a weekly thing that you're switching between different AIs that are available for how powerful they are. But I think as we start to come out of that S-curve,

and like with projects that we've seen like DeepSeek, there's gonna be these open source alternatives that are really powerful. And when you pair that with being able to keep your data private and collaboratively be able to do compute with other people that have the same information, there's gonna be this really, really powerful way to say have your personal medical data

appraised by your AI data, and then it can share that data set and it can decrypt subsets of that data based upon homoformic hits that it has to decrypt it and utilize that to do analysis. So I think it's really interesting because I think as we're building all these tools of surveillance, like it's also creating a rope that's long enough to hang these people with. Because the others is like, if people have the alternative, they will choose it.

People aren't like, Google's great. They love me. I want to give them all my info. Like people are really upset about it. But everybody's trapped very much in the same way that they are in the monetary system. And that's why you hit a particular form of nihilism where you go, well, you know, why don't you do this or try this? And they go, well, what's the point? We're totally defeated. There's no way we could ever actually achieve freedom. There aren't the tools for it.

So how could we do it? And that's where building the tools for the future are really important. Like, it's very possible that Bitcoin could have failed early on if people didn't champion the cause and choose to take on and build the tools that were necessary. And so when I saw that going on, I very quickly made a decision for myself in my own life of that I would rather take a substantial risk in joining small startups that were building tools that I thought were really important than to stay in my normal life. And a lot of people were extremely critical of me and I lost friendships over it because they're like, this is crazy. It can never work.

It's bound for failure. There's never been anything like this in human history. So why do you suddenly think that this is the thing that makes a difference? And the thing that I came to realize is that most people don't actually utilize true thinking to try to understand and follow a chain of logic to understand something. And that they just go to this authoritarian fear-based ideology that has no relationship to truth itself. And so I found pretty quickly that while there was robust criticism of projects like Bitcoin, very few people had actually done the work to study it. And so when I finally got to the bottom and felt like I really understood it,

I was like, this is the path and this is the decision we must make if we want to have any possibility of a future where we could actually be free. And so like with this tool that you're building, what is like the end state of it? I mean, the way that I've envisioned the end state is that like this is going to be. a personal home data server that everyone around the world is going to use to not only secure their own data, but then to build out a robust, decentralized network on all sorts of different levels. Because now if you have a totally secure self-sovereign data server that has Aragap cryptographic key storage on it, you can use this to interact with the internet in all sorts of different ways, and you know that it's going to be secured in a meaningful way.

And I think that that's the only direction we can go in the future if we're going to defeat this massive Panopticon. Is that like this thing, it's lifeblood is data. And if we can encrypt that data, that's going to choke them off from their ability to actually work. In the very same way that Bitcoin's operating. Is that we start funneling money out of that system and into a new one. And from that, we're going to have an extraordinary bloom that makes me feel relently optimist towards the future. And Jesse, you said that you think this can like help change culture? Like, how? Tell me that.

Well, I mean, I think we're already seeing in the Bitcoin community that it's not just about technology that we're building culture. We're creating memes. We're creating ethical principles like around shit coins. It is a cultural movement just as much as it is a technological movement. And as we've seen throughout history, a lot of cultural movements, they start kind of niche. And then eventually they get enmeshed into the entire society. And Bitcoin is such a powerful idea, and it has so much benefits to every single person on earth that as it continues to proliferate, like, I don't, these early cultural influences of Bitcoin

will influence and establish themselves in the same way that the ideas of freedom in the 18th century started out as a niche thing and then eventually became globalized to everyone. And so when we look at these trends, if we take the big picture view of history and how things are progressing, and when we see that we're moving into this digital world that's dominated by the internet, by computers, this is the only chance that we have for freedom in this sort of digitally dominated world is Bitcoin, is cryptography, is self-sovereign data. like the cypherpunks already figured this out. They already had this vision, you know, back into the 80s, way into the future. And everything is playing out exactly as they had expected it to. And so that is, I have complete conviction that that idea is going to continue to spread, like the orange pill, right? There's something viral about how these ideas spread from person to person to person.

And of course, the price is a big part of that too. like as Bitcoin goes from 100K to 500K to a million to 10 million and so on, like that can't be ignored. And when people buy Bitcoin and they interact with it, even though it's not necessarily initially based upon some philosophical commitment, they take that orange pill and it changes their consciousness. And they start learning about, well, who is Satoshi and why did he do this? And who are the cypherpunks? and what is Austrian economics or what is, you know, the state of exception, what is Eric's work?

So that's going to keep spreading and spreading and spreading and establishing itself into our culture. So you think that culture can scale to the degree that like everyone truly cares about, like what money actually is? And then what does that do to like the political realm? Because that is a huge mask off moment for the masses at that point. So like what happens to politics in that world? I mean, we already see this throughout here.

history that every single political system eventually is overturned and a new paradigm is established. People have this expectation that whatever the current paradigm is will just last indefinitely into the future. But that's not what history tells us. So like when we look at, for example, the Gutenberg printing press and the control that the church had over Europe, like that was an information technology and the dissemination of different translations of the Bible and even pornography. like that was something that destabilized the church's control over society, over the law,

and opened up into the more free political systems that we have today. Or during the 18th century and the American Revolution, no one, you know, the average person who were like, oh, we're going to have a state without a king. They'd say, you're crazy. You know, that's never going to happen. But that's exactly what did happen. And so there's every reason to expect that that is going to happen again. and that's exactly what's happening right now with Bitcoin.

But the beauty of Bitcoin is, in the same way that Walter Benumeen talked about, divine violence is absolutely lethal without spilling blood. We now have a way of transforming these civilizational infrastructure in a nonviolent way. And that's much more powerful because we can establish this moral high ground that draws a clear line between the hyper-violent nation-state paradigm that we're in, where they are the biggest purveyors of death on the planet by orders of magnitude, of torturing people by putting them into cages with mass incarceration. This is the bright line that this new Bitcoin ethos is going to be able to establish,

that now we can enforce contracts non-violently, We can create new monetary systems without coercion. And so that is going to win the hearts and minds of the people. And that's the ultimate revolutionary force, is once you win over those hearts and minds, the political system has to change. So I know Eric's thoughts on this, but what do you think of Bitcoin as sort of cheerleading the state then?

Because this is the thing that Bitcoin can potentially nonviolently overthrow. And now we're being like, come in, have our Bitcoin. We love you here. What do you think of all that? You know, I think it's great because I think it's this Trojan horse dynamic. Like I think Bitcoin is so powerful and Bitcoin, the technology is so powerful, the culture is so powerful, the community is so powerful that I don't think it's going to get watered down.

Like the state thinks it can co-opt Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is co-opting the state. And it's becoming enmeshed into the system. it's giving cover for people, for Bitcoin companies to emerge, for the price to continue to go up. And that is going to change the nature of government. And so I don't, you know, we definitely have to be vigilant and make sure that we don't lose touch with the Bitcoin principles and that we don't start to genuinely believe that the status mentality is what we want for Bitcoin. But if we see this kind of under the surface dynamic, you know, like Sun Tzu said that all wars by deception, you don't tell your enemy like, hey, this is where I'm going to line up on the battlefield, you know, come and get me. So this is what we're doing with Bitcoin where we're saying, yeah, this is great for the dollar. This is great for the nation state.

You know, buy it up and your strategic reserve, you know, establish the right of self-custody into the law. will preserve your power forever into the future because that's part of the cryptographic strategy that Bitcoin has always engaged in from the beginning is that it's not clear on the surface level exactly what it's up to. And that's why it's not going to be stopped. So you don't see any real risk of like actually the stake-cocting Bitcoin rather than the other way around? I think there's a risk. I don't think we should get complacent. But I think that if we continue engaging in the kind of efforts that we are. And if the trend continues as it is, I think things are looking very good for the deeper aspects of Bitcoin and the freedom that

it brings to society is going to win out in the end. But we have to make sure that, for example, Bitcoin doesn't become the worst surveillance system in the world. Like we have to keep moving privacy forward. We have to keep moving the cryptography forward because Bitcoin tracks every single transaction in an immutable way where the data can never be erased. And once you have chain analysis able to link all those transactions, now it becomes very scary. And so we need to keep evolving these technologies so that Bitcoin is truly private. And we need to make sure that we don't get these like KYC walled walled gardens where it's like, yeah, you can use Bitcoin and is legal as long as you KYC yourself or as long as you use

like the government forked of Bitcoin. So there's definitely these potentials where we can see it going wrong. But it's very, you know, so many people in the Bitcoin community are very clear-eyed about these dangers and are working every single day to make sure that that's not the direction it goes in.

Do you agree with that, Eric? For the most part, like, I'm always sort of the dissident. And so this is one of the places why I'm pedantic is that, like, I would much rather have us just run forward with the revolutionary agenda and to discard these people on their face and really ultimately battle it out. But I do think that a sly roundabout way is

probably the best approach ultimately. But I do worry very much about the complacency. And I think one of the key things is like, I don't want to see ossification. I think it's too early. Like, I think there's still very powerful tools that can be implemented. And furthermore, we need to continue to be vigilant. Like, I think most bitcoins right now probably have KYC Bitcoin, if not actually being on exchange. And like the, this is a danger of precedent for the future. But the refreshing thing is, is that we do actually have the tools and capacity to use it. And as we continue moving in this direction, I think like this is sort of what the Trojan

horse becomes is they integrate all of these different tools in the state. They're like, ha ha, we've captured Bitcoin. And then we'll see new tools come out that go, actually, you can very fluidly move your Bitcoin. It can be private. And the way that you'll transact will allow for you to preserve that privacy in a meaningful way. So I think that very much in the story of the Trojan horse, like the Greeks were very clear with the Trojans.

They were like, hey, if you take this into Troy, it will destroy you. Because it's so grand and so powerful, there's no way you could actually get it into Troy. And then hilariously, they were like, well, now we got to move it into Troy. And very similar to what's going on is once they got the horse in Detroit, they had a massive party where everyone got totally drunk. And then when they were absolutely hung over from the amount that they had done, they had drank and they were completely incapable of making war, that's when Odysseus opened the horse. And so I think the moment that we start going into hyper-bitquinization and the fiat system

breaks where it's at, that's when Satoshi is going to essentially pop out and people are going to realize, oh, like this thing actually can destroy the state. And I think that's when we start to get 60102 attacks and that there's going to be a huge panic where if people haven't been vigilant about how they're going to secure their Bitcoin, they're very quickly going to find that they don't have any Bitcoin. So do you think the 61-0... There's a few things that I think are, like, a risk of sort of state adoption of Bitcoin. Like, one is definitely a 6102 attack. I think that's, like, relatively likely over a long enough time period. But then the one that really concerns me is, like, if, I agree with you that, I don't think we should justify yet. And if any change to Bitcoin

becomes, like, a national security issue, who knows if they can actually have real influence, but they're certainly going to throw their hat in the ring. And what does that mean for Bitcoin? And I think we're already seeing certain things like that, and this is why people need to have very deep technical understanding what they're messing with. And like the first tweet that I had when I came back to Twitter after you're taking off was that like the op return debate, I think is absurd and ridiculous. And like no one wants any of the stupid cats or images on Bitcoin, but because of the way that Bitcoin stores data, like that can happen. So the question is, is do we dump all this garbage in the UTXO sets and allow for that bloat to then start to break Bitcoin? Or do we simply allow for that to be put into op return? And like it, I don't think people understand that there isn't a whole lot of optionality about it.

And so this is one of the places that I do have some fear is that the lack of technical knowledge can allow for people to be appropriated so that if JP Morgan has a fork where they're like, hey, guess what? Like, we're going to do filters. The only of the things that we want are going to get on Bitcoin, there's an extremely dangerous path to where it's like, oh, and it turns out those filters are designed specifically for AML KYC stuff. and I would just think it would be very tragic if we found this radical plebearian contingency that doesn't necessarily have the technical knowledge end up being the foot soldiers for the very people that they oppose.

Yeah. And do you think that the kind of like Bitcoin treasury companies are sort of part and parcel of the same kind of like threat to Bitcoin and this like financialization of it? I actually think that there are our most valuable allies unequivocally because of their idiocy. Like I think, like I think that I think it's a very, short-sighted idea of like, yeah, like everybody's just going to load up on Bitcoin and that like Bitcoin goes to the moon and that like now we're all just rich.

Like there's very little tessiary thinking of understanding that, okay, so like what happens when all of this value funnels itself into Bitcoin? Like does that old system just adapt to it? And I don't think that they see that like they're actually the people that are bringing in the existential threat. And so to me it's quite hilarious about like they're the individuals that are parading in front of the Trojan horse. being like, victory, like, now it's integrated with the state. It's so wonderful. Like, let's all get drunk and high on all of the money that we've just made. And they'll do that.

And then in the end, they'll find, oh, shit, we've actually designed and created a system that not only is going to destroy the fiat system as we understand it, but it's also going to radically empower self-sovereign bitquiners in a way that, frankly, we're going to be deprived of. Like, we're kind of the first victims of the collapse of the system. And they're totally unaware of it. Wait, explain that. Why is that? Why are we the first victims? No, no, the Treasury companies will be the first victims.

Because essentially, like, the government's going to show up and steal their Bitcoin. Yeah, because they're the easy ones to 6102. Yeah, and so the big question is when that happens, how much of the Bitcoin is actually going to find its way into the state hands in addition to how our Bitcoiners are going to respond to that dynamically in the moment. And like, that's kind of the big open-ended question that is where it's not clear who's Trojan horse and who. But in that scenario, surely all the Bitcoin finds itself in the government's hands.

Well, this is where it starts to get really interesting, is that if people have been actually securing their Bitcoin with methodologies and collaborative custody in intelligent ways, that when that attack happens, there will be able to be essentially panic buttons and release buttons so that they'll be able to pull their Bitcoin out through different jurisdictions or in anonymous ways. Oh, sorry, I mean like all the Treasury companies, Bitcoin,

is going to be in the hands of the government. Well, again, even the Treasury companies could choose to secure their Bitcoin in a way so that when they come and they go... But not are doing that right now. Yeah, I don't... using Coinbase. Yeah, I think that's pretty much what most people are. And I think that anybody who has thought about this with any depth or concern that's

running a Treasury company should be deeply alarmed and concerned. And really understand that the number one attack vector for them will be a 60102 attack where the government comes to them and says, you need to give us all of your Bitcoin under legal redress. And this is one of the places that, and one of the reasons why Vora is an American company is we actually think the American legal system is strong enough to stand up. to that and that there will be a massive legal fight in a Supreme Court ruling where we will say, no, this is our property. You are not entitled to it. We will not give it to you. And if you try to do

that, we're going to use several state jurisdictions to fight you because we now actually do have the right to hold and secure Bitcoin self-sovereignly through various states. Yeah. And we need to, what we need is an evolution of the concept of the Bitcoin Treasury Company. I mean, none of this is surprising. All of this has been, you know, predicted on Bitcoin talk that, you know, eventually corporations are going to hold Bitcoin, governments are going to hold Bitcoin. But what we need is, like what Eric's talking about is Bitcoin Treasury companies that self-custody their own Bitcoin. I think there almost needs to be a distinction between what a Bitcoin Treasury company is

because there's lots of Bitcoin Treasury companies. Like what Bitcoin did is a Bitcoin treasury company, like all my, all my like spare money is in Bitcoin. But what I specifically mean, obviously, is these people that are just issuing a ton of debt and buying a ton of Bitcoin, they're just leveraging themselves like crazy. Right. And I think, but the market is going to be able to price this out. I mean, if you have a Bitcoin treasury company that has this existential risk of leverage of 6102, then do you really want to invest in it over the long term if you really understand those risks? Because that basically means it's going to zero. Whereas if you have a true Bitcoin treasury company, a true self-sovereign Bitcoin treasury company that uses self-custody, that's grounded in what we really look for in Bitcoin, which is long-term sustainability, which is low time preference, that is a much better value to an investor

because they know in 100 years that Bitcoin's still going to be there. So, you know, in Bitcoin, we're all about competition. We're all about markets. We don't need some big entity to come in and force the right thing to happen. We can just take it directly to the market. Even if there's a fork, is the market going to prefer KYCD Bitcoin that undermines its key value propositions to free Bitcoin? Probably not. And so we have to get out there and compete.

And that's what we're doing with Vora. We're going to have a Bitcoin treasury that we self-custody. And we're going to provide tools to other Bitcoin companies. and not just treasury companies, but emerging class of Bitcoin companies, where they define themselves around Bitcoin, where their incentive structures are built around Bitcoin, and they self-custody their own treasury.

And so we just got to get out there and build and compete and not just stand on the sidelines passively and hope that everything works out. I also want to add that, like, the market is obviously brilliant, and it discovers these differences, and very similar to when it became a, apparent that Mount Gawks didn't have all of their Bitcoin. There became a price differential between Mount Gawks Bitcoin and other Bitcoin.

And within that, it becomes apparent that I think something very similar to the Bitcoin Treasury strategy of if people haven't been holding their Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way. And there starts to be rumblings of 6102 attacks. The market is very quickly going to determine that and show prices that are going to differentiate there. We'll see what the MNAV is then. Exactly. And so, like, I think that it's really important to understand that like this is sort of

the ongoing iterative process that will happen. But with that being said, like, there will be a lot of bloodshed, not in a physical way, but in a proverbial way, like when all of this goes down. And the sad thing is that most people will know and understand that they should have been holding their Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way. And because they didn't, they're going to end up getting garbage that will probably go to zero over time, very similar to how what happened after the gold seizures in 1933. Yeah.

Have you seen this Wall Street guy? I think he's called Jim Chanos, who is shorting micro-strategy and longing Bitcoin in the moment. And like, I think that will be one of the ultimate strategies, and that's sort of the... I think he's too soon, though. I definitely think he's too soon right now. But, like, this reminds me of the scene from the Joker where he, like, breaks the pool queue and, like, throws it down between the two guys. He's, like, there's one spot open and then, like, walks away. And this is sort of the brilliant strategy that anarchists have somehow found themselves as very strange bedfellows,

with free market capitalists of that were like, hey, like, what if I told you the most profitable thing you can do is kill the state for me? And they're like, I'm listening, and it's like right on. And so I think strategies like this are literally what's going to produce this Trojan horse strategy is because there's people out there that realize micro strategy can only do the play

that they're doing for so long and other companies can only do it for so long until it becomes problematic. And it's pretty hilarious that now with the whole Bitcoin Treasury strategy that we're essentially returning back to 2020 again with the whole blockfly strategy of that now people are getting all of these different instruments that really at the end of the day are all relying on some synthetic structure that can collapse and will collapse on itself. Do you think that will last long enough to even get 6102'd?

Yeah, and I think that all of these things are going to collapse into like some giant event that happens in one week where we see some blacks one event, we see price panic, we see the government moving to do 6102, we see like on. fee chain, the fees on chain will spike up to like 300 v bytes per stat and people will happily pay it because that means they're going to be getting their Bitcoin off exchange. We'll see exchanges go down. It's going to be chaos across the board. And with that being said, people will still be able to use their Bitcoin, get it out of

these systems in a viable way so long as they can actually still do that. It's hilarious to me that the people doing these like Bitcoin Treasury companies are like trying to pretend this is not just shit coining. Yeah. Like, I don't mind people doing it. Do whatever you want. Put your money where you want. But it's shit-coining.

Yeah. And, like, you know, like, it's a very interesting irony that points to itself in this sort of lamb-fony kind of way. Because, like, they say all of the right stuff up until you go, well, isn't this just shit-coining in a derivative way? And they're like, no, look at all the hand-wavy stuff I can do to make excuses and all of this great stuff is going on. But at the end of the day, like, we can cut this Gordians knot and simply say, if you don't

control the private keys that hold your Bitcoin, that's not Bitcoin. And so the paper Bitcoin thing, I think is going to become very similar to how paper gold is. But I think the big difference is is because the actual liquidity of Bitcoin can move immediately, whereas you would need to show up to the gold volts to kind of claim your gold, that there will be a liquidity crisis at some point in time. And it'll be clear that there's not enough chairs for everybody to sit down. And in the like 61 or two scenario, it doesn't even matter if you're a huge Michael Saylor fan. I think Michael's great. He's done some cool things. But it doesn't even matter if you like him because they only have to go to Coinbase. They don't even have to talk to Michael Saylor. Exactly. And it's pretty dangerous,

particularly with the amount of Bitcoin that it has. And Saylor obviously is aware of this risk, which is something that makes him a very strange fellow to me in particular ways because you obviously understand the value proposition of Bitcoin. And if that is true, why are you keeping it in a way that you clearly are opening yourself to more susceptibility towards more well than any other person in human history. But I also think, I mean, I totally agree with all that. But the other thing is the more Bitcoin gets entrenched into the economy and into the financial system, the more complicated a 6102 attack becomes.

You know, you have Black Rock, which is a systemically important financial institution that has tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin that they're holding. You know, as more... Are they holding it? Well, they're not holding it, but they're exposed to... to its price. Yeah. And so if Bitcoin suddenly goes to zero or if those assets are suddenly seized,

what does that do to the economy? Like if the politicians have to choose between collapsing the economy or creating some giant crash because 20% of companies in the world or in the United States are holding Bitcoin, that's going to be very politically difficult for them. And especially as the dollar is collapsing, and the amount of federal debt is increasing, how much longer were the government even have the power and the political capital to take these kinds of measures

and have the economic resources because eventually the money printer is no longer going to work anymore and all those new dollars that they're creating are worthless. So there's a little bit of a scenario where I could see the dollar collapsing and the government's ability to enforce a 6102 happen before all these Bitcoin treasuries blow up. Well, and I also want to add, like, this is one of the reasons that people that have chose to take

going in the state and trying to change it from within is why I won't be terribly critical to them because I do think it's really important. And there is a pretty good shot as well that the government moves to 6102 and because we have such strongly embedded state rights and other things in the United States that they can go, no, this is absolutely illegal. This is not an emergency. You guys have totally mismanaged your own finance. and you are not allowed to steal from American citizens.

And although, like with how the 6102 attack originally happened, where you can show up and put a gun in somebody's face, this time with Bitcoin, they could say, hey, we actually aren't going to give it to you and you don't have access to that. And I think that that's a really powerful idea. And so the other thing to, that's really important to understand about 6102 attacks is Bitcoin has an intrinsic defense against 6102

that gold does not. and every other asset does not, which is that there's a principle in the law, the rights remain silent, that came out of the Star Chambers that happened in England during the 15th to 17th century, where it became clear that there's something fundamentally unjust

about forcing people and coercing them to testify against themselves and accuse themselves of committing a crime. So we have, for example, along history in the U.S. Constitution, that you cannot, under the Fifth Amendment, you can't be forced to testify against yourself. And this principle of law has been applied to force decryptions, where the government wants to force somebody to decrypt data. And if they have a memorized password or if they have some sort of testimonial factor that's required to decrypt the data, that under that very old

principle of law, that can't be forced to happen. And so when it comes to Bitcoin and one of the defenses we have in the Vora system against 6102 is being able to move your Bitcoin into be secured by a key that requires a testimonial factor. And one way that people do this today is with brain wallets or with seed phrases, but that has the risk that maybe you're going to forget it. And so we're going a step further with that where we're going to be able to use something called an OPRF, an oblivious pseudo-random function, where you can derive a strong, non-brute-forceable key from a short pin.

So imagine you have like a four-digit pin, and there's only 10,000 different combinations of a four-digit pin. But if you have to derive the key from the pin, there's a server where you send the server a blinded pin. it uses its entropy to extend that pin into a strong key. It doesn't see the key. It returns this blinded key back. And then the user unblinds the key and gets their strong key back.

And that server can enforce rate limiting. So you can't brute force it because it has like a minute time out every time or something like that. Exactly. And then we can decentralize that pin server because every single Vora Vault is going to have. a trusted execution environment with remote attestation. So we're going to build a decentralized pin server that you can't shut down that can enforce the rate limiting, that the chip can prove to you that it will enforce the rate limiting and the code that it expects. And that way, if you think a 6102

attack is a risk or one starts occurring, you move your coins onto this pin layer. And now, you have strong constitutional protection that's backed by hundreds of years of precedent that the government cannot force you to give up your Bitcoin. This episode is also brought to you by Iron, the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin Miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They also provide cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with the founders Dan and Will for a long time now and have been really

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So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're fully protected by Anchor Watch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individuals and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to Anchorage for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage over anchorwatch.com. That's anchor watch.com. This is kind of back to the point you made a little bit earlier, Jesse. Like, when it comes to 6102, you're saying it's much more complicated with Bitcoin.

But because, like, BlackRock obviously are, like, their systemic to the economy. But, like, really, would they not do it in a more sly way where they take the coins, say, we'll still denominate it for you? Like, you still have it. But we're just going to look after it. They're not like multi-stage to this where at first it seems like relatively nothing. And then it just ramps up and ramps up and ramps up. Yeah. I mean, I think, especially with the Black Rock dynamic, there's going to be a battle there,

and Black Rock will go to court too, and they might lose. But this testimonial factor, there's not going to be a way around that because that's established in the law, and it is one of the fundamental sacred principles of the law. And the data is encrypted. So the government can't even prove it is encrypting a Bitcoin key. they don't know what the data is is completely opaque and so even to get access to that data

to get visibility into the data they have to force you to speak something against your will that could incriminate yourself and that can be taken all the way to the Supreme Court and we can fight and win that battle now we shouldn't be complacent

this is a multi-front war we're not just going to come at it from one direction but this is very powerful defense we have and the legal direction. We're also going to battle it out politically. We're going to lobby. We're going to gain political influence so that we can have enough influence

over states or the federal government where they're not going to take this act because they are Bitcoiners or because they're funded by Bitcoiners. So that's another front in the war. So we're coming at it from a legal angle, from a political angle, from a technological angle,

from all these different directions. And the combination of that, is so powerful that the state is not going to be able to fight all those fronts simultaneously and win. This is why we need the orange party, Eric. It's so funny that you as the anarchist are pushing the orange party. Yeah, I exist in strange idioms. But I think it's really important. And this is one of the reasons that I feel compromised in a lot of it.

And also why to recuse myself a bit like we've entered into a totally new area of politics where I think all of the of the past fail. And so like as an anarchist, I believe that pushing forward technology and trying to create a radical new. And it's funny because we call a political party because I see this as a party very much in the classic idea of it of that like this isn't about getting the right people elected, but it's truly about creating communal movements where it's like, hey, I'm part of the orange party and that's not because I like elect guys that run for the orange party, but it means

like I run my own node. I have my Bitcoin stored in a self-sovereign way. I educate others on the problems with the Fiat system. the endemic abuses that have, and the reason that we need to use technology, first and foremost, to start building out this new form of the political. And I very much believe that using tools like Noster

to actually create decentralized social networks, like that can actually be the substrate of really a new system that I think the closest thing that relates to historically would be syndicalism, where essentially you have layers from the local level to the regional to state to federal level, all of these different forms of organizations, that push power upward and really have true democratic representation through the people that they elect from those councils to then speak for them.

And so when I say political, I'm usually not talking about contemporary politics, but I'm talking about capital T, capital P, the political, which is a very Schmidian concept. You said you wanted to Hodel to run for president, though. I do want Haudill to run for president. I think he would be an amazing president that would get a lot of this stuff done that we need to have done. So he's got my vote. He's got my vote too. Are you going to be his vice?

If he nominates me, I'm not going to deny it, but I mostly just want to, I mean, for me the big thing is like, I'm just- You want him to be president because you know he's going to get shot. Well, you know, I don't know that, but like there is substantial risk that that could happen. But I mean, ultimately at the end of the contemporary political system and it's fundamentally broken. It's that there, if you went back to when these systems were made and we're like, hey, hey, do you think there's like a magical thing in the future where like we can talk to people on the other side of the planet and organize like through these like crazy computer things that they'll have?

And they'll be like, again, you're totally insane. But we've finally reached the place that like it's clear that the internet's the most powerful technological apparatus that's ever been created. It's not going away. And it's empowered billions of individuals around the planet. So at what point are we really going to stand up and say if there is an opportunity for the future to be freer than the one that we were given? We must use this technology to push that mission forward. And it's really only up to us. Like being the generation that straddles and knows what the world looked like before the internet and after the internet,

it's fundamentally something that's given to us that we're the only ones that can actualize this. And that window will close if we don't take the opportunity to make sure that we build the needed tools to ensure that future comes about. And just before you said all the isms have failed. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, this relates back to Alexander Dugan's fourth political theory, where in it he sort of makes the argument that liberalism, fascism, and communism were all the primary political systems of the 20th century. And essentially after the collapse of the Soviet Union with Francis Fukuyama's presentation of the last man of history, that it was the assertion that liberalism has fundamentally won, that the entire global world order will move over to liberalism, that there will be free market economies, there will be deep interdependence between all global economies. and that's just the way it goes.

But through the 1990s, we saw liberalism develop into a form of neoliberalism that I think is inherently and fundamentally always a lie because it wants to speak to all of the principles of liberalism, but then it wants to engage in

panoptic surveillance, capitalism, mostly explicitly for profit, and sort of at the bottom is there's this extremely evil notion that it's incapable of thinking because it's so self-invested in just making money for itself individually. And so within that,

the order has sort of collapsed in a particular way that when we speak of something like capitalism today, it doesn't exist in any meaningful sense. We don't have any truly free market economies because of how Fiat works. In the same way that if you pivot over and look at what communist China is, like they have all of these very strange principles that are allowing for them to operate these quasi-market mechanics

that's totally unrelated to communism. And then fascism died such an early death in its grave that to even speak to fascism is such a heretical idea or the very idea of there being a fascist party is something that is so heavily oppressed that you can't openly speak about it without people decrying that you're a horrific individual. Do you want to speak about it?

I mean, like, I think as a form of political system, it has a lot of merits and importance and some extraordinary dangers that was really what happened throughout the course of World War II. And so, like, I personally believe, like, whatever the politics of the future, it's gonna be an integration of several of these principles,

And we're already seeing that with Bitcoin and that the decisions that Satoshi made for the Bitcoin system, like that was a fascist ideology that he implemented, that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. That if you secure your private key with, if you secure your private key in a self-sovereign way, like you own that. There is no exceptionalism to be able to violate that. But furthermore, if you have one Bitcoin and I have one Bitcoin, like those are totally equal and can be utilized in the economy in the same way. So there's some like communist idea. in there as well. Yeah, and so it's really fusing these ideas into a radical new way, and that's in order to implement the most radical form of individual liberalism that there's ever been that. I own my Bitcoin. Nobody can take it away from me if I've secured it in a proper way,

and that the entire system functions on those emergency principles that we spoke about earlier, they simply can't function in this arena. So you think this, like, fascist and communist protocol ends in liberal, liberalism? Well, I think, uh, And again, it's very important to sort of read Alexander de Gooden's fourth political theory. Because in this, he said that because all of these former ideas have been liquidated by neoliberalism, there's now an opening that we can take different parts of prior political theories and utilize those to implement and create a new form of the political. And I think that's very much not only what we're seeing with Bitcoin, but the future that we're going into where we make the decision that we want the Internet itself to become a political vehicle is going to do that. And I think that this is one of the real opportunities that we have to simply say,

this prior political order no longer serves us. And it's very clear in the Declaration of Independence that when these become a long train of abuses and usurpions, that the people have a right to change their forms of government to better themselves. And I truly believe that we're at that place. But the biggest problem is, is the, frankly, the cowardice and spinelessness that most people have because of living inside of a slave system their whole life, the very idea of standing up and say, I won't do this anymore is very radical to most people.

So when I tell most people, like, I don't vote, it doesn't make any sort of a difference. They get really angry with me. And I go, show me the party that I can elect that will not bomb people. That's my priority is that I came into Bitcoin first and foremost as an anti-war activist and continue to maintain that because I have no interest in murdering anybody who I've never met for whatever reason there may be.

If you want to go do that, you are free to take yourself to those places and wage those wars with your own money. But do not use mine. That's a violation of my personal principles. And frankly, it's illegal as well and unconstitutional. It's just that we've lived inside of this state of emergency for so long. Yeah. And I think along with that, this problem with the isms is there's a deep anti-intellectualism that is at the heart of this over simplification and polarization of these concepts. So there aren't these clear boundaries between these thinkers and between these isms that people, that it seems to be.

Like, people say, okay, you know, I'm against communism, but have they actually read Karl Marx? Or they say they're against fascism, but have they read Julius Savola? Or they're against liberalism, but have they read John Locke? Like, they don't really understand the basis of these ideas, the nuance of these ideas, the actual books and thinkers that are at the root of these. ideas. Carl Marx was influenced by Adam Smith, who is the primary thinker in terms of capitalism. There aren't these firm boundaries, but the problem is that both the media and the politicians want to divide people and pit them against each other because that makes people easier to control. Just make a spole.

Exactly. And so all the nuances drained out, it becomes this brain-dead tribalism of like, are you red or blue? What side are you on? Cancel culture, guilt by association. Oh, you're citing Schmidt, you're citing Dugan, you're citing Heidegger. You know, that means you're a Nazi or that means, you know, you love Putin. Like everything becomes not about ideas, but about using words as a way of bashing people over the head, disempowering them, scaring them, and imprisoning them. So we need to break out of this kind of artificial constraint where that has been imposed on people and become free thinkers who go to the first principles, who go to the underlying books, who read them and think about them, who then piece them together in new and creative, liberating ways

where we can take parts of this idea and parts of this idea and parts of this idea. And that's what is so beautiful about Bitcoin is it's a fusion of all. these different components. There's a communist aspect of Bitcoin, which is the open source part. We have this common property that everybody owns collectively. You also have the same sort of bourgeoisie versus proletariat class consciousness with this idea of the plebs. The plebs is a reference to this sort of communist class consciousness notion. So you have this communist part of Bitcoin. You also have this hypercapulous, anarcho-capulous part of Bitcoin, where it's completely market-based, where there's no state control or coercion.

Everybody's free to run whatever code they want and take it to the marketplace and compete. You have a fascist part of Bitcoin, which is not that everybody just invents their own truth, but that there is a truth. There's a mathematical basis. There's proof of work. There's something that is objective in the system. So there's this fusion of all these different ideas, all of these thinkers, into a new combination. And we need to get over just having this surface level labeling that we just stick on people and say,

now I'm not going to listen to you because you invoked this isom or because you referenced this thinker that you don't even know what they had to say or what they wrote. Mic drop. I fucking love that. Should we talk about quantum? I've seen you a couple of times in the last month or so. and you've chewed my air off about quantum a couple of times. Yeah, I mean, I got a brainworm that essentially like I started running down a bunch of different ideas that I've had for probably more than a decade about ideas of essentially like how the universe works, how black holes operate. And I think that there's a real opportunity to innovate around this, particularly with all of the new AI software and being the quantify and sort of run down math equations.

And so I actually think like this is one of the other. distant political goals here too, is that like if quantum becomes the thing that we believe it will, this is going to inherently break the internet in a new and different way that could be an existential threat to how it functions. And again, like building the tools and making sure that we actually have the power and ability to be able to address these problems in a thoughtful and meaningful way is really important. And so I'd like to see more and more people trying to participate in this. And, you know, hopefully in the five or 10-year quest, when Vora has become a much large company and we have much more substantial financing.

I have a number of different scientific experiments that I'd like to run down that's sort of align with this pretty wacky idea that I have about essentially that black holes are really Mobius strips and that the entire universe is based on this non-Euclidean topology as opposed to the various disparate theories. I mean, I think you need to explain what all of that means. It's pretty hard. I should have brought all my notes, but more or less that a black hole itself looks like a which amovius strip is if you take a piece of paper and fold it over itself and then twist it once and reconnect it

There becomes a surface that you can traverse along infinitely going in one direction and it goes over both sides of the black hole and so non-oriented topology is something that is well known within quantum Mechanics and even to create Quantum resistant encryption they use a lattice structure which a Mobius strip if you were to Interconnect them in a particular way it makes a lattice structure like that So these aren't really too far-fetched ideas. And ultimately, this comes from an idea that I have that you can take information and when you put it into a black hole, it's not actually being destroyed, but it's being compressed

and encrypted. And then when it escapes the black hole as Hawking's radiation, like, that's actually encrypted information that the black hole itself has the private key based upon how that black hole is essentially absorbing information. And funny enough, like this is, from this, there was a subset of essentially, something that ChatGBTGPT was insisting that, like, we've invented something that it calls a holographic cryptography, where it's creating cryptographic algorithms essentially based upon the principles of how holograms are created. But instead of this doing from a two-dimensional

to a three-dimensional format, it's doing it from a three-dimensional to a four-dimensional format. I mean, you can't call it holographic cryptography. It's got to be Kaysen's cryptography. No. But if you're building something that is going to encrypt data indefinitely in the future, like quantum something you have to seriously consider. And so, like, how much are you thinking about that, Avora? It's definitely not part of the MVP. Yeah. But it's, you know, as we continue to grow and, you know, become one of the biggest companies,

if not the biggest company in the world, we're going to have vast resources to fund the best and the brightest in terms of cryptography, in terms of fundamental research. And that's going to be, you know, we're going to be one of the largest employers in the world of cryptographers, which today the largest employer of the world in the world of mathematicians is the NSA. And we want to overtake them. And we want to be the largest employers of mathematicians in the world because mathematics is fundamental to freedom in the digital age. And that's how we're going to stay free. And that's how we're going to continue to deliver better privacy, better decentralized systems, better user experiences.

is through fundamental breakthroughs in mathematics, including related to Mobius strip topology, related to quantum physics, and in all these different domains. And so that is coming as we look into the future. And in the same way that right now, vibe coding is a huge thing. Eric has quickly realized that you can vibe physics. And, you know, it's with AI,

which has continued to become more powerful over time, science is going to have to face the fact that some person, you know, sitting in their living room talking to an AI, is going to be able to completely revolutionize our understanding of physics, even if they didn't come through academia or the university or all the sanctioned channels of being able to think, that thinking is not something that anybody controls. We've seen throughout history how the most revolutionary ideas come from the most unexpected places, and that's going to continue. And Eric's done the same thing with political philosophy, where, you know, he isn't formally trained in political philosophy, yet his ideas are more innovative, more insightful, more impactful than anything that's coming out of academia. So it doesn't surprise me that he's about to do that with physics as well. Wait, why is that? Why do you have such sort of revolutionary ideas to psychology? Well, there's two particular answers. And one is, is that. But like it's taking me a long time to come to terms with it, but like, I do believe that, like, I'm a seer in terms of that, like, there's some weird oracle thing that goes on.

Because, like, a lot of, and this is also why I enjoy psychedelics and other things is, like, a lot of times, like, I'll get really high. And then just particular ideas kind of plop in my head. And then particularly because I haven't been formally trained in these things, I haven't been forced into believing that there are certain ways or methods that I'm supposed to think. and that's allowed for me to kind of have a haphazard approach to just being like, what? This feels like something that would be true, and I start pulling on that threat of intuition. And I think it's extraordinarily important

that most people understand that almost all of the greatest developments in human intellectual history, like it didn't come from somebody sitting down and thoroughly working through the problem, but it came through some radical inspiration that they had at some point, and then they tried to reconstruct it later. Like Albert Einstein famously said that a lot of times

he just saw these sort of structures that then he later tried to mathematics and offer in that way. And it's important to understand that, like, again, Albert Einstein wasn't somebody that was trained as a physicist, but he was working in a patent office in Zurich, I believe, at the time when he released his papers. And like, it's really important to understand that this creativity that allows for us to do development,

it's not going to be coming through these official channels, but it's going to come from individuals that are curious and they're going to follow their intuition through a very particular way. And so for me personally, utilizing this method to follow things, I've trained myself over the last decade to honor and respect what my own intuition is and allow for myself to chase it down. And there's been plenty of kind of crazy, wacky ideas that sort of fell flat on their face. And that was totally okay because this wasn't my career.

It wasn't something that was expected of me. And the same thing when I started publishing my philosophy is that I felt felt really nervous about the criticisms that were going to come to me, but it felt much more important to get the ideas out there. And because of that, like, I've established so many extraordinary and powerful friendships, like not just the one that me and Jesse share, but there's been bitcoins from all over the world, literally hundreds of people at this point in time, that because of me putting my thoughts and ideas out there, they've connected with me, and we've been able to share it in those developments together and collaborate and inspire their

ideas. And I've had people that I have extraordinary amounts of respect for who have came to me and said, I only wrote these things because of the way that you inspired me to do that. That's very cool. And to me, that's one of the most beautiful things that we have is being able to do that together. Is part of the reason as well, because you're willing to kind of entertain the ideas of philosophers who aren't particularly popular in, like, traditional academia? Absolutely. Like, to me, that's one of the keys is that if we're not allowed to talk about someone because of what they did, like that's fundamentally dishonoring

the intellectual process of that, like, a great example is like, I've read Mao's four philosophies. Like, Mao is arguably one of the most evil people on the planet. Same thing with Lenin's state and revolution. I've read that and I thought it was absolutely brilliant and it inspired my ideas. And Lenin also was a horrific human being. But it's really important that we separate the intellectual ideas

from the person to be able to explore that. And that was one of the things that sort of tipped my hand when I started reading Ambigant and he exposed me to Schmidt was when I first started researching Schmidt, everyone was like, this guy's a Nazi, you can't listen to anything he says, it's all horrible and terrible. Same thing goes with this guy, Heidegger. And I was like, well, they haven't provided any intellectual argument for why their ideas need to be dismissed. So let's go explore those. And I actually found rooted in them were some of the most important ideas that you fundamentally can't explore in academia. Tell me a bit more about them, because I don't know. They were part of the Nazi

party, but were they like the people that were for these ideas of like ethnic cleansing and all these horrible things that came out? No, like there, so Heidegger, for example, he was, he was part of the Nazi party and he joined in 1936. Like a lot of these individuals were sort of bandwagoners. And like Carl Schmidt, for example, he had several ideas that were oppositional to the Nazis before they came into power. And once they came into power, like he was essentially a clout chaser and he realized that if he hooked himself up to the bandwagon of the Nazis, that there might be great opportunity for him. And poor Schmidt is a tragic figure, in my opinion, because almost immediately after he did that in 1938, he got canceled by Herman Goring, and he existed in a quasi-state until the

war was over. And then they accused him of being one of the key aspects of assembling the Nazi legal regime. He was never actually put on charge with trial, but he was always seen as a Nazi insolid and not allowed to even teach after that. Same thing goes for Heidegger. He joined the Nazi party because that advanced his own personal interests in a way that allowed for him to become the reactor at Freiburg, but within that, he also did implement Nazi policies like purging Jews from the university. And because of these actions, these people are seen as being terrible, horrific Nazis. And the moment that you bring up the word Nazi, and particularly if somebody's career is at stake in it, like, you need to back away from that very quickly or you will get canceled.

And I think that this is one of the massive disservices that has particularly happened to philosophy because a lot of the greatest ideas in continental philosophy came out of Germany in the 1930s, very similar to how some of the greatest ideas and the advancements of physics came out of the Nazis in the 1930s. This wasn't just some bloodlusting, reckless civilization. Like, the reason the Nazis were so powerful is that they had very strong intellectual arguments

and methodologies for how they advanced their ideas. The problem is that, like, Hitler was just a drugged out wacko, and once he consolidated his power, and also it's pretty obvious that by the 40s, like, he had a pretty severe and significant meth addiction that, like, a lot of how the war played out was based off of this insane man's ideas. And it's also important to understand that the entirety of how the Holocaust produced itself was a slow slipping. They didn't start with being like, hey, let's kill all the Jews and Roma's and other people that are opposed to us. They were definitely like, let's oppress them, let's get them out of the country. But it was only once the full crisis

of the war started to escalate, that were like, actually, all of these humans that we need to take care of, it's probably easier just to liquidate and kill all of them. And one example, you know, to show how important it is to be able to engage with these ideas, is this thinker that we've been referencing an Italian philosopher who's still alive today, Georgi Ogamban, who was a student of Heidegger. Well, he builds on Heidegger in order to criticize the concept of the camp and actually to to make clear what the concept of a concentration camp is, how it still applies in the contemporary political system.

He does an investigation into Auschwitz and into the complete dehumanization of the people in the camp and how that is a fundamental aspect, not just an aberration, but an inevitable byproduct of our political system that will reproduce itself. Building on Heidegger. he builds on Schmidt. Schmidt had this idea of the state of exception that in some ways was used by the Nazi legal apparatus to justify the overthrowing of this of their of the of the of the Weimar state. But Agamben builds on that to extend it into this idea of the permanent state of emergency, the permanent exception that in many ways leads him to conclusions that Schmidt would probably not be a fan of, which are very anti-state. So if we're,

Aghaven refused to learn from these ideas and build on these ideas, he wouldn't then be able to call into question a lot of what the Nazis did and how it extends into our society today. So you can't draw these firm lines. And then even from a moral perspective, you know, it's easy to sit on your high horse. And, you know, this isn't meant to excuse anybody. But it's like all of humanity is flawed. Everybody has done things that they regret and don't. don't feel good about. Everybody's been caught up in political ideas that they don't necessarily feel good about. People who in the wake of September 11th who were very afraid were all about torturing terrorists because they were watching 24 all the time. And it seemed like,

yeah, torture is the best way to get information. Like people are caught up in crowds. They're caught up in political movements or they do things that they later learn to regret. They become more morally advanced in the course of their evolution. And so we need to have a perspective about the fundamental interconnectedness of all of humanity instead of having this oversimplification that they're good guys and bad guys rather than just a bunch of hurt, flawed people that are working as a single species to advance and evolve. So it's kind of just separating the ideas from the people. Exactly. Interesting. Just to close out, Jesse, I, you know, before you said that you thought you were going to become the biggest company in the world.

Absolutely. I know everyone has to start shooting for the stars. But why do you think that? I think because we're the only company that has absolute conviction about hyper-bitcoinization. One thing that really surprised me is even among bitcoiners, there's very few of them who believe that hyper-bitconization is really going to happen. Or think that it's going to displace the dollar. Or think that it is going to become a new political cultural paradigm.

where everybody in the world knows Satoshi's name and understand cypherpunk ethos. Like most Bitcoiners think it's just going to be this niche thing forever. And it's like this cool club they get to hang out in and kind of be apart from everybody else. But like we understand and we have a track record of being able to predict these trends as, you know, two people who got into Bitcoin, you know, around 2013 and held through every single crash of 80 percent. you know, when I got into Bitcoin in 2013, I knew it was going to be $100,000. That didn't surprise me when it happened. I already knew that was going to take place.

Were you a bit excited, though? I mean, it's exciting. It's validating. It feels good. But it's like, we are building this company that has a clear understanding of where we're going in history that's informed by political philosophy, that's informed by cryptography, that's informed by imagination and intuition about the future. And also so many Bitcoin companies,

like their ambition is way too small. And the scope of what they want to do is way too small. Like, Bitcoin is the most important thing that's happening on Earth right now. And if we can build a company that is completely grounded in the magnitude of that, there's no doubt in my mind that we will become the biggest company in the world.

Fucking love that. Thank you guys so much. This has been fun. So tell people where to find Vora and what you guys are doing. Well, this is our logo. It's the the Honey Badger and Vora stands for Melvorah Capensis, which is the Latin name for the Honey Badger. If you go to Vora I.O., right now we have an email list. We're working on the product. Right now we're doing our seed round and raising and we're having a lot of interest because like Jesse said, I do believe that we're going to be the largest company in the world because we're the only people that actually have a vision of how you can own your own data, own your Bitcoin, and have an entire vertical stack that's going to be plug and play that allows for everybody, even the non-technical people,

to be able to not only own their Bitcoin, but own their data and be able to interact with the internet in a new and radical way. And I really do believe that this is going to be the substrate for a new infrastructure for the internet itself, but one that actually honors and respects the right to privacy and self-sovereignty around data. And as, as a As far as I know, very few people have an idea for how that's going to be built or become a reality. And finally, is that being a philosophical company first and foremost means that there isn't some end goal. It's something that continually evolves and develops. And very similar to how Steve Jobs saw that every person was going to need to have a personal computer in the year 2000 back in 1975.

We see that by the year 2050. Everybody's going to need to have their own personal home data server. And that's why we're building it as a truly transparent and open source endeavor because all people everywhere deserve this right. And through securing this, we assure and can provide the substrate for a new political concourse for the future that will last forever. And I think another important component on that that we haven't touched on is we don't just secure keys. We secure people. We're also a physical security company. And as we move into hyper-bitcoinization, we're not going to be able to just rely on the state to physically secure this self-sovereign individual.

And so we're going to have full home alarm security systems. We're going to have drone technology, robotics technology, personal security. All of this is going to be part of this vision of self-sovereignty of decentralization that self-sovereign individual. are going to be able to take physical security into their own hands in a way that is grounded in the roots of the law, in the castle doctrine, in the right to self-defense, and into this new vision of the future that we're going into where we're able to provide credible deterrence and actually reduce the amount of violence that takes place because you won't want to take on a home that's secured by Vora. It'll become very clear when the drone swarm pops up into the

sky that you do not want to mess with this individual. And eventually, the logo itself will be enough to say, like, don't try anything because you will get caught and you will get punished. So by combining this notion of mathematics and physical security into a single vision and a single company, that's how we establish the self-sovereign future. Let's fucking go. Vore.com. Check it out. Thank you, guys. Appreciate that. Thank you.