You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 96: Max Hillebrand - Building Weapons of Defense for Freedom

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

My guest today is Max Hillebrand, praxeologist, cypherpunk, and open-source advocate dedicated to building freedom tech that empowers individuals through economic and technological sovereignty. As a contributor to projects like Bitcoin Core, Wasabi Wallet, BTCPay Server, JoinMarket, Lightning Network, Bisq, Angor, White Noise, and Amethyst. In this episode, Max shares his journey from Austrian economics into Bitcoin privacy, recounting how tools like CoinJoins, Wasabi, and the Taproot upgrade push Bitcoin closer to true anonymity. We explore the battle between fiat and freedom, the broken incentives of inflation and war, and why opting into Bitcoin is both a moral imperative and a form of resistance. Max also introduces Nostr as the communications layer for a censorship-resistant future, explains the axioms of human action, argumentation ethics, and resistance, and highlights why he believes we now have the technological weapons to end modern financial slavery in our lifetime.► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow and support my work. Thank you!-- SPONSORS --→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn → Shield your bitcoin with time-delayed transactions over multisig with BitVault: https://www.bitvault.sv/ – AFFILIATES –→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD)→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat → Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat → Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Max’s Website: https://towardsliberty.com Max’s Nostr: npub1klkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qulx3vtEfrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson-- CHAPTERS –00:00 – Coming Up01:23 – Intro to Max05:56 – Max Passion for Austrian Economics06:56 – Bitcoin: Bridging Economics with Computer Science11:16 – Building Freedom Tech14:16 – CoinJoin and Bitcoin Privacy18:56 – Legal & Regulatory Challenges for Privacy Tech – Samurai, Tornado, Wasabi Wallet26:36 – Why Is Privacy Important?29:06 – Economics of Wars & The Broken Window Fallacy41:23 – The Value of Cash and Fiat Currency45:38 – Moving to a Bitcoin Standard & Influence on Businesses50:03 – Max’s Take on Bitcoin Treasury Companies52:03 – Nostr & Decentralized Protocols1:00:03 – “White Noise” - Building Nostr Private Encrypted Messaging1:04:48 – Austrian Economics Axioms: Human Action, Argumentation, Resistance1:13:10 – Max’s Book Recommendations & Reasons to Stay Hopeful

Our contributors got kidnapped at the border. I put into a room, said, hey, what are you doing? Tell us all your passwords, etc. Bank accounts were shut down. Addresses were doxxed on where people are living. Stop using fiat. It's literally used to kill people.

Now, thankfully, we have a cheap, easy to use, open and free alternative. It's called Bitcoin. Get a wallet to get out of fiat. The most evil part of fiat is it tricks us into stealing from others without even knowing or realizing that. Any security technology can only protect you if you resist an attacker.

Security is fundamentally a human problem. No technology can provide you security unless the human wants to be secure and resists an attacker. Bitcoin is a big player. It's no longer a small currency. It's one of the biggest base monies that humans have ever created. What Bitcoin enabled us is to have a peaceful protest that's profitable. You just need to hold Bitcoin and you increase your purchasing power, your capital, simply by saving your money. We have the technologies to end slavery in our lifetime. That sounds crazy, but it's actually true.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of slavery in our lifetime currently. Slavery never really ended. It just changed face a little bit. Hello, and welcome to another episode of You're the Voice, coming to you from beautiful Prague, once again in the Trezor studio. I just finished recording an episode with the Trezor guy here, that told me that I had used this studio more than anyone else, and I am so happy about it. Hello, Max Hillenbrand. It's good to meet you, Efrat. Happy to be on the show, finally. I know. I'm happy to have you on. Thanks for agreeing to come. Yeah, always. And cool that you got the studio.

Right. It's good to use the space. I know. I'm so happy about my partnership with Trezor. They're awesome. Yeah. One of the OG companies. One of the OG companies. True to their core. Trezor is one of those projects that I've always admired. And they did a lot of innovation, a lot of pioneering in the space, and that's awesome. yeah and they're one of many czech companies that are in this space and it's quite amazing

to see how many companies come from prague and czech republic yeah um because it is such as still such a small industry and early in terms of the adoption and we're seeing quite a bit of innovation coming out from here yep and you live here are you based here no it's it's one of my places I return to. I'm traveling the world a lot. But Prague is a special place. It's one of my favorite cities. And one of the OG Bitcoin spaces here, Paralelnypolis,

like when this was one of the first conferences I attended to back in like 2016 or something. It's a real cypherpunk? It's a real cypherpunk. It has the Institute of Crypto Anarchy, has a co-working space, a Bitcoin

cafe that since 2014 does not take fiat bitcoin only seriously yeah why did i not go there yet well i have another week here i should probably go there right you should go there yeah unfortunately parla nipolis officially has ended um they're kind of reopened it as a second culture and now they do take fiat so that's a step back i would say oh how did that happen uh they got rug pulled um the ethereum foundation didn't pay bills as far as i can hear so serious yeah unfortunately um yeah but a lot of amazing projects came out of the space okay um a lot of great talks if you look up hcpp on youtube you'll have hundreds of really groundbreaking talks the best ones are not recorded you know

but there's a couple really good ones on there and have you been speaking there yeah many times announced a couple of cool things there. Yeah, that was a really special event. When did you start your journey in this space? Which year? I guess the first time I heard of Bitcoin was 2012. Back then I was mainly an Austrian economist. Haven't used Linux or free software yet at all,

so I didn't get it. And then it took me another four or five years to get familiar with free and open source software. A friend of mine helped me install Ubuntu on my laptop. And then I started doing some research on why is free software interesting from an economics point of view. So wait, I'm stopping you. When you say Austrian economist, it means you study economy or you taught yourself about Austrian economy? I do have a bachelor's in economics and banking, but I learned nothing about economics or banking in there.

Right, of course, clearly, yeah. No, so it came all from self-study or in other words, just reading books. Yeah, autodidact, absolutely. Mises.org, it's an amazing website. Which is beautiful. I agree with you. Tens of thousands of books. So I want to try and sneak just before you continue with your story because we are going back to it.

I just want to introduce you properly to my audience that may not know you. So just sneak in your short bio and I'm sure it's missing many things. And then you will complete for me what I've missed here. So Max Hillebrand is a Bitcoin privacy advocate, entrepreneur, and used to be the CEO of ZK Snacks, which was the team behind Wasabi Wallet, one of the leading tools for preserving financial privacy in Bitcoin. A firm believer in Austrian economics and free open source software, Max builds what he calls weapons of defense to empower individuals against surveillance and coercion.

I love it. What did I miss? okay take us through the journey please yeah it started with economics like that was my first love really um specifically monetary science um rossbart is is fantastic on this topic there's a tiny pamphlet called what has the government done to our money yes beautiful title um and back in the day i did a lot of videos about economics what has the government done to our money people go read it yeah it's great available for free mises.org yes and so i did an audiobook of the of this book, but I replaced the word gold with Bitcoin. And it still makes sense. You

know, so that's Rothbard really is way ahead of his time. The guy never even used a computer. He wrote all of his books on a typewriter. Wow. So completely not a cypherpunk. Yes. Even though he was around at the time, just barely. But he understood the foundational principles that the cypherpunks build upon. And so a lot of the early cypherpunks, like Timothy May, Nick Szabo, they read on Rothbard heavily and relied on his thoughts. So they were like the first to kind of bridge economics with computer science. And then still a lot of Austrian economists never really understood the value of Bitcoin because they thought that it's digital and digital things cannot be scarce

and money needs to be scarce. And also some people think today that digital is dangerous. Yeah, exactly, exactly. so austrian economics is full of boomers if you go to an austrian economics seminar everyone's i have just been to a freedom fest in palm springs in california with a lot of libertarians all white hairs yes great people wonderful people but so much talk of gold yeah and i was brought there to talk a bit about bitcoin that's good yeah that's good no i um i went to the mises university in 2018 yeah and i gave a bit of a lecture there on bitcoin as well um by that point

And more and more economists started to get it. And I think now it's pretty non-controversial. Bitcoin is Austrian economic money and they all appreciate it, even though most still don't really get it. They're at least in a camp of free market for competition for money. That's great, which it obviously is. So, yeah, that was my first love. So I did a lot of videos on that. You know, everyone should do the thing that he was good at before Bitcoin and just apply that on a Bitcoin standard.

that's exactly that yeah sure that's exactly what i say all the time like we don't need to reinvent the wheel you come already with a lot of skills and experience and you need to kind of adapt that into the bitcoin world yeah exactly that's what i do yeah yeah that's the best yeah communications and and marketing and content and all that stuff before so now i come prepared yeah i just bring it into bitcoin exactly exactly um and so i did that many thousands of hours of videos um but eventually i got a bit not tired of the economics but i wanted to explore something new uh so what kind of videos were you making uh back uh the youtube channel was called the world you speaking yeah okay um me speaking you know doing some audiobooks talking about economic principles

okay um and and then got into the tech side right made tutorials on how to use different softwares so hold on what's the name of the youtube channel world crypto network so it's still already it's still up and it's it's still up and i think this was a network of a bunch of different creators it started in 2012 back when crypto meant cryptography i had the tagline of the event was like tor pgp um and bitcoin something like this yeah so it really was like a lot of cool people got together and especially i fell in love with that channel during uh segwit and no2x because there were just hours and hours and hours of roundtables of amazing people talking about the details of what was going on,

what this consensus change was about, why hard forks are a bad idea, why small blocks might actually be beneficial compared to large blocks, etc. So this really taught me so much and then I wanted to kind of give back and join the network doing a bunch of videos there. I have to go watch that channel.

Now you've made me so curious. And I already have thousands of hours of study into Bitcoin, but I always want to learn more. It's a never-ending thing. The rabbit hole goes deep. I know. I don't sleep enough because I consume so much Bitcoin content. But I'll definitely check it out. What's that?

Then you make the content too. And then I make the content too. I know. What did I do? You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company. pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open-source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins.

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hours to 15 days giving you space to react, trustless recovery after one year, works with trusted hardware wallets, open source and built with one focus, beyond keys, protecting humans. Only 42 lifetime subscriptions are available at $199 forever. Head over to bitvault.sv to sign up and use code FLAT for 10% off. And then I went meeting the people who built the software. So I made a lot of interviews similar to what we're doing now. Not much in person. Actually, sometimes at conferences, I did a lot of in-person shows.

And there I just met a bunch of new cool people, made a lot of friendships, and learned who those people are who are building these awesome tools and realized that they're way in above their head and they need help. And also realized that... What kind of help? Yeah, that's the thing. I first thought that you need to be a developer, a programmer in order to help for free software. And I'm not, right? Never have been. But there's so much other stuff that needs to be done, right? Educating people about it, right? Writing documentation, doing the marketing, going on stage, doing the product management, like what are the bugs? What are the features? Let's coordinate a call to discuss it and fix it, right? All of these things, all the other stuff is essential for building software. Oh, yeah.

And so I just stuck around and did that for the projects that I used myself. Very good. Yeah, I've been doing that for 20 years, being around tech, but just not developing. I have a computer science degree and I was a programmer for a few years. But very quickly I realized that I have no passion of creating the code. There are some people that come to the office every morning and they literally tell their friends that they had a dream about the algorithm. them i now i know how to do the engine for gaming and i'm like they're so excited and i look at them watch weirdos like they love it they get so much joy out of it and i don't so i clearly i love tech

but not like that so i shouldn't be doing this i should be doing more of the other stuff like you said there is so much to do around technology companies that is not writing the code itself Yeah, exactly. So yeah, scratch your own itch. Do the things that you're really passionate about. The thing that you're marginally best at, as economists would say. And then trade with others. It's the beauty of the division of labor. We don't need to do everything all the time. We can specialize on the things that we're really, really good at. Not compared to others, compared to yourself. You're more excited about one topic rather than the other. Go with the one you're more excited about. And trade with those who are more excited about the other things. And that just increases the pie, the cake of capital as much as we want. Humans are value creation machines. We don't stop with that. Exactly. Awesome.

Okay. And what about today? What do you do today? Still the same. Building freedom tech. That's, I guess, the tagline. And not so much anymore in Bitcoin. To some extent, I think we've solved the money problem.

right and i mean that's a big claim but i think we have inflation resistant censorship resistant fully anonymous base money in cyberspace that's that's that's a thing we have now it's it's fucking unreal if you think about that right it is there's like cypherpunks have been wanting this for 40 years and finally we have it and it's good enough right sure we can make it better on a thousand and one different factors and and we are right a lot of people are working on this yeah But I've spent like the last seven, eight years or something working on this problem. And so I'm a bit curious for other things that we can do. How is it fully anonymous today?

Coinjoins fixes this. That's the gist, right? So that's the project I worked on quite long. Can you just give one or two sentences about what Coinjoin is for those who don't know? Yeah, Coinjoin is a collaborative Bitcoin transaction. And so instead of making your own transaction alone by yourself, now let's say you have two two inputs coins that you received in the past and two outputs one goes to the merchant whom you're buying the pizza from the other is your change address back um that's

that's a regular transaction how most of us are doing it but that's a very small transaction so there's no crowd to hide in meaning people see that hey these two coins on new addresses which we thought belong to different people actually belong to the same persons right because we can say that multiple inputs of a transaction belong to the same person and then we can see which of the outputs they're going to ultimately so that has been a problem since the white paper right this was one of the first responses that satoshi got is the system does not scale because it is not private and everyone has to verify every transaction of everyone else and we have a clear linkage from inputs to outputs if we have a really small transaction right but the realization is

that we don't have to be alone when we make a Bitcoin transaction. We can team up with hundreds of others of people and create this transaction that has 300 inputs, 300 outputs. Where you yourself have, let's say, three inputs, two outputs. But nobody knows which of these inputs belong to the same person or which of these inputs paid which of these outputs. Because fundamentally, Satoshi gave us a perfectly private system inside a single transaction.

There is no real cryptographic link that the Satoshi from the first output moved to the third output. Satoshis get destroyed on the input side and they magically appear on the output side again. They get teleported from left to right. They don't flow. And so this means we just need to increase the size of transaction,

meaning the number of inputs and outputs. And if we are a little bit smart with the amounts that we're choosing for inputs and outputs, then we have a pretty private system. So now with Wasabi Wallet, it's very easy, fully automated to use Bitcoin privately.

You just need to receive and wait and spend. And this is for on-chain? Yeah. Not for Lightning? Yeah. Lightning is the kind of second approach to make Bitcoin more private by not telling everyone about the transactions that you make.

And so not telling people is very good to be private. That's off-chain. If we do need to tell people, if we do need to make an on-chain transaction, then at least tell it in a crowd. So either increase the size of the crowd or decrease the amount of data that you tell to others. Lightning is that second approach.

And Trezor also have CoinJoin in there. Yeah, that's my special connection to Trezor. Like they already back in 2019, like two, three years after we started Wasabi, they were like, hey, this is amazing tech. It's cypherpunk as fuck. Let's go build it. Because I remember it from the dashboard,

like from the tool, the suite. I can just click CoinJoin on a transaction and we'll send it through CoinJoin. Yeah, we thought it's going to be easy, right? Like two weeks and we have a prototype. Sure. Turned out like five years later, it still wasn't solved. It was actually a really nasty problem. And back when we started it, we realized that the Bitcoin consensus rules as they are now, don't enable us to securely sign a multi-party CoinJoin transaction on an offline hardware wallet device. There was a trick that your laptop could trick the hardware wallet into signing a transaction where you're losing money and you wouldn't know it. And then that's what Trezor wants to avoid, that you can have a malicious laptop, but your funds are still secure. And that security assumption was broken in multi-party transactions. And so we needed to fix that.

And for that, we actually needed to contribute to Bitcoin Core and Taproot. So in the Taproot upgrade proposal, like before this was finalized and merged, we realized that this problem exists and that it would still not be solved in the Taproot upgrade itself. So the Trezor engineers found a genius solution to the problem and proposed to adjust the Taproot soft fork to include a fix for this. And after some review and discussion, we actually got that merged.

And so we changed the Taproot proposal to then after Taproot was activated to allow a multi-party transaction to be signed on an offline device. And that's useful for coin joins. That's useful for Lightning Network. So that was a pretty cool achievement, actually. It is super cool. And OK, and let's talk a bit about Wasabi then, because lately there has been, I mean, Wasabi was in the headlines, unfortunately. What is the status with Wasabi today? I'm also asking you about the actual action of trying to prosecute them where there's a deeper debate there about their prosecution.

Can you prosecute someone for developing a tool that enables an action that you haven't taken? but someone else using your tool has taken, right? Can you talk a bit about that and what has happened? And many people probably don't know what happened with Wasabi at all. So if you want to give some background about that. Yes, cypherpunks have been under legal fire since forever, right? Phil Zimmerman back in the day, the inventor of PGP, he almost got locked up for like multiple lifetimes probably

or 40 years or something ridiculous for publishing source code on how to encrypt securely. And the argument was that, hey, this is munition. bad guys might be using it. So why are you exporting this powerful technology to our enemies? They might use it.

And of course, that might sound interesting at first glance, but if you think deeper, that's just code. That's just speech. And you can literally print this code in a book

and transport the book across borders. And is that really transporting ammunitions? And if we prevent the publication of books, are we really in a free society? And so the same continued to happen like for anything that provides privacy to the everyday person, that's all of a sudden quite an undesirable thing to do because there are people who want to violate the security and privacy of individuals because if people are spied upon, they're very easy to steal from.

And if people have secure encryption and other privacy preserving technologies, all of a sudden theft becomes no longer profitable. And that is something that the thief does not like. And so unfortunately, cypherpunks for since forever have unjust legal prosecution for their activism, for their belief that humans have a right to just be left alone and to use their property as they see fit. And so, yeah, we founded the company in 2017. And since the very early times of that company, we got nasty letters asking us, what are you doing there? And are you sure you want to continue doing that? Are you sure?

Are you sure? Are you really sure? And then these types of soft attacks escalated both in their extent and in the frequency. Right. You know, our contributors got kidnapped at the border. I put into a room, tell, hey, what are you doing? Tell us all your passwords, etc. Bank accounts were shut down.

Not just of the people working on the tech, right? But on their wife as well or their parents. Addresses were doxxed on where people are living. And our company was closed because the jurisdiction all of a sudden, even though we had legal statings that this is a legal business and not a money transmitter, all of a sudden the jurisdiction says, no, we think you're actually a money transmitter. So you can take us to court or you can ignore us, but it's better if you leave. So all these types of attacks continued and two, three, four, five letter agencies kept writing us nasty messages.

And then other projects got kidnapped, right? The founders of Tornado Cash, which is a privacy-preserving technology on Ethereum, also non-custodial. And then eventually Samurai Wallet, another Bitcoin CoinJoin software. And that just continued to escalate. So we eventually said that, hey, for the safety of our contributors, we have to close down the company and stop providing the service. But the good thing is that it's just an idea. It's just code. It's just software.

And that software was published and it works. It's a functional tool. And it's very easy and very cheap to operate. You know, you can run a CoinJoin coordination service on a $5 a month virtual private server, right, on a Raspberry Pi somewhere that you put in the forest. So it's quite difficult to actually stop people from using the software because it's just code and it's just an app that people run on their phone. And so people do still. So Wasabi as a software continues. It's much more resilient now than when we were still running it.

Right. And private transactions continue to exist on Bitcoin. Amazing. because that's one of the first things that you hear people say about Bitcoin or people that are into crypto, but not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not anonymous. It's not private. Well, it can be, depending how much you want to learn and implement it.

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of hosting professor matthias desmet at a conference i produced called new totalitarian order this master class is now recorded and available to watch the conference explores the psychology behind global mass processes offering a behind the scenes look at science economics and human potential it addresses challenging global agendas mass formation transhumanism consciousness societal change and the path to transformation click the link the show notes to access three and a half hours of exclusive presentations in-depth content and my fireside chat with professor desmic use my code a flat for 10 off i hope you find great value in it and the difficult thing was just to to make it easy and cheap for it to be private right so that

it just works in the background that's the really really difficult part and i'd argue that's the It's the main innovation of Wasabi. We just made it the default on every layer. Like we integrated the Tor network. So we hide your IP address from any outside computer. It uses block filters. So you can find out how much money is on your addresses without sending your addresses to some third-party computer.

And we made CoinJoin so efficient on the blockchain that it was so cheap that we can just do it automatically in the background. So you really just need to install Wasabi, receive money, send money, and you're good. There's no extra steps required. other than a bit of patience in between the sending and receiving. Right. What do you say to the ridiculous claim that people use sometimes about privacy? I don't have anything to hide.

Well, if you really have nothing to hide, you're just a very boring person. You know, we all have things that we don't want the entire world to know. Yes. Yeah, it's like you speak different to your partner. Why do you think people say that? well because they were told it many times right this is just part of the propaganda and the mind control i think it's a programming yeah it's it's an external programming that just a lie a bold lie repeated so often yes so frequently that we all just assume it is the case and it's

also a form of giving up on your life because it's like yeah you know they already know everything about me yeah what do i have to hide yeah when did you stop caring about your life yeah right Yeah, maybe they know a lot, but don't you care? Like, don't you want a better world? Don't you want to build something good for your kids? Yeah. That's what I think. And it's also that we oftentimes are too paranoid and overestimate our adversary.

They actually don't know so much. Right. Like, it's still quite expensive and costly to do a serious surveillance attack. And especially when you use the technology that are at our disposal, It becomes extremely difficult and expensive to find out the details that they would be interested in. They have to have a really good reason to really come after you, like surveil you in a very targeted way, right? And there is a praxeology to violence, right? So to say a cost-benefit analysis to the attacker.

An attacker is just an entrepreneur, right? He has costs in his production and then he has revenues. The cost would be to buy surveillance equipment, to buy a gun, to buy the diesel for the car that goes to your house and steals your stuff. And then there is a revenue, which is the loot that he gets, the things that he steals from you. And if his costs are larger than his revenue, he's not profitable. An unprofitable attacker is soon going bankrupt and will just disappear. So the attacker, the adversary must be profitable for him to continue to make sense, for him to continue to exist. And so if we increase the cost of attack while simultaneously decreasing the cost of defense, then we make it much cheaper to protect a more valuable asset and then we will make theft simply impractical, uneconomical.

Not economical, just like we hope to do with wars. Yeah, exactly. If we take away the money printer, if we take away confiscation of assets, of people, all of a sudden they can't print money to pay the people who conscribe soldiers and kidnap them to the front line. If that economics doesn't play out anymore, then we're back like three, four hundred years ago where if the king ran out of gold, he couldn't pay salaries of his soldiers and they just left. And then the king stands alone on the battlefield and he'll shit his pants. And let me add for you another vector to this horrible loop of war funding, which unfortunately I think about more from time to time because my home is on fire and is in war. So another vector would be the incentive structure in place to encourage war is also the build back better ethos. as long as governments and global organizations have this mindset of, yeah, if something is

ruined, we will build it back better. And by the way, it's a name of a program of the United Nations. So I haven't made it up. You can Google it and you'll find a Wikipedia entry about it. Not that I trust Wikipedia, but it exists, right? So there is a program for the United Nations It's called the Build Back Better program, and it's a program that is being enacted every time there is a disaster or emergency or a war or, you know, any kind of event that will justify to then pull out the emergency program and start planning what we're going to build where this was destroyed. And so if you just stop and think deeply about this concept for a second, you would understand that this whole plan would not be created if it would not be based on the basic assumption that something is going to be destroyed, that there are emergencies, that there are all these natural disasters, that there are these inorganic disasters that are happening and wars. And so war is another input into that program that helps fire, like keep the fire burning in this ethos of mankind and humanity that, you know, yeah, it's a normal thing to just have wars that will be creating more destruction and will be creating more deaths. and we would have to enter and then rebuild whatever was broken and we will have to rebuild it better.

And, you know, I am seeing this with my very eyes where I come from. Gaza has more than 80%, I think it's 86% of the actual territory as rubble right now. Rubble, right? It's all concrete and rubble. You have to build it. There is no choice. Who will come in?

big government contractors, Black Rocks, you know, they will come in and they will rebuild it. And there will be a lot of money involved in that. Israel, the moment October 7th happened, they declared this whole area, what's called the Gaza envelope, which is the area around the Gaza Strip. They declared it as a new territory. They gave it a name. They gave it a brand. It was called the resurrection island they just gave it a brand straight away and they associated budget with it straight away for building back better and it's like it's a recurring theme every time they go into war or a project or a disaster they pull out the money printer and it's like here's more money to build better and we will by coincidence right we will make this a green

island as well so that it will be all sustainable energy projects and let's bring elon musk to look at that area and they did this is real and to to envision how we can build like electric vehicles stations in this area and how we can put solar panels now we can put wind blah blah you know it's like it's a whole industry and that's what people don't get that you know you have so many incentive structures built around destruction and around death and around wars that will just keep keep this cycle going unless you start fixing fixing the money yeah right and then maybe you can come in here and help me how how does a new form of money help battle this Yeah. The French economist Friedrich Bastiat, I think, coined the term the broken window fallacy, which talks about exactly this.

Tell me. The analogy is that we have a baker, right? He has a house where he bakes the bread. Right. And that house has windows, right? Yes. Now a guy comes along, takes a stone, throws it through the window, it shatters, right? And the economist comes along and says, like, that's great. Now we have new jobs for the glassmaker. Yeah.

Right. How awesome is that? Now the glassmaker gets to produce a new glass. The baker gets to pay him. You know, now the glassmaker can feed his family. That's awesome. We have more jobs, more GDP. That's great. That's a very short sighted, like short term thinking analysis. Because what actually happened is that the baker had savings. Right. And he wanted to use those savings to have a good time with his family. Right. Go on a vacation or maybe buy a second oven to produce more bread. Right. Or something like this. And now, because someone broke his window, he has to use his capital for something that he would not have done otherwise. The window was perfectly fine beforehand. He didn't need a new window. He didn't want that. But he had to now prioritize something that he didn't want to prioritize, actually. And so this is not that the glassmaker all of a sudden is more profitable out of nothing. It's that the capital was reallocated away from the baker towards the glassmaker.

So this is a reallocation of capital. We don't create more capital. We just shift it from one pocket to the other. So we're basically destroying it. Because that glass was working before and now it no longer is. So that's just pure destruction. And another great book on this is War is a Racket from 1930. I forgot the name of the author.

But after the First World War, he's basically talking about the military industrial complex and how this is just a pure mafia that is there to reallocate resources from peaceful people to the war machinery, right? You can think of it like all of those, you know, fighter jets, et cetera. They were produced 30 years ago, right? So your parents' tax money were stolen to pay for the creation of those fighter jets.

And now someone throws a bomb at them and destroys them. So the tax money stolen from you today pays for the bombs that destroys the thing that was funded by your tax money from your parents. So it's a pure destruction scheme. I mean, obviously, right, common sense is clear on this, that when you destroy something, that's not good, right? That's not a benefit to society. You literally broke it, right?

And it is, however, not a net negative entirely, right? There are some people that greatly benefit from this, as obviously the state and obviously the military-industrial complex and obviously the big corporations that get then pulled in to do the reconstruction. And so it's a further centralization of capital and centralization of power. So how can a better money fix this? The problem is ultimately with taxation, where the wars are only funded with taxation. Either direct confiscation of money or assets or via indirect taxation of inflation. And specifically that last part.

Inflation is just the kicker. Now you can print paper and say, no, I have money to pay the soldiers, to pay for the bombs, etc. You didn't have it before, but because you had the money printer and you could very cheaply produce this monetary asset, that difference between the production cost and the market value of the money, that's the senior rush. Yes, senior rush, income.

Exactly. That's why nobody's producing the one cent anymore. Because it costs like seven cents to produce one cent. So if you were printing one cent pieces, you're actually losing money. The state's not in the business of losing money. They want to make money. So that's why they print

a hundred dollars paper. Because it costs 17 cents to produce a hundred there's 99 plus dollars of senior rush here and if you go into the digital creation of base money right then you don't even have the 17 cents to produce the one paper you just have some basic electricity cost such a good business it's a great business right and you can one click and you get trillions of dollars and you can send them to whichever accounts you want so the senior rush here is is staggering absolutely staggering numbers that we cannot even comprehend and it's So easy, so cheap, so fast for the government and its cronies to print the money that, of course, they will do it.

Of course. So how could we make a stop to that? Simply stop using the fiat currencies because the demand for the money is that's the price ultimately, right? Price is supply and demand. They're increasing the supply. So eventually the value of the currency goes down. Of course. And we can accelerate that by one print more fiat, which the government doesn't need any help in that regard.

They're doing that just fine. But we can accelerate by decreasing the demand. Stop using fiat. It's literally used to kill people. And now, thankfully, we have a cheap, easy to use, open and free alternative. It's called Bitcoin. Get a wallet and trade with Vexel or some other peer-to-peer way to get out of fiat and hold your wealth in an asset that cannot be inflated, that cannot be stolen and where nobody can stop you to resist the warmongering going on by every nation on this planet. It's a moral imperative. It's a strategic imperative to put everything that you can in front of this war machine. And back in the days, you need to stand in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square to show your protest and you die. That's not a very profitable protest. what bitcoin enabled us is to have a peaceful protest that's profitable you just need to hold bitcoin and you increase your purchasing power your capital simply by saving your money right it's it's the universe revolutionizing on the way yeah it's it's the universe showing you that hey a peaceful life is better if you live the peaceful life i love it and you don't let yourself be stolen to fund endless war you'll get rich who would have thought people do you get why i love

bitcoin because of this this max this is genius i love it it really is like it's magical i love it it's just the incentives are aligned all the way around for the creation of a much more peaceful and prosperous society so you see when people ask me why are you so passionate about this bitcoin thing i tell them they think it's because you know i invest and i make money yeah that's great That's a beautiful adverse reaction of the phenomena. But the main and the key reason why I am in Bitcoin is because I get to opt out of fiat. And I love that. I feel like such a rebel when I am not in fiat, when I minimize my fiat to the bare minimum.

What I really just need for my taxes and my whatever, my business, my bills, whatever. But I want to be on Bitcoin as much as I can because of that, specifically what you said. This is great. Yeah. And it's so easy nowadays. Like I've met people who since 2012, you know, don't have a bank account. They just travel the world with Bitcoin. Occasionally they trade their Bitcoin for cash.

And I've been doing this since 2019. I finished my university and I quit my bank account. And it actually works. But I want to also talk to you about cash, because a lot of my audience are people that have woken up during COVID because of what the state have done to them. And they understand that the state is not an entity to be trusted. They understand how the government is hurting their rights. But sometimes they're too lazy to do the work on learning what money is. And so they don't understand what inflation is and they don't understand how cash is not, not, I repeat, it is not the solution.

Yeah, I love cash just as you love it because it's a form of private fiat. So it's better than digital fiat because it does give you a level of privacy. But cash is still fiat. And you need to understand what's fiat. And that's exactly what Max has been saying. here, right? Cash is not the king. It can never be. Cash is the least bad option of fiat, right? For one, it's a bare asset, right? So you can hold it. You have full control over it. Once you have it, it's very difficult to take it away from you, especially if someone is not close to you.

And then it also is actual base money, which is important. Base money is not an investment. It's not a debt contract. It's not an obligation of someone else to pay you later. It's the thing itself it's like a chunk of gold coin right you have it in your hand it's like a bitcoin utxo you have the keys right that's the equivalent of the physical paper currency yes now what what you can do is you can take your paper currency and put it to a money warehouse a bank right and they will give you a credit somewhere on an online banking system right where where you see now a hundred dollars were deposited or whatever but that hundred dollars that you see on the screen is not equivalent to the physical paper it's an obligation of the bank to give you back a hundred dollars in

cash later right and the crazy thing is that i mean obviously they can not give it back to you right so it's custodial there's the trust aspect but even worse they have the legal right the legal possibility that you give them a hundred dollars right and they turn around and hand out a hundred thousand dollars yeah to other people yeah and so we inflation is an increase of the money supply And so any dollar that you hold in a bank increases the money supply by 100x because the reserve requirement is 1% or less. Through fractional reserve. Exactly. And so if you need to hold fiat, then holding it in cash physically by yourself is better because it decreases the money supply by 100x.

So that is the least unethical way to deal with fiat. It's still unethical because you're stealing from billions of people. It's not just unethical, but also a bit silly because you're being debased when you're holding large amounts of fiat. And like that's, at this point, it's so scary because, sure, you get debased, right? If you're holding fiat, if you earn fiat, you get this newly created money later than all the banks, governments, big corporations before you. They get the newly created money first. So they literally are stealing from you, right? They take your capital away.

That's bad, right? You don't want to be stolen from. But here is where the devilish trick comes in. you're not the last one in this chain right there's literally billions of people behind you children not even born yet that in a decade or more will receive the same newly created money that you're holding right now they will receive it later and guess what you're stealing from them too that's the most evil part of fiat is it tricks us into stealing from others without even knowing or realizing that yes yes and it's not you to blame obviously but just a call to action to go and

learn more about fiat so that you can start fucking holding bitcoin yeah yeah especially when you realize that this is how the system works and there is an alternative that's all around better for everyone especially for you what are you waiting for right and with bitcoin they cannot then have the same incentive structures that we've talked about now for creating more violence, more destruction, more wars. I mean, they will continue doing that for some centuries. Let's see. What do you think it's going to look like

when the world transitions to a real Bitcoin standard? I think we're already starting to see it. Like Bitcoin is the fifth largest currency. There's Japanese yen, the Chinese renminbi, there is the euro there's the dollar yeah and and then there's gold and so Bitcoin is is like only Bitcoin needs to double or something like this and it's larger than the yen it only needs to triple and it's larger than the dollar and so Bitcoin is a big player it's no longer a small currency it's it's one of

the biggest base monies that that humans have ever created it needs to still go up like 10x for it to be bigger than gold but we can get there right so Bitcoin is already bigger than the British pound the oldest fiat currency around right um we're much closer to hyper bitcoinization than most people realize and the thing is it's it's not evenly distributed there's some crazy lunatics like myself who who are on a native bitcoin standard already um more and more companies are adopting this as well um and it's bitcoin is a small nation so to say in in regards to the capital that is being saved in this asset um and it's available for anyone to use you know it's it's a much more solid currency than

hundreds of other fiat currencies that are out there and just a little bit smaller than the big boys around. So I don't think it's going to take that long for Bitcoin to be the most liquid medium of exchange on the planet. And at that point, you know, things start to change. And then how do you think it will look? How would it impact aggressions and wars and violence? I think the root or the causal consequence of starting to print money is that we misallocate resources. We malinvest them. We build stuff that we don't really need and we overconsume. We consume more stuff than we actually need. And so ultimately that just means we're wasting capital. And capital is the kernel of civilization. We need to have savings and capital to build the

machine that builds the machine that builds the things that we actually want. So more capital is a lot more better. And with fiat, entrepreneurs are tricked to misallocating their resources into something that's actually not profitable something that actually decreases their capital stock and so with bitcoin you know so many businesses now start to realize that hey i'm not actually profitable right every year i have less and less bitcoin um and so maybe i should invest into something else right and and now we have to the new batch of companies that see bitcoin as their hurdle rate of like hey i want to have more bitcoin every year and if i don't then i should stop you know and and not invest in those same things that cost me more money than they produce

so bitcoin will help us to shift the mentality of what should we allocate our resources on what are the problems that need to be solved and it seems that currently we're just not we're not solving the problems that that with that we should solve we're solving things that are completely out of whack like i don't know for example decreasing the carbon emissions of the planet like that's a ludicrous thing to spend your money on when it's so clear that it's just destroying everything that you have. It's like putting your capital on fire and then you have nothing left and you're poor and starving. So we should focus our efforts on much more practical, real things that actually alleviate problems of humans. And I think Bitcoin will teach us, teach entrepreneurs to be much more

careful with what they invest in. And probably a lot of people realize that, hey, I shouldn't invest in anything right now that's why so many people start to hold bitcoin to hold money to save money is the opposite of investing right you're basically telling every entrepreneur that no i don't want to invest in your business i don't want to give you equity or debt right i want to hold my capital such that i have the flexibility to invest in whatever i want in the future and to save money is to remove the uneasiness or the uncertainty of what you need in the future and right now all the bitcoin hodlers are telling the merchants the the marketplace to do better you're not solving the problems that i think you should be solving so i'm going to save my capital

and maybe in the future when you get your act together when you build something that's actually meaningful and useful for me then i might invest then i might buy your product lovely such a good way to put it it educates the market in this indirect way yeah it's so good yeah okay max what do you think about the treasury companies that are popping like mushrooms after the rain um bitcoin is good for anyone right um and if you have a company and and you're not holding bitcoin then you're just losing capital again right and and if bitcoin is is your your asset and your accounting asset then you realize that a lot of your investments are not good and again you should stop investing and you should save money of course if you hold dollars or any fiat coin then

that capital is just going to waste so better hold it in in a sound asset that cannot be inflated so on that front makes sense as a company to hold your treasury in bitcoin and i guess there is this nuance of um a lot of companies go into debt in order to acquire more bitcoin right and this is what's known as the speculative attack uh you go into debt meaning you increase the fiat money supply and then you get the newly created fiat and now meaning again you steal from a bunch of people and so that's maybe not the best thing to do and and now you reallocate this money to bitcoin right so which means the bitcoin price goes up right arguably um and since you increase the money fiat money supply that price goes down and then 10 years later you can pay back the much more

deflated fiat denominated loan with much more valuable bitcoin so it seems economically like quite a sound strategy i'm personally not the biggest fan of increasing the money supply even if it's at my own benefit so i personally am not doing this but on the other hand maybe it hastens the demise of fiat yeah and that might be quite a beneficial thing to to the economy um but ultimately leveraging up on bitcoin doesn't seem like a very valuable like thing to do i would much rather build useful products than do some financial engineering and speaking of building what are you building today well one thing i'm really excited about is noster okay like this is the big problem that needs to be fixed after the money problem which again i think we have almost figured out

So speech is the other huge problem. We need a protocol for collaborating and communicating with each other. A protocol that's open for anyone to build, for anyone to use. And that simply cannot be a closed source centralized platform like X. That's ludicrous to have one guy in control of who can have an account, who can share his message with others. and having an opaque closed algorithm that decides what you see, that's crazy.

So I think this is a market ripe for disruption by a new protocol that is open for anyone to use and makes it easy to build new applications on top of that. A little bit like Bitcoin. How hard is it to create your own bank? Insane, right? How easy is it to write a Bitcoin wallet? You can do it in an afternoon by now with all that developer tooling.

And the same goes for Noster. How hard is it to write an alternative interface to Twitter or X that maybe has a different algorithm? It's impossible. You cannot do it. Or at the very least, you need to have a whole bunch of permissions and special API keys and whatnot, which can be revoked at any time. So it's not rational to build a company or a business on this quicksand that can be rocked from under you at any time. Nostris is the complete opposite. You can now extremely easily, like in an afternoon, create a new interface that shows a social experience as you would like.

And you can download all of the data that was built or created by other people. And so, you know, the first user of your application has a useful experience because he sees all of the posts of other people, right? And this beats the very entrenched network effect because of the open data set that Nostra provides. And so you can connect to any relay, download the interesting data and see what your friends are up to. And you can take your identity, your friends, the posts that you made,

the posts that they made, and just move from one app to the next. And that is next level. But it extends much more than just the Twitter or X use case of some short form posts or long blog posts. The so cool thing is that we have an open standardization body where if you want to make a novel application that introduces a new feature set, you don't have to wait for anyone else to give you permission to build it. You just define the standard, you ship your code, and now other developers can see that standard and integrate it in their applications. And so, but each of these has private public key cryptography as the identity layer, right? It has a decentralized network of relays for data storage and retrieval. It has a clear, standardized, uncorruptible way of making sure that we can verify what

other peoples are saying. So you can do crazy cool stuff with this. Like, for example, one of my favorite Nostra apps is App Store, right? This is an app store for Android that makes publishing software unstoppable, right? where you no longer have to back Apple or Google to please give me a developer account. Please, can I push this update to my users? And then they say, no, we think that meeting in person

is reckless activity, right? That's what they say for Vexel. That's why Vexel didn't have an iOS update in a long time because Apple says, no, you're not going to ship this feature. A computer says no. Yeah, exactly. Not even the computer, like some random bureaucrat at the Apple company does it.

It's unreal. So we can just make that obsolete. You can verify the signature of this application yourself. You can see that all of my friends are using this application. They've made cryptographic signatures on it as well. So this is a real app. This is a good app. I'm going to use it.

And you just download it. And yeah, there's so many great use cases. And Blossom, for example, that is a way to host media like pictures, videos, software. Decentralized way. In a similar decentralized way as Nostra does it for text. So the amount of use cases is absolutely staggering. I hope your podcast is on Podcasting 2.0 as well. It's on Fountain, of course.

Exactly. Of course it is. And people, if you don't know, go download Fountain and listen to my podcast on Fountain. And you can stream for yourself. You can get stats for listening. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? We tried to get Bitcoin payments integrated to Twitter.

People wrote like extensions that pulled a lightning address from the Twitter bio, like we hacked it together. Even Jack tried to do it officially in the Twitter stack. Then Elon bought it and just scrapped that project. So it was the pain in the ass to begin with. Well, he has to do his own thing. He has to now roll out the app of everything with the money of X. Yeah, exactly.

But what if you don't want to use that? Then you can do nothing about it. Well, on Nostra, you just build things, right? You can just do things. And so we build a way to send and receive Bitcoin so that your friends see what's the stuff that you like. And that's a social signal that's not just likes and reposts, right? But a real monetary cost of, hey, I value this thing. And Gigi has the perfect line of you wouldn't sap a car crash, right?

Car crashes are something you just have to look at when it happens. You don't really want to see it, but your attention is drawn to it. You're somewhat tricked by your brain to actually look at it. But you wouldn't send money to it, right, for how great it is. So we have a car crash economy or intention seeking in the legacy social media that makes you see stuff that you don't really want to see. But you're forced to look at it because the algorithm chooses to maximize for your attention. And in Nostra, we can simply make that obsolete. and we can build, for example,

an algorithm that don't take attention as the thing to maximize, but money. Only show me the posts that receive the most amount of money. And that's a very simple algorithm that all of a sudden shows you quite high signal content. And it's not the only algorithm.

That's the cool thing. We can just experiment with a hundred different ones. There's many different algorithms. I love Nostr. And I always encourage my audience to go and open a Nostr account. Just search on my Twitter feed the word Nostr and you'll see all my posts about Nostr and my NPUB and then you can follow me there.

And Max, obviously, you have a lot of followers on Nostr. It depends on the app, right? Nostr is still a very small protocol. And so the network effect is small, but there's high signal. So there's cool people that follow me, which is great. And it's a little bit similar to how you have a huge benefit to be an early adopter of Bitcoin. All the OGs from 2010, if they held on to their stag, are doing quite fine. Similar things are happening in Nostra.

If you're early in Nostra and were so super early to Nostra, all of a sudden you can be there first in your niche for this ecosystem and you build, you grow with the Nostra ecosystem. And so in 10 years, if Nostra actually does what we think it does, and 8, 10 billion people are on it, you were early, and then you will have a large amount of followers and a big impact that you can make. So you might not have a direct financial benefit, just as with Bitcoin, but you have a social benefit by finding cool people and by cool people finding you. Love it. Okay. And you have something in your pipeline, like coming out on Nostra that I should be aware of? Yeah, actually, like a lot of amazing cool projects come out in Nostra.

And one thing that I'm extremely bullish on is that Nostra had a big problem of direct messaging, right? We had encryption from the beginning, which is already better than Twitter or Telegram, which are unencrypted. So the server administrator sees exactly who is saying what to whom, which is unreal. So we did have encryption right from the beginning,

but anyone could see whom you're sending messages and who is sending you messages. Not what's the content of the message, but who is sending to whom and when and how much. And the NSA kills people with metadata, right? So metadata is a scary thing. And with Nostra, this was just available for the public anytime, right? But the beautiful thing is that cypherpunks have continuously improved the encryption standards.

And one of the recent achievements is called the Messaging Layer Security Protocol, MLS. And this is an IETF, Internet Engineering Task Force agency, like big brain cryptographers. They came up with a standard that makes group messages very scalable, fully encrypted. And so this now scales to hundreds of thousands of people in a single group sending encrypted messages. And it's very efficient to add or remove someone,

which is actually quite a hard cryptographic protocol or problem. And so we've now managed to take this well-reviewed security audited standard and put it on Nostr. Meaning that we finally have encrypted group messages where nobody knows who is messaging who. That's good. Yeah. Is it rolled out yet?

Soon. In a NIP? There is a NIP. NIP 104, I think. NIP is Nostr Improvement Protocol. Nostr Improvement? It's actually Nostr Implementation Possibility. Oh, okay. It doesn't have to be an improvement, so to say.

Sometimes it's just a bad idea. but it's a possibility yeah so there is an app called White Noise will be released on the 4th of July maybe after this episode is published already and that will be kind of our flagship

proposal of hey look at this app this is how you can do secure messaging in Noster and hopefully we'll continue building this for many years to come but what excites me even more is that it's more than just one app this is a protocol So we will work diligently to upgrade existing Nostra clients to work with this newer encryption standard.

So this will be Primal, Damus, Amethyst, Coracle, Shopster, Plebian, like a lot of different existing Nostra applications that have happy users. We'll get a massive upgrade in the security of direct messaging. And they will all be interoperable. That's amazing. That's so cool. Imagine if WhatsApp users could write Signal users. Yeah. Why not?

What the hell? It works with email. Why doesn't it work with direct messaging? And with MLS, it actually does. And we want to make it as easy as possible for you or your AI agent to write a new chat interface. So this will hopefully be that we have hundreds, thousands of applications that can talk to each other securely, encrypted, privately, without too much hassle. I can't wait. Yes.

That will be awesome. It's a really cool project. And what about automation of content on Nostr? I am waiting for that because I want a tool that will help me schedule and put content out there on Nostr without providing my private key to anyone. And I know that that's a challenge. Yeah, that is. And with Nostr, because it's such a decentralized project, there are solutions for this already for a while. Like Shipyard, for example, is a way to schedule your posts.

The thing is, it's like an MVP, you know. Yeah, I've tried the stuff that is already there and it's not good enough. enough. Some of it is buggy and it doesn't work for me. So here at the conference of BTC Prague But Primal told me they're working on it. Exactly. Primal announced the Primal Studio and it's

a pro feature for their app that is tailor-made for content producers. Let's go! So this Nostra is just so early still, right? So this is for one, have patience. Support your devs. Or just build it yourself, right?

If you have an issue in Nostra, maybe that's your calling to build a new business and hopefully make a whole bunch of money by solving the same problem for a bunch of people yes not me but yes someone else do it please yes I'm with you

awesome okay I want to ask you about Austrian economy economics what is one of the most important principles in Austrian economics that you think people should be aware of?

And the biggest thing that differs from Keynesian economy that people believe today and is not true or not the right way to look at things? I would say the axioms are. There are a couple axioms in Austrian economics that are really groundbreaking. So what's an axiom, first of all? It's an assumption that we start out with

and on which we base our logical conclusions later on. But you can't start out of nothing. You need to have some things that is your starting point. Alone, this way of thinking has never been part of Keynesian economics or historian school. This is quite unique to Austrian economics. And Ludwig von Mises defined one of the first groundbreaking axioms. There are three that I think are worth mentioning.

The first is the human action axiom. Yes. Humans act. Yes. that means that they have a problem and they perceive that in the future they could solve this problem if they allocate their scarce resources correctly and that they do they allocate scarce resources time your body and physical things to create the tools that solve your problems yeah um so that is the first important realization that humans have it in

them to creatively solve their own problems. That's the action axiom so to say. And out of this one axiom almost, there's a couple others, but out of this one core axiom we can deduce almost the entire economic thought. We can say what are the consequences of your actions. We can make statements like if you add a minimum wage it will lead to unemployment. That is a praxeologically sound statement and it is in part based because humans act. But Mises was always very critical that we cannot derive an ought from an is.

We can say that it is so, that yeah, this leads to unemployment, but we cannot say that that's a good thing or a bad thing. So Mises was of the value-free economics, that we shouldn't put values or like put our own perception of values on top of these conclusions. But then later – so Mises came up with this action axiom in like the 1930s or 40s or maybe even earlier. Anyhow, then in the 1980s or so, Hans Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mary Rothbard who was a student of Mises, Hoppe came with the argumentation axiom, right? Which basically means that humans have it in them to understand truth and to reach to a true conclusion.

and now you can say things that if you would say that hey I don't own my body right I don't have ownership in my body that is performatively wrong because I've just used my body right I've controlled it I've applied my ownership in it to speak the words that I don't own it which is a logical contradiction right so people can argue with each other to come to truth and if you have some basic reasoning then you have to agree that in fact yes this is a true statement right you do own your body and with this one realization of the argumentation axiom Hoppe deduces in ethics right he did what was thought impossible for thousands of years he says no we can deride an ought from an is we are free creatures right we do own our body therefore theft is bad you

ought not to steal that is the truth right and this means we have an objective ethics right it is simply bad to steal full stop no exceptions i don't we have a logical proof to this point now which is incredible yeah and now comes the third axiom which was just recently introduced actually by one of the greatest bitcoiners alive called eric voskiel he is the maintainer of the lip Bitcoin full node implementation and the author of the fantastic book Cryptoeconomics on the Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin. It's the best book written on Bitcoin, period. And it is one of the most groundbreaking achievements in praxeological thought. And I have not read it. Yeah. Another one to my list. Go on. And so he introduces the axiom of resistance,

right? Meaning that any security technology can only protect you if you resist an attacker. yep right that security is fundamentally a human problem no technology can provide you security unless the human wants to be secure and resists an attacker right so you can have your gold stored in a physical vault you know thick steel bars with a big lock you have a gun and a guy in front of the vault with a gun right and a tank next to him but then the guy comes in the adversary and says hey i'd like to have your gold and you're like yeah sure i'll open the vault for you right you're not resisting this adversary you're just doing what he wants then neither the tank nor the gun nor the guy with the gun nor the vault can protect you yes because you failed the axiom of

resistance yes bitcoin and any security technology relies on the axiom of resistance yeah so when does bitcoin fail when people stop using it and stop resisting an adversary right you cannot be protected by bitcoin's inflation protection if you say that if you give your your keys away exactly if you're being arrested by someone and yes and then you just give your keys away and you broke because not secure yeah exactly if the government says oh no no you cannot protect yourself from inflation by holding bitcoin 6102 that's super interesting so you're saying that the act of resistance is like a basic principle that I've always been fascinated with that one because I went to the streets four or five years ago and I always asked myself what what is it

that has me resisting something so fundamentally like I feel it in my body that I have to say no that I have to resist something and it's so interesting to hear that you say that this is a basic principle yeah of austrian economics if you if you don't apply that axiom the entire security culture falls apart and i think this is in part what a lot of austrian economics failed to understand bitcoin like oh the government is just going to ban it right right and then you discredit your part in this in this equation exactly we assume people will resist the government banning bitcoin that's why bitcoin is secure right so voskul made this genius realization to clearly articulate how any security technology works and he same as with hoppe or with mises

he articulates clearly something that we all tacitly assume yes but we we don't consistently act on that assumption and by by bringing this realization to the forefront and saying this is the concrete starting point let's assume this is true and then we deduce on top of that Mises managed to build an entire school of economic thought Hoppe managed to build an entire rational objective ethics and Voskiel managed to build an entire strategic security culture on top of that so these three are absolute heroes of praxological thought so the three books just to make this clear is is human action yes by Ludwig von Mises yes economic science and the Austrian method by by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

and then Cryptoeconomics the Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuhl all three of them available for free online the first two on the Mises Institute

both PDF EPUB and audiobook and the last one on Voskuhl.org both the PDF and I've made the audiobook

of it you made the audiobook because it's such a good book like it just had to be I can't wait to listen to that yeah oh my god

search for Cryptoeconomics in your favorite podcast app on Fountain for example and you can listen to that yeah with your calming soothing voice yes that's awesome another book that that has had the same impression on me um is by the author paul rosenberg yeah called a lodging of wayfaring men okay um it is a fictional telling based on a true story of a group of early cypherpunks in the

1995 era um that builds the first anonymous digital currency the first anonymous marketplace Look at that. The first dispute resolution mechanism. The original project was called Laissez-Faire City. And the story tells what these characters went through, right? Why they built the things that they built and whom they were up against and what nasty tactics their adversaries used. And how they ultimately succeeded in launching a decentralized marketplace. Look at that.

So this book is fantastic. it's it's the other audiobook that i produced yeah um so very much can recommend reading that too um that's on the parallel society podcast um and this is also where you think about this is these guys in 1995 i know and they're just bitcoin was even exactly exactly they can envision that yeah yeah isn't that remarkable that people have that capacity to look so far into the future and create a whole world that doesn't exist yet it's so beautiful absolutely and then one that that blew my mind even more is from the 1970s right so pre-internet pre-computers basically called voluntary not vulnerable v-o-n-u a search for personal freedom by an anonymous author called

rayo right and and he talks about encrypted mesh networks and stuff like this before encryption was the thing right um so he uh and he formulized a an applicable metric of success for freedom right which is uh called the mean time to harassment and what's time to harassment what's the average time yeah between your between you when you were stolen from right or in other words when was the last time you were stolen from the longer this number the more free you are oh that's Awesome. I love it, that metric. Yeah. And if you really consistently apply it and you include into theft every time you have to ask for permission. Yeah.

Then for me, it was, you know, very short ago when I was driving a car and I had to ask for a license plate. Right. Or you have to have a driver license. Right. So many examples. Yeah. So he went really extreme into actually and honestly increasing this number as much as possible until eventually he just lived in the forest in the tent that he produced. And he got these numbers to years before he had to ask anyone for permission. Wow. Wow, that is so inspirational and awesome. And I know that some people live like that today. And I really am like, yeah, inspired by them. And whomever can do it, I think they should. I mean, amazing. All right, we're coming to the end of our time. I could have spoken with you for a whole day. I reckon a good conversation

starts three hours in seriously they do and I think we have to do this again for sure and I you know

I'm so grateful because people came out of this episode with so many good resources to continue learning so that's excellent and where should people follow you

Noster? Noster only I don't have X anymore anything else? so just maxitowardsliberty.com you can send me zaps

you can send me notes you can send me mail So all the stuff goes through there. So yeah, I reached out to you on Oster to ask you if you want to be on the point. Yes, it works. That's the only place I found you. And last, last, last question.

What gives you hope? That we have the technologies to end slavery in our lifetime. And it's like, that sounds crazy, but it's actually true. Unfortunately, there is a lot of slavery in our lifetime currently. Slavery never really ended. It just changed face a little bit. But the coercion, the violence, the asking for permission, the inflation, there's so much theft that we just got used to and we don't have to.

And now we have the technological weapons of defense to put an end to that. That makes me crazy bullish. Oh, amen. Hallelujah. Makes me bullish to get it with you. Max, please don't ever stop doing what you're doing. please don't get too tired to be on our side we need you always it's so much fun to work on freedom tech i wouldn't have it any other way good awesome thank you so much for coming on my podcast

thanks for the invite this was great thanks for being with us please take a minute to give this episode a like a comment and subscribe or follow and please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives. Till next time!