Praxeology, Property Rights & Bitcoin with Stephan Kinsella | Bitcoin Infinity Show #192

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Stefan, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show.

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Nice to have you here.

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Good to hear.

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Yeah, fantastic to have you here.

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I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time.

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So the first long format video I saw with you, I think it was the, you were on my friend Robert Breedlove's show doing a couple of episodes, right, on intellectual property and all of this.

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Correct.

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And yeah, I don't know how much you know about me and my background, but I fell into the whole Misesian rabbit hole somewhat at the same time as I fell into the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

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And I've been delving deeper and deeper ever since.

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I even wrote a beginner's book on praxeology here.

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I've seen that.

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Yeah, I did see that.

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Yeah, I was looking into that a few months ago.

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There we go.

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Yeah, so one of my goals with this book was to get to know some Mises Institute people, because I came to this completely from the Bitcoin angle.

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But I've been devouring Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe in particular, but not limited to and reading up on libertarian thought.

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And yeah, I just love it.

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Yeah, I find it interesting that there's a – I think most people get interested in Austrian economics because they're libertarians and people get into Bitcoin because they were libertarians and Austrians.

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But I think there's a subset of people that it's the other way around, right?

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Like they get interested in Bitcoin, so then they get interested in economics and then they become libertarians and Austrians and that kind of thing.

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I find that fascinating.

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Yeah, for me, I'd say it's a bit of both.

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I mean, I grew up in Sweden, and I was always freedom-oriented and, you know, understanding, having an intuition for how freedom is much more powerful than people think it is.

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But it wasn't right. And I'd heard of the Mises Institute and stuff, but I was unaware of the thought tradition and everything and didn't do the proper deep dive until basically Bitcoin and Seyfedin pushed me over the hump, so to speak.

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yeah so

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where would we start this

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like I see a lot of people

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online and a lot of people

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Bitcoiners too, specifically

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Bitcoiners who are unaware

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of how real

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Praxeology and

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the Austrian theory

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is, they think it's optional

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or they think that it's something

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you can have opinions about

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and I

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try my best to tell them like

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yeah but

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give me a good argument against first principles.

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Give me a good argument against one of the claims praxeology makes,

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and I never get a good answer out of them.

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So why do you think that is?

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Why do you think so many people have such a hard time

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grasping how real this branch of science really is?

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I think it's because it's been corrupted.

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I think in the last, say, 70 years or so, there was a sort of corruption of philosophy in the sense of, and you hear about this now, people say that, oh, science proved with like Darwin and with relativity that we don't know anything.

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And then Kant, you know, we don't know anything for sure.

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We can't know anything real.

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And so your average person just sees this incomprehensible discipline of thinkers in philosophy. And it seems to be unscientific and all over the map, and you can't get anything from it.

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So there was a retreat to the hard sciences, the physics and chemistry because of all the successes in the early 20s.

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Science as the natural sciences, and they started dismissing the humanities and philosophy.

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And then economics was in this position where it was like a soft science of human action, trying to understand the implications of human action in the marketplace, right, in the human society sphere.

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And to jump onto this wave of pro-natural sciences in the 50s with Milton Friedman and positivism and things like that, it switched from the old type of soft science to pretend empirical science.

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So now it's dominated by people that the economic profession is dominated by people that do calculus and math and equations and plots and econometrics and trends and regression theorems.

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And I think that's basically pseudoscience. And also, I think the average person is bewildered by that, just like they were bewildered by philosophy before. And they just dismiss it because the so-called experts and most of the prominent economists are now prominent university professors or employed by the government, like the Fed of the chair or the Treasury secretary, people like that.

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And so they claim to know what they're doing, but then the economy is always in a shambles.

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So people just don't trust it. Right.

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Just like they're starting to not trust regular science with the with the way COVID worked out and vaccines and the new skepticism of everything, everything institutional and authoritative.

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Everyone's questioning everything now.

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So I think that's the main reason is because they don't know who to trust and believe.

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And it's bewildering. And I think economics has been on the wrong track for 50 or 70 years.

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But economics is unavoidable

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The typical person needs to have an understanding of a lot of things in their life

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They need to understand facts

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They need to understand basic laws of cause and effect

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You know, gravity

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The fact that if you eat poison it will kill you

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You know, things like that

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You know, virtues like hard work leads to prosperity

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And laziness leads to the other things

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Honesty is a virtue because it helps you in society

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You know, common sense, things like that, and knowledge of math and language and reading and writing and grammar and history and the basic sciences is a useful thing, right, which is why the average educated person knows something about most of these things.

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And they know something about the market and transactions and finance.

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Okay, so that's why there's a need for economics as a way to understand the implications of that field of human life, which is market transactions, exchange and trade, because it's an important part of our lives.

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And so there's a need to understand it both on a common sense level and on a more systematic level as a theorist.

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So that's the need for economics. And I think that's the reason people need to understand praxeology. Now, I will confess that when I was a young, budding Austrian interested person and libertarian, I was intrigued by all these concepts I read about, like epistemology and praxeology and ontology.

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But they all seem to me to be almost unnecessary made-up terms that are overcomplicating the issue that I didn't see any use in, any utility in.

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But over time, I started understanding why there's a field of philosophy about knowledge called epistemology and why it's not bullshit.

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And even ontology is like – it seems like a very nuanced thing, like we're splitting – it seems almost like armchair philosophy by grad students or something.

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But ontology and metaphysics and ethics and these are all branches of philosophy that study different parts of reality.

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And so ontology is the study of the basic types of things that exist.

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And even this is important.

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I don't think you need to know that on a day-to-day basis for the average person. But epistemology, you need to know something about how we can know what's good evidence, how we can know what's true, how can we reason to things, how can we trust our senses, that kind of thing.

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And praxeology, I used to think, was a throwaway term, like you could just describe all of economics without it.

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But – and I always – I also think that people, especially amateur theorists, and there's a lot of them now because there's people on Twitter with opinions that just are – they're actually usually pseudonyms.

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So they don't even have a name, and they're not educated, and they just have these theories.

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And then there's cranks, lots of cranks. And because of self-publishing, anyone can write a book now. So one thing I – one rule of thumb I've settled on in my life is that if someone comes up with a new term, they coin a new term, it's a red flag that they might be a crank.

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Now, there's exceptions

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Like I would give Mises an exception

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Because Mises coined, as far as I can recall, two terms

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One is praxeology and the other is catalactics

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And that's about all you can get away with if you're a super genius like Mises

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But you understand why he came up with those terms

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Now, there's others like Eric Vogelin and even Hayek

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They come up with all these needlessly complicated terms like taxes and cosmos

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and things like this,

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which no one can remember or keep.

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So when you start coming up with your own vocabulary,

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it's a sign that you're a crank.

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Now, there are certain exceptions, right?

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Like Wittgenstein or world-class geniuses

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like Kant or Mises, give them a break.

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But anyone who comes up with too many terms,

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there might be a crank.

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All that said, I've come to appreciate praxeology.

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In fact, in my mind,

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And I was really attracted to the – my favorite aspect of Austrian economics personally was always the epistemology and the methodology.

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My favorite book by Mises is his last one called The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.

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It's very short.

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It's sort of like the culmination of his life's work on the understanding of what economics is, right?

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And it explains why the concept of praxeology is needed.

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So the word praxeology for the average person, they can roll their eyes and just think that someone's talking gibberish.

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But really, it's just a word to describe one of these sciences, one of these systematic studies of a realm of phenomena in human life, just like biology is a field of systematic study of what biology covers.

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And then physics and chemistry are these fields, like mathematics is another field.

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History is another field.

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And praxeology studies the logic of human action, right?

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Which is just a formal way of saying, when we try to understand market phenomena, human cooperation, human production, things like this, the creation of wealth, market transactions, we're not looking at history.

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We're not looking at data.

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We're not looking at finance and entrepreneurship.

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We're looking at narrowly what are the implications of policies and human action in a world of scarcity because that's the world we all live in.

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That's the fundamental insight of economists and especially those like Mises and Hoppe is that we live in a world of scarcity.

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So the central insight of praxeology is that it's just simply to understand the nature of what it means to be a human and to act.

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Okay, this is something any person can understand, even if you just throw away the word praxeology, it's the inquiry into the nature of what it means to act.

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And what it means to act is to be purposive, to have a purpose, to have a goal in mind, to see the world around you, to understand that we live in the present. There was a recently past past. There's a future that's coming. We all know this. There's a world of facts around us and a world of materials around us, other people, other resources.

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there's things we know about the world causal laws laws of cause and effect recipes that we

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know we can use to make things happen how to make machines and how to catch a fish and how to cook

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we know all these things and so we're faced with the always we're faced with the choice what to do

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next that's what human action is is so we we see what's coming and we try to do something about it

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we try to interfere with the world interfering with the world means to act it means to use your

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body, which you can control, and to use that body to manipulate other things in the world that you

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can also control that can have an effect on changing the outcome of things, the course of

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history. And those things are called scarce means of action. These are scarce resources. So the world

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is full of scarce resources, which if you have knowledge, you can employ to make things happen.

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So the structure of human action is, which is what praxeology studies, is simply that we have,

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We are human actors that are imperfect. We live in a world of scarcity. We live in a world where the future is always coming, and we always have the necessity to make a decision about what to do next to increase our satisfaction in the world.

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And we do that by using our knowledge to manipulate our bodies to employ scarce resources that we think because of knowledge that we have about cause and effect that we think are causally efficacious at changing things So you can see that the key elements of human action are two things In addition to control and possession of your body which is what it

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means to be a human actor or a human being with a body, a corporeal body. The two essential

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aspects of human action are you have a purpose in mind, but you have to achieve your purpose

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to act. You have to have knowledge. You have to know something about the world. You can't be a

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You have to know what can achieve your ends, what ends are possible, what ends you want to achieve, what means can achieve those ends. You have to have knowledge, technical knowledge, and you have to have available means you can use to achieve your outcome.

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So it's the combination of these two things, knowledge and scarce resources that combine to result in an output, in action.

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And then it's either successful or it's not successful, right?

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Either you achieve what you wanted to achieve or you don't.

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Or you might achieve it and then you're dissatisfied, but ahead of time you thought it would achieve what you wanted to achieve.

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So that's called – so anyway, all these basic categories of economics are implied in that basic common sense story.

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Profit and loss, opportunity cost, means cost, success, failure, happiness, dissatisfaction.

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All these things are implied in what it means to act.

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So it's just the verbal and logical and reasonable unpacking of this that is what the core of economic analysis is.

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And any intelligent human can understand that, I believe.

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And then it's the more sophisticated unpacking of that and development of that, which is what Austrian economics is. And then modern economics took kind of that basic framework and they started changing it to an empirical discipline where instead of having that rational understanding of how humans act, they started trying to do what physicists do.

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And they say, let's just hypothesize a law and then come up with an experiment to test it and see if it's right or wrong.

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That's logical positivism.

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And I think that that's largely misguided.

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And that's anyway, so that's that's sort of my how I view economics and its its relationship to human action, human life and the other disciplines like philosophy, law, math, business, finance, et cetera.

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Yeah, if I look back on my school years, I remember the harder the science, the more I liked the subject, basically because it meant I just had to understand stuff and I didn't have to do a lot of homework.

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It was all about understanding instead of memorizing shit.

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And the softer the sciences and the more I got into the social sciences, it was more about remembering stuff, memorizing stuff, and also about things that, you know, if you have an inquisitive mind, you're in this wait-but-why mode all the time.

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And they tell you why it's important to vote, but they don't really explain why and so on and so forth.

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And once you stumble upon praxeology, you realize that there is a hard science for the social sciences.

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There is actually a way to do this, a methodology that works, that is as robust as mathematics.

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Like it is to the subjective what mathematics is to the objective in a sense.

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And that's a holy shit. That was a truly light bulb moment for me because it sort of proved that what I learned, I had to unlearn everything of the social sciences because I realized that it was truth. It was just opinion. It was just tailored to suit the people who paid for the whole thing to have me brainwashed in a way.

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I mean, this takes a long time to get to that conclusion.

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But yeah.

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Yeah.

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And what I've noticed is that a lot of very smart people or moderately smart people, they sense that there's this chaos and confusion and this pointlessness to philosophy and all the official opinions they hear.

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So they just throw it all away and they retreat to what you did.

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Like they retreat to the sciences.

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They say, OK, here's what I know.

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Technology works and physics works.

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But it leads to a sort of anti-intellectualism among some people, and it also leads to – because they're impatient, they also don't want to have no answers to the bigger questions that science just can't answer.

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Like, I don't know, is there a god and free will and what's the purpose of life and politics and the softer things?

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So they try to reduce it like the economists do.

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They try to reduce it to a scientific question, but of course that can't work.

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So you can't just say, well, let's just do an experimental. Let's just – let's look at – we saw this in COVID. Like, look, what does the data say? What is it? They always talk about the data.

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And they just fail to understand that just even the very scientific method itself, which is what people retreat to when they're logical positivists or empiricists, that itself is not a testable scientific theory.

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In other words, assuming that the only meaningful scientific statements are those that are falsifiable and subject to experimentation, that assumption, which underlies all of physics and the hard sciences, that assumption itself is sort of a pre-scientific assumption.

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It can never be proved or disproved.

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So you can see how philosophy is at the base of science.

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It's more fundamental than science.

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But people don't have the time for that, and they've thrown away philosophy, so they just ignore that problem.

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and they move on.

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I love that because that reminds me of a part of my favorite Austrian economics book,

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which is Economic Science and the Austrian Method by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

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It's so dense and so beautifully written.

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And there's a passage in that where he explains that the empiricist's claim is that we cannot

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know anything to 100% certainty.

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We can only like get closer to the truth, but never get to an absolute truth.

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But what the empiricist doesn't realize is that that statement is in itself an absolutist statement.

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Correct.

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So it's self-contradictory.

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And that was just such a mind-blowing.

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And Mises said this.

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So Mises and Hoppe.

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Hoppe says that in that small pamphlet.

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And Mises says that also in, I think, in Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science and probably elsewhere.

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So yet they both saw the same thing.

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Yeah.

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And Hoppe is just like sort of underlining how or highlighting how right Mises was and like how he, the action is the bridge between the subjective and the objective and all of these beautiful insights.

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I think that was one of Hoppe's biggest contributions was to sort of extend and bolster Mises because Mises has long been criticized by the objectivists and Randians because the Randians had this understandable aversion to Kant.

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Okay. It's understandable for two reasons. Number one – well, the primary reason is Kant was a little bit murky of a writer and kind of inscrutable.

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And there has been a whole Kant industry after him. There's so many interpretations of him.

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But one of the interpretations is this sort of skeptical or relativist idea that we can't know anything for sure because we don't know the real world.

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And if you take that interpretation, which people like Hoppe have argued is not really the only or the best interpretation of Kant, that there's a more realist interpretation of Kant, which is compatible with the realist view of the world, which the objectivists are in favor of.

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But that was more of a continental or European interpretation of Kant.

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In the American side, there was a more skeptical interpretation of Kant.

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And I think if you take that interpretation of Kant, you can understand why the Randians rejected him.

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But it has led them to have this knee-jerk hostility towards even the Kantian language.

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So Mises adopted just a very tiny part of Kant, and that is his language and concepts and terminology, the categories, right?

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Like a priori and a posteriori, synthetic and analytic knowledge.

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But Mises was ultimately a realist, and by realist, I mean Mises did not deny – he did not employ Kant's concepts like some American philosophers may have to say that we can't know anything about the world.

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To the contrary, Mises was just trying to find a useful vocabulary to describe human action and praxeology.

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So he's talking about different types of knowledge, scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge, and knowledge of more fundamental things like a priori concepts, things you can't – things that you would basically contradict yourself if you deny.

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And ironically, Ayn Rand herself also believed in certain fundamental categories that are undeniably true. She called them axioms, a little bit eccentrically called them axioms, like the idea that there is existence, that there's consciousness.

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The basic things that you can't even deny without accepting them as true, which is also a method Hoppe used ethically in his argumentation ethics, like to say that you can't object to basically self-ownership and private property rights because they're presupposed by the normative presumptions of argumentation itself.

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So that's his argument there. And then Mises, of course, used something similar with his opriary categories. And Rothbard, of course, which I'm sure you've read, is an interesting hybrid example because he was influenced by Rand and he was a Thomist and an Aristotelian.

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But he didn't have this hangup with Mises using the Kantian concepts to describe economics and praxeology.

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But he did sort of give a more – he tried to show that there's – they can be understood in the Aristotelian terminology or framework.

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I do think that – anyway, what I was going to say was this criticism of Mises that he is contributing to relativism and Kantian skepticism because of his use of their terminology and also because of the Randians' eccentric use of the word value and subjective.

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They mean the word subjective to mean this Kantian idea, according to them, that we can't know anything for sure, that everything is just subjective to the person.

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Like the reality you're seeing is not the real reality.

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That kind of thing is subjective to you.

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So now Mises meant the concept of subjectivism to mean that value is an implication of teleology or human action.

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It just explains why you're acting.

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You chose this means to achieve that end because that's what you preferred.

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You valued it.

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That is not subjective in the skeptical sense at all.

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It's just a different use of the term.

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So the point is you have this sort of uncomfortableness with Mises by some libertarians because of this – his baggage with Kant.

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But Hoppe in that pamphlet, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, he points out that, look, if you actually deeply understand the implications of Mises and praxeology, he was showing that praxeology is the bridge, as you were just alluding to, I think, is the bridge between your personal experience of the world, which I mean Kant might call the nuomenal world or phenomenal.

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I always get them confused. And the outside world, like it's because to achieve an end, you have to employ a means that actually is causally efficacious, which is why I used that word earlier.

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A means has to be causally efficacious. In other words, it has to comply with the real world laws of cause and effect to achieve something.

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This is why like a rain dance is not really hardly a real action. Like if you do a rain dance to make it rain, you're not really using a means that is going to make it rain. So if you have knowledge.

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Well, you think you are. You think you are. You're just failing to reach your end because your means were insufficient.

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Yeah, and economics, I think a rigorous understanding of economics helps you understand what's going on there.

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Like why is this guy – now, you might have a guy doing a rain dance in a movie.

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He's an actor. He doesn't believe it or someone doing it for fun.

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But someone really who did that 300 years ago might have falsely believed that that was one way to make it rain.

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So that explains why he would do it.

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it also explains why he would have a loss, right?

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Why his effort would go to waste

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because he wouldn't achieve the outcome desired.

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So I'm getting an image in my head here.

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I haven't thought of it this way before,

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but could one say that the end is subjective

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because it's in your head?

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The means is objective

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because it something in the real world something physical And if the action is successful then you reach your end meaning that you successfully bridged the subjective and the objective

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But you only successfully bridged it if you didn't do the rain dance,

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you did whatever, geoengineering or something instead.

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That actually led to it raining.

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I mean, so...

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Well, let's think about that. That's interesting. I think that the means and the end both have a hybrid aspect. They both have an objective and a subjective component, and here's why.

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Yeah. So let's take the means, the rain dance, for example. So it's subjectively viewed as a means because you actually falsely believe that it will cause it will cause rain. OK, so that's the subjective aspect. But the objective aspect is that it really won't. Right. So things work a certain way. So it really won't cause the rain to happen. So there's a there's a combination aspect to the nature of that means. Right. It's regarded as a means because of the subjective.

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perspective of the actor. And by the way, Hoppe also has another related comment in,

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I think it's in A Theory of Socialism, Capitalism, and also maybe repeated in Economics,

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Economic Science.

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ESAM.

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No, the second book, EEPP. His second book, his second English language book, EEPP. I've got it

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on his website. But he's got a long passage where he talks about the character of goods is not being,

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there's no, just like there's no intrinsic value in things, which is another false belief of modern

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economics and of Marxism too, by the way, this idea that the value of a product is an objective

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characteristic based upon the labor put into it, that kind of stuff. But the characteristic of a

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good as being a good, and this, by the way, relates to Bitcoin, which maybe we can get to.

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oh and I wanted to say I have your pin

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I have your infinity over

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over

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what's it

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21M

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I have that pin and a t-shirt too

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I'm just aware of her interview but I forgot

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yeah I've got that

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yeah I saw the t-shirt

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you didn't buy my ones though

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you bought the

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but I don't believe in intellectual property

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just like you

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I bought the one

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I could buy yours

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The problem is I started to understand – I was asking, why did you use that?

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And you explained, well, it's sort of a signaling method to tell the people that you know that you get it with Bitcoin but without telling the kidnappers to kidnap me.

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It's a good object.

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I don't even want to wear that.

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I'm afraid to wear it even in that, to be honest, because I don't want to be kidnapped.

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I don't want people to think they should kidnap me.

287
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I don't have any Bitcoins.

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I'm just a theoretician.

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So, yeah, yeah.

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Go on.

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But I was going to say, so Hoppe, there's another comment he makes in his second book is that there's no – it's about the public goods.

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It's like some people say there's public goods, and that's why we need the state.

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He's like, well, there's no such thing as a public good, just like there's no such thing as a capital good in the sense of its intrinsic characteristic.

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What a good is depends upon the way it's valued by a given actor, right?

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So it's characteristic as being public or private or being a consumer good or a capital good or being a bad.

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It could be a bad. If I have a big ranch and oil starts bubbling up, it might be a nuisance to me.

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It might be a bad, not be a good because I might not want to sell. I might not know I can use the oil.

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So nothing is intrinsic characteristic. It's the way they're valued.

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By the same token, when you have something you're aiming at in the future – so we'll get back to this hybrid concept.

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So when you aim at a future – when you act, you're actually trying to – I have a blog post on this where I characterize – I envision people as little gods because every time you act, you're trying to basically create – you're trying to change the future universe that would otherwise come.

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So you're trying to go from universe A to universe A prime or universe B.

302
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but of course that might be incompatible with what other people are doing which is why

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in competition only sometimes one person can win right i mean this is this is all fascinating stuff

304
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yeah it might be literally true if we're if the multiverse theory in quantum mechanics is true

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and we actually create a new uh an infinite amount and now you're now you're now you're

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giving support to all the people that think that modern philosophy is relativistic and we can't

307
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know anything uh yeah i'm necessarily i know i'm still doing it in one specific universe yeah i'm

308
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a big skeptic of quantum theory and uh all that stuff but uh uh even even of relativity uh special

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relativity i i'm i i personally i'm of the opinion that peter beckman was right that um

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that the speed of light is not is not independent of the observer but um anyway that's yeah yeah i

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I don't know what's up.

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That's a good subject for another pod at another time.

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It is, yeah.

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But I think that the name of the book you're looking for is The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, I think.

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Yeah, EEPP, yeah, yeah.

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So, yeah, I want to try to steer this conversation into a specific direction because there's a thought behind the madness here.

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And yeah, so we've covered means and ends and property and subjective and objective.

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Real quick, real quick, let me interrupt just a second.

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And let me mention why I would mention something and then you can get back to this if you want to.

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The reason I mentioned Hoppe and his insight into the subjective analysis of what a good is, is I think it plays a role in this fungibility debate with Bitcoin.

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People say Bitcoins are fungible because they're different.

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In a sense, nothing in the world is fungible. Even if you have gold, every atom is unique. It's just that we subjectively decide to ignore those similarities.

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And so the very concept of a good that is something that has a homogenous supply, that very concept of something that is a good that has a homogenous supply presupposes that people that regard it as that subjectively ignore the – they ignore certain aspects of it and they treat other things.

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So for their purposes, gold is sufficiently homogenous and fungible. So fungibility is a subjective phenomenon. So when people say Bitcoin is not fungible, well, nothing is fungible. I mean, it's only a question about – it's sort of like could Bitcoin be money? Anything can be money if people regard it as a homogenous supply of divisible units.

325
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And what they can be – yeah. So anyway, let's go back to it.

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I love this because this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, because you can express this so clearly.

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And it's totally in line with my thinking.

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I have this in one of my books.

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I don't remember which one, but like pointing out how fungibility is in the eye of the beholder.

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And in the Praxeology book as well, of course, homogeneity.

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Like, well, who's to say what constitutes a homo?

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That's why there's apples and oranges on the cover here.

333
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So the orange is in Bitcoin orange, but that's the only.

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They're both fruits.

335
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I mean, they're both fruits.

336
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I mean, what's the class or the category, right?

337
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Yeah.

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So one of the latest interests of mine in praxeology is the difference between law and ethics and natural law and how natural law is actually true and how that, like the foundation of that, why the non-aggression principle, because I've seen people argue online that the non-aggression principle doesn't work because there are psychopaths and stuff.

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And I try to tell them that, no, the non-aggression principle does work because there are psychopaths. Like, if there's a psychopath, the non-aggression principle can tell you what an appropriate response to the crime is and how much retaliation that is ethically tolerated and stuff.

340
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But so what are the foundations of that? And yeah, Hoppe's argumentation ethics, we can go deeper into that too, like the layers below it.

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What you can, the argumentation ethics thing is, the conclusion is sort of that you own your own body, but you show that you do by controlling it. So is control really ownership? Or is ownership something? What's the difference here? Ownership, possession, control? What are the differences between the words?

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Yeah, I think to make progress in these fields, I found that – so the way I look at it on maybe a high-level view is there's been progress in humanity over the centuries, the millennia.

343
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And it's because there's been a sort of social aspect to humans, right?

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We're social creatures.

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That's the way we developed.

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We evolved that way, which means that there's a certain natural dynamic.

347
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There's a reason people live together.

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number one that's how we procreate and we happen living next to each other but given that we do

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there are certain you know that's how the species propagates but the way we developed so we've

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there's a logic to it there's a reason there's a rational reason that people want to be with each

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other and trade division of labor all that kind of stuff but there's also just human empathy as

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part of our development so people naturally so it's natural that a species and each individual

353
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member of it has values like any act they value their own life you have to have self-preservation

354
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as your core value but we're not all completely sociopaths we happen to value other people we

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love other people we want to be around other people we value the species itself we value our

356
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life and and the human race's life so we have these values that are all related so you know

357
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You don't live only for your own life, but you value – so when someone else is – you want other people to do well too.

358
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You might not value them as highly as yourself, but you do value them to some degree, which is why I think there's a possibility of society and why we're not always fighting with each other.

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And then you have the virtues arise like honesty, integrity, independence.

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Character becomes important.

361
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And then law emerges.

362
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Now, because we live in a world of scarcity, there's always a possibility of conflict, right? So the benefit of living with other people is you get to live with other people, and also you get to trade, and you can benefit from the division and the specialization of labor.

363
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But then you have the possibility of conflict that is a violent clash with someone over your bodies, like rape or murder, or over your own – your resources that you use in the world.

364
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So these resources that you need to employ, like land and food and animals and tools, things like that.

365
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So because of this possibility of violent conflict and because people happen to have certain commonly shared values for the most part, there are the occasional sociopaths out there.

366
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But most people have a normal predisposition, and they value each other.

367
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They would value peace and cooperation over violence because it's less profitable and it's less fun, right?

368
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And so because of this, over time in society, laws emerge and rights emerge.

369
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Now, when you have a deeper understanding of politics and law and the modern state and society and history and economics and all this stuff, then you start to have more careful distinctions.

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So the distinction that you need to draw is fundamentally between possession and ownership.

371
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Okay, those concepts, those words are very important.

372
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And what were you saying earlier that some people say one of their objections to say to ethics and the non-aggression principle is that we have psychopaths.

373
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I say it simply doesn't work.

374
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We need a state to control the criminals.

375
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And I point out that, yeah, but they're –

376
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And their mistake there is, like, as you say, if the – sort of like maybe Thomas Jefferson or one of the U.S. founding fathers said, if the world were angels, we wouldn't need government, right?

377
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And what they mean is that if people voluntarily – if they just shunned all violent conflict and they respected each other's rights, then you wouldn't have any violent conflict and you wouldn't have any rights violations.

378
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You wouldn't even need law and order or the government or police or anything like that.

379
00:41:17,267 --> 00:41:49,260
But you do have that at least on occasion and that the purpose of having these laws and rules is because people that want to cooperate with each other which is the bulk of humanity even they don know what to do sometimes to avoid conflict unless they have a clear indication of who owns what which is why you have ownership rules which can tell you who owns what Now these ownership rules are what we so the mistake that people make when they say

380
00:41:49,260 --> 00:41:54,320
that they're psychopaths and the rules don't work for them is they're conflating the normative realm

381
00:41:54,320 --> 00:42:01,220
with the factual realm. The normative realm or the descriptive realm is a world of, say, facts.

382
00:42:01,220 --> 00:42:06,320
It's like what people do, and that is analogous to the concept of possession.

383
00:42:06,900 --> 00:42:09,200
So in economics, it's purely descriptive.

384
00:42:09,440 --> 00:42:12,620
It's about the descriptive world when we describe what people do.

385
00:42:12,740 --> 00:42:21,340
And like I said earlier, that story I gave earlier of apraxeology is purely descriptive because it would apply even to Robinson Crusoe alone on an island.

386
00:42:22,840 --> 00:42:26,660
Every minute of your life, every day, you have to face a choice of what to do.

387
00:42:26,660 --> 00:42:32,340
And to do that, you have a goal in mind and you employ certain means to achieve it.

388
00:42:33,020 --> 00:42:34,700
That's not an ethical thing at all.

389
00:42:34,760 --> 00:42:37,460
It had nothing to do with conflict or violence or right and wrong.

390
00:42:37,540 --> 00:42:38,740
It's just what people do.

391
00:42:39,880 --> 00:42:46,240
So to employ a resource means to use it, to have the ability to use it, to grasp it, to grapple with it, to control it.

392
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:48,280
And that's what possession means, right?

393
00:42:48,340 --> 00:42:50,120
So possession is just a factual thing.

394
00:42:50,120 --> 00:43:10,180
Now, sometimes a person might wonder, what should I do? What's the right thing to do? What's the right or the wrong thing to do? So then you have things like morals and ethics and philosophy and values and the virtues, study the virtues.

395
00:43:10,180 --> 00:43:28,140
What's the, you know, it's best to be honest and to have thrift and to not be lazy. And also the values of I value other people. I value other people's well-being, too. So I prefer cooperation over violence. All these things inform a normative system.

396
00:43:28,140 --> 00:43:33,680
And a normative system is like, so you could have one type of normative system is your personal moral code.

397
00:43:33,800 --> 00:43:35,360
Like, what should I do in this situation?

398
00:43:35,740 --> 00:43:40,340
Even if you're alone on an island, like, should I be lazy or should I work hard?

399
00:43:40,500 --> 00:43:48,700
You know, should I be honest with myself about what's going to happen if I don't save up enough coconuts for the winter or whatever, you know?

400
00:43:49,560 --> 00:43:54,080
Or in society, should I be honest or should I cheat and steal?

401
00:43:54,260 --> 00:43:57,320
Should I, you know, should I abide by these rules or not?

402
00:43:57,320 --> 00:44:04,720
So there's a set of norms in society. Some of them are minor, like we call them manners, like it's impolite to do certain things.

403
00:44:04,780 --> 00:44:12,620
But some of them go to a higher level, and they're such a level that breach of that moral rule – it's not just immoral.

404
00:44:12,780 --> 00:44:20,320
It's not just bad manners, but it's actually so extreme that people think that the use of force is justified in retaliation.

405
00:44:20,960 --> 00:44:22,240
That's what law is basically.

406
00:44:22,240 --> 00:44:29,760
So if I'm rude to my grandmother, people will disapprove of me, and they might ostracize me, but that's about it.

407
00:44:30,180 --> 00:44:39,240
But if I shoot my grandmother, now I've committed murder, and that's such a violation of her rights, and that can be met with force.

408
00:44:39,420 --> 00:44:43,600
Someone could use force to punish me or to stop me, and that's what law is.

409
00:44:43,600 --> 00:44:52,320
But anyway, the point is these are norms that guide conduct, but they guide the conduct of the people interested in their conduct being guided.

410
00:44:53,200 --> 00:45:00,960
It's basically a set of – it's not a recommendation for the criminal. It's not telling the criminal how to live his life because that's personal morals.

411
00:45:00,960 --> 00:45:16,760
The law is basically saying when are we as people that want to be moral or society in general, when are we justified in using force to sanction this activity, to punish this activity or to stop this activity?

412
00:45:17,120 --> 00:45:24,320
And that's what law does. Law tells us when we're justified in using force to stop someone from doing something that we don't like.

413
00:45:24,320 --> 00:45:53,580
So what it tells us, and from time immemorial, the core of private law ever since the Roman days and even before Roman law, English law, and even modern law is that people have the right, property right in their body, and they have property rights in material resources that they need to use to survive in the world that were previously unowned.

414
00:45:53,580 --> 00:46:03,100
So that's why we have the rule of homesteading or original appropriation, and then the second rule, you can sell it by – you can sell it so then by contract.

415
00:46:03,940 --> 00:46:13,220
So these three normative rules, which are legal rules as well, they mirror or emerge from the descriptive world.

416
00:46:13,500 --> 00:46:16,880
The descriptive world says you have a body. You can control it.

417
00:46:17,020 --> 00:46:22,160
There are resources that you need to employ their scarce means of action to get things done.

418
00:46:22,160 --> 00:46:34,640
You can possess them. So possession, control, these are all descriptive things. They're not normative at all. Even the criminal and the psychopath has control of his body and needs to use resources.

419
00:46:34,640 --> 00:46:40,940
But then a set of normative rules overlay on top of that and reinforce it.

420
00:46:41,100 --> 00:46:48,780
So the way I look at rights is rights are normative support for possession.

421
00:46:49,880 --> 00:46:56,020
So economics deals with the descriptive world and with possession and with the implications of human action.

422
00:46:56,860 --> 00:47:02,960
Ethics and law and norms deals with how we should.

423
00:47:02,960 --> 00:47:09,900
And so the thing is that ethics and law are like a normative support on top of it.

424
00:47:10,020 --> 00:47:20,020
Now, what that means is that if I'm a criminal or a good guy, I just need to control myself and things I can control to get things done, to act.

425
00:47:20,820 --> 00:47:26,840
But if I'm actually a moral person and a good person, I want to avoid conflict, so I want to respect people's rights.

426
00:47:26,840 --> 00:47:33,000
So if there's a legal system that's established, a normative system, it can tell me what to do to avoid conflict.

427
00:47:33,620 --> 00:47:39,080
It can also tell me what I'm justified in doing to stop someone who doesn't care about that.

428
00:47:39,680 --> 00:47:53,100
So that's why it's irrelevant that you might have a criminal or a sociopath who doesn't care about rights because they're going to be dealt with, as Hoppe says, as a technical problem because they're not amenable to reason.

429
00:47:53,100 --> 00:48:00,880
Now, okay, on occasion, you might have a robber or a bad guy, and you could persuade them not to – it's like don't kill the baby.

430
00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:03,720
Come on, guy. Don't kill the baby, and he might listen to you. He might not.

431
00:48:04,920 --> 00:48:09,540
Hoppe tells this funny story about a friend he had who – I think it was a true story.

432
00:48:10,560 --> 00:48:20,960
And he's using this story to show that democracy is horrible because every democratic government is terrible because, as Hayek said, the bad rise to the top.

433
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:25,280
democracies are horrible. Whereas like at a monarchy, on occasion, you might have a good

434
00:48:25,280 --> 00:48:29,680
monarch. You might have a stupid one, but you might have a good one on occasion. And just like

435
00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:34,680
you might have a private criminal, like the story he told was his friend was like at an ATM, like at

436
00:48:34,680 --> 00:48:40,560
night in Germany or somewhere, two in the morning, and some guy robbed him. He just took some money

437
00:48:40,560 --> 00:48:47,760
out of the ATM and some guy robbed him. And he handed the $500 or euros over to the guy. And he

438
00:48:47,760 --> 00:48:52,600
He says, man, I was going to use that to go buy a couple of beers and to get my cab ride home.

439
00:48:53,020 --> 00:48:57,120
So the robber gave him like $50 back because he felt bad for him.

440
00:48:58,280 --> 00:48:59,680
Sounds like a government program.

441
00:49:00,420 --> 00:49:11,440
Well, but the government would never – if the government takes your money in taxes and you say that I don't have enough money to take my vacation, the government just says tough luck, too bad.

442
00:49:11,920 --> 00:49:13,920
At least on occasion you might have a nice robber.

443
00:49:13,920 --> 00:49:21,560
The point is sometimes you can persuade a robber or a bad guy with the force of moral suasion not to do something.

444
00:49:21,940 --> 00:49:24,640
But if you can't, then you have to resort to force.

445
00:49:24,720 --> 00:49:27,060
You have to treat him as what we call a technical obstacle.

446
00:49:27,640 --> 00:49:30,540
Now, man in the world has to deal with many challenges, right?

447
00:49:33,240 --> 00:49:35,340
There's scarcity, lack of abundance.

448
00:49:35,500 --> 00:49:36,080
There's poverty.

449
00:49:36,320 --> 00:49:37,160
There's pestilence.

450
00:49:37,360 --> 00:49:38,980
There's hurricanes.

451
00:49:39,200 --> 00:49:39,860
There's tigers.

452
00:49:40,180 --> 00:49:40,840
There's lions.

453
00:49:40,840 --> 00:49:51,220
And we don't regard a lion as an evil thing. It's just a fact of the world, and you have to take a precaution and treat the lion as a technical problem.

454
00:49:51,340 --> 00:49:58,980
How do you protect yourself from the possibility of lions attacking you? There's ways you can do that, and we have to regard criminals as the same way.

455
00:49:59,100 --> 00:50:04,640
It's just that the bulk of humans are moral, and they only want to do what they're justified in doing.

456
00:50:04,640 --> 00:50:16,160
So when there's another man and they know they need to treat him as a means of action, right, which Kant talks about as being an immoral thing, treating someone as a means, sometimes you need to.

457
00:50:16,440 --> 00:50:18,360
And the question is, when are you justified in doing that?

458
00:50:18,420 --> 00:50:30,900
And the non-aggression principle basically says you're justified in treating someone else as a means that is doing something they don't want you to do when they're doing something to you that you don't want them to do to you.

459
00:50:30,900 --> 00:50:42,320
In other words, when they're initiating force, when they're committing aggression, they're using your body or your resources that you legitimately acquired by homesteading or by contract without your permission.

460
00:50:42,900 --> 00:50:46,640
Then they breached the peace and they basically entered the world.

461
00:50:47,020 --> 00:50:52,100
They've admitted in a sense by their conduct that they don't respect your rights.

462
00:50:52,220 --> 00:50:53,260
They don't believe in law.

463
00:50:53,440 --> 00:50:58,540
So they really have no complaint anymore if you use a similar type of force against them to stop them.

464
00:50:58,540 --> 00:51:07,200
That's why in the mind of the person wanting to be moral, he regards his use of force against that person as just.

465
00:51:08,000 --> 00:51:09,520
And that's why there's law.

466
00:51:09,780 --> 00:51:12,380
That's why law emerges and why it has a certain characteristic.

467
00:51:12,780 --> 00:51:15,780
That's why law across all societies has certain things in common.

468
00:51:16,180 --> 00:51:17,640
It always protects self-ownership.

469
00:51:17,700 --> 00:51:20,800
It always protects the right to acquire an unknown resource.

470
00:51:21,360 --> 00:51:25,900
And it protects the right to acquire or sell that resource by contract.

471
00:51:26,100 --> 00:51:28,100
That's the core elements of private law.

472
00:51:28,100 --> 00:51:58,080
And it has to be.

473
00:51:58,100 --> 00:52:07,640
The one that's what the criminal deserves or the largest punishment that the criminal can deserve.

474
00:52:08,180 --> 00:52:13,220
But anything above that is then you're a criminal yourself.

475
00:52:13,760 --> 00:52:16,120
And anything below that is, of course, OK.

476
00:52:16,220 --> 00:52:17,660
You may choose to forgive.

477
00:52:18,180 --> 00:52:22,100
And there's a great power in forgiveness sometimes.

478
00:52:22,100 --> 00:52:27,740
So usually the punishment wouldn't be two eyes for one eye, but something milder.

479
00:52:28,100 --> 00:52:33,440
And yeah, that book is very eye opening too, I think.

480
00:52:34,340 --> 00:52:35,640
I totally agree.

481
00:52:35,640 --> 00:52:47,760
In my book, my book here, my book there, chapter five, I have my own unpacking of punishment theory and rights theory and this kind of stuff.

482
00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:58,200
And now I think Rothbard's way of putting it is more of a, it's more of a shorthand.

483
00:52:58,380 --> 00:53:02,900
I think it's a way to, I don't think that there's any mathematical formula.

484
00:53:03,140 --> 00:53:09,380
You can't say it's just double the punishment is acceptable because there's a subjective aspect to all this.

485
00:53:09,920 --> 00:53:14,400
Yeah, but that's not what he says, though, to defend Rothbard there.

486
00:53:14,400 --> 00:53:24,820
He says that that would theoretically not be criminal, even though he points out that that would never be a real scenario.

487
00:53:24,820 --> 00:53:48,240
STEPHAN KINSELLA, JR.: Correct. But, and I'm – yeah, he got that from Walter Block as well. I'm just saying that I think that that's a useful way to understand the fact that the way that we justify rights is because what we're saying is our institutional or personal use of force against someone who doesn't want you to – like the criminal doesn't want you to use force against him.

488
00:53:48,240 --> 00:53:58,540
So he's not consenting to it. He's objecting. But the reason why it's okay to override his desires is because he's doing something similar to you.

489
00:53:58,640 --> 00:54:04,960
But what that means is that there's a limit to how much of a similar thing he's doing to you, and there's a limit to how much you can do in response.

490
00:54:04,960 --> 00:54:16,080
So I think what Rothbard is getting at, that's the reason why there's a proportionality requirement. There always was, and that is implied in the eye for an eye idea or in the two eyes for an eye idea.

491
00:54:16,080 --> 00:54:18,720
It's not that it's a mechanical formula

492
00:54:18,720 --> 00:54:25,060
It's more that that gets at the heart of the reason why there's a limit

493
00:54:25,060 --> 00:54:28,760
Now, in reality, because values are subjective

494
00:54:28,760 --> 00:54:34,740
And because there's a difficulty in administering any system of justice

495
00:54:34,740 --> 00:54:37,580
There are certain practical aspects to it

496
00:54:37,580 --> 00:54:40,180
Which I believe, and I talk about in that chapter 5

497
00:54:40,180 --> 00:54:43,500
Lead to certain things that the law has settled on

498
00:54:43,500 --> 00:54:56,540
Things like burdens of proof and standards of proof. So, for example, I think that what you do is you always have a rule that says in a case of doubt, we favor the victim of aggression.

499
00:54:57,480 --> 00:55:10,720
So if you say, well, this guy did this to me, what exactly would be a proportional punishment? In some cases, it's not always clear, right?

500
00:55:10,720 --> 00:55:13,480
Like let's I mean, I don't let's say I have one arm.

501
00:55:13,480 --> 00:55:16,380
I'm a one arm guy and some gun chops off my right arm.

502
00:55:16,380 --> 00:55:18,260
So now I have no arms.

503
00:55:18,260 --> 00:55:22,880
I mean, is it is it the same punishment to chop off his arm?

504
00:55:23,060 --> 00:55:24,520
Because he still has one arm left.

505
00:55:24,520 --> 00:55:28,260
I mean, things like this are like you can see why you can't have a formula.

506
00:55:28,560 --> 00:55:33,040
But the point is you would so you have to you have to you have

507
00:55:33,094 --> 00:55:38,614
to say we have to give the maximum flexibility to the victim to choose what he wants to do within a

508
00:55:38,614 --> 00:55:46,114
reasonable range of procedures as overseen perhaps by a judge or by a jury who looks at it and says,

509
00:55:46,114 --> 00:55:50,334
yeah, using our judgment, I think that's the best you can do, and then let's move on.

510
00:55:50,954 --> 00:55:58,554
So that's how any legal system has to work, and that frustrates some libertarians who fed up with

511
00:55:58,554 --> 00:56:03,714
the way the positive law and the legal system has dealt with things. They just want to throw it away

512
00:56:03,714 --> 00:56:09,554
and have like a Rothbard sit down and write a book and give you the answer to everything and say,

513
00:56:09,914 --> 00:56:14,814
okay, for my armchair, if there were two guys doing this, here's what the answer would be.

514
00:56:14,894 --> 00:56:19,014
And here's what the answer would be. And here's what they want answers to every question. And it

515
00:56:19,014 --> 00:56:23,094
frustrates them if you say, well, we don't really know. You have to just let a jury hear it and make

516
00:56:23,094 --> 00:56:27,394
a decision. They want to have a solid answer, but you can't always have an answer to things because

517
00:56:27,394 --> 00:56:34,834
the answer depends because life is complex and you can never predict um all the factors that would be

518
00:56:34,834 --> 00:56:42,274
relevant to a given dispute um and that's why you have to have a trial and a jury and people that can

519
00:56:42,274 --> 00:56:49,474
take evidence and ask questions of witnesses and take into account custom and context and history

520
00:56:49,474 --> 00:56:52,654
and the way things are done.

521
00:56:53,434 --> 00:56:58,354
No, and crime and law in general are especially complex

522
00:56:58,354 --> 00:57:03,774
because you cannot see what didn't happen.

523
00:57:04,254 --> 00:57:08,694
Like if I steal from you, I might stop you from doing something else

524
00:57:08,694 --> 00:57:12,674
that may or may not lead to a third thing and so on and so forth.

525
00:57:12,674 --> 00:57:26,794
It goes into why taxes are so criminal in themselves, because if I steal from you every month, then I probably cause a lot more harm than if I steal a lot once.

526
00:57:27,374 --> 00:57:30,434
Like, this is super complex.

527
00:57:31,154 --> 00:57:31,514
But, yeah.

528
00:57:31,514 --> 00:57:48,654
By the way, I think Leisner Spooner has a comment about that where he compares the highwayman to the government because the highwayman doesn't rob you and then keep following you around for life and then reminding you about what a good thing he did for you all the time.

529
00:57:48,854 --> 00:57:55,814
Like the government always hounds you, they tax you, they never let you go, and they always keep acting like they're the good guy helping you out.

530
00:57:56,394 --> 00:57:57,414
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

531
00:57:57,414 --> 00:58:02,394
So let's try to get into the Bitcoin side of things.

532
00:58:02,774 --> 00:58:10,214
So a TLDR on my, like after 10 years in this and my sort of deepest insight,

533
00:58:10,374 --> 00:58:18,154
like the thing that intrigued me from the very get-go with Bitcoin was that here was this promise of a number that couldn't be copied

534
00:58:18,154 --> 00:58:23,034
or something in computers that couldn't be copied, which like blew my mind.

535
00:58:23,034 --> 00:58:28,554
Like this must be bullshit because that's the nature of information, right?

536
00:58:28,914 --> 00:58:29,094
Right.

537
00:58:29,354 --> 00:58:30,894
Information can be copied.

538
00:58:31,474 --> 00:58:31,674
Correct.

539
00:58:32,214 --> 00:58:33,454
Or data can be copied.

540
00:58:33,594 --> 00:58:37,254
Information is sort of data interpreted by human beings, I guess.

541
00:58:37,614 --> 00:58:39,914
But all data can be copied.

542
00:58:40,134 --> 00:58:42,874
So that's what sent me down the rabbit hole.

543
00:58:43,074 --> 00:58:49,814
And I quite soon understood why that would make perfect money or damn near perfect money

544
00:58:49,814 --> 00:58:54,014
and why there could only be one because any copy of it would like,

545
00:58:56,334 --> 00:59:02,514
it's pointless at best to make a copy of resistance to copyability.

546
00:59:02,514 --> 00:59:07,174
Like it's obviously counterproductive to try to copy that property.

547
00:59:09,234 --> 00:59:14,614
So I got into all that, but like it took me a long time to really put words

548
00:59:14,614 --> 00:59:20,654
on why the Satoshi is sacred compared to all other data

549
00:59:20,654 --> 00:59:23,294
and why only that can be scarce.

550
00:59:23,474 --> 00:59:28,774
And the conclusion I came to is that the reason you cannot copy them

551
00:59:28,774 --> 00:59:31,394
is because they're not really on the internet.

552
00:59:31,594 --> 00:59:32,674
They're in people's heads.

553
00:59:33,134 --> 00:59:35,474
Or the ability to move them is in their heads.

554
00:59:35,474 --> 00:59:39,794
Like the private key, either the literal private key,

555
00:59:40,034 --> 00:59:42,934
the 12 magic words, or the location of a hardware wallet,

556
00:59:42,934 --> 00:59:46,394
or it's all about keeping a secret from everyone else.

557
00:59:48,054 --> 00:59:51,834
So owning a Bitcoin or possessing a Bitcoin, if you want,

558
00:59:52,154 --> 00:59:54,914
or controlling it is something you do

559
00:59:54,914 --> 00:59:56,934
by keeping a secret from someone else.

560
00:59:57,694 --> 01:00:01,214
And you cannot really say that you own it

561
01:00:01,214 --> 01:00:04,194
because here we go into intellectual property,

562
01:00:04,334 --> 01:00:09,074
your favorite subject, and you cannot own data.

563
01:00:09,434 --> 01:00:10,874
It's impossible to own data

564
01:00:10,874 --> 01:00:26,154
And it's impossible to prove that even if you have control of your own private key, you do not know if other people also know that same information, if they also have the private key or have access to it.

565
01:00:26,154 --> 01:00:36,354
meaning that the reason you can act as if you own the bitcoin is is because you you understand how

566
01:00:36,354 --> 01:00:42,714
improbable it is that someone else has access to the same key as you and you also understand how

567
01:00:42,714 --> 01:00:48,574
improbable it is that the system itself will change to such an extent that it will render

568
01:00:48,574 --> 01:00:55,334
your bitcoins worthless but but i've come to the conclusion that you cannot own them what you can do

569
01:00:55,334 --> 01:00:56,814
is act as if you did.

570
01:00:57,354 --> 01:00:58,794
Does that make sense to you?

571
01:00:59,214 --> 01:00:59,934
A hundred percent.

572
01:01:01,994 --> 01:01:03,014
And you have to remember,

573
01:01:03,114 --> 01:01:04,554
money is a practical thing, right?

574
01:01:04,934 --> 01:01:06,094
So it just has to be good.

575
01:01:06,174 --> 01:01:06,994
It has to be good enough.

576
01:01:07,134 --> 01:01:07,854
I mean, yeah.

577
01:01:08,574 --> 01:01:10,334
Bitcoin doesn't have to be around forever.

578
01:01:10,974 --> 01:01:15,014
Bitcoin might work for 50 years or 10 years,

579
01:01:15,014 --> 01:01:17,174
and then maybe something else would come around.

580
01:01:17,494 --> 01:01:19,934
And that's okay because money is not wealth.

581
01:01:20,534 --> 01:01:22,194
It's fine for money to transmute.

582
01:01:22,774 --> 01:01:25,014
The way I look at it is Bitcoin...

583
01:01:25,334 --> 01:01:33,854
So gold is, let's say, 90% good as money in the old days, right?

584
01:01:34,414 --> 01:01:36,914
It had some drawbacks, but it was better than barter.

585
01:01:37,694 --> 01:01:38,954
So that's why it worked.

586
01:01:39,414 --> 01:01:43,234
But the problem with gold was it could be commandeered because it needs to be stored.

587
01:01:43,354 --> 01:01:45,054
It could be commandeered by the government eventually.

588
01:01:45,514 --> 01:01:46,414
So it failed.

589
01:01:46,754 --> 01:01:49,354
And the problem with fiat, of course, is it could be inflated.

590
01:01:49,454 --> 01:01:51,074
And if it can be inflated, it will be.

591
01:01:51,074 --> 01:02:12,694
Yes. And to me, Bitcoin is like 96% like good money. Yeah. And if it becomes the world dominant currency, it could be that Bitcoin, too, would be slightly better, but it's just not worth the cost to switch to it.

592
01:02:12,694 --> 01:02:15,394
But eventually, it could be.

593
01:02:16,034 --> 01:02:18,274
Maybe the block size is too small.

594
01:02:18,454 --> 01:02:20,614
Maybe in 50 years, we'll see the block size.

595
01:02:20,714 --> 01:02:21,094
I don't know.

596
01:02:21,394 --> 01:02:21,814
We don't know.

597
01:02:21,874 --> 01:02:23,834
The point is, money is not wealth.

598
01:02:23,954 --> 01:02:26,434
And so it's fine if you transition from one money.

599
01:02:26,534 --> 01:02:29,194
I think it's really hard, but you can see that happening in the future.

600
01:02:29,194 --> 01:02:32,654
Well, I see it slightly differently.

601
01:02:33,014 --> 01:02:34,074
Here's why I disagree.

602
01:02:34,314 --> 01:02:42,334
I don't think there's a Bitcoin 2.0, but I can see a future where Bitcoin adapts and becomes Bitcoin 2.0 itself.

603
01:02:42,334 --> 01:02:57,954
But it wouldn't – well, resetting the whole thing and forcing people to buy new stuff is not like – it has to have the property that you have to – that if you do nothing, you will still have them.

604
01:02:58,694 --> 01:02:59,134
I agree.

605
01:02:59,474 --> 01:03:06,454
I'm just saying you could imagine – like let's suppose the Bitcoin network somehow there's a flaw, no one's found, and it breaks down.

606
01:03:06,454 --> 01:03:13,434
Or let's imagine when we colonize another planet and someone there starts out with their own currency because

607
01:03:13,434 --> 01:03:16,314
They would have to, they would have to because the hatch horizon

608
01:03:16,314 --> 01:03:20,074
Yeah, the time delay is too great, so they have their own currency

609
01:03:20,074 --> 01:03:24,014
So let's suppose it's Mars and there's Bitcoin too there

610
01:03:24,014 --> 01:03:28,354
And let's suppose eventually their society becomes to be the dominant one

611
01:03:28,354 --> 01:03:32,614
Maybe then they would absorb the Earth, I don't know, you never know what the future is going to be

612
01:03:32,614 --> 01:03:44,894
Well, the argument against Mars coin is that anyone bootstrapping that on Mars would have insider information about how insanely valuable it can get.

613
01:03:45,114 --> 01:03:54,334
And therefore, it wouldn't have the same like Bitcoin is the way I see it was totally dependent on how these things played out.

614
01:03:54,334 --> 01:04:03,414
and Satoshi disappearing and MT Gox and all of the events that happened led up to this point.

615
01:04:03,494 --> 01:04:06,674
I mean, we know that we live in a timeline where Bitcoin works.

616
01:04:06,774 --> 01:04:11,054
We don't know if it would have worked had the parameters been any different.

617
01:04:11,534 --> 01:04:14,194
It's sort of like the constants of the universe.

618
01:04:14,194 --> 01:04:17,014
We cannot know because we don't exist in that.

619
01:04:17,154 --> 01:04:19,514
We know it works here because we do exist.

620
01:04:19,794 --> 01:04:21,374
Yeah, the anthropic idea.

621
01:04:21,374 --> 01:04:28,674
Well, I mean, this is slightly tangential, but like my friend Jeff Tucker used to be a Bitcoin guy, but now he's joined with the Roger Veritypes and all this.

622
01:04:28,854 --> 01:04:34,514
And he's always he's saying that, oh, it was going to be a payment mechanism.

623
01:04:34,514 --> 01:04:46,034
But because the big blockers, I mean, the small blockers refused to adapt, then that allowed Venmo and Zelle and PayPal to rise to the fore.

624
01:04:46,034 --> 01:04:51,754
And I'm like, so you think that there was there was only like a three year period where Bitcoin could have worked.

625
01:04:52,014 --> 01:04:55,954
It could have become the payment system that Venmo and Zelle and PayPal would have been.

626
01:04:56,574 --> 01:05:02,314
But because we delayed that gave that gave PayPal the chance to become dominant.

627
01:05:02,314 --> 01:05:04,374
And now it's too late for Bitcoin to ever work.

628
01:05:05,074 --> 01:05:10,234
I mean, it's promise never was that it was just a little payment system reducing the friction of payments a little bit.

629
01:05:11,154 --> 01:05:15,754
But but but so let's go back to your point, though, about acting as if you own it.

630
01:05:16,034 --> 01:05:31,094
To me, so the more I thought about this, and it goes back to, number one, the point I made earlier that Hoppe's view about the character of a good being subjective and how that relates to the concept of fungibility.

631
01:05:31,854 --> 01:05:39,474
That also relates to the suitability of something that is a commodity, that is a divisible supply of something.

632
01:05:40,314 --> 01:05:42,834
And by the way, it doesn't have to be a physical thing.

633
01:05:42,834 --> 01:05:49,014
Some of the earlier Austrians had this regression theorem criticism of Bitcoin, which I think is completely wrong.

634
01:05:49,234 --> 01:05:53,274
Number one, I don't think the regression theorem is what they think it is.

635
01:05:53,274 --> 01:05:59,014
It's not a proof that money has to arise the way that Mises thought it would.

636
01:05:59,834 --> 01:06:02,894
And it's not a proof that it has to, you know, anyway.

637
01:06:03,574 --> 01:06:06,734
Oh, can I interrupt and just counter-argue that?

638
01:06:06,934 --> 01:06:12,394
Because I think Bitcoin proves the regression theorem because we actually have the first transaction.

639
01:06:12,834 --> 01:06:16,734
Before that, it's a curiosity and a collectible.

640
01:06:17,314 --> 01:06:20,614
And then Laszlo buys two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins.

641
01:06:20,834 --> 01:06:24,914
That is the moment where Bitcoin becomes a medium of exchange.

642
01:06:25,374 --> 01:06:26,354
Perhaps, perhaps.

643
01:06:26,534 --> 01:06:36,334
But the point is the Austrians of 2011 or whatever who were saying, oh, Bitcoin is impossible because it violates the regression theorem.

644
01:06:36,334 --> 01:06:41,114
I think they're just wrong because they were assuming that it has to be a physical commodity.

645
01:06:41,474 --> 01:06:42,814
And it doesn't have to be a physical commodity.

646
01:06:42,834 --> 01:06:43,434
No, no.

647
01:06:43,434 --> 01:06:43,894
It doesn't have to be.

648
01:06:44,274 --> 01:06:54,114
Well, Mesa said it had to have had some use value, right, to the, but use value can be, I mean, a baseball card can have use value.

649
01:06:54,134 --> 01:06:55,194
But again, that's a subjective thing.

650
01:06:55,354 --> 01:06:57,154
So it doesn't have to be a physical thing.

651
01:06:57,234 --> 01:06:58,074
Exactly, exactly.

652
01:06:58,074 --> 01:07:03,034
I mean, basically, Bitcoin is, so what are Bitcoins, number one?

653
01:07:05,094 --> 01:07:11,234
When you said you act as if you own a Bitcoin, you're right that you have, because of the password, you have the ability to control it.

654
01:07:12,834 --> 01:07:33,654
You can transfer it. But when you say transfer it, what is it? It's basically one of the many units on the blockchain, on the spreadsheet, maintained in distributed computers around the world. It's just an abstract entry in a data system, which we regard subjectively as something that's interesting.

655
01:07:33,654 --> 01:07:47,674
Like if Satoshi had not a little bit dishonestly named it Bitcoin, put the word coin in there in an attempt to bootstrap it, if he had called it distributed spreadsheet, it would be the same thing.

656
01:07:47,754 --> 01:07:49,454
But people wouldn't think of it as money.

657
01:07:49,554 --> 01:07:55,854
They would just think of it as a useful, if very inefficient, distributed spreadsheet or ledger system, right?

658
01:07:56,534 --> 01:07:56,714
Yes.

659
01:07:56,954 --> 01:08:00,974
And I wonder what would have happened then if it would have worked even better.

660
01:08:00,974 --> 01:08:13,674
So I think it's a little bit dishonest to call it Bitcoin. It's also a little bit dishonest, I think, when people – well, the big blockers are dishonest when they keep going back to the title of the paper saying, oh, this is a cash network.

661
01:08:13,794 --> 01:08:16,414
That's why we need it to be cashed and all this kind of stuff.

662
01:08:16,414 --> 01:08:39,654
But back to this other point. If you go back to what I said earlier that property rights are normative and they're the normative support for possession, then you can see that the reason is you need normative support for possession is that people have free will and they can choose to violate rights.

663
01:08:39,654 --> 01:08:50,254
They can choose to use your resource without your permission. If I lived in a very peaceful community where no one ever committed robbery, I wouldn't pay money to put a lock on my front door of my home.

664
01:08:50,594 --> 01:09:00,034
But I do that because it might happen on occasion, and I can afford to put the lock on there even though it makes the house less convenient to use, and it adds cost.

665
01:09:00,034 --> 01:09:14,014
Right. Likewise, if people never commit violated rights or if it was impossible to violate rights, like if God was up there zapping people that tried to steal from you, then you wouldn't need a lock on your door.

666
01:09:14,134 --> 01:09:32,607
You wouldn need to defend yourself from people Right But because that not the case we need laws which provide a disincentive for people to violate your rights So the purpose of law is to provide normative support for property rights or for possession But that because it possible to violate those properties

667
01:09:32,607 --> 01:09:34,947
It's possible for there to be violent conflict.

668
01:09:35,887 --> 01:09:37,747
But Bitcoin designed a system where

669
01:09:37,747 --> 01:09:40,347
you have possession of the Bitcoin,

670
01:09:40,467 --> 01:09:41,607
you have the ability to control it.

671
01:09:41,727 --> 01:09:42,907
And because of its design,

672
01:09:43,547 --> 01:09:47,007
it's almost impossible for someone to violate.

673
01:09:47,447 --> 01:09:49,627
Semantics, semantics, please.

674
01:09:49,627 --> 01:09:51,727
You don't actually have possession of it.

675
01:09:52,007 --> 01:09:55,307
You have control over the private key, which means you know a secret.

676
01:09:55,307 --> 01:09:59,187
Because possession implies that nobody else has possession over it.

677
01:09:59,787 --> 01:10:00,847
And you don't.

678
01:10:01,027 --> 01:10:04,627
So control is, I would say control rather than possession.

679
01:10:05,047 --> 01:10:05,547
That's fine.

680
01:10:06,127 --> 01:10:10,167
You have the ability to, but you have the, whatever this big point is,

681
01:10:10,467 --> 01:10:12,987
you have the ability to transfer it to someone else,

682
01:10:13,047 --> 01:10:16,047
and no one else can do that unless they know your key, correct?

683
01:10:16,227 --> 01:10:17,147
Exactly, yeah.

684
01:10:17,147 --> 01:10:20,147
And you believe that no one does.

685
01:10:20,467 --> 01:10:23,407
That's important because otherwise you wouldn't believe it was valuable.

686
01:10:23,847 --> 01:10:26,507
But your belief is that it's good enough.

687
01:10:26,587 --> 01:10:28,287
The likelihood is good enough.

688
01:10:28,547 --> 01:10:28,907
Exactly.

689
01:10:29,167 --> 01:10:33,907
It's low enough so that this can serve potentially as a medium of exchange.

690
01:10:34,107 --> 01:10:34,167
Okay.

691
01:10:35,067 --> 01:10:44,267
But the point is that your ability to control and to transfer is analogous to possession in the world,

692
01:10:44,267 --> 01:10:47,947
which could, in possession of a physical thing,

693
01:10:48,047 --> 01:10:49,207
someone could violate that.

694
01:10:49,387 --> 01:10:52,007
So you have to have rights and laws and ownership

695
01:10:52,007 --> 01:10:54,147
as a normative support layer on top of that

696
01:10:54,147 --> 01:10:56,427
to try to reduce the likelihood someone will do that.

697
01:10:56,807 --> 01:11:01,027
But with Bitcoin, it's almost like there was a law

698
01:11:01,027 --> 01:11:04,087
that gave you ownership, but it's perfectly enforced

699
01:11:04,087 --> 01:11:06,447
because no one can violate it.

700
01:11:06,547 --> 01:11:10,307
So it's even better than a law that prohibits murder or rape.

701
01:11:10,707 --> 01:11:13,247
So you can just act as if you own it

702
01:11:13,247 --> 01:11:18,887
And you don't need ownership because your ability to control it is even better than ownership would be.

703
01:11:18,987 --> 01:11:22,327
So that's why it looks like ownership, but it's not.

704
01:11:22,407 --> 01:11:28,067
And that's why people use the term, I own my Bitcoins, because what they mean is they have control over it.

705
01:11:28,367 --> 01:11:30,947
Yeah. And I talk about this all the time.

706
01:11:31,127 --> 01:11:33,187
Like you say, you cannot take it.

707
01:11:33,747 --> 01:11:42,287
The scenario there is I can point a gun at your head and say, Stefan, give me all your Bitcoin and you can give me a fraction of what you own.

708
01:11:42,287 --> 01:11:46,127
and I have no way as the attacker of knowing how much you actually had.

709
01:11:46,547 --> 01:11:49,547
And that's already true for every single person on earth.

710
01:11:49,547 --> 01:11:54,807
I cannot, there is no way that I can know how many Bitcoins they control

711
01:11:54,807 --> 01:11:57,267
because it's a secret in their heads.

712
01:11:57,967 --> 01:12:02,987
So someone's grandma can have the private key to every Bitcoin.

713
01:12:03,227 --> 01:12:05,327
You simply cannot know that.

714
01:12:05,687 --> 01:12:09,107
You can make an educated guess, of course, and people do,

715
01:12:09,207 --> 01:12:12,187
and they kidnap big crypto exchange holders and stuff.

716
01:12:12,287 --> 01:12:15,947
But still, there's a fundamental shift here.

717
01:12:16,987 --> 01:12:26,127
And to me, what the thing did was, yeah, I'll need to paint this as a scenario in a way.

718
01:12:26,307 --> 01:12:28,887
So when you ask, what is a Bitcoin?

719
01:12:29,147 --> 01:12:31,367
You asked that hypothetical question before.

720
01:12:32,047 --> 01:12:33,987
When I get the question, what is Bitcoin?

721
01:12:34,127 --> 01:12:37,227
My short answer is, it's an agreement on a fixed set of rules.

722
01:12:37,227 --> 01:12:55,027
And the slightly longer answer is the reason we agree on this specific set of rules is that it's thus far the only rules known to man that are provably more expensive to try to cheat than to just follow.

723
01:12:56,487 --> 01:12:58,047
You follow me here?

724
01:12:58,627 --> 01:12:59,347
I follow you.

725
01:12:59,647 --> 01:13:00,147
I follow you.

726
01:13:00,247 --> 01:13:02,087
I don't know if I – I don't disagree.

727
01:13:02,087 --> 01:13:09,147
I just, I'm a little uncomfortable with the terminology of agreement because agreement is illegal, but I know what you're getting at.

728
01:13:09,147 --> 01:13:31,767
Yeah, so it's a physical or a means of communication in that sense. And the wonderful thing it did to me is like point out that physical possessions are actually less ownable in this sense than this ability to interact with people and just acting as if you own a number.

729
01:13:31,767 --> 01:13:41,067
so it's it unlocked something that was true always which is communication and uh free trade

730
01:13:41,067 --> 01:13:49,267
is better than violence than aggression that that it's it's it's a literal uh you you have

731
01:13:49,267 --> 01:13:55,947
somewhat somehow satoshi managed to boil that down into a beautiful equation and it's so powerful

732
01:13:55,947 --> 01:14:01,247
Like, it's just pointing out that all of these Austrian theories were right.

733
01:14:01,367 --> 01:14:07,227
We're all better off if we do this this way, if no one can counterfeit, if we can't take shit.

734
01:14:08,027 --> 01:14:20,307
What it leads to is more responsibility and, you know, number go up technology, which is really just putting on a lens that allows you to see the true deflationary nature of the free market.

735
01:14:20,307 --> 01:14:24,447
you can actually if you measure in bitcoin you can see how prices are falling forever

736
01:14:24,447 --> 01:14:31,687
because people get better at doing stuff like uh would you agree to that or is that too much hope

737
01:14:31,687 --> 01:14:37,147
no i agree with all that and i but i think it's so interesting well i don't but i don't agree that

738
01:14:37,147 --> 01:14:42,507
that's a good definition it's it's more metaphorical it's sound more like michael saylor talk which is

739
01:14:42,507 --> 01:14:47,467
driving yeah yeah although i i'm i'm with you on the inspiring but i just don't think it's a good

740
01:14:47,467 --> 01:14:51,607
definition of what if someone asks what a bitcoin is and we should say we should really say what's

741
01:14:51,607 --> 01:14:56,567
it what is what is a satoshi i don't think yeah you're okay this is this is the definition if

742
01:14:56,567 --> 01:15:02,767
someone asks what is bitcoin like no what is if they hear what is a bitcoin yeah what's what's a

743
01:15:02,767 --> 01:15:08,667
bitcoin yeah it's not much harder to answer yeah the bitcoin is an entry on a spread on a ledger

744
01:15:08,667 --> 01:15:15,487
okay that's stored distributed ledger and that ledger of course is is bolstered by this agreement

745
01:15:15,487 --> 01:15:17,067
that you're talking about, things like that.

746
01:15:17,107 --> 01:15:19,067
But I just think it's an entry,

747
01:15:19,327 --> 01:15:22,247
it's an abstract entry on an abstract spreadsheet

748
01:15:22,247 --> 01:15:24,487
that people regard as an abstract thing

749
01:15:24,487 --> 01:15:25,747
called a Bitcoin ledger.

750
01:15:25,947 --> 01:15:27,327
I mean, that's what it is.

751
01:15:27,367 --> 01:15:29,067
It's one of the units on there

752
01:15:29,067 --> 01:15:32,907
and it has such a nature that it can be transferred

753
01:15:32,907 --> 01:15:38,127
by someone to another person if they have the key.

754
01:15:38,307 --> 01:15:40,187
I mean, that's what it is, right?

755
01:15:40,907 --> 01:15:43,487
Well, I love this

756
01:15:43,487 --> 01:15:48,367
because there is so much philosophy in this type of discussion

757
01:15:48,367 --> 01:15:55,087
because all the important aspects of it are not the ones and zeros.

758
01:15:55,347 --> 01:15:58,447
All the important aspects, because it's money

759
01:15:58,447 --> 01:16:03,307
and not just a database for something else, for ordering stuff,

760
01:16:04,647 --> 01:16:10,847
that means that all the important aspects of Bitcoin

761
01:16:10,847 --> 01:16:14,367
are the human beings behind it.

762
01:16:14,467 --> 01:16:16,247
So the important part of a node

763
01:16:16,247 --> 01:16:20,307
is the person choosing what software to run,

764
01:16:20,467 --> 01:16:22,587
buying the hardware, installing the software,

765
01:16:22,767 --> 01:16:23,507
and running it.

766
01:16:23,747 --> 01:16:27,447
It's not the software that's the interesting part.

767
01:16:27,507 --> 01:16:29,907
The interesting part is getting someone to run it.

768
01:16:30,267 --> 01:16:31,547
And the same with a miner.

769
01:16:31,927 --> 01:16:34,147
Like if I have a hangar full of ASICs,

770
01:16:34,147 --> 01:16:37,527
the hardware itself is just the,

771
01:16:38,027 --> 01:16:40,647
I call it a fancy abacus, right?

772
01:16:40,647 --> 01:16:48,607
It's just helping the real miner, which is the guy who bought the stuff, to do calculation really, really fast.

773
01:16:48,607 --> 01:16:56,527
But at the end of the day, it's like a person deciding by his own volition, like his purposeful action, purposeful behavior.

774
01:16:57,067 --> 01:17:00,127
Human action is behind all of it.

775
01:17:00,527 --> 01:17:08,967
It's just that we found a way or Satoshi found a way for us to do this that makes it more expensive to cheat than to try.

776
01:17:08,967 --> 01:17:11,547
So it's an anti-lie machine in a way.

777
01:17:12,047 --> 01:17:13,207
Yeah, I agree with all that.

778
01:17:13,547 --> 01:17:15,287
I don't mind the metaphorical talk.

779
01:17:15,567 --> 01:17:18,207
Like, the sailor drives me nuts with his energy stuff.

780
01:17:18,287 --> 01:17:19,187
I think he's just wrong.

781
01:17:19,947 --> 01:17:20,387
He's very scientific.

782
01:17:20,387 --> 01:17:21,767
Yeah, because it's not backed by energy.

783
01:17:22,087 --> 01:17:23,707
It's backed by human action.

784
01:17:23,927 --> 01:17:26,007
Yeah, he's too scientific about it.

785
01:17:26,307 --> 01:17:31,947
And the one question he never answers, okay, which I think people – I think there's an answer to it.

786
01:17:31,947 --> 01:17:33,607
And I'm curious what yours is.

787
01:17:33,607 --> 01:17:40,567
the question is, so when people say, oh, it's just information, it could be copied. And

788
01:17:40,567 --> 01:17:46,427
it is true that there are many Bitcoins. There's Bitcoin Cash, there's Bitcoin,

789
01:17:46,427 --> 01:17:51,647
you know, the Bitcoin God, there's many cryptocurrencies. There's nothing stopping

790
01:17:51,647 --> 01:17:57,127
someone from duplicating Bitcoin itself. You can have an identical Bitcoin blockchain tomorrow if

791
01:17:57,127 --> 01:18:04,707
you wanted to. My way of thinking of it is that that's all true. But if you understand Austrian

792
01:18:04,707 --> 01:18:11,067
economics and the purpose and nature of money and why it emerges, it emerges as a response to the

793
01:18:11,067 --> 01:18:16,367
two problems of barter, which is the double coincidence of wants problem and also the

794
01:18:16,367 --> 01:18:25,027
inability to calculate in among heterogeneous goods, which are not commensurate in value.

795
01:18:25,027 --> 01:18:33,587
So barter solves these two problems. I mean money solves these two problems, but that means that you can expect there to be a tendency towards one money.

796
01:18:33,927 --> 01:18:45,267
And also if you understand that money is not wealth, that money is just a special sui generis good that trades between things of value.

797
01:18:45,627 --> 01:18:50,567
So that's what money is and why you can expect there to be one money, but it's not wealth.

798
01:18:50,567 --> 01:18:58,767
And so you only need – so when people – like my friend Tucker tells me, oh, this Hayekian idea of many types of money.

799
01:18:58,867 --> 01:19:06,567
Maybe you have one money among the merchants and one money for art and one money for secure transactions and for anonymity.

800
01:19:07,227 --> 01:19:08,587
And one – like, no, no, no.

801
01:19:08,607 --> 01:19:10,707
You're going to have a tendency towards one money.

802
01:19:10,707 --> 01:19:25,467
And now my view is that there's nothing special about Bitcoin itself as a blockchain except that a crypto money has advantages over gold or a commodity money.

803
01:19:26,167 --> 01:19:35,367
And Bitcoin is the first and therefore has the longest network – has the longest blockchain in terms of time and the biggest network effect.

804
01:19:35,367 --> 01:19:40,987
And so it's the one that's likely to emerge as the one that will tend to dominate in the future.

805
01:19:41,487 --> 01:19:44,387
It's not guaranteed that it had to be Bitcoin.

806
01:19:44,507 --> 01:19:46,347
It could have been Bitcoin Cash or something.

807
01:19:46,507 --> 01:19:47,927
But I mean, would you agree?

808
01:19:48,027 --> 01:19:52,607
Is there anything special about Bitcoin compared to, say, Bitcoin SV or Bitcoin Cash?

809
01:19:52,987 --> 01:19:53,567
Yes, yes.

810
01:19:53,667 --> 01:19:54,827
I love this question.

811
01:19:55,047 --> 01:19:56,547
And I think I have an answer to it.

812
01:19:56,767 --> 01:20:03,527
Like, OK, I tried to put words on this in my second book and I called it the one shot principle.

813
01:20:03,527 --> 01:20:16,907
That principle is absolute mathematical scarcity in a sufficiently decentralized distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention.

814
01:20:17,307 --> 01:20:26,227
It cannot be achieved again by people aware of this discovery, since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability itself.

815
01:20:26,227 --> 01:20:34,207
alluding to that the very point is that since it's just numbers and since it's just a number

816
01:20:34,207 --> 01:20:41,767
trying to replicate the the resistance to replicability in this specific number 21 million

817
01:20:41,767 --> 01:20:53,747
is pointless at best and a most of the if not all of the other cryptocurrencies or shit coins

818
01:20:53,747 --> 01:20:58,667
are there to enrich their founders.

819
01:20:59,067 --> 01:21:01,187
And Bitcoin had a founder that disappeared

820
01:21:01,187 --> 01:21:04,307
and then it got distributed in a very specific way.

821
01:21:04,807 --> 01:21:07,987
So the best analogy I know for this and why,

822
01:21:08,447 --> 01:21:12,067
like Bitcoin, we can do the Bitcoin Cash example first

823
01:21:12,067 --> 01:21:15,987
because it's super easy why Bitcoin Cash could never be it.

824
01:21:16,347 --> 01:21:19,067
And that is because they wanted to increase the block size.

825
01:21:19,227 --> 01:21:20,567
Now, what does that imply?

826
01:21:20,567 --> 01:21:25,727
It implies that blocks are costlier to download.

827
01:21:26,327 --> 01:21:34,807
So in the long run, running a node will be more costly on the Bitcoin cache network than the Bitcoin network, if the blocks are full, that is.

828
01:21:35,587 --> 01:21:42,127
Meaning that it centralizes over time faster than Bitcoin centralizes over time.

829
01:21:42,127 --> 01:21:51,447
You could claim that Bitcoin will also centralize over time because if you extrapolate into infinity, then the cost of running a node will be infinitely high.

830
01:21:52,107 --> 01:22:01,227
But at least Bitcoin was resilient to that and understood that blocks needed to be smaller in order for the common man to run a node.

831
01:22:01,367 --> 01:22:05,987
Otherwise, miners are in charge of the network and then it's not the same thing anymore.

832
01:22:06,107 --> 01:22:07,547
Then it's not resilient to change.

833
01:22:07,987 --> 01:22:11,227
But the analogy I want to make is the game of chess.

834
01:22:11,227 --> 01:22:18,107
so let's say that bitcoin is the game of money chess is the game of chess uh the the latest

835
01:22:18,107 --> 01:22:25,907
chess rule the latest time uh the rules of chess were changed were like the 1100 years ago when

836
01:22:25,907 --> 01:22:30,747
there's a move called on passant when when you can take it you know you know about the move like

837
01:22:30,747 --> 01:22:39,287
the the pawn moves two steps and you can take it on the square so so that um uh and the reason that

838
01:22:39,287 --> 01:22:44,467
change that chess doesn't change is because of this wonderful network effect and it's the same

839
01:22:44,467 --> 01:22:51,507
the same in bitcoin it's so big that everyone plays this game and there are endless infinite

840
01:22:51,507 --> 01:22:58,727
variations of chess and you can you can learn to play chess cash or chess gold or chess theorem

841
01:22:58,727 --> 01:23:05,847
or chess whatever like like it was another cryptocurrency like chess theorem for instance

842
01:23:05,847 --> 01:23:07,847
the rules would change with every move.

843
01:23:07,847 --> 01:23:11,687
Chess cash would have a 64 times 64 squared board

844
01:23:11,687 --> 01:23:13,347
and no pieces on it.

845
01:23:13,347 --> 01:23:31,061
And like these are all there nothing stopping anyone from using Bitcoin cash if they want to It just that you cannot play the best game of them all if you do because this is the game that allows you to play with the most number of players

846
01:23:31,061 --> 01:23:38,761
So it's almost like if you change it, you're setting the precedent that it can be changed and then it's not.

847
01:23:40,281 --> 01:23:40,581
Exactly.

848
01:23:40,921 --> 01:23:43,521
Yeah, but so your argument is what I said.

849
01:23:43,521 --> 01:23:50,061
It's the one that's going to be because it was the first, in a sense.

850
01:23:50,261 --> 01:23:57,681
No, I'd say because it was the last, because there were precursors to this and predecessors to Bitcoin.

851
01:23:57,921 --> 01:23:57,941
Right.

852
01:23:58,801 --> 01:24:00,161
But they all died.

853
01:24:00,341 --> 01:24:06,621
So this one is the only one that actually worked after and still works after 17 years.

854
01:24:06,781 --> 01:24:07,901
It's kind of amazing.

855
01:24:08,101 --> 01:24:12,281
It's the first one that solved the problems at the pre-cruise.

856
01:24:12,281 --> 01:24:12,501
Yeah.

857
01:24:12,501 --> 01:24:18,161
I mean, so basically your view is it's the first one and it was good enough because.

858
01:24:18,641 --> 01:24:21,521
Yeah, and it only ever needed to be good enough.

859
01:24:21,621 --> 01:24:24,181
It never needed to be perfect, just good enough to last forever.

860
01:24:24,521 --> 01:24:26,561
And the idea of a perfect money is nonsense.

861
01:24:26,701 --> 01:24:28,101
It's impossible to have a perfect money.

862
01:24:28,321 --> 01:24:28,861
Yeah, of course.

863
01:24:29,461 --> 01:24:35,221
But it can change, but it's hard enough to change it for it to only change for the better.

864
01:24:35,221 --> 01:24:36,521
Yeah, it's good enough.

865
01:24:36,721 --> 01:24:38,541
I mean, I'm curious what you think about.

866
01:24:38,541 --> 01:24:55,841
But I think – who's the guy that has the – I have his – the guy that had the formula for predicting the scarcity of Bitcoin.

867
01:24:56,641 --> 01:24:57,241
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

868
01:24:58,241 --> 01:25:01,381
But if you know anything about Austrian economics, that's bullshit.

869
01:25:01,381 --> 01:25:02,221
I know.

870
01:25:02,421 --> 01:25:03,601
I'm curious what you think.

871
01:25:03,821 --> 01:25:07,981
It's the guy – he's the Austrian – the Dutch guy.

872
01:25:08,541 --> 01:25:15,741
uh yeah i plan b plan b yeah plan b right and he had this power yeah what do you think i think it's

873
01:25:15,741 --> 01:25:20,661
i think it's bullshit because value is subjective and you can't like market predictions are all

874
01:25:20,661 --> 01:25:26,381
bullshit like that it's it's a it's a good guess i guess but it wasn't a good guess since it didn't

875
01:25:26,381 --> 01:25:34,941
play out that way so like no and you cannot know uh i mean who's to say that this uh like

876
01:25:34,941 --> 01:25:41,321
technology is following this s-curve adoption thing and if that is true for bitcoin yeah that's

877
01:25:41,321 --> 01:25:46,081
true for the adoption of bitcoin but it's not true for price because price goes for absolutely

878
01:25:46,081 --> 01:25:51,521
bonkers if that happens yeah because people have more money like there's not like you

879
01:25:51,521 --> 01:25:58,901
people can produce more goods and services during a lifetime so that means number can go

880
01:25:58,901 --> 01:26:04,361
infinitely high that's the everything divided by 21 million theory that's alluding to that

881
01:26:04,361 --> 01:26:06,901
This can go on forever and it doesn't have to end.

882
01:26:07,021 --> 01:26:08,341
It can just go up forever.

883
01:26:08,341 --> 01:26:16,181
Well, by the way, your comment earlier about in Bitcoin world, then prices are always falling, that kind of thing.

884
01:26:17,801 --> 01:26:31,221
And I think so that dovetails with my understanding of intellectual property and praxeology, because if you understand human action as is based on two key ingredients.

885
01:26:31,221 --> 01:26:35,421
One is the availability of scarce resources in the world, and the other is knowledge.

886
01:26:36,201 --> 01:26:44,081
Okay, so the reason that we're richer today than the Romans is because – not because we're smarter than the Romans.

887
01:26:44,181 --> 01:26:46,941
We're probably stupider than the Romans, right?

888
01:26:47,241 --> 01:26:49,701
It's because we have more knowledge at our disposal.

889
01:26:49,861 --> 01:26:55,101
So every generation, we keep getting more – and the world is not – doesn't have more resources than it used to have.

890
01:26:55,141 --> 01:26:58,821
We might get to more of it, but basically we're actually using up resources, right?

891
01:26:58,821 --> 01:27:10,841
So the world is like a ball of kind of a finite ball of resources, but we keep – what keeps changing every year and every generation is we learn more and more ways to do things more efficiently.

892
01:27:10,841 --> 01:27:24,221
Our knowledge increases, which is why I'm so against intellectual property because it restricts the one thing we have that makes us richer, right?

893
01:27:24,221 --> 01:27:37,221
We have a world of finite scarce resources, and the way we're richer is we keep improving our knowledge, and to impede or restrict the ability to develop that knowledge is suicidal.

894
01:27:37,601 --> 01:27:49,281
But that goes along with the reason why in a world of scarcity and in a world of a fixed money supply money like Bitcoin, that's why prices keep going down.

895
01:27:49,281 --> 01:27:52,121
They keep going down because the human race keeps growing.

896
01:27:52,321 --> 01:27:55,821
I don't know if they grow in numbers, but if they grow in numbers, the GDP goes up.

897
01:27:56,281 --> 01:28:04,101
But also we go up and we increase in productivity because we keep accumulating technical knowledge, technological knowledge that makes us more efficient.

898
01:28:04,261 --> 01:28:06,041
And so that's why prices keep going down.

899
01:28:06,881 --> 01:28:07,041
Exactly.

900
01:28:07,321 --> 01:28:09,281
I mean, it's so simple.

901
01:28:09,421 --> 01:28:17,721
And once you see it, it's like kind of impossible to unsee and impossible to not be upset about because you realize how much they steal for you via inflation.

902
01:28:17,721 --> 01:28:21,621
since most people think no inflation would mean stable prices.

903
01:28:22,261 --> 01:28:23,321
But that's total bullshit.

904
01:28:23,321 --> 01:28:29,601
It means falling prices and falling in increasing rates too.

905
01:28:30,541 --> 01:28:36,421
I don't know if you've seen – Seyf and Nina Moose has been arguing this lately,

906
01:28:36,601 --> 01:28:38,701
and I'm trying to figure out whether I agree.

907
01:28:38,801 --> 01:28:39,901
It's about interest rates.

908
01:28:40,581 --> 01:28:41,421
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

909
01:28:41,761 --> 01:28:45,841
And I met with him in Turkey earlier last year with Hoppe,

910
01:28:45,901 --> 01:28:47,421
and he was trying to persuade Hoppe of this.

911
01:28:47,421 --> 01:28:59,481
And Hoppe is not quite sure what he thinks about it. But Saifedean's argument, if I understand it, is that now I think he's trying to find a way to justify the Islamic.

912
01:29:00,021 --> 01:29:01,181
Yes, I've had the same thought.

913
01:29:01,601 --> 01:29:06,261
I think he's trying to find a way to justify the anti-usory view.

914
01:29:06,261 --> 01:29:11,141
Okay, I think I can do a pretty good TLDR of it.

915
01:29:11,381 --> 01:29:22,441
So the theory is that a money hoarder would at some point be the cost of owning the money would be-

916
01:29:22,441 --> 01:29:24,961
Wait, wait, hold on. What kind of money? You mean gold, right?

917
01:29:25,641 --> 01:29:27,261
Well, gold or Bitcoin or whatever.

918
01:29:27,501 --> 01:29:30,501
Let's talk about gold first because I think there's a difference, but go ahead.

919
01:29:30,961 --> 01:29:33,801
Yeah, I think Seyfrieden's theory is more general.

920
01:29:33,801 --> 01:29:39,241
this is from the principles of economics book that he wrote a very good book by the way but

921
01:29:39,241 --> 01:29:51,321
it but the the original idea in that book as said by safety and i'm paraphrasing him here of course

922
01:29:51,321 --> 01:29:59,261
but is that at some point the the cost of holding money becomes so high that you're incentivized to

923
01:29:59,261 --> 01:30:01,361
lend it out

924
01:30:01,361 --> 01:30:04,041
at a negative interest rate even.

925
01:30:05,721 --> 01:30:08,041
But this is paired with his insight

926
01:30:08,041 --> 01:30:09,121
that over time,

927
01:30:10,461 --> 01:30:13,401
time preference goes down

928
01:30:13,401 --> 01:30:14,621
and over time,

929
01:30:14,741 --> 01:30:15,681
the progress of society

930
01:30:15,681 --> 01:30:16,441
is that interest rates

931
01:30:16,441 --> 01:30:17,581
go down and down and down.

932
01:30:17,841 --> 01:30:18,881
So you reach a point

933
01:30:18,881 --> 01:30:22,621
where the interest you could charge

934
01:30:22,621 --> 01:30:24,121
is less than,

935
01:30:25,181 --> 01:30:26,821
it's not enough to pay

936
01:30:26,821 --> 01:30:27,681
for your storage costs.

937
01:30:27,681 --> 01:30:39,441
So the theory is that, if I understand it correctly, that the cost of the storage would be higher than to just lend the money out with a very low or even negative interest rate.

938
01:30:39,461 --> 01:30:47,441
Yeah, so basically you're getting storage costs paid for by lending to someone, even if you get no interest, because at least they're holding it for you.

939
01:30:47,441 --> 01:30:59,021
Yeah, but so he discussed that recently. I think it was in some podcast, maybe with Adam Heyman or maybe Bob Murphy. But he was talking about his book, his new book, his novel, The Gold Standard.

940
01:30:59,221 --> 01:30:59,541
Yeah, yeah.

941
01:30:59,541 --> 01:31:02,041
And that's set in a gold standard world.

942
01:31:02,161 --> 01:31:07,581
And my thinking is that he might be right for gold because there is a cost to holding gold.

943
01:31:07,701 --> 01:31:08,281
There's a risk.

944
01:31:08,841 --> 01:31:09,561
There's a cost.

945
01:31:10,361 --> 01:31:18,021
But it's hard to imagine that that same phenomena happens with Bitcoin because the cost of holding Bitcoin is basically zero.

946
01:31:18,441 --> 01:31:21,041
And there's no increasing cost with the amount.

947
01:31:21,441 --> 01:31:26,401
So the cost of holding one Satoshi is exactly the same as the cost of holding all 21 million Bitcoins.

948
01:31:26,401 --> 01:31:36,941
So it seems to me like that there would always be a positive interest rate that is above the cost of holding for Bitcoin, but I'm not sure about that.

949
01:31:36,941 --> 01:31:44,341
No, I mean, theoretically, like, let's unpack that.

950
01:31:45,061 --> 01:31:59,681
There is a cost to holding a Bitcoin, but how much that cost is, it's like, yeah, I mean, you could hold like trillions of dollars by memorizing 12 words.

951
01:31:59,981 --> 01:32:03,521
It's possible, not advisable, but it is possible.

952
01:32:03,521 --> 01:32:12,701
And the question becomes like – so, yeah, theoretically it may be true, but then again everything may be true theoretically.

953
01:32:12,701 --> 01:32:32,341
Well, put it this way. Let's put it this way. If I understand Seyfedine's point, so the question for me is – I think he's correct that the development of the human species over time could be viewed as one of reducing time preference, right?

954
01:32:32,341 --> 01:32:43,661
And so you could – and with increasing prosperity and reducing time preference and more long-term events, you could see the interest rate would go lower and lower.

955
01:32:44,041 --> 01:32:49,381
So the question is, does it tend towards zero or does it tend towards some finite amount?

956
01:32:49,561 --> 01:32:57,741
And if it tends towards – whichever way it is, you could see that it could get below the cost of holding gold in a gold world.

957
01:32:57,741 --> 01:32:58,381
Absolutely.

958
01:32:58,921 --> 01:33:07,761
So you could see that in a world where gold is the money, interest could go so low that you might be incentivized to loan it for no interest rate.

959
01:33:07,881 --> 01:33:09,081
Okay, I could understand that.

960
01:33:09,581 --> 01:33:10,621
I just don't know if –

961
01:33:10,621 --> 01:33:18,341
Simple fact, it might be more valuable to have friends than to have a vault full of gold because that's what that means.

962
01:33:18,341 --> 01:33:18,701
Correct.

963
01:33:18,901 --> 01:33:19,221
Correct.

964
01:33:19,601 --> 01:33:22,881
Yeah, you make them have skin in the game in a sense.

965
01:33:23,221 --> 01:33:23,721
Yeah, exactly.

966
01:33:23,721 --> 01:33:38,621
But let's say Bitcoin is tending towards – I mean let's say interest rate for money is tending towards 1.2%. That's the tendency. It's not going to zero because maybe he's wrong that there would be no interest. Maybe there would be some interest.

967
01:33:38,621 --> 01:33:43,421
Now, I'm actually more amenable not to the idea that there'd be zero interest.

968
01:33:43,801 --> 01:33:56,061
I'm more amenable to the idea that in a Bitcoin world, the concept of loaning would almost, like, I'm more sympathetic towards that idea, that the idea of credit would almost disappear.

969
01:33:56,481 --> 01:34:03,101
Well, I'd say not disappear, but these artificially low interest rates would disappear.

970
01:34:03,241 --> 01:34:03,681
Oh, certainly.

971
01:34:03,681 --> 01:34:08,941
Then we would have like a more proper interest rate, which might be like 20%.

972
01:34:08,941 --> 01:34:09,861
But not just that.

973
01:34:10,041 --> 01:34:13,141
The idea like that people's characters would change.

974
01:34:13,241 --> 01:34:20,041
Like, for example, when you get out of college, when you get out of school, you wouldn't borrow money to buy a house or to buy a car.

975
01:34:20,261 --> 01:34:20,861
You would save up.

976
01:34:20,861 --> 01:34:21,681
No, no, you would save up.

977
01:34:21,941 --> 01:34:22,041
Yeah.

978
01:34:22,241 --> 01:34:25,761
So all those things would – they would largely disappear.

979
01:34:26,121 --> 01:34:30,641
So the question is, if you have a new business, would they borrow money or would they take investors?

980
01:34:31,201 --> 01:34:31,741
So I don't know about that.

981
01:34:31,741 --> 01:34:34,901
This is another brain tickler.

982
01:34:35,441 --> 01:34:35,621
Yeah.

983
01:34:35,921 --> 01:34:40,441
If we extrapolate to the year 2140,

984
01:34:41,961 --> 01:34:43,841
so all the Bitcoins have been mined,

985
01:34:44,441 --> 01:34:48,661
which means that not only is there a finite supply of them

986
01:34:48,661 --> 01:34:51,141
or a finite amount on the market,

987
01:34:51,561 --> 01:34:55,261
it's ever diminishing because people lose their Bitcoins,

988
01:34:55,261 --> 01:34:56,961
people choose to huddle forever.

989
01:34:57,381 --> 01:35:00,381
That will happen even when the last Bitcoin has been mined.

990
01:35:00,381 --> 01:35:07,041
By the way, not only that, but let's suppose you die and you're a billionaire

991
01:35:07,041 --> 01:35:11,621
To donate the money to charity, you might just destroy your keys

992
01:35:11,621 --> 01:35:13,961
Yeah, that's what Saylor says he will do

993
01:35:13,961 --> 01:35:17,021
He's alluded to that

994
01:35:17,021 --> 01:35:21,601
And because money is not wealth, that's not destroying anything

995
01:35:21,601 --> 01:35:29,001
Yeah, but just imagine this scenario where you have this ever decreasing total supply of money then

996
01:35:29,001 --> 01:35:38,841
in that world, very few people would be able to actually have black numbers on their balance sheets in terms of Satoshis.

997
01:35:39,381 --> 01:35:41,221
They would have what, Sagan?

998
01:35:41,561 --> 01:35:43,001
Black numbers on their balance sheets.

999
01:35:43,161 --> 01:35:44,341
So they would all be red numbers.

1000
01:35:44,341 --> 01:35:51,601
Like all stacks would be diminishing because very few businesses would be able to be profitable.

1001
01:35:53,221 --> 01:35:54,501
Don't get me wrong.

1002
01:35:54,501 --> 01:36:01,961
They would be very profitable in purchasing power terms, but not in terms of the Satoshis themselves.

1003
01:36:02,501 --> 01:36:03,701
So it's the same thing with wages, right?

1004
01:36:03,741 --> 01:36:04,721
Your salary would go down.

1005
01:36:04,961 --> 01:36:05,301
Yeah, exactly.

1006
01:36:05,461 --> 01:36:06,281
It would go down every year.

1007
01:36:06,281 --> 01:36:07,501
In nominal terms.

1008
01:36:07,661 --> 01:36:22,201
So theoretically, you may start a business not to actually make more Satoshis per year, but to decrease the rate of decline of your stack of Bitcoin so that it diminished a little slower.

1009
01:36:22,201 --> 01:36:27,161
So you're looking at like the angle of the curve rather than the curve itself.

1010
01:36:27,801 --> 01:36:31,581
It's such a mind-blowing world to even think about.

1011
01:36:31,881 --> 01:36:37,061
Do you think that the supply would go down of Bitcoins also because of friction?

1012
01:36:38,941 --> 01:36:39,921
How do you mean?

1013
01:36:41,621 --> 01:36:42,901
How do you mean friction?

1014
01:36:45,021 --> 01:36:51,621
Well, every time you make a transfer, I guess it's not for, I guess you don't lose.

1015
01:36:51,621 --> 01:36:55,361
If I transfer Bitcoin, I guess nothing is lost because someone gets the fee, right?

1016
01:36:55,441 --> 01:36:56,181
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

1017
01:36:57,141 --> 01:36:59,621
Not a single Satoshi is lost per se.

1018
01:36:59,641 --> 01:37:02,441
I guess virtually just from lost to people losing it.

1019
01:37:02,461 --> 01:37:05,841
But they are lost in the sense that there's a minimum amount.

1020
01:37:05,841 --> 01:37:23,394
And also at that point right now sometimes the mempool and and it costs literally one satoshi to send a bitcoin uh which is or one satoshi per vbyte uh which is the lowest

1021
01:37:23,394 --> 01:37:29,854
allowed but you could theoretically have like a very low amount of bitcoin in one address and

1022
01:37:29,854 --> 01:37:35,294
never be able to to spend it because the fees would always exceed the amount that is in that

1023
01:37:35,294 --> 01:37:42,614
address so all of those bitcoins would be like just effectively lost that's my point yeah yeah

1024
01:37:42,614 --> 01:37:46,374
i guess that's what i that's part of what i mean by friction well let me ask you what is your vision

1025
01:37:46,374 --> 01:37:53,174
of let's say 50 years from now i don't know let's say bitcoin is is worth i don't know 50 million

1026
01:37:53,174 --> 01:38:00,574
dollars in yeah in current in current money and every satoshi is worth i don't know 17 dollars or

1027
01:38:00,574 --> 01:38:07,434
or whatever. I mean, do you envision side chains or do you envision that the protocol gets modified

1028
01:38:07,434 --> 01:38:11,114
to expand the decimal points? What do you think is going to happen?

1029
01:38:11,334 --> 01:38:16,654
Super glad you asked that because I think I have quite original ideas about this.

1030
01:38:17,314 --> 01:38:24,894
I think the real scaling is that we'll just spend less. I think, you know, micropayments are a very

1031
01:38:24,894 --> 01:38:32,434
fiat-y thing. So whenever, if I go to the central station in Amsterdam and I need to take a leak,

1032
01:38:32,514 --> 01:38:40,574
then I have to pay a euro to open the door to the toilet, right? And then I have to buy a train

1033
01:38:40,574 --> 01:38:47,474
ticket, then there's like 130 different types of train tickets. And I, all of this-

1034
01:38:47,474 --> 01:38:50,594
So using money is going to be too much of a hassle for people to bother with it?

1035
01:38:50,594 --> 01:39:03,134
No, but imagine if you have a Bitcoin business, it may make sense to you to sell lifetime subscriptions instead of selling individual products.

1036
01:39:03,134 --> 01:39:05,354
Because then you get the money earlier.

1037
01:39:05,894 --> 01:39:10,674
And since the money goes up in value forever, it's better for you to get the money now than later.

1038
01:39:11,314 --> 01:39:12,554
So it's like the opposite.

1039
01:39:12,734 --> 01:39:15,634
Everything is the inverse of the fiat monetary system.

1040
01:39:16,114 --> 01:39:20,494
So in fiat, they always say the first million is the hardest.

1041
01:39:20,594 --> 01:39:21,934
And Bitcoin is the other way around.

1042
01:39:22,374 --> 01:39:29,794
Like the first million is the easiest, of course, because the increasing difficulty applies to everyone.

1043
01:39:30,414 --> 01:39:34,514
So I think also we'll trust each other more.

1044
01:39:34,614 --> 01:39:36,074
This is also the irony of it.

1045
01:39:37,954 --> 01:39:41,014
The theory is this, and I'd love to pick your brain on this.

1046
01:39:41,014 --> 01:39:55,014
If you have 10 poor people who buy food every day for 10 days, then there's 100 transactions because each of them goes and buys noodles for themselves and eat in their apartment.

1047
01:39:55,454 --> 01:40:08,294
If 10 wealthy people do the same thing and they're friends, they might go to a restaurant every night and one of them picks up the bill each night because they're nice and friendly people and they can afford to do that.

1048
01:40:08,294 --> 01:40:12,234
So at the end of the week, you have 10 transactions instead of 100.

1049
01:40:12,934 --> 01:40:16,814
My point is that it's very expensive to be poor in the fiat system.

1050
01:40:17,414 --> 01:40:22,074
And if everyone's on a Bitcoin system and everyone benefits from everything in the economy,

1051
01:40:22,254 --> 01:40:26,114
because it's not a zero-sum game, all prices go down forever,

1052
01:40:26,834 --> 01:40:30,854
then fewer transactions are necessary because you can bundle them.

1053
01:40:31,174 --> 01:40:35,774
And you're also incentivized to bundle them since there's a fee to sending the transaction.

1054
01:40:35,774 --> 01:40:40,774
And you're incentivized to use all other types of trust models between people.

1055
01:40:41,014 --> 01:40:42,854
At the end of the day, this is just communication.

1056
01:40:43,514 --> 01:40:47,634
So all of humanity will act more like you do within a family.

1057
01:40:48,214 --> 01:40:52,334
You just give the other guy a meal because you know you'll get it back at something.

1058
01:40:53,134 --> 01:41:00,074
I can see that changing, but the question is, but that kind of assumes there's only one, everything's on chain.

1059
01:41:00,174 --> 01:41:04,034
I mean, it could be that side chains develop to augment what you're talking about.

1060
01:41:04,034 --> 01:41:06,014
All I'm talking about here is off-chain.

1061
01:41:06,454 --> 01:41:09,514
None of these transactions actually have to happen on-chain.

1062
01:41:09,954 --> 01:41:12,914
And also, you don't even need a sidechain.

1063
01:41:12,974 --> 01:41:19,174
If you trust the person, then you don't need any blockchain.

1064
01:41:19,554 --> 01:41:20,274
You don't need any...

1065
01:41:20,274 --> 01:41:23,254
But that's a type of sidechain conceptually.

1066
01:41:23,354 --> 01:41:24,234
It's a type of sidechain.

1067
01:41:24,414 --> 01:41:27,654
In other words, you're counting on getting paid back somehow.

1068
01:41:27,654 --> 01:41:33,174
Yeah, you and I, I trust you already from just internet reputation

1069
01:41:33,174 --> 01:41:35,814
to if we ever had transactions together,

1070
01:41:36,214 --> 01:41:38,174
we could just keep a tab on one another.

1071
01:41:38,294 --> 01:41:39,074
I wouldn't mind that.

1072
01:41:39,374 --> 01:41:40,714
Like, I wouldn't need a blockchain.

1073
01:41:41,074 --> 01:41:43,614
So I wouldn't need a banking system.

1074
01:41:43,694 --> 01:41:44,474
I wouldn't need anything.

1075
01:41:45,694 --> 01:41:47,534
I'd rather just keep a tab.

1076
01:41:48,254 --> 01:41:51,054
No, no, but I think that's all fascinating

1077
01:41:51,054 --> 01:41:52,074
and good and right,

1078
01:41:52,214 --> 01:41:53,994
but it still doesn't answer the question

1079
01:41:53,994 --> 01:41:55,614
about what's actually going to happen.

1080
01:41:57,534 --> 01:41:58,674
50 years from now,

1081
01:41:58,714 --> 01:42:01,654
when Bitcoin is a dollar per Satoshi,

1082
01:42:01,654 --> 01:42:04,814
do you think that the decimal points will be modified

1083
01:42:04,814 --> 01:42:06,134
and there will be sidechains?

1084
01:42:06,314 --> 01:42:07,234
I mean, I'm curious.

1085
01:42:07,674 --> 01:42:09,914
No, why would they need to be modified?

1086
01:42:12,074 --> 01:42:14,034
I mean, over the Lightning Network,

1087
01:42:14,274 --> 01:42:15,954
which is like how,

1088
01:42:16,954 --> 01:42:19,574
when Bitcoin is used for everyday commerce,

1089
01:42:19,714 --> 01:42:21,134
like in El Salvador, for instance,

1090
01:42:21,954 --> 01:42:23,594
everything is over Lightning.

1091
01:42:24,094 --> 01:42:26,394
And you can do sub-Satoshis on Lightning.

1092
01:42:26,554 --> 01:42:27,134
It's trivial.

1093
01:42:27,774 --> 01:42:29,414
So you can divide it into...

1094
01:42:29,414 --> 01:42:37,894
Okay, so you don't see the decimal points in the blockchain, in Bitcoin changing, but you're imagining a sidechain, though.

1095
01:42:37,994 --> 01:42:39,194
You are imagining a sidechain.

1096
01:42:39,714 --> 01:42:42,854
I wouldn't call Lightning a sidechain, necessarily.

1097
01:42:44,054 --> 01:42:45,614
Why not? What would you call it?

1098
01:42:46,494 --> 01:42:48,414
Because it's...

1099
01:42:49,534 --> 01:42:56,714
To be honest, because I've never heard it described as a sidechain, Liquid is a sidechain.

1100
01:42:57,354 --> 01:42:58,714
What would you call it?

1101
01:42:58,714 --> 01:43:05,754
Because I think Lightning is not a side chain because it's not a chain at all.

1102
01:43:05,874 --> 01:43:07,174
There's no chain involved.

1103
01:43:07,514 --> 01:43:08,354
It's just...

1104
01:43:08,354 --> 01:43:09,074
Oh, I see. Okay.

1105
01:43:09,274 --> 01:43:09,434
Yeah.

1106
01:43:09,754 --> 01:43:16,534
You're just staking, you're devoting X number of Bitcoins into a Lightning channel.

1107
01:43:16,734 --> 01:43:18,234
And then someone else does the same.

1108
01:43:18,334 --> 01:43:21,314
And now you've opened a channel and you can interact.

1109
01:43:21,434 --> 01:43:26,074
But it's a channel that can be funded with and settled in Bitcoin, correct?

1110
01:43:26,834 --> 01:43:27,214
Only.

1111
01:43:27,214 --> 01:43:27,814
Yes.

1112
01:43:27,814 --> 01:43:36,914
It is the Bitcoin because at some point it settles back on chain when you close the channel.

1113
01:43:37,134 --> 01:43:40,194
It's conceptually a little bit like a debit card, right?

1114
01:43:41,834 --> 01:43:43,834
Yeah, except there's no debit card.

1115
01:43:44,394 --> 01:43:55,294
But you load it with, yeah, I know there's no bank, but I mean, you load your channel with a certain number of Bitcoins by an on-chain transaction, correct?

1116
01:43:55,294 --> 01:44:04,994
Well, it's a distributed IOU system, I guess, except that it's totally accountable.

1117
01:44:07,994 --> 01:44:21,254
I mean, I wouldn't call it as robust as Bitcoin, but even if Lightning Channel closes too early, all that happens is that the balance goes back to its rightful owner.

1118
01:44:21,254 --> 01:44:25,054
So there's no way of gamifying and rigging the system.

1119
01:44:25,054 --> 01:44:27,194
It has the same.

1120
01:44:28,014 --> 01:44:31,794
Do you actually use Lightning yourself right now?

1121
01:44:32,134 --> 01:44:34,534
Yeah, yeah, I do for a lot of things.

1122
01:44:35,314 --> 01:44:39,014
And I try to use Bitcoin as much as I can.

1123
01:44:39,494 --> 01:44:40,454
Of course, it's hard.

1124
01:44:40,694 --> 01:44:49,334
I mean, I live in Europe and the governments here have decided to suspect me and treat me as a criminal

1125
01:44:49,334 --> 01:44:54,654
because I'm using a means of communication that they cannot tax or they cannot inflate.

1126
01:44:55,054 --> 01:44:59,554
So I'm being criminalized for refusing to use something that they counterfeit.

1127
01:45:00,294 --> 01:45:03,854
So earlier you talked about Bitcoin as money.

1128
01:45:03,974 --> 01:45:05,554
Do you regard it as money now?

1129
01:45:05,634 --> 01:45:08,674
Or do you think it's got degrees of moneyness and it's on its way?

1130
01:45:08,854 --> 01:45:12,374
Where do you view Bitcoin at in money?

1131
01:45:12,374 --> 01:45:19,774
I mean, the definition of money is something like the most dominant form of medium of exchange, right?

1132
01:45:20,314 --> 01:45:20,434
Yeah.

1133
01:45:20,514 --> 01:45:22,934
So I think it's on its way there.

1134
01:45:22,934 --> 01:45:27,554
I view it and I think the terms medium of exchange,

1135
01:45:27,754 --> 01:45:31,814
store of value and unit of account are somewhat confusing,

1136
01:45:32,274 --> 01:45:34,954
especially store of value.

1137
01:45:35,114 --> 01:45:38,314
Since value is subjective, you can't really store value.

1138
01:45:38,554 --> 01:45:42,514
I prefer medium of exchange over space and time.

1139
01:45:43,174 --> 01:45:46,234
It's just medium of exchange and who's to say,

1140
01:45:47,094 --> 01:45:50,054
and all I get, I get these questions so much,

1141
01:45:50,054 --> 01:45:54,114
like how will we transact with one another on a Bitcoin standard?

1142
01:45:54,434 --> 01:45:58,334
But the thing is, transacting a lot is a very Keynesian concept.

1143
01:45:59,954 --> 01:46:01,894
Transacting over time with yourself.

1144
01:46:02,574 --> 01:46:03,974
Velocity of money is bullshit.

1145
01:46:04,754 --> 01:46:07,794
So I think we'll all get into more like,

1146
01:46:09,294 --> 01:46:13,894
what it leads me to is less materialism and less consumerism

1147
01:46:13,894 --> 01:46:17,294
and you only buy quality over quantity.

1148
01:46:17,294 --> 01:46:20,174
Like quality is really the opposite of equality.

1149
01:46:20,834 --> 01:46:23,394
Like you get into the mindset.

1150
01:46:23,394 --> 01:46:23,954
That's interesting.

1151
01:46:24,514 --> 01:46:35,474
Yeah, I agree with that, especially as we get richer because of Bitcoin and we have lower time preference and money has a cost to use.

1152
01:46:36,294 --> 01:46:36,774
Yeah, yeah.

1153
01:46:37,154 --> 01:46:42,234
And you'd rather keep the Bitcoin than buy the frivolous shit that you otherwise would have bought.

1154
01:46:42,614 --> 01:46:45,134
So like it's not about the fucking Lambos.

1155
01:46:45,134 --> 01:46:48,294
Like if you can do without the Lambo, you own the Lambo.

1156
01:46:48,734 --> 01:46:56,994
So I've always thought, and maybe you disagree with me on this because of your view about Bitcoin's unique status as money.

1157
01:46:57,494 --> 01:47:05,194
I've always thought that, yeah, during the monetization phase, it makes sense to hold it for speculation, if nothing else.

1158
01:47:05,694 --> 01:47:10,774
But let's suppose it sort of starts plateauing and becomes the world's dominant money.

1159
01:47:10,774 --> 01:47:15,454
it would go up in value because of productivity, but it wouldn't keep going up

1160
01:47:15,454 --> 01:47:22,394
hyperbolically, right? Or parabolically. It would finally plateau at a certain point.

1161
01:47:23,114 --> 01:47:28,914
And at that point in time, it seems to me that you would only hold a fraction of your wealth

1162
01:47:28,914 --> 01:47:39,514
in money because of the risk of collapse or the risk that it might fail. So let's suppose I'm

1163
01:47:39,514 --> 01:47:48,394
worth, I don't know, $200 million in wealth in Bitcoin, I would be stupid to hold that in cash.

1164
01:47:48,394 --> 01:47:54,474
I would hold maybe 10% of it in Bitcoin and the rest I would have to put in the stock market or

1165
01:47:54,474 --> 01:47:58,774
buy real estate or something like that just to diversify. What do you think about that?

1166
01:48:00,154 --> 01:48:05,674
Yeah, I think that's correct. I do think that after it sort of plateaus, I don't envision it

1167
01:48:05,674 --> 01:48:17,114
Because say that total goods and services and productivity in society increases by about 10% per year in today's economy.

1168
01:48:17,514 --> 01:48:17,674
Yeah.

1169
01:48:18,794 --> 01:48:19,414
I'll imagine.

1170
01:48:19,814 --> 01:48:28,794
But what we leave out then is that a Bitcoin economy is a much more free market oriented, much more well-oiled machine.

1171
01:48:28,794 --> 01:48:35,234
So it might increase by 25% per year still after everyone's adopted it.

1172
01:48:35,234 --> 01:48:36,774
But we're not at 10% now.

1173
01:48:37,254 --> 01:48:38,874
Are you imagining we're at 10% now?

1174
01:48:40,594 --> 01:48:44,274
Like more goods and services per year globally?

1175
01:48:45,074 --> 01:48:45,594
Yeah.

1176
01:48:45,634 --> 01:48:46,294
Aren't we?

1177
01:48:46,394 --> 01:48:47,314
What do you imagine?

1178
01:48:47,434 --> 01:48:49,354
What would be a good number?

1179
01:48:50,054 --> 01:48:50,534
5%?

1180
01:48:51,134 --> 01:48:52,314
3%, 4%.

1181
01:48:52,314 --> 01:48:52,814
3%.

1182
01:48:52,814 --> 01:48:53,634
Yeah, yeah.

1183
01:48:53,834 --> 01:48:55,654
But thought experiment is the same.

1184
01:48:55,774 --> 01:48:58,474
Say it increases from 3% to 15%.

1185
01:48:58,474 --> 01:49:08,414
It's still super incentivized to hodl the Bitcoin and wait another year before you buy another lawnmower.

1186
01:49:08,834 --> 01:49:14,554
Like you're still incentivized to save rather than spend frivolously.

1187
01:49:15,394 --> 01:49:17,234
So that's the gist of it.

1188
01:49:17,294 --> 01:49:18,034
That's the point.

1189
01:49:18,374 --> 01:49:23,934
And also that when everyone has it, the rate of which they're lost is much higher.

1190
01:49:23,934 --> 01:49:27,434
So you have the decreasing supply and the increasing demand.

1191
01:49:27,434 --> 01:49:30,854
like forever type of thing.

1192
01:49:30,854 --> 01:49:35,574
I have a hard time envisioning what that actually looks like, like everyone else.

1193
01:49:35,574 --> 01:49:39,194
But like I try to think about it, but it's super strange.

1194
01:49:39,194 --> 01:49:45,074
Well, and with the simultaneous advent of robotics and AI, it's hard.

1195
01:49:45,654 --> 01:49:47,434
These things are all going to go together.

1196
01:49:47,634 --> 01:49:54,414
I mean, what is your personal prediction of the adoption of Bitcoin?

1197
01:49:54,414 --> 01:49:59,754
What do you think that the next, you know, when do you think it's going to hit X?

1198
01:49:59,934 --> 01:50:07,774
And do you think it'll be a soft transition or a worldwide disruption as the U.S. gets the dollar?

1199
01:50:08,214 --> 01:50:11,794
What do you see is happening with hyper-Bitcoinization or whatever?

1200
01:50:13,254 --> 01:50:17,714
I love how this turned into you being the interviewer and I being the interviewer.

1201
01:50:18,734 --> 01:50:20,534
You know more than me about Bitcoin, I think.

1202
01:50:20,534 --> 01:50:24,254
Yeah, but I love because I love these discussions.

1203
01:50:24,414 --> 01:50:29,394
So like every Bitcoin, I'm waiting for hyper-Bitcoinization like any day now.

1204
01:50:29,554 --> 01:50:32,214
It's going to go parabolic tomorrow and all this.

1205
01:50:33,374 --> 01:50:41,874
But I think it's more like, you know, I grew up and I first started traveling around Europe in the early 90s.

1206
01:50:41,874 --> 01:50:45,934
So like very close to the falling of the Berlin Wall and all of this.

1207
01:50:46,454 --> 01:50:47,694
And no one spoke English.

1208
01:50:47,834 --> 01:50:52,174
Like if you went to France or Spain or Germany, no one spoke English.

1209
01:50:52,174 --> 01:50:54,634
Like English wasn't around.

1210
01:50:55,594 --> 01:51:00,634
And today, everyone under 20 speaks perfect English in Europe today.

1211
01:51:01,154 --> 01:51:06,154
Like there's no, maybe not perfect everywhere, but it's...

1212
01:51:06,188 --> 01:51:08,748
It's become the default lingua franca.

1213
01:51:08,748 --> 01:51:09,748
Yeah, the second language.

1214
01:51:09,748 --> 01:51:12,548
Yeah, my Swedish kids speak English to one another

1215
01:51:12,548 --> 01:51:13,388
rather than Swedish.

1216
01:51:13,728 --> 01:51:14,388
And they don't have to.

1217
01:51:14,448 --> 01:51:16,048
With the other Swedish friends too,

1218
01:51:16,148 --> 01:51:16,868
they speak English.

1219
01:51:17,028 --> 01:51:18,848
For some reason, they just do.

1220
01:51:20,048 --> 01:51:24,288
And I think that Bitcoin adoption happens in the same way.

1221
01:51:24,548 --> 01:51:27,188
Because I think the boomer generation will never get it.

1222
01:51:27,648 --> 01:51:31,508
Like the hurdles are too big.

1223
01:51:31,508 --> 01:51:36,048
The rewiring of the brain that is necessary to...

1224
01:51:36,188 --> 01:51:41,628
understand just a fraction of what this implies is it's just too much.

1225
01:51:42,028 --> 01:51:53,348
But I think the younger generations, if they actually grow up and they have a wallet on their phone and they start using it, then it becomes second language.

1226
01:51:53,908 --> 01:51:57,048
And sooner than you know it, everyone speaks Bitcoin.

1227
01:51:58,048 --> 01:52:04,608
And yeah, if you look at merchant adoption and stuff, like we think it's super small and we still are super early.

1228
01:52:04,608 --> 01:52:06,768
but it is like doubling every year.

1229
01:52:06,868 --> 01:52:09,708
It's just that we haven't seen the real effects of that yet.

1230
01:52:09,808 --> 01:52:13,508
We haven't seen the exponentials always start small, right?

1231
01:52:13,688 --> 01:52:19,648
And so when it happens, I mean, I think we're in for a ride.

1232
01:52:19,808 --> 01:52:21,928
I don't know when the last cycle is,

1233
01:52:22,128 --> 01:52:25,328
but I think we're going to go in cycles for a couple of more times,

1234
01:52:25,428 --> 01:52:27,628
like over one or two decades more.

1235
01:52:27,848 --> 01:52:31,868
And then there's a point where it just goes up forever until fiat dies.

1236
01:52:31,868 --> 01:52:39,648
like if it works like how could it not how how could it not at some point go up forever in terms

1237
01:52:39,648 --> 01:52:45,428
of dollars because all they can do is print if it causes so much uh so much societal disruption

1238
01:52:45,428 --> 01:52:51,148
that it triggers some kind of uh nuclear war or some kind of some kind of societal meltdown um

1239
01:52:51,148 --> 01:52:57,248
i think that i think that could slow down adoption if we're if the human population

1240
01:52:57,248 --> 01:53:01,328
has been decimated and we're living in the Stone Age again, you know.

1241
01:53:01,748 --> 01:53:06,148
Yeah, but the more people we get on board, the less likely that is.

1242
01:53:06,748 --> 01:53:09,208
Because wars are funded by fiat.

1243
01:53:09,528 --> 01:53:12,208
Like the more we go out to a Bitcoin standard,

1244
01:53:12,208 --> 01:53:17,248
the less we take away the resources for these assholes to do these things

1245
01:53:17,248 --> 01:53:19,248
and the incentives at the same time.

1246
01:53:19,708 --> 01:53:21,108
So, yeah, and this is utopian.

1247
01:53:21,268 --> 01:53:22,608
I know I'm a hopium salesman.

1248
01:53:22,608 --> 01:53:31,488
But I cannot get these thoughts out of my head because they're too beautiful and it's too hopeful.

1249
01:53:31,988 --> 01:53:34,468
And hope is, in my opinion, a rational choice.

1250
01:53:34,908 --> 01:53:39,048
You're going to die anyway, so you might as well live as a hopeful man and as a free man.

1251
01:53:40,188 --> 01:53:43,228
Most people wouldn't believe this, but that's basically my approach, too.

1252
01:53:43,288 --> 01:53:44,108
That's my view, too.

1253
01:53:44,868 --> 01:53:57,081
It a long hope and it also a hope that doesn have anything to do with activism Like either it going to happen or it not because the logic is there and it makes sense

1254
01:53:57,541 --> 01:54:01,521
It's not because libertarians or even Bitcoin activists are out there promoting it.

1255
01:54:01,521 --> 01:54:06,701
Like, if Bitcoin needs libertarians or Bitcoins to promote it, then it's not going to work.

1256
01:54:06,801 --> 01:54:09,421
It's got to have a logic of its own for it to work.

1257
01:54:10,101 --> 01:54:11,021
Yeah, absolutely.

1258
01:54:11,921 --> 01:54:14,721
Anyway, I'll stop interviewing you if you have any more with me.

1259
01:54:14,721 --> 01:54:18,581
Have you read The White Pill by Michael Malice?

1260
01:54:19,061 --> 01:54:20,381
I came to think about it here.

1261
01:54:20,501 --> 01:54:22,181
I have it. I've read most of it.

1262
01:54:22,181 --> 01:54:22,381
Yeah.

1263
01:54:22,641 --> 01:54:22,781
Yeah.

1264
01:54:23,661 --> 01:54:37,381
The sort of core of that book is that totalitarianism and authoritarianism falls on its own weight at some point.

1265
01:54:37,521 --> 01:54:38,501
There is always hope.

1266
01:54:38,501 --> 01:55:03,741
I mean, in a way, that's sort of a modern version of what Fukuyama said, which I know is crude and neoconish. But I kind of see something to that idea of the end of history and but maybe not democracy. But I do think that I've always thought the human race is in its infancy. Right. And we're early. We think that we're advanced because we've been on the moon. But and we have lasers. But we're really still primitive.

1267
01:55:03,741 --> 01:55:08,901
But I think the best is yet to come if we can survive the growing pains.

1268
01:55:09,281 --> 01:55:12,301
So I think the future is one of unimaginable.

1269
01:55:15,241 --> 01:55:18,641
Like it could be an unimaginable future, like the golden age of John C.

1270
01:55:18,721 --> 01:55:19,661
Wright or something like that.

1271
01:55:19,781 --> 01:55:27,441
So, yeah, I mean, I'm half tempted to have cryogenic storage for myself someday and wake

1272
01:55:27,441 --> 01:55:29,981
up in 500 years and see what the world looks like.

1273
01:55:30,421 --> 01:55:31,021
Like Hal Finney?

1274
01:55:31,201 --> 01:55:33,161
Did you know that his head is cryo-frozen?

1275
01:55:33,161 --> 01:55:39,321
No, I didn't know that, but maybe he's Satoshi, right? Maybe Satoshi's going to wake up someday.

1276
01:55:39,321 --> 01:55:43,621
Listen to this. Maybe he memorized the private key before he cryo froze his head.

1277
01:55:44,241 --> 01:55:47,641
And what if we resurrect him and move that Bitcoin 400 years later?

1278
01:55:48,521 --> 01:55:54,101
Well, there's actually a book. I just read a book. There's a science fiction book where there's some guy who wakes up.

1279
01:55:54,761 --> 01:55:58,321
It was a kind of a pulp novel. I'm trying to remember the name of it.

1280
01:55:58,321 --> 01:56:03,741
But it's about a guy that wakes up in the future and he owns the entire Earth because of some fluke.

1281
01:56:04,621 --> 01:56:10,641
So he always starts a war because people are fighting over control of him because he owns the entire planet Earth.

1282
01:56:11,421 --> 01:56:19,481
So you could imagine someone waking up and they revive three million Bitcoins that we thought were not part of the money supply anymore.

1283
01:56:20,281 --> 01:56:21,901
It's either that or idiocracy.

1284
01:56:21,901 --> 01:56:30,441
yeah anyway uh stefan is there anything else you want to talk about before we wrap this up

1285
01:56:30,441 --> 01:56:47,715
is there anyone where you want to send our listeners or something um let see um No I still anyone interested in these ideas can read my intellectual property stuff or my libertarian book which is here

1286
01:56:50,015 --> 01:56:55,475
I'm working – so Murray Rothbard died – I was sorry.

1287
01:56:55,555 --> 01:56:59,355
He was born 100 years ago, March 2nd, this coming March.

1288
01:56:59,355 --> 01:57:10,715
So I'm editing, putting together a book of essays on Rothbard, which we will release on March 2nd on his birthday.

1289
01:57:12,015 --> 01:57:13,435
It's about Rothbard at 100.

1290
01:57:13,595 --> 01:57:16,475
So working on that right now with Hans Hermann Hoppe and some other people.

1291
01:57:18,055 --> 01:57:19,495
Well, that sounds fantastic.

1292
01:57:19,875 --> 01:57:21,795
So that's one project I'm working on.

1293
01:57:21,795 --> 01:57:28,315
Well, we're going to release the essays on March 2nd and then the book in September for the Property and Freedom Society meeting.

1294
01:57:28,315 --> 01:57:29,915
So that's what I'm working on right now.

1295
01:57:30,395 --> 01:57:31,595
I'm interested in that.

1296
01:57:31,895 --> 01:57:32,615
Where is that?

1297
01:57:32,675 --> 01:57:34,175
Is that in Bodrum in Turkey?

1298
01:57:34,375 --> 01:57:35,495
It's in Bodrum every September.

1299
01:57:35,715 --> 01:57:35,975
Yes.

1300
01:57:36,115 --> 01:57:37,915
And we just said, we just released the announcement.

1301
01:57:38,075 --> 01:57:40,835
If you're interested in coming, email me later and we'll talk.

1302
01:57:41,315 --> 01:57:42,235
I'd love to.

1303
01:57:42,495 --> 01:57:43,455
And yeah, yeah.

1304
01:57:43,515 --> 01:57:45,575
We'll definitely talk more about that.

1305
01:57:46,955 --> 01:57:48,755
September should be relatively free.

1306
01:57:49,135 --> 01:57:49,255
Yeah.

1307
01:57:49,375 --> 01:57:49,635
Yeah.

1308
01:57:50,355 --> 01:57:51,455
We'll talk offline.

1309
01:57:53,655 --> 01:57:54,835
I just finished.

1310
01:57:54,835 --> 01:58:00,815
I was in Prague twice this year, once for the Free Cities thing and once for the – and it was wonderful.

1311
01:58:00,915 --> 01:58:01,915
I hadn't been there in 30 years.

1312
01:58:02,075 --> 01:58:06,615
It's a wonderful city, and I went to the Liberland thing in December.

1313
01:58:07,835 --> 01:58:16,675
I just released last year a project I was working on with a guy named Freemax and Alessandro Fusillo and some others.

1314
01:58:16,995 --> 01:58:23,455
It's called The Universal Principles of Liberty, and it draws upon that book and my own writing and my property theory,

1315
01:58:23,455 --> 01:58:34,015
which is inspired by Hoppe and by Rothbard and Mises, but it was sort of like a concise, systematic statement of libertarian principles.

1316
01:58:34,015 --> 01:58:36,735
It's called the universal principles of liberty.

1317
01:58:37,235 --> 01:58:52,215
It's not a constitution, and it's not a detailed legal code, but it's more like here's the principles of property rights and self-ownership and justice that we agree to and that have to be agreed to in any free society.

1318
01:58:52,215 --> 01:58:54,315
and that's on my website

1319
01:58:54,315 --> 01:58:55,615
stefancancello.com

1320
01:58:55,615 --> 01:58:56,595
so if anyone's interested

1321
01:58:56,595 --> 01:58:57,335
in these ideas

1322
01:58:57,335 --> 01:58:58,255
take a look at my book

1323
01:58:58,255 --> 01:59:00,755
my intellectual property ideas

1324
01:59:00,755 --> 01:59:01,295
and

1325
01:59:01,295 --> 01:59:04,235
the universal principles of liberty

1326
01:59:04,235 --> 01:59:05,995
and the upcoming Rothbard book

1327
01:59:05,995 --> 01:59:07,975
fantastic

1328
01:59:07,975 --> 01:59:10,075
are you planning to go to any

1329
01:59:10,075 --> 01:59:10,915
Bitcoin conferences

1330
01:59:10,915 --> 01:59:12,155
by any chance this year

1331
01:59:12,155 --> 01:59:12,675
or

1332
01:59:12,675 --> 01:59:14,715
no I went to a couple in Miami

1333
01:59:14,715 --> 01:59:26,888
about three or four or five years ago I haven been I haven been lately that that unfortunate that the Bitcoin Magazine ones tend to be quite apologetic to shitcoiners I say

1334
01:59:28,088 --> 01:59:29,948
They're taking a lot of money from that.

1335
01:59:30,428 --> 01:59:34,048
I think I would only go to a Bitcoin-only conference at this point.

1336
01:59:34,048 --> 01:59:38,008
But is there any good ones coming up that might be worth going to?

1337
01:59:38,568 --> 01:59:43,008
Well, if you love Prague, there's the one in B2C Prague in June.

1338
01:59:43,588 --> 01:59:44,648
That's a very good one.

1339
01:59:44,688 --> 01:59:46,008
That's the biggest European one.

1340
01:59:46,528 --> 01:59:59,988
Yeah, I'm going to one in El Salvador here. I mean, probably after this episode is I would have already been there when this episode is released. That's like two less than two weeks from now.

1341
01:59:59,988 --> 02:00:06,648
now i you know i tried a few i'm i just find i go there and there's i'm just a hodler i'm just

1342
02:00:06,648 --> 02:00:11,548
waiting so i'm not an activist i'm not a promoter i i'm not into the business i i don't really see

1343
02:00:11,548 --> 02:00:16,028
what and most people are not that theoretical or libertarian so there's nothing to really

1344
02:00:16,028 --> 02:00:23,488
there's interest me at the conferences there's one uh that i think you'd like they uh that i'm

1345
02:00:23,488 --> 02:00:29,568
co-organizing i'm i'm biased here of course they're called btc hell in a helsinki finland

1346
02:00:29,568 --> 02:00:36,768
um in october we've only done it once but it's going to be done again it's around 1500 people

1347
02:00:37,488 --> 02:00:46,048
uh and uh a lot of good speakers uh we can definitely do some some austrian economics talks

1348
02:00:46,048 --> 02:00:53,088
uh i think i have a lot of friends are coming um i could be persuaded if anything it's something

1349
02:00:53,088 --> 02:00:55,588
Something like that comes along that I could be persuaded.

1350
02:00:55,868 --> 02:00:57,148
I'm potentially interested.

1351
02:00:57,908 --> 02:00:58,688
Yeah, great to hear.

1352
02:00:58,908 --> 02:01:03,028
I mean, I think we're in talks with Seyfeddin this year.

1353
02:01:04,128 --> 02:01:09,628
I'm going to talk to Rahim about it too, Rahim Tagisayel again, and we'll see.

1354
02:01:09,628 --> 02:01:17,068
I'm going to push for more Austrian economics content inside that conference.

1355
02:01:18,348 --> 02:01:19,668
Yep, but that's it for me.

1356
02:01:19,808 --> 02:01:21,628
But I appreciate your work too.

1357
02:01:21,628 --> 02:01:23,428
and I've learned from you too.

1358
02:01:23,568 --> 02:01:24,408
So I appreciate it.

1359
02:01:24,408 --> 02:01:24,748
Thank you.

1360
02:01:25,048 --> 02:01:26,188
Thank you very much.

1361
02:01:26,448 --> 02:01:26,968
It means a lot.

1362
02:01:28,308 --> 02:01:28,568
Yes.

1363
02:01:28,648 --> 02:01:31,288
Anyway, I absolutely adored this conversation.

1364
02:01:31,508 --> 02:01:33,908
I hope we get to meet in real life soon.

1365
02:01:34,848 --> 02:01:38,048
We'll talk about details about Bodrum after this.

1366
02:01:38,788 --> 02:01:40,528
And yeah, go follow Stefan

1367
02:01:40,528 --> 02:01:43,488
and read up on your praxeology people

1368
02:01:43,488 --> 02:01:44,468
and brush your teeth.

1369
02:01:45,128 --> 02:01:47,208
This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show.

1370
02:01:47,568 --> 02:01:48,448
Thanks for listening.

1371
02:01:49,048 --> 02:01:50,048
Thanks, Stefan, for coming.

1372
02:01:50,048 --> 02:01:50,768
Thanks.

1373
02:01:51,628 --> 02:02:21,608
Thank you.