You Don’t Own Your Bitcoin | Stephan Kinsella | BIS #225

0:00 Stefan, a warm welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Lovely to have you back. How are you? Glad to be here. Good to see you again. Yeah, and we've had some fun this fall, haven't we? We've been to two conferences together. You're flying the colors of one of them, the PFS conference on your T-shirt there. Yeah, so we went to Bodrum to see, well, for me, I got to meet a lot of my heroes, including, of course, yourself and Hans Hermann Hoppe, who also organizes that conference. And as I understand it, he has been organizing it for like 20 to 30 years or something now, like a long time.

0:46 And it was absolutely lovely. And then we took a flight to Helsinki where you joined the B2C Health Conference with a bunch of my friends up in Helsinki. And yeah, we had a good time. So I'd like to hear more of what your experience with both the conferences were. I know that a big part of the PFS conference was this Rothbard book, like celebrating 100 years of Rothbard would have been 100 years old if he were alive today. So the PFS conference focused a lot on that in celebrating Rothbard at 100. And the accompanying book that you've released on Seyfedin's you know, publishing via Seyfedin's publishing company, I guess.

1:44 And after that, also, there's a bunch of stuff that happened. Like you were invited to like the finance minister of Finland or something like that, like a bunch of Bitcoiners and you. I mean, you count as a Bitcoiner too, I guess, but a whole bunch of us. I wasn't invited for some odd reason, But people who more often than me wear ties were invited to meet with a minister in Finland. And we had a lot of fun there. We did a panel together. So what's your general impression from these two events? Like, what's your big takeaways? Well, so I'm home in Houston now.

2:26 You know, my friends don't believe me when I say I don't like to travel because this has been the busiest travel year of my life. and I have this list this blog post I update on occasion on my website where I talk about what I'm going to do next year and I always say like for like 10 years I've said I just want to stop traveling I want to take a year off a goal strike and then I add one event and another one they open up and my dad asked me the other day why do you travel so much? I said well that's where the things are you know I think I was lucky to travel more than most southern middle class Americans in my youth around college I started going to Europe with people and so I've kind of seen the world, I lived in London for a while and I've been all over Europe and I feel like I've seen the world and I just say I don't like to travel but I keep traveling places so I've never been one of these guys that wants to check a place off my list although maybe that's because I've done it and so I'm kind of jaded but But I enjoy when I go with other people, and that's where the events are.

3:35 And this year, it just turned out to me, even though I'm retired now, and I just accept opportunities that seem interesting to me. So this year, I went to – I can't remember all the places I've been to this year, but it's been a busy, busy year. But the last two months or three months especially, I went to Honduras for the Free Cities event, and I went to the Tom Woods Cruise. I went to New York to go see Rush. And then I saw Rush again last week in Houston because they happened to add that date to their schedule. I'm a big Rush fan. I went to New York. I went to Boston for the Tom Woods cruise and came out of Canada. And then I went to Honduras to speak there at the Free Cities thing.

4:17 And like I said, and then – yeah, and so – oh, and in May – or was it June? Right after Rothbard's birthday. So this year is Rothbard's 100th birth year, and his birthday was March 2nd, if I recall. And Hans Hoppe and I produced this book, which they're very happy about. We produced this book in honor of his birthday, and we published it online March 2nd on his birthday on the PFS, Property and Freedom Society website. And it took about – that was about a two- or three-month production, so it was a rush, but it came out really nice, but we didn't have time to get the hard copy done in time.

4:57 So after we published it online, we worked with Seyfedina Moos to publish a nice, handsome hardback with the safe house. And Manuel Agondo, who also was at PFS in Turkey, who you met, who's Portuguese, organized a conference in June where we did present a book for the first time. And so we went – Hans Hoppe and I went to that and some other friends, and that was a wonderful conference. I got to see Portugal for the first time. So – but then when I came back, I did the Honduras thing and the Tom Woods Cruise. And then, like you said, in the annual Property and Freedom Society meeting, which was started 20 years ago.

5:44 This was the 20th anniversary event. It was started in 2006 by Hoppe, which I was at the first event. And it's just a wonderful conference. And as you've seen, it is unlike any other libertarian or Bitcoin meeting. Although what's interesting to me is that all these meetings I go to and all these conferences I go to over the years, Libertarian Party, Mises Institute in Auburn, the event in Portugal, Bitcoin meetings in America and in Europe, the PFS, the Tom Woods crews, they're all different. But there's these interesting overlaps. Like you'll have one guy who's in one and not the other.

6:24 And someone at the Libertarian Party is totally different. They're not usually aware of the intellectual things. The Mises is the two people, are aware of the other groups. And in the Bitcoin conference, of course, some people know about Australian economics and libertarianism, and some don't. So the PFS meeting was great. I'm glad you were able to attend. And I want to hear what your thoughts were when I showed up. But normally what I do since I'm retired now, I used to go there in and out because I was always in a rush to get back home to my wife or my job or my kid. The last five or seven years, I have more time. So I usually stay two or three days extra because I'm already in Turkey.

7:05 I'm already in Bodrum, and we do some side trips, and so it's always nice to do that. This year, because you got me invited to speak in Helsinki at the BTC – how do you pronounce it? BTC H-E-L or Nordic Bitcoin? BTC Hell. BTC Hell. So it's a play on words, I guess. Yeah, yeah. And that's funny, but I never saw the Nordic Bitcoin conference used while I was there, but I thought that was how it was advertised months ago. Maybe they changed their promotion or their naming or something. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of still the only big Bitcoin-only conference in the Nordics. We've only done it for two years now, but I'm very happy that it exists and that there's a freedom movement in the Nordics at all.

7:50 Because as you know, like most people in the Nordics are statist cucks and hard to convert. These are very high trust societies, which of course come with like, there's a lot of perks to a high trust society. I believe this high trust was built during eras of less state interventionism rather than more over the centuries even rather than decades. And unfortunately, they're turning into lower trust societies as we move on into the future.

8:31 And in comparison to Turkey like seeing Finland comparing Finland to Turkey I mean in Turkey there a lot of things about Turkey that really excite me For instance, everybody smokes, which you may think is a bad thing at first glance, but there's a freedom aspect to that. I think there's a connection between everyone stopping smoking in the Western Hemisphere at the same time and how they could pull off the whole COVID bullshit. True. Yeah, yeah. Make people accustomed to being obedient to the state's commands about health advice.

9:16 Do you mean smoking among the attendees or among just the Turks? No, no, just among the Turks. Like walking down the streets, you see a lot more street commerce and stuff than in Finland. Finland is like people are scarcely like in Bodrum, you run into people all the time, right? and everybody smokes and everybody's busy with some business venture of some kind. In Finland, you run into a person every 200 meters and they're trying to avoid the weather and do whatever is necessary of them. Not that I dislike Finland in any way. I think Finland is probably the most pure, if that's a correct word, of the Nordic countries today.

10:01 Seems more based in a way. like the whole sauna culture and everything. There's a freedom aspect to it. However, you don't see people. I get this entrepreneurial vibe from Turkey in general. Same experience with Istanbul or other places in Turkey I've been to. Like you see people, maybe some of it is, of course, because the currency is hyperinflating, so they have no choice but to do that. But when you come to a gray, northern Europe kind of place, the cultural differences are just vast.

10:42 And I think people have a skewed view of why that is. Anyway, it made me happy to see people smoking in Turkey for some reason. I guess it's just this innate rebel in me that likes people not obeying the general rules of society. anyway yeah i agree i mean uh i noticed in finland uh like i i was trying to find a place to smoke my pipe or my cigar and like it's basically illegal there's nowhere indoors you can do it there it's just illegal um um i thought finland was fascinating so because you invited me i i i left on tuesday after the conference which ended on monday in turkey instead of staying extra and my friends joy joy joy and greg moran came with me and they had to leave early for a wedding so they couldn't go to the Bitcoin conference, which was probably for the best because I don't know if they would have enjoyed sitting there for all the talks.

11:37 But they got to see it and so did I. And yeah, I had three saunas there. We went to that nice one, the nice private one. And then I did the one for the VIPs at the event at the rooftop. And then we did the floating one next to that restaurant on the final day. And then there was a portable one next to the floaty one. I mean, it was crazy. To be honest, what's interesting is I started thinking about it because right now I'm actually – my wife and I are designing our summer home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. and I was talking to the architect when I got back and I said, you know, I really like this sauna kind of culture in Finland and I'm probably going to design a Finnish style, a fairly authentic Finnish style sauna in Jackson Hole.

12:30 And I even met, I met this guy Juso, I don't know if you met him, Juso, who I saw him in two different saunas and so he was at the event too And he, I was asking him questions and he's a real authentic sauna guy and he's a civil engineer who designs saunas. Yeah, you saw. And so he said I could consult with him to get it done. But I don't know if he would be happy the way, I'm probably not going to do it the, my wife was like, oh, let's do the infrared sauna, you know, the Americanized version. But I looked into that. That's not, I know that's not good enough. So I'm going to do a sauna with the rocks and with the finish way, but probably electric, not wood burning, because I want to be able to use it. And if I do wood burning, you know, it'll be something I use every now and then.

13:15 So anyway, I may have a finish sauna because of that exposure. Yeah, I didn't go to any sauna this time in Helsinki, but I grew up with them. When I was a teenager, I used to live in the basement of the villa, my parents' villa. And in that basement, there was a sauna next to the bathroom I had. So I could have a sauna whenever I wanted. I used it for different purposes, though. So I was in like 15, 16, and there was a window in the sauna, and I used to crawl out of it in the middle of the night to sneak out of the house.

13:55 Well, there was even a panel, which I found interesting, at least maybe two panels, but there was at least one panel on health and that kind of stuff at the event. It was, you know, about carnivore and also, I don't know, living healthy and all this kind of stuff. And saunas came up and it was like, you know, is eating meat and is the sauna culture and biohacking and longevity. and of course, you know, the fins amp up and they hype up the sauna. I think all these things is like chiropractic or meditation. They always amp up the benefits. I mean, it's probably good for you in terms of the lifestyle and the heat, but it's just a way to relax and it's a way to have a good rhythm in your life, right?

14:41 A good set of rituals and practices. So I'm going to do it though. Yeah, I think that this is a good thing to double click on because I think this is one of the areas where these conferences sort of overlap, as you say, like when you go to libertarian conferences. I went to Michigan this summer and there was a libertarian conference just the week after the Bitcoin conference I went to at Lake Satoshi. But they were the kind of libertarians that were mostly in it for the, you know, legalizing cannabis aspect of libertarianism and not really the intellectual crowd. So I didn't hang out with them too much.

15:23 But there's always an overlap and there's this health overlap. And with that comes a lot of, I feel at least that there's a lot of chicanery that comes with that. Maybe that's not true for PFS as much. I mean, PFS, to me, that was one hopeful thing from PFS. One of the takeaways I had was like, I think that at least 70% of the attendees were Bitcoin hodlers. And like actual Bitcoiners and not shitcoiners, they actually got the thing. And they're more clever than us public Bitcoiners, though, because they don't make a fuss about it. They just go and hang out in Turkey and have fun.

16:04 So that made me very happy. In Michigan, meeting these LARP-bitarians, I shouldn't use derogatory terms that much, though, because I think they were all well-intended. But what I'm getting at here is that with these overlaps comes a lot of chicanery, I think, because I think adjacent to all of these freedom movements is like as soon as – there's a certain crowd that as soon as they realize that the state is lying to them, they immediately take everything that Alex Jones says to be the absolute truth.

16:44 so so so there's a lot of astrology there's a lot of alternative medicine there's a lot of like you have to do this and you have to do that uh and uh i don't buy most of it i i just think that there's a that there's kind of an irony there that like the when you actually get liberty and when you get it from an epistemological uh point of view and actually get why the austrian method is superior to the scientific method for understanding humans in general I think this is more true for Bitcoin conferences than for libertarian conferences in general but you get this crowd of people just clinging on to whatever random tribal kind of thing that is going on at the moment like you have to wear these red shaded glasses or you have to be a carnivore or you have to do saunas all the time or you have to do this and that.

17:47 There's something there that doesn't sit well with me. I remember, I think I went to, I've been to a few American Bitcoin conferences like Miami I went to a couple of times back around 20, 21, 22. And I went to one in Dallas called BitBlockBoom and Sanfidina Moose was there then and he hosted this carnivore dinner. So it was popular even back then. I remember I ran into Michael Goldstein who goes by Bitstein and he was skinny and I was saying, how did you lose weight? He said, oh, he's on carnivore. He only eats meat. I said, what about chicken? No, I said, no vegetables? He said, no vegetables. And I said, well, what about chicken? He goes, chicken is a vegetable. So these guys are hardcore. They only eat red meat apparently.

18:28 But no, I think what happens is you have – this is the fault of the establishment. The establishment has basically overplayed their hand. So now no one trusts the establishment, especially after COVID. So you can't blame people for not trusting their doctors and the nutrition advice of the government. But then they go to – but then among all the people out there that are contrarians, 90 percent of them are cranks. So you don't know who to trust and who to believe. So everyone's got their own spin. And I did like the panel. The panel is balanced. This doctor was really impressive. The longevity doctor. I can't remember his name. Joni Apover? Yes. And he was saying how alcohol is bad for you too, even though he was up on stage with a guy who was touting some whiskey he makes.

19:13 He was the chef at that dinner that you went to the night before, which was sold out. It was a carnivore dinner, I guess, or a steak dinner. Yeah, it was so good. This is Christo. Yeah, yeah. Let me just chill him here for a moment. Yeah, go ahead. There's a butcher in Helsinki called Christo that is the most awesome butcher in the entirety of at least Finland. Everything is natural and everything is made from what they slaughter. So they got all sorts of broths and like skin creams and whatnot Everything you can derive from a cow basically And you can pay for all of it in sets So a wonderful guy and he threw a wonderful dinner And I don't know how he pulled it off Because it's a small restaurant and it was like packed That's why it was sold out The pictures look great And you told me about it that morning But it was already sold out So I did something else. I had pizza by myself, which was fine. I enjoyed it.

20:15 I was going to say about Helsinki, it reminded me sort of of a cross between Prague and Amsterdam. Well, I shouldn't even say that. Someone was asking me about it. I said it wasn't it was it was beautiful. It wasn't beautiful and energetic like Prague seems to be now. I've been to Prague recently a couple of times. But it was beautiful in an understated kind of way More like Amsterdam, I think You know, with the canals and the water It was a little sleepy But the people were nice For some reason we were at the gay hotel Yeah, that's a whole other story They managed to put us in the gayest hotel in all of it Yeah, the door literally said, we speak gay here That's hilarious, yeah So we were scared of being thrown out because like 30% of the entire vocabulary of the 50 Bitcoiners that stayed there are the words gay and retarded.

21:14 I know, I know, I know. Yeah, fortunately they didn't throw us out. But my impression of the event, I mean, I haven't been to a Bitcoin event in several years, but I kind of got tired of going because I'm basically just a hodler. So I really have nothing to gain from these people trying to upsell me on things. I don't spend my Bitcoin. Although at the restaurant with the floating sauna on the last night, they did have a little, their little, their payment machine accepted lightning. I don't know how they accepted lightning, but so I paid for my meal with, I had like a $200 balance I'd done several years ago as an experiment. And so I paid for my meal and I was, oh, it actually worked, this is the first time.

21:56 And so then I was having drinks with some guys later and I said, well, I'll buy you guys a round of drinks because for me, it's just play money. I've got this leftover money I'll never use on my wallet of Satoshi. So I went to buy them drinks, and of course the machine broke, and they said, oh, it's not working anymore. So I had to use Fiat to buy their drinks. But the impression I got of the city is that it's – or of the conference. I just had the vibe that it wasn't quite as scammy as the Bitcoin Miami thing I've been to. Like there were people there hawking their wares. There was a guy there selling that – what's it called? Vosch, the guy that has the software that speeds up the firmware on miners.

22:40 There was practical things there. I mean I'm not the customer for it, but I understand why they were selling their wares. And there was, of course, there was the Trezor guy, and they were probably lapping up the renewed interest in Trezor now that CodeCard has failed, I guess. But I really enjoyed the conference and the people. And it seemed to be a mixture. There were some libertarian people there and Austrian people, but there was normies. But the normies seemed to kind of – I don't know how to put it this way. They seemed to know their place. Like we were having drinks that night at the place, and there was like two or three normal businessmen, Swedish guys or whatever. And they weren't Austrians. They weren't libertarians, but they've heard it by now.

23:20 So when we were talking crazy, radical, anarchist stuff, they weren't blinking their eyes. And one of them even says something like, oh, yeah, I know Hoppe. And I said, you know Hapa? He goes, oh, no, I thought you said ABBA. He thought I meant the group ABBA. Like, no, it's Hapa, not ABBA. No, and B2C Hell is supposed to be for normies to a large extent. Like, that's the crowd we're trying to hone people in. So my experience with Bitcoin conferences in general, I mean, the Miami one and now subsequently Nashville and now Vegas. the B2C media one that's just infested with shitcoiners like they accept every single sponsor just if they have the word Bitcoin anywhere in any paper they ever put out so it's just teeming with charlatans and snake oil salesmen and I don't really like that which is why sort of my personal boycott of that kind of crowd and I try to go to only events that I align with more, then of course there's always a scale.

24:30 I don't think you can make a profit or even break even for an event like this with only Bitcoin Puritans that refuse to sell their sets and have nothing to shill. Then you would have no sponsors and no attendees, right? So there's a balance there between Cypherpunk values and diplomacy. And that's sort of what you have to endure if you want to have in-person conversations. I do think that the in-person conversations have a very big value to them, though, in comparison to just what you see online, because online you get the opposite. You get the purity tests and people calling you out for this and that.

25:13 So communication is always preferable. Yeah, people have more manners in person. It was, no, I think your balance was good. And I think it was, but of course, what was interesting about it was you were like kind of the second in command there and Luke DeWolf was supposed to take charge. But of course, his wife was pregnant and had her baby on the opening night. So you had to take charge. And it was funny. I kept going to you saying, hey, hey, Newt, do you know if this event is tomorrow at 10? And you're like, I don't know. Like you didn't know anything. It was funny. I had absolutely no information. I was like, I'm sorry about that. I'll get up on stage and wing the next event. But it worked out fine. No, and yeah, yeah, Yeah luckily enough Luke and Sarah had a healthy baby and everything went fine I was lucky enough to me and Duncan went to this dinner at their house the day before the conference So literally the last chance we had to do that, we got to do that when we grilled the picanha and whatnot.

26:16 So we had a lovely evening there before the conference. And then the morning after, of course, I get the message that the block height of the birth of the baby. so there was nothing to do yeah not nothing to do but cover uh the best i could for luke there and so i so who was the guy that was uh my uh my sort of handler that was helping me out um the younger guy i i mean remu is the ceo yeah yeah so like i got there a couple days early because greg and joy and i wanted to get there early so we got there tuesday and the event didn't started until Friday. So I think on Tuesday or Wednesday, I got an email from Remu and he said, oh, you're invited to meet with the economics minister of Finland. And I thought, so I thought it was like there was an event Luke was going to and they just invited me to tag along.

27:15 But, and so then I was talking to, then I researched the guy and he had a physics degree. So I thought, oh, well, Rahim was there, my good friend Rahim. I thought, well, maybe I'll see it Rahim should come because Rahim's a physicist and an Austrian. And I thought the guy maybe wanted to talk to me because he knew Hoppe or something. But when I sent Rima the note, I said, how about if I bring Rahim along? He says, no, the economics minister specifically asked for a one-on-one with you. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I had no idea what the guy wanted. So they made an appointment, and they got a room for us down in the basement. and I met, his name is Sakari Puisto. He's an interesting guy.

27:58 And so, I don't know, I met with him for a while. And they also brought in Marty Malmo, what's his name? Marty Malmo. Marty Malmo, sorry. Marty Malmo. I believe the second Bitcoin developer ever. He's one of the first people to ever talk to Satoshi Nakamoto. So and we're, by the way, we're he's also the drummer in my band. We're having a gig in Logano. OK, well, I think I had not heard of him because I'm not steeped in this stuff, but I realize now he's he's a big deal. But I think the plan was that Sicari was going to meet with me and then he was going to meet with with Marty.

28:38 But they went ahead and put us both in there. So we we three were talking at first with Sicari's little helper, Lars. And then Rimu would come in after 30 minutes and say, hey, would you like to also meet Daniel Batten is his name He's a businessman And then he brought in Adam back So it was appropriate But the interesting thing was, so this guy Sakari, he actually had been to the Mises Institute in Auburn 20 years ago in 2006 He had met Hoppe and his wife, Gulchin, and he had read my book. That's why he wanted to meet with me. He had read my book on intellectual property. So he was very intelligent. He was very aware of Austrian economics, but he was also a politician. He asked questions and he listened to my answers, but he never did betray whether he agreed or not.

29:33 You know, like I would just say, oh, so of course, Finland should do A, B and C for Bitcoin mining or for AI development or for copyright. But they can't do any of that because they're part of the stupid EU and they should they should leave the EU to have more freedom to have autonomy. He, you know, I would say increasingly radical things that he never pushed back, but he never did agree either. Still, it gives me a ton of hope that the economics minister or finance minister or whatever Economics minister or what was his official name? Economics minister He's the economics minister His portfolio is innovation policy So it's the perfect role, but he just doesn't have a lot of flexibility because of the EU No, no, but just the fact that a guy like that in the actual Finnish government wants to meet with you I mean you belittle yourself a bit here I think you're more famous than you realize Stefan but to me that's very very hopeful because it means that these people are paying attention to the actual proper intellectual debates about economics that are going on in the world. I agree and I think that because he wanted to meet with me and he did meet with me then that gave him the opportunity to meet with two or three other people at the conference and You know, so maybe the Bitcoin scene and the related scenes there, AI and, you know, Bitcoin mining and tax policy and, you know, intellectual property policy, like that's sort of maybe a little bit more on his radar now, which is good for the Bitcoin technology scene in Finland, I think.

31:17 yeah and i think i think all of our little you know autistic nerdy gatherings have have some kind of impact because people are taking notice i know yeah just from the experience in turkey a lot of people are there that that do have meetings with other important people like these these are not nobodies these are people with actual influence and I mean I'm very very happy that you invited me to that and so a big thank you for letting me join that thing because I've been following on the sidelines for a long time and I'm very proud of the debate I mean we did a panel about why Austrian economics is important in Helsinki and big kudos to Thomas Brand the moderator because he had really done his homework He was absolutely excellent.

32:13 And it's you and me and Rahim giving our own thoughts about why this thing is important, why people should know about it. And we have very different ways of delivering the message, I think. So I think that was a – I hope that that comes out on YouTube real soon because I'm very proud of that. I think we did a good job. I was surprised and pleased with how – I mean, I wasn't worried about it, but I did know how well that would be received. But yeah, Thomas was great. He did his homework. And it's a 35, 40-minute little panel. But we weren't really in disagreement, but we all had different perspectives. And I thought it was nice and balanced. And also, I think it was pretty appropriate for an intelligent audience, some of whom are pretty unfamiliar with this.

32:59 And like, it was perfect. It was like, some of you guys are hearing about R3 economics all the time. Here's why we think it's important and why it's relevant to your interest in Bitcoin. And we, I think I did a non, it was a non, it wasn't too simplistic, but it wasn't too over the heads, but it was food for thought for people who want to learn more and go further. So it was a nice, it was a good panel. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that at a Bitcoin thing that's the right, it hit the sweet spot just about right, I thought. Yeah, and I'm very happy it did. Also, another thing I'm proud of about the conference is that all of a sudden I ran into you having an argument with Giacomo Succo, and I've been wanting to connect you two for a while, because Giacomo is a good friend, and I know he's a big fan of yours, and you were deep into a debate about contract theory.

33:53 And whether if I sign a contract with you and you promise me to pay you three months down the line, if I give you the money in advance, is the money really yours or are you indebted to me and stuff? And it's just right at the center of, like, this is what I love about all of these communities is that you can skip all the bullshit talk about your daughter's birthday or how your car is running. And did you see the game last night? And you can go straight into Aristotelian versus Kantian epistemology and just deep dive.

34:35 And I absolutely love that. And yeah. Yeah. It was great because so I think we know each other. other for Twitter and then he ended up saying I should come to Lugano for that Bitcoin meeting. I guess he meant next year. I guess it's happening right now. No, no, you should come this year. It's just two weeks from now. Well, I thought he was talking about next year, so maybe I misunderstood. Maybe I'll send him an email and find out what... No, no, next year you'll be a speaker, but of course you're free to come this year too as an Okay, well, I'm recovering from my travel, so let me think. Maybe it's possible. Anyway, but no, so we started talking about contract theory, and we had to put a pin in it, of course.

35:18 And what was interesting was I was getting pretty deep and heavy, and he is very intelligent, and he was following along, but he had some good objections. But he hadn't read what I had read, so he didn't understand my circularity argument. So I sent him a long Twitter message later with five or six references and links, and I said, just read this when you get a chance. But he read it on the plane. He says, oh, I see. I agree with you now, which is amazing to have an open mind and to sort of, oh, I agree. But what was interesting was when you walked up, we were talking, and there was this woman there who had been on the other panel. She was the Pirate Party woman who was like a European human rights lawyer. she gave me her car and i forgot what her name was but um she was a total normie the icelandic lady yes she was yeah that was a fun interaction because she was obviously intelligent and well read uh on on certain topics she was just totally unfamiliar with libertarian mindset like she she she's just completely foreign to to to to just the idea of starting at the individual and that the individual is self-evidently sovereign.

36:29 She couldn't even conceive that we didn't equate democracy with like liberalism or something like that. She didn't even know how to think about that. It was kind of amusing to see her hearing concepts like it was like someone hearing a sound they'd never heard before. But I was surprised because she's intelligent, but she's at this event. Doesn't she sometimes bounce into people that are a little bit different in the way they think? I think, but I see it as very hopeful that people like that are at these events because they're all obviously embezzled or very entrenched in the communities they surround themselves with and in political circus and stuff.

37:12 And it's very hopeful to me that we can meet them and have these conversations because maybe they get a perspective they haven't heard before. Just like criticizing democracy is still such a taboo subject in most circles. People don't even think of democracy as a flawed system, or as I see it, a fundamentally flawed system that can never work in the long run. But just planting that seed in someone like that makes it all worth it for me. Yeah, and when she sees people that are kind of well-dressed and successful and intelligent and educated and not foaming at the mouth crazy people online, then you have to take a second step back and think, well, maybe I can't just dismiss what they're saying.

38:09 Maybe they thought about it and they – it doesn't sound quite as incredible to them when they meet someone face-to-face who doesn't look like a raving lunatic. But I'm curious about your opinion about all the events you've been to. How did the PFS appear to you compared to the other events? Did it seem like a unique type of event to you? Because one thing that's unique to Americans is that it's so European-centric So we like the fact that we leave our Mises Institute and our Libertarian Party and our Tom Woods crew sort of crowds And when you go to PFS, it's more of a European crowd anyway But you probably get that already when you do libertarian things So I don't know if it seemed as different to you as it did to Americans But how did it seem to you as a conference?

39:00 Well, I mean, Turkey is not the EU And you can immediately feel that Turkey is not the EU. The smoking thing is one thing. But you sort of feel that you're not in the EU anymore. And for me, PFS, there's quite a lot of Americans there. I'd say at least 50% of the conference were actually Americans, or maybe I'm wrong about that. Yeah, probably true this year. That's right. And a lot of these, you know, red state, very Christian Americans that are and a lot of boomers that have their values and stuff that are kind of foreign to the European mind, I guess.

39:42 However, I absolutely love interacting with that. And I absolutely love hearing other perspectives on Europe. I've changed my mind about Christianity a lot over the years, by the way. I used to call myself an atheist and be very vehemently against imaginary friends in general. But over the years, I've come to accept that it's better if people believe in imaginary friends than people they believe to be their friends on this earth. Yeah. So in that sense, religions can be an antidote to the even worse religion of statism.

40:23 Totally agree. So I have a lot more tolerance for that now, and I understand it from that viewpoint a lot more. But I just find it, I found it liberating to be talking to people who weren't first and foremost Bitcoiners, but first and foremost libertarians. Because usually at the Bitcoin conferences, you meet people who are Bitcoiner first and anarcho-capitalist second. And I would classify myself as being an anarcho-capitalist first and a Bitcoiner second. I just find Bitcoin to be the most obvious tool to actually materialize that thing and to actually act as if anarcho-capitalism is actually possible in the world.

41:09 Bitcoin is a great tool for that. But a lot of Bitcoiners haven't properly stumbled down that rabbit hole yet. And they still think Bitcoin and the state can coexist, that Bitcoin and the dollar can coexist in the long run, and that somehow you can fit this square peg into this round hole. And this is, by the way, I'd like to go back to your conversation with Giacomo because I interrupted you at one point and just asked you straight up. Stefan, do you think you can actually own a Satoshi in any real sense? And you immediately said no. And that was great to me because, yeah, this guy gets it.

41:51 The intellectual property guy understands that information cannot be owned, but you can act as if you own the Bitcoin, but you cannot actually own it, which is why this square peg round hole dilemma always shows up when you try to marry the Bitcoin world with the fiat world because they don't really mix. It's like oil and water. They're two different things. They're connected somehow because purchasing power is a real thing, but they don't really... One is the antidote to the other, so they don't really work together. Once you see it, it's not hard to figure it out.

42:33 You just have to keep legal and normative concepts separate and distinct from economic, and then they relate to each other, but there's a difference. And once you understand that, you can sort it out, despite the terminology that's a little bit confusing. But one interesting wrinkle to that, I think, is this. So you could imagine a free society with a Bitcoin world where, yes, legally speaking, you don't own Bitcoins, but on the other hand, you don't really need to because possession of them is so secure by the technology. And you would also have a network of contractual arrangements which would have they would have like if you had a contract with a custodian let say of your Bitcoin and then your Bitcoin was what we call stolen now then you might have an insurance policy or you might the stolen Bitcoins might be made good by the custodian I mean you would have arrangements like that that would that would come in to fill the gaps even though there no technical ownership of the Bitcoin itself But in today's world, ironically – so my argument that you don't own Bitcoin also in a way applies to fiat dollars now because, number one, dollars are not the same as printed tickets.

43:48 The money supply is bigger than the printed dollars. The printed dollars are just almost like a token or evidence of the dollars, which are just imaginary fiat units. It's just like Bitcoin, but they're maintained on a government ledger, which can be inflated and censored. Do you like the term fiduciary media? I don't know if I find it the necessary term to distinguish, but that goes to some nuances about the fractional reserve banking debate itself. The way I think about it is that when you have gold as money, then it makes sense to store it in a bank because it's more convenient and safer.

44:37 But then that results in money substitutes, which is money tickets, which are like a substitute for the money because the piece of paper is proof or evidence of ownership of something. So then you can see how that would start trading as a money substitute. But then you can see how the state's involvement in defining what the law is would lead to the corruption and the blurring of the distinction between the warehousing aspect or the deposit aspect and the credit intermediation aspect of lending. And so when the bank starts lending the reserves, then if the government says, well, that's not theft after all, then it would lead to fractional reserve banking and inflation and the business cycle and all that stuff and a blurring of what money is.

45:22 And then fiduciary media is a result of all that kind of stuff. I think that's one advantage of Bitcoin is that you wouldn't need to keep it in a bank, and therefore the danger of the money substitute, the infracture reserve thing happening on top of it, even in a private system, is much less. So to me, that's a separate issue. But my point is that you could say that in today's system, you don't own your dollars either. But on the other hand, I don't want the state to listen to me, and I don't want the courts to say that Kinsella's right. You don't own your dollars because then the government could just take it without your permission. So I want them to keep the fiction up that you do own your dollars as long as the government's going to force us to use their fiat system.

46:08 I still want us to be treated as if we own legally the dollars even though that's problematic from a theory point of view. Do you follow me? Yeah, and this is right at the point where I want to pick your brain on a lot of these topics, because to me, the distinction between ownership and possession is quite clear. Like possession is your physical possession of an object like this one. And ownership is like my legal relationship with this object. Like if someone came and stole this remote to my AC, I could call the police and say someone stole this and everyone in society would agree that I'm the rightful owner of this thing.

46:54 So it's a legal relationship between me and a thing. and this i i think this is where your debate with giacomo was kind of where it sort of got blurry because giacomo sees even things as just you know at the quantum level or whatever like just vibrations in the universe and that there's no real distinction between a thing and a an object and a service if you will i think this is um confusing too so let's not let's not go that that deep just yet like my my my uh insight yeah i use the word insight about bitcoin is that you can neither possess it nor own it in any practical sense all you can do is you know you have some information like that information being the private key or the access to the private key which is the actual the crucial bit of information you need to interact with the bitcoin network because it's the only thing that allows you to actually alter the state of the network or alter the state of the ledger so anything that's in the ledger is just a historical document of what happened to the things in the ledger but your ability to alter the ledger is completely dependent on your you knowing a secret then that you believe nobody else has access to you follow me so so so what you what you can do when you have access to this information

48:31 is that you can utilize that in a way that makes that allows you to act as if you own the bitcoin Meaning – which is legal ownership and he distinguishes those um and he calls one the having h-a-v-i-n-g the having of something by which he's getting at his concept of praxeology which is that um action is the um the employment or use of a means to achieve an end but that's sort of a general way of looking at it and what does it mean to employ a means it means to have some control over it to get to get the end done that you want done and in in sort of a physicalist uh economic sense normally that's physical grasping and manipulation of an object with your with your hands right that's what it normally means so that's the having or the possession but so my first my first argument

50:04 for money and Bitcoin and all that is to make a distinction conceptually between possession, which is, say, a physical possession, and ownership, which is the legal right to use force to stop someone from taking it or to recover it after it's taken. So that's the distinction. But like you said, you can act as if you own something. What that means is the possession of something, if it's so secure, no one could physically actually take it, it's as if you have ownership because the purpose of ownership is to make it hard for someone to take it from you physically. So they have an interplay. But when you have another level of extraction and you have Bitcoin that doesn't even exist in the sense of a physical object, it's our conceptual way that we categorize the entries on this spreadsheet called the ledger, the satoshis.

50:49 So they don't really exist any more than a number exists except in some platonic space, which I think is nonsense as a category. But it's a useful conceptual way to be organizing. So we as humans look at this ledger, which has a finite number of entries, 21 million times 100 million entries on this ledger, and it's stored. And we categorize them as relatively fungible entries on this ledger that you can – that you have the – so the word to me is ability. Like do you have the ability to change the state of this spreadsheet? and the ability comes from your possession or having or knowledge of the key, right?

51:34 Knowledge. In your head or knowledge. I'd say knowledge is key here. Knowledge is key, but knowledge is a key and knowledge is key. But again, you don't even have knowledge in the same way that you have an object. So we use the same word for it. So you have to be careful. So when I talk about, I say that, you know, praxeology is the study of action, but action is the combination of two things. It the employment of means to achieve an end guided by knowledge that you I guess that you you could say you have the knowledge I mean to be guided by knowledge you have to know something You have to have knowledge You don't possess the knowledge in the same way that you possess the object that you're manipulating, but you still somehow have the knowledge in your mind that guides you, right?

52:19 And so by the same token, when you have the knowledge to interact with the Bitcoin network and give it the key to cause some Satoshis to transfer control, then that is what it means. That's why it's important to have that knowledge because it lets you access and manipulate the network. Yeah, so it very directly allows you to use the asymmetric information that you possess, or no, possess is the wrong word because it's not a physical thing, that you know about, Like the asymmetric information that you're aware of in a way that allows you to use it as a means to reach your ends by using it as a medium of change over space and time.

53:06 Yeah. And when you start describing it that granularly as you just did, it's accurate, but it gets pedantic and it gets tedious to people because they – like I say often, I don't like to call something that you own property. That's a whole different discussion. So I'll say that you have a property right in a resource, in a scarce resource or in a material resource. So I'm repeatedly saying in that car that you own or in that resource that you own, because I don't want to call it your property because that leads to other confusions. But that gets tedious after a while, and people just want to say, you mean that car is your property?

53:48 And I'm like, well, there's problems with calling it your property, but sure, I mean your property. Because I have to kind of simplify at some point because people get tired of hearing you repeat the kind of mechanical robotic way that's literally true, but it gets to be tedious after a while. Yes, but the reason I'm having you on the show instead of your average normie that thinks this is tedious is because I want to have exactly these kind of discussions. because the way you said it was right. I believe the way you said it was right. Yes. Okay, great. So thinking of the word ownership, let's double click on that. So there's this guy called Frank Van Doon and also I think Hoppe's own argumentation ethics go into this, the distinction between legal and lawful because legal in the Frank Van Doon version of it, I believe is the man-made laws that a society around you has agreed upon.

54:55 So let's say tax dollars paid for this remote control. That means that legally, I'm the owner of them because I was the receiver of a tax-paid remote control for an AC. So if this was a public good that was given to me, so this is welfare now. Bear with me here because it's a long, long convoluted argument. So this is welfare now. I received this from the state as compensation for being retarded or something. Instead of actually homesteading it or trading it with someone else in a lawful contract.

55:39 So the distinction between legal and lawful is lawful is abiding natural law, which is absolute property rights, which can be derived from argumentation ethics almost at least, because science can't produce an ought from an is, but it can get very close to an ought not simply through Hoppe and argumentation ethics, I believe. Because if we make the assumption that humans want to resolve conflicts without violence, then communication is always preferable to aggression.

56:20 That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, although I would – you said there are absolute property rights. I'm also skeptical of using the word – Absolute, yeah. Absolute, because it adds nothing. I mean what is it – I mean if I say it's aggression to take your remote control or anything or to do violence against your body, if I say it's absolutely aggression, I mean what does it add to say absolute? So I would – I don't use the word absolute to say absolute property rights, although the allodialists like to say this.

57:00 So I just say property rights. I prefer Nozick's concept of rights as side constraints. The criticism of libertarians is that we only care about liberty. And when anyone says that, they're about to explain why it's okay to violate your liberty. yes but but we don't only care about liberty it's just that we believe that you can't violate prep that is it's not justified it's not justifiable to violate property rights that's all uh we have other values too but but but you you don't have a good excuse to violate my property rights that's all we mean by saying it's a side constraint um exactly but go ahead yeah on to the argument about legal legal versus lawful maybe a better example than the remote So imagine that the government uses tax dollars to buy a house or to either just – let's say the government steals my house and they give it to you like they did it under communism.

58:02 Like the government took private houses and they gave it to someone else to live in. So then lawful would say that the law says the legal owner is the current user, but the rightful owner would be the guy that it was stolen from. No, no, the other way around. Like lawful would say that the rightful owner is the owner legally. I think the distinction lawful is natural law. Legal is man-made law. At least that's my understanding of it. I think that's how Van Dunn uses it. I don't think Hoppe uses that terminology, but Hoppe has a different issue. And Hoppe's argumentation and ethics, if you look at my book in chapter 20 where I had this old essay where I did a review essay criticizing – I'm sorry, reviewing Hans' 1993 book, The Economist and Ethics of Private Property.

58:53 The one quibble I had was the way he slides back and forth between ownership and control, and that's one criticism some people have made of him. But in my review, I said this is a slight mistake, but it's not fatal to his argument, and you can just – if you clarify the terms, it's fine. Frank Van Dunn, I think, is a different case because Frank, who's interesting – he's been to PFS many times, by the way. He's a good friend. He's a great guy. He's an anarchist, but he's also heavily natural law-oriented in his thinking. And ironically, he's also heavily influenced by positive law in the sense of he takes for granted a lot of legal concepts which developed in the positive law.

59:37 He sort of gives them presumptive validity. Like he can't imagine not having defamation law or trademark law because that's the way it's always been. Explain the term positive law for a labor. Positive law is just the – it's what you would call maybe the legal laws. Positive law is the law enforced in a given legal system, and positive rights are the correlative of whatever laws there are. So positive law is just the law that's being enforced by the courts in society, and it could be from the libertarian – see, from the legal positives' point of view, that's all there is. So when they criticize a law as being bad, they don't really have anything to compare it to.

1:00:20 We libertarians believe that there's justice, and justice comes from argumentation ethics or our nature or whatever. But from what justice is and what our nature is we can determine which laws are just and which ones are not just what our property rights are what they not what our natural rights are what they not And that gives us a type of law which we can compare positive law to So we could say the reason that that tax law or that drug law is unjust is because it doesn comply with natural rights or natural law So we have a higher law we compare positive law to.

1:01:01 So to the extent positive law is compatible with our natural rights, then we don't have an objection to it. But just because it's the positive law doesn't mean that it's just. But it could be law. So you have these natural rights people that they think that if you admit something is law, you're giving it – you're admitting that it's just. That's because they've sort of bought into the legal positivist mentality where there's only one lawgiver. It's just in their mind it's not the legislature's God, but they still have this legal positivist mentality that law is that which is decreed by a lawgiver. But that's not how law works. Law is what's compatible with our rights as determined by reason in accordance with our nature as arguing, acting beings.

1:01:47 So that's the way we should look at it. The point is once you have a natural rights Hoppian libertarian view of what rights are, you don't have any problem admitting that, oh, well, that is a law. It's just a bad law. So I'm perfectly willing to say that there is a law against tax evasion. But to me, what that means is the positive law in this society is such that if you violate this rule, you will go to prison. You will face a sanction, and that's the truth. It doesn't mean that it's just. It just means that that's the law. So I distinguish between positive law and rightful law or just law or natural law, you could call it.

1:02:29 Yes, and this is the distinction I'm sort of getting at here. So, however, there's one caveat here. I would say that if you have accepted the terms and conditions of moving into a city-state or a citadel or whatever, where you voluntarily signed a contract with a juridical system, then legal, those man-made laws would still be just because you signed a contract admitting that you agree with them. The problem with democracies or whatever that you're born into is that you never get to sign the contract.

1:03:13 Would you agree with that? With a couple of caveats. So if I move into a totally private community, let's say in a free society, in a free world where there's different enclaves or different areas, yeah, if I enter into an area and I accept the rules, then I'm subject to those rules. Except I do think that there's a limit to even that because of my view of contract, which is influenced by Rothbard's title transfer theory of contract. And this is what Giacomo and I – I think if I recall, Giacomo and I were talking about – he was thinking you could base contracts on promising, but that's the whole point is that you can't.

1:03:55 And that's why I was talking about the circularity, and that's why we got to the circularity thing. Like the circularity of the common argument is that promises are binding because people rely upon them to their detriment. It's called detrimental reliance. And I explained to him that circular. He didn't understand why, so I sent him the references, and he finally agreed. But if you understand that, you'll see why promises themselves cannot be the basis of contract law, and contracts should not be viewed as binding promises. They should instead – or as obligations. They should only be seen as transfers of ownership to owned resources. But if you understand contracts that way, when you move into a regime – see, contracts are just the exercise of ownership of an owner.

1:04:39 You're the owner of your body and anything you own, any external resource that you own. And so a contract is just sort of the form or manifestation of the general fact that as owner, you have the right to exclude people from using your resource without your permission. Or you can agree to it. You can consent to it. And you could consent to it temporarily or you can make it permanent, which is what a contract is, is when you say, I'm giving you ownership of this car that I own. I'm transferring it to you permanently. Or you could loan it to them temporarily. Or just like your body, you could say, look, you can have sex with my body right now, or you can kiss me, or I can withdraw the consent because I'm the owner. So it's all about the owner granting consent or not granting consent, or granting it temporarily or with conditions or unconditionally or permanently or without conditions.

1:05:28 So that's what contract law really is. So how does that differ from a promise then? Because spoken contracts are also contracts, right? A contract is just a transfer of title to a resource, but that's done by communication of your consent. The communication can be by gesture, by context, by words, written or unwritten. It doesn't have to be words. It can just be by communication somehow. There has to always be language and communication, but it doesn't have to be verbal language. So people often – by the way, to clarify something, people often say – they use the word verbal when they mean unwritten or oral contract.

1:06:15 But yes, a contract could be oral or it could be written. But it doesn't even have to – but both of those are verbal because they involve words. They're verbal contracts. But contracts don't even have to be verbal. They could just be by context. You know, if I'm in Finland and I don't speak Finnish and I hand payment to some guy for a candy bar, the transfer of title happens even though we don't speak a language. But there was communication. So that's what a contract is. It's got nothing to do with a promise. A promise is a statement of intent. It's a statement of your belief about the future. If I say, I promise I will do this, I'm just giving you my belief of what's probably, it's my prediction of what's going to happen.

1:07:03 Yeah. Right? And if you rely upon that, that's up to you whether you rely upon it or not. And that's usually coupled with a contract, but it's not the same as the contract. So the contract is adding outcomes to the promise, right? So if outcome A, then B, and if outcome C, then D. That's conditions. If you make the contract conditional. Yeah, yeah. Conditions is the right word. You can make it conditional. Not every contract has to be conditional. You could have an unconditional contract. Like I can give you a gift That's unconditional What does that mean though Like if Well if I have a contract Saying I'm giving you a gift And then I don't give you the gift Isn't there Like is there Is this an No I mean No I mean What you have to distinguish If I'm promising To give you a gift in the future Or if I'm Another way of putting it Is I'm giving you A future gift I'm saying the simple case Is I hand you an apple Right now I'm gifting you the apple That is the transfer of title It's done And if I recall the conversation with Giacomo correctly What I'm actually doing When I'm giving you the apple Is that I am Allowing this property To now I un-homestead it And I allow you to homestead it That's my other theory About why

1:08:33 The transfer is affected And I said When people say why do you have the power See, I'm trying to distinguish inalienability or voluntary slavery. I'm trying to explain why you don't have the right to sell your body into slavery, but you do have the right to sell other things that you acquired to someone else. And the reason is because you homesteaded or acquired by contract ownership of a thing that you didn't have before. It's not part of your body. And because of the way you acquired ownership of it, you can unacquire it because you need to maintain the intent to own it as owner. If you get rid of that intent by communicating that you've abandoned it, then it's free to be re-homesteaded and someone can re-homestead it.

1:09:18 So that's sort of the under-the-hood mechanics of why a transfer works. But what a contract – yeah, go ahead. You can't on homestead your body because that's simply impossible because you. Well, well, you can if you commit aggression. But the point is, you don't own your body because you homesteaded it. The basis of your ownership right to your body is not that you homesteaded it, it's that you have direct control over it. So there's a different basis for ownership of your body than it is for other things. All right. Your body is unique because you need to already have control of your body to be an actor that homesteads things in the first place. I mean, it's auto-homesteaded at birth.

1:10:00 Like, you have no choice but to already have homesteaded your body, so to speak. But it's not homesteaded because when you're an actor in the world, you already possess a body. Whether you own it or not is a different question. You possess your body. You're an actor that has a body, and you find unowned, unclaimed things in the world that you want to start using and you homestead them to yourself. So you're homesteading an unowned thing. All right. So homesteading is simply the wrong word for bodies. It's wrong because it implies that if you homestead your body when you wake up and you become a rights-bearing person, that your body was unowned before. But it wasn't unowned before because presumably it was part of your mother's body and your mother owned it at that point.

1:10:47 So it was never unowned. But the ownership transfers from the mother to you when you wake up, is the way I would put it. All right. So is there a, if we backtrack a bit here and back to the ownership of Satoshi's and stuff, like I really want to pick this apart. in your mind is there a better word to be used for like different words to be used for ownership in the natural law sense and ownership in the legal sense meaning like the the laws that are enforced because practically practically i don't like i can say i own a thing because i'm the rightful owner according to natural law uh but what like well i think i think i'd say for instance an example here the the state would be the owner of a state-run company but they're not the rightful owner they cannot be because all they have is stolen so so so is that is there another word to be like is that no there isn't there probably should be That's why I put the word – I usually say – I think the typical libertarian would say natural owner, but I say rightful owner.

1:12:03 Rightful owner. Yeah, I agree with that. Because that gets at whether you can justify – it could be a justified claim or not. But I think we need to have a concept for ownership in a legal system because we need a way to describe what's going to happen to you if you don't follow this law. No, and this is why I want to get into the weeds of ownership of Satoshis, because the whole prospect is absurd to me since it's just a piece of information. So it's not actual ownership, which is also, by the way, why I would never go to the police and report my Bitcoin stolen, because I don't think they are stolen. If someone else had the private key, they're just as much as an owner as me. Hold that thought. Let me use the restroom real quick and I'll be right back.

1:12:48 All right, I will use the restroom too. Yeah, 30 seconds. The ownership here, like when I say that you cannot own a Satoshi, but you can act as if you own it. I mean that from all senses. This is also why I think that people sometimes allocate too much of their wealth into Bitcoin because they don't understand the risk. because if you don't own it, but you just probabilistically own it or can act as if you own it, then there are risks associated with that that you have to be willing to accept them. You accept that two things need to be true.

1:13:30 You need to believe that no one else has access to the same private key as you do. And you also need to believe that the system is set up in such a way that it won't change to such an extent that it will render your Satoshis value less. Like you need to sort of believe in the system in order to be able to act as if, which is why we see forks and stuff. People lose their belief in Bitcoin and therefore they no longer act as if they own the Satoshis. This goes all the way down to the whole BIP 110 and spam debate. I had an insight about that today, by the way, because I saw, I don't know how aware you are of this whole debacle, but the thing was, on the new chain that just forked off, people were starting to spam that chain and fill it with spam.

1:14:29 And to spam that chain, in Satoshi terms, it costs about double to spam that chain in comparison to the legacy chain or normal Bitcoin. However, in purchasing power terms, it's way cheaper to spam the new chain because those Satoshis are not worth as much as a regular Satoshi. Oh, that's a good point. So in order to believe in the hard fork, you also have to believe that in the long run, those Satoshis are going to be worth more. But a great hurdle to that is that it's less costly to attack that chain at this point. Meaning that you have to tell yourself that the ever accumulating purchasing power of the Satoshi was not part of the immaculate conception.

1:15:20 And I think the ever accumulating value of the purchasing power of the Satoshi is crucial to the immaculate conception of Bitcoin. If that was not the case, like if you leave that out and all of a sudden you render the Satoshis valueless in a way, then it becomes way easier to attack the network. So in this sense, I think the people who fork off, this is not a defense of, even if your claim that the normal Bitcoin is now subject to a Fabian attack and is on a slippery slope and is going to die one day, it still doesn't validate your belief in the new chain.

1:16:01 Because that new chain is so much cheaper to attack. Well, that might be right. I'm trying to formulate this. Yeah, that might be one reason why it's extremely difficult to dislodge an existing money or the dominant emerging money like Bitcoin is. And it might also be why, kind of ironically, although one of the main benefits of Bitcoin is that there's no inflation in the end, you had to start out with this bootstrapping system where it has a scheduled inflation. You had to start off somehow to give an incentive to the minors. So even though we're against inflation, it's still inflating a little bit over time.

1:16:49 Look, I wrote a post one time about – so I think that in a free society, you would tend to have more resort to property title insurance. In addition to the legal system, which you use to secure your rights, you also would have insurance. So, for example, if I own a watch or a car, even though my possession is one way I keep it, another way is I keep it in a locked garage, and another way is I rely on the legal system to prevent theft, I might also have insurance in case it still gets stolen. This is why we need more words than just ownership. We would need three different words for different types of ownership. Yeah. So so I but I also think that the reason we have diversification and investment and portfolios is because it's stupid to put all your wealth in one basket.

1:17:40 And so I think in the Bitcoin world, so this might be I've never heard Bitcoiners really talked about this, but in my view. If Bitcoin ever becomes adopted as the world reserve currency, I don't think people would keep most of their wealth in it. I think they would keep only a fraction of their wealth in it because it might someday be demonetized and replaced by something else or it might fail Or you might get stolen or or might get hacked So it would just be stupid to keep all of your wealth in Bitcoin You would keep maybe 10 in Bitcoin and the rest would be in something else, even if the return was the same or even slightly less. So I might have 90% of my wealth in mutual funds or real estate just to diversify.

1:18:26 But in the meantime, we're speculating on it going up. So that's why we're taking a risk by putting a lot of your money as a hodler in Bitcoin. And you can't really ensure that right now. So you're taking this risk because of this unique monetization phase that we hopefully are in. Does that make sense or not? From a certain perspective, let me just devil's advocate that for argument's sake, because it's so fun. so the the reason that would you you would choose to keep 90 percent of your wealth in bitcoin and maybe 10 percent in physical assets is that uh if if an attacker came to your house and pointed a gun at your head and said give me all your bitcoin you could give them a fraction of your bitcoin and they would have no way of knowing how much you actually had and if they shoot you all of that wealth is gone and you're removed as an economic actor from the bitcoin system however the the scarcity of the remaining bitcoins goes up so there's there's some balance there if you shoot every bitcoiner there's no value to bitcoin but if you shoot one but hold on what i didn't say that 90 percent of your wealth would be in in physical it could be in stocks exxon stops and how would someone how would someone know what percentage of your wealth is in bitcoin anyway how could you play this game but that's my point if they don't know uh and right even right now there's it's it's literally impossible to know how many satoshis another person owns because it's not owned at all

1:19:58 it's just a piece of information so i have no clue how many bitcoins you have access to you have no clue how many bitcoins i have access to and i have no clue how many bitcoins your grandmother has access to like theoretically she could have access to all the bitcoins if she knows all the private keys like that this is this is the the point is that this is what changes the incentive for aggressive behavior in the long run so i agree with you but how does that mean that so let's suppose bitcoin is is is 20 million dollars a coin and it's it's the world money now okay and let's say you're worth $20 million in Bitcoin terms why would you keep all of that in Bitcoin instead of only 10% why would you do that just so that you could tell a robber I'm only giving you a sub wallet the reason I would keep 90% of it in Bitcoin rather than in physical assets is that all physical assets I mean your stock portfolio Let's say mutual funds.

1:21:06 Yeah, but my stock portfolio requires trust in a third party in a way that Bitcoin doesn't. My stock portfolio is completely dependent on the system I'm in. No, no, I totally agree. I agree with you. I see that. But you don't believe the stock market would disappear in a Bitcoin world, do you? No, I don't. However, I think it will work very differently because a corporation could just be a signal group of Bitcoiners. And every time we settle a good or a service, we could easily split the profits between whoever is in that group. And we wouldn't need legal services or accountants or anything really that has to do with taxes.

1:21:53 like all of these lubrication companies, as my friend Dave Bradley likes to call them, that only makes the government dildo hurt a little less when it inevitably comes to rape you. All of those things would be gone. And it would be much, because now you have a non-interventionist free market where there's no intervention whatsoever. So, sure, having stocks in a company, it could be a completely different thing. It wouldn't even require me to have a paper saying that I own this and that much of that company. Look, I'm skeptical of smart contracts and all this, but to me, that's just a detail.

1:22:36 But the point is, you could still want some of your portfolio to be in Apple stock and some in a mining company. I mean, you would still have a robotics company and Tesla maybe. Why wouldn't you have some of your wealth in stocks in a company? No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that the more you have in Bitcoin, the harder it is to steal from you. Like from a very realist kind of the incentives of the aggressor kind of point of view. But who has their IBM and Apple stocks stolen from them now? uh what well everyone who's taxed okay but you're you're saying that in a tax-free world so there will be no taxes so uh yeah and i i like this is far ahead into the future and this is all abstract and all imaginary scenarios right so uh so it's kind of hard to to actually visualize uh an all else being equal scenario.

1:23:38 But if you imagine Bitcoin as the dominant money of the world, then almost everyone's stacks would go down over time. Bitcoins will be lost. There are no more Bitcoins mined. The total number of available Bitcoins will shrink over time. So I imagine where you would start a company just to have your stack shrink a little slower and just it's the angle of the slope of the decline rather than... You could start a company to actually lose SATs a little slower, but still increase in purchasing power. It's so hard to wrap your head around because we're all...

1:24:20 I don't disagree with that. Yeah, the world will be different. All I'm saying is this. Right now, people... Like someone like me who normally would diversify, I am taking more of a risk than I think I normally would by having – by hodling because it's the only way to take advantage of this possible monetization. But all I'm saying is I think people are taking more risk now during the monetization phase than they would after. That's all I'm saying. I think there would be more value to diversification after. How people would – what percentage of their wealth they would keep in Bitcoin, I don't know. The other thing is I think that money, whatever the money is, whether it's gold or fiat or Bitcoin, money always has a monetary premium because of the network effect.

1:25:12 It always has that, which is why people like Peter Schiff who say that gold is backed but Bitcoin is not are confused because nothing can be backed as money. It always has a monetary premium. But the other the point is money solves a function of overcoming the barter and the calculation problem. And it doesn't have to be money forever. Like Bitcoin might be money for the next 30 years and then something else might come along. I don't know how hard it is to dislodge it. It depends upon whether Bitcoin fails or whether there's a big advantage to switching. But even if Bitcoin is just money for 30 or 40 years, it does its job and then it goes away. So that risk that it could go away.

1:25:53 Means that there's a risk to holding all of your wealth in that thing that's not real wealth. It's the thing that trades against wealth. So that's my point is I think I would diversify if Bitcoin was the world's money. I wouldn't keep all of my wealth in Bitcoin because of the risk of it not becoming money someday. And neither would I. I'm just trying to devil's advocate the 10% number. because the incentive might be the other way around, that you want to keep most of it in Bitcoin simply because it's so much harder to expropriate than anything else. Yeah, and I think that's one advantage to having your wealth in Bitcoin, but there's advantages to diversifying too.

1:26:38 So how that will play out on an individual basis I have no idea But let go back to we were talking about Bitcoin No me neither course Yeah so but let forget about body ownership Let just talk about ownership of things And so you and I are both saying that there's an analogy you can make between possession of a Bitcoin and ownership of a Bitcoin. Just like if you have ownership of a car, it's like a normative legal support to possession of a car, but they're different things. The reason I say you can't own Bitcoin is that – so the car actually exists.

1:27:23 It's an object, it's a scarce object in the world that exists on its own independently. But the reason intellectual property is not a legitimate form of property is because in a sense, information doesn't exist as an independent thing. Information always is the impatterning of a thing that exists. Information has to be stored on an underlying carrier or storage medium. Sorry for interrupting, but I heard this very good explanation of the word information. like information is data interpreted by a human brain correct but it's got to be stored somewhere for you to have it just stored on your brain or it's stored on a medium yeah but all all the storage devices that's just a fancy abacus like helping the human brain understand correct like it's it's the equivalent of the stick that the orangutan puts into the the termite mount like Correct. It helps us. It saves us time.

1:28:28 But the point is, the information is the way we interpret data, but it's stored on some medium, but that medium has an owner. So that has an important – so we were getting to – you said earlier why you wouldn't report a theft of a Bitcoin. So let's talk about a physical – let's suppose you have a car that you own. Yeah. Or a watch. Let's say you have a watch and your watch is stolen. And a year later, the thief is long gone. But your insurance company finds the watch on someone's arm. He bought it from a pawn shop, let's say.

1:29:09 He's an innocent, good faith, third-party buyer, but he has your watch. I think most people would agree that in a just legal system, you're still the owner of that watch, which is another distinction between legal owner and rightful owner. So you're still the rightful owner of that watch. You're even the legal owner, and because you're the legal owner, you can get it back from the current possessor of the watch who thought he was the legal owner, but he's not. So you can recover your watch from the third party who has your watch. Okay, because you're the owner still. That's what ownership to me means. Ownership means you have the right to the legally enforced right to use force to get your watch back.

1:29:50 Doesn't mean you can punish the guy Doesn't mean he owes you anything But he does have to return your watch Because you're still the owner Now, if you're the owner of Bitcoin Let's take the cold card thing Everyone says, oh, everyone's cold Bitcoins were stolen by this cold card fiasco I'm not persuaded that there was any contract breach Or anything even unethical about taking people's Bitcoins because if I guessed your key and I took your Bitcoin, I don't know if I'm doing anything wrong because there's no contract between us. I didn't violate the rules of the protocol of the Bitcoin system.

1:30:31 I just happen to know the same key that you know and I use it to take the Bitcoin from you. How does that... But if you believe that Bitcoins are owned, then you would call that an act of theft. Yes, but I don't believe that. And this is where I differ from a lot of Bitcoiners. And I had arguments about this in Helsinki. Yeah, me too. That's what I'm thinking of. Most people think that, yeah, of course, you're the legal owner and we should fight crime and whatnot. However, I totally agree with you. If someone else happens to have the control of the same key and use it, there's literally, like, that's one of the things I agreed to when I first acquired the Bitcoin.

1:31:14 Yeah, you're taking that risk. You're taking that risk. This is the analogy I'd like to introduce. Like, if I'm betting money on a boxing match, I bet that Bruce Willis will win because I've seen Pulp Fiction and that he won't, like everyone else thinks he will lose because he got money from Marcellus Wallace to lose the game. but I've seen Pulp Fiction and I know he beats the other guy to a pulp and he escapes on his chopper afterwards so I'm betting against Bruce Willis losing that's the exact type of asymmetric information I have about my Bitcoin I'm not 100% sure that that will happen but I'm pretty goddamn sure that I have information about the future state of the world that most other people don't have.

1:32:11 Yes. And that's the bet I'm making. It's still a bet. So Bitcoin is a bet. It's a pretty binary bet because either you lose it all, either through your squandering, like you losing the key somehow, or that Bitcoin goes to zero because you misinterpreted the whole system and you were wrong about stuff. All it is is a bet. it's just that the if the bet holds true the upsides are absolutely enormous if the bet if you lose the bet you go to zero so so yeah that's that's sort of the yeah and if the bitcoin scheme was such that it was easier to guess that then it wouldn't work as well or people would have to have insurance or something like that um but it happens to be that the risk is so small as long as you're careful enough. That's the thing. You have to be careful.

1:33:04 And there are Bitcoin insurance companies popping up now, by the way, and people willing to bet that your Bitcoin will, your Bitcoins will be safe if you do this and that. The insurance companies are doing that. But the other wrinkle, the other wrinkle was this. So if you own an object like a watch, and like I said, if you find it, you can get it back from the guy. You can compel the current possessor to return it, even if he didn't do anything wrong. You can compel him to do that. And you can not only that, you can use the current monopoly on violence in your jurisdiction to enforce that. Yes. So in the case of the cold card thefts or other thefts, in principle, if you could find the bad guy who took your Bitcoin, okay, there's two things that would happen.

1:33:57 If you consider the Bitcoin to be owned, number one, you could use the force of law against the guy that took your Bitcoin to punish him or to get him to give you some of his assets to make you whole. And you and I, I think, would agree that, well, he didn't do anything wrong, so there's nothing to punish him for. But second, even if this guy is gone and you can't find him anymore, in principle, because Bitcoin is viewed as an ownable thing, an independently existing ownable thing that was stolen, then in principle, you could get a court order against everyone in the world who has a Bitcoin node. And you could order them to unwind or replace their copy of the Bitcoin of the blockchain with a new one that has a patch in it that restores your Bitcoin to you.

1:34:50 But that would require them to use their property in a way that they don't want to do. So it would imply that you own their property, but you don't own their property because they own it. That's why it's impossible to say you own Bitcoin because they don't exist as independent things. they're just the way we interpret information that store on people's computers. Exactly. But the thing that people don't get, to me, this is a feature, not a bug. This is the actual beauty of the system. This is the square peg in the round hole. This is what makes it so unique And for instance if you compare it to Ethereum Ethereum did exactly that when there was the DAO hack back in 2017 I believe They decided to rewind the chain and undo that thing.

1:35:40 Yeah. Making the whole promise completely moot. Because by doing that, they proved that this thing is not decentralized, therefore not secure. because they could do that. So in other words, it is reversible. I mean, Bitcoin transactions are not reversible. That's the whole beauty of it. Yes, exactly. So this is, no, and it's such a beautiful thing, but I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about why it's beautiful and why it's dangerous and how they should relate to their Bitcoin, quote unquote, their Bitcoin, because you have to be willing to accept that when you plug in your cold card the next time around, there might just be zeros on your screen.

1:36:33 Like there's always some trust in some hardware manufacturer. Like no one can build a computer from scratch. The computer itself is a wonder of human progress. Cold card, I don't know the details, But cold card itself, in principle, could be liable for breach of contract or breach of warranty or something like that, especially if they did it negligently or if they did it intentionally. But that's a whole different, that's a contractual claim against the company. That's a different issue. Depending on what they promised their customers. Because the customer, as far as I know, all the customer bought was a device. Correct.

1:37:13 They didn't buy like an insurance that. That's my default view is that they don't have an obligation. But in principle, they could, but it would be a claim against – like if I paid Unchained Capital in Austin to set up a multi-sig wallet for me, and then they were really doing this to scheme behind the scenes to take my Bitcoin, then I would have a claim against them, not really for theft, but for the equivalent of it, some kind of contract breach. But that's a day or gave my you know, if I gave my lawyer or my my accountant my keys and then he used them to steal my Bitcoin. Even though I don't own Bitcoin, then he breached a contract with me and he I can I can sue him for breach of contract or breach of trust.

1:37:59 But but those are separate things. So let me ask you a question in your view. Let's suppose there's some guy who figured out this cold coin cold card problem in the beginning and he he went to. He took one Bitcoin from some anonymous guy. So this guy woke up and he's now lost his one Bitcoin. Now, the hacker has the Bitcoin. Now, number one, do you think that he did something unethical? And do you think he should give it back? Or basically, do you think that it's good that people are taught a lesson?

1:38:40 Like, has the money moved to better hands now? Even if we say it's not theft, ethically, should the guy give it back or not? Well, this is all depending on context, of course. It depends on what promise Coldcard made when they sold the guy the device. No, not Coldcard. Let's forget about Coldcard. Let's just say I'm just a stranger and I figured out that there's a mistake in the entropy. And so I start running around, exploiting this and taking Bitcoin from people's wallets who are unsuspecting. Okay. So in effect, like you're guessing keys and you happen to guess the correct keys.

1:39:21 Isn't that what happened? Isn't that basically what happened in the cold car? It is because the entropy was not enough. So the keys were generated with insufficient entropy, so it's easy to get the... I guess it is... Oh, this is such a good question, because is it unethical? Like, pooh. You know that the guy you're doing... If you're aware that the guy you're doing this to may now lose his ability to support his children or whatever, like, I'd say there's nothing inherently unethical about using information in that way.

1:40:11 However, if you're aware of causing someone else a lot of harm by doing so, it's just, Now, is ethics even the right word to use in a case like this? It's a morality. I don't even know the correct. So let's say there's a guy that he pops up tomorrow and he goes, hey, guess what? I was the guy behind $100 million worth of the so-called coal card exploit thefts. But I'm going to return it now. But you've learned your lesson. And everyone would view him as a hero, I think. But really. We call that a white hat hacker. Yeah, white hat. So really, you're really rewarding laziness and stupidity on the part of people that were not careful.

1:40:56 I mean, you could imagine that there's a company out there always looking for exploits. And they say, listen, if I find it, I'm going to take it. And so it keeps people on their toes. That's actually a good thing, right? Absolutely. Because this is part of why I fell in love with Bitcoin in the first place, because it's like the antithesis of the welfare system. Like, you're completely responsible for your actions. Like, 100%. If you fuck up, it's fucking gone. And there's nothing to do about it. If someone fucks up and you take their Bitcoin, but then you give it back to them because you're a nice guy, aren't you rewarding sort of your responsibility in a way?

1:41:37 Yes, you are. But still, the beauty of the system is that there's no way to bail out the bankers or bail out the airline companies. On a Bitcoin standard, there are no zombie companies, right? Because there's no one to bail them out. except right uh so so so the the harshness of it is is why is part of why i uh yeah yeah yeah i'd say that bitcoin is a bitcoin is a very very faithful and lovely wife but it's a harsh mistress that's the way i view it why couldn't you have bailouts under a bitcoin standard because you you would still have taxation, right?

1:42:20 Would you? If no one knows that you have money because you acquired them non-KYC from another Bitcoiner by selling goods and services, and you can spend them without anyone being able to censor them. But Bitcoin is not... I mean, I wouldn't assume that going to a Bitcoin standard makes taxation impossible. Why not? I mean, what is taxation? Like it's the ability to take something from you without your consent. It would make it more difficult. The government could threaten you with prison if you don't volunteer. I mean, the government could say, listen, anything. Yeah, but if they don't know that I have something, there's no way for them to take it.

1:43:04 They tax waiters and waitresses now who get cash. They assume they have a certain income and they tax them on it. I mean. Yeah, of course. But this was always true. You were like a guy could walk in here right now and rob me. Like there's never any way to get around that. I just believe Bitcoin is more efficient if you want to actually be able to be self-sovereign in that way that you don't have to give up certain information. And this is, by the way, my friend Max Hillebrand wrote a great book about this called The Praxeology of Privacy. Have you heard of it?

1:43:45 Yes. Yeah, I think it was available in a PFS, right? A few copies, I believe. I think so. About how cryptography and asymmetric information gives you abilities that you simply didn't have before. And this is why it's so hard to wrap your head around because it simply wasn't an option before to actually, Well, it was an option to have cash and a black market is possible with cash, but only to a certain extent because cash is still printed by a central... Cash doesn't come from consent.

1:44:26 It comes from a money printer somewhere. So cash is not... Sure, you could trade gold with other people on a completely black market, but this actually allows for much more. Well, the reason I bring up the tax thing is because I've been saying for a while that, you know, if the U.S. government, if Bitcoin became money, then it would basically end the ability of, say, the U.S. government to deficit finance because they wouldn't be able to sell bonds anymore. Right. Which means they would have to exist upon tax revenues. So instead of having a four trillion dollar budget, they would only have a two trillion dollar budget. But if you're right, then they would have a zero budget because they wouldn't be able to tax either.

1:45:08 And I don't know if that's just right. Yeah, it would be good. But I don't know if Bitcoin's existence would starve the state completely of the ability to tax. It would make it more difficult, but I don't know if it would be zero. No, that's utopian. To think it's zero, it's utopian. But I don't view it as the state even. I view it as like it reduces the amount of aggression possible in a society. True, I agree with that. So, I mean, theft is theft regardless of whether it's done by someone who has a monopoly on violence or in a certain geographical area or not.

1:45:52 but this Bitcoin sort of reduces the attacker's ability to steal your stuff regardless of who the attacker is if it's a private entity like a mafia or a thief or a public entity such as a government mafia it's still harder for them to get to your stuff because there are now ways of doing these things way more incognito But only if Bitcoin is used properly. And actually, you know, when you still use the fiat rails and if you buy your Bitcoins off of a KYC exchange and, you know, all the stuff, if you do all that, then you're sort of stuck in the old system and they can figure out what you have or make very good assumptions at least.

1:46:44 So if you're not using it the way it was intended, then you don't get some of the superpowers it comes with. So my advice is always for people to at least keep their KYC stack and their non-KYC stack separate just because of this. then sure this is going to take a long time and maybe it takes a couple of hundred years and it requires Bitcoin to not fail during those hundreds of years so maybe it's far-fetched but to me it's hopeful and something worth fighting for I don't know is that a good answer?

1:47:35 I feel exactly the same way. I think that when you have a self-contained money, you don't have rails, yeah, then it will effectively be anonymous at some point. And then it would be hard for the state. Yeah, of course, there's going to be a transition period like right now where they can trace you and they can control you. But no, I'm as hopeful as you are about it still and enjoying the ride. Yeah, yeah. That's what it is. So back to the PFS conference. There was a talk by Guido Hulsman about why Bitcoin can never be money, which I found interesting.

1:48:20 He made the case that because there's nothing backing it, it might just go to zero at any point, basically. Or did I get him wrong? Like, what was your takeaway from that talk? And where do you agree and disagree with him about these things? I mean, for years, since Guido and I have been friends since 1995, I think Guido and I agree on almost everything so far, except for this. I mean, this is not, I didn't really, I don't think his argument was good. He's stuck in and he was a rarity there. I mean, like, like you said, most people are Bitcoiners there. So Guido is fighting. He's fighting the tide. He's swimming against the tide. I mean, Saifedean was there. You and I were there. Other Bitcoiners were there. I don't. His argument doesn't make sense to me. So I'm not persuaded by it. I just that's not how I think of money. So I don't. It didn't make a lot of sense to me at all. I think that the the Austrian arguments against Bitcoin.

1:49:28 Well, I mean, he said it can never be money. It's already, I mean, money is a degree, money, I agree, money is a thing, it's a degree of moneyness, right? So it's already got a certain degree of moneyness, and there's no reason it couldn't go higher. So I don't know what he means, it's impossible. And I think from what we know about Bitcoin, it's impossible that it will go to zero as well. You and I both know we'll never go to zero because there's people like us that would snap it up if it goes low enough. So I don't know I'm not persuaded by that So here Guido and I differ Yeah Let's just say I have a huge respect for the man So I won like try to Pick it apart too much The one thing I reacted to was like he said that fractional reserve banking can just as easily be done on Bitcoin as with gold which I simply don agree with because it so much more trivial for anyone to verify that the correct amounts of Bitcoin are there Like with gold, it's very hard to know the absolute amount of gold that exists on earth.

1:50:39 Like no one knows that at any point in time. In Bitcoin, it's trivial for anyone to just check how many Bitcoins there are. And I also think because Bitcoin is not really the same, even legally owned as dollars and gold, it's harder for people to get – I think it's harder for companies to get away with fractions or banking because I think it would always have to be made clear to the – like if I store my money with Coinbase, I need to understand whether it's 100% reserve or not and whether they're lending it or not. That just needs to be communicated to me somehow And I think it pretty much is Like right now Coinbase, as I understand it, is 100% reserve And if it's not And I think in a free society that would be made even more clear So you would have credit intermediation And you would have Bitcoin custody services And they would be totally distinct And they just wouldn't be able to get away with Conflaining the two roles And if they couldn't get away with it then that means that when you gave your Bitcoin to a lender, to a bank to relend, to rehypothecate, so you could earn interest, you're getting up title to it, totally.

1:51:54 You're not depositing it. You don't have ownership of it. All you have is a promissory note that you'll get it back. And you know that's risky. So I don't see how that promissory note could circulate as a money substitute. It wouldn't be valued the same as the underlying promised thing. So I just don't see how it could ever get off the ground in the first place. So I don't believe that a Bitcoin standard is as prone to fractures or banking as gold was. And for the reasons you mentioned too, it's auditable. You can see it's transparent. They just can't get away with it. And not only that, you don't need to store your money at a bank for safekeeping.

1:52:36 It's just easy and cheap to do it on your own. So if you did it with a custodial bank, you're just doing it for convenience, I think. So you wouldn't be paying a lot of fees. So you wouldn't need to be told, we need to loan a little bit of it out to make some interest so we could pay for the storage fees to give you this free service. Because the storage fees are basically zero. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And for me, people sometimes ask me why I use custodial Lightning wallets, for instance, because running your own Lightning node is a bit of a hassle, to say the least, especially if you're trying to travel around and connect to your own node back home while you're abroad and stuff like that.

1:53:20 So for smaller amounts, I use custodial lightning because I am perfectly aware that they could easily do fractional reserve banking on custodial lightning. But it doesn't matter to me because I can put it in cold storage when I come back home. It's trivial. And also that there's a limit to how much fractional reserve they can do because the bank run is a very real scenario and there's nothing for them to do if that happens. except rug everyone. And then they just go out to business and then some other custodian takes over. So, yeah, I don't see that at all.

1:54:01 More about PFS. Like, I have a couple of more things I want to dissect about that. So you say that the conference has been around for 20 years. And I think that this is sort of a fork of, like, the Mises Institute and the Cato Institute and PFS, How do they relate to one another? I think there's been... Yeah, that's interesting. The libertarian movement has fractioned. There are forks of the libertarian movement. Yeah, and I think what I've noticed over the years is that people in the U.S. are somewhat unaware of battles between different groups in Europe or in, say, Brazil.

1:54:44 We're not aware of that. And I think the same is true of like libertarians outside of America. They sort of don't quite understand the battles between like Cato and Mises and all this, which happened a long time ago. So there's always been a split between the sort of Rothbardian Mises Institute type people and the Cato type people for kind of personal, for personality reasons and also for strategic reasons and also because ideological reasons. You know, they're more minarchist and more establishment and we're more radical. But then, of course, they start calling us racist because we're, you know, we're opposed to, I don't know, affirmative action laws or something.

1:55:25 That means we're racist. We don't accept the need to overcome past discrimination or something. Compromise, accept the civil rights laws or whatever. It's just tedious at a certain point. When you refuse to acknowledge race, you're a racist. Yeah. But in recent – so last year, there was a split sort of between Hans Hoppe and the Mises Institute, which he was long associated with, for various reasons, which Hans publicized in his article Quo Vadis and his follow-up article. And then I went ahead and published a long article called My Years with the Mises Institute explaining my own past sort of rocky history with them So all the details are there But the long story short Hans moved to America in 1985 to study under Rothbard and he did so And they talked together for 10 years in Las Vegas until Rothbard died in 1995.

1:56:26 Okay, that's around the time that I became associated with the Mises Institute. Hans had already been associated since 1985 with them since he moved there. They started in 1982. So Hans became the fixture at the Mises Institute when Rothbard was alive and then even more so after. So Rothbard – Hoppe was appointed the successor editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1995 when Rothbard died. Rothbard had pioneered that journal. So Hoppe became the natural successor editor of it and also a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics or the Review of Austrian Economics. I think it was at the time. Anyway, 10 years later, and by this time, I was heavily involved with them too. My intellectual property work had been influential. They had opened up all their works on Mises.org. They had used an open copyright policy. Jeff Tucker was there. Doug French was the president. Everything was going great.

1:57:27 And then all of a sudden in 19 – in 2005, 10 years after Rothbard died, Hoppe was removed as editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies for no clear reason. The reason given was a make-weight argument that he was behind on some of the issues, which was ridiculous because then Roderick Long got it. That was a disaster. Tom Woods tried. That didn't last long. And then it just fell apart for like 10 years. In the meantime of which I started a journal to fill in the gap is called Libertarian Papers, which I published for 10 years from 2009 to 2018 when the JLS said they were coming back. So I closed down my journal and turned over my articles to them.

1:58:08 So in 2005, when Hans was removed as editor of the JLS, I think he sensed that his perch there was not as secure as he thought it was because he was the Rothbard successor and the chief intellectual of the Mises Institute. And yet they had basically fired him as editor of the JLS. And so the very next year, 2006, he started the PFS. And I think he did it somewhat presciently to have his own institution or group that he could control and he couldn't be fired from or couldn't be interfered with.

1:58:49 And that turned out to be useful because when he broke with Mises this year, he had the PFS, which he had built up over the last 20 years. So PFS, I'm part of it, Tom DiLorenzo, all the former presidents of Mises who have all been fired or had bad endings to their career, namely Doug French and then Jeff Deist and then Tom DiLorenzo. They're all members of the PFS now. So from my point of view, the main intellectual force behind the Rothbardian Austrian libertarian movement is clustered around Hans and the PFS now.

1:59:29 There's a few people still left at Mises, but as you notice, the book that we just did for Rothbard for his 100th birthday, we were able to get a host of great contributors without needing the Mises Institute people at all. So I think Mises Institute could have done the same thing because they've lost all their main contributors that, to my mind, are the most important thinkers in the movement. So this is just one of these things in the movement. We've gone our own way, they've gone their own way, and I wish them well. But, you know, things happened, personality battles happened, disagreements happened. But that's the good thing about secession is you can form your own group and go associate with whoever you want to in a free world.

2:00:17 absolutely it's a little harder to do with bitcoin forks for reasons discussed earlier on this pod but uh yeah the cato institute that like that fork as i understand it they they chose hayek as their guru instead of rothbard because he's sort of the statist version of what what statists want a libertarian to be he's more respectable he's more acceptable he's he's he won the nulo prize of course rothbard was the chief intellectual founder of the cato institute and he was on board in the beginning but then there was disagreement between him and ed crane and the coax um the founders of it uh when they wanted to move to washington and join the beltway and all this stuff and so rothbard's shares were stolen in some underhanded move by you know the high-priced lawyers, all this stuff.

2:01:15 And so he just joined up with Lou Rockwell and with the support of Mises' widow, Marjit von Mises, founded the Mises Institute in 1982 and they went their own way. And so they've been sort of enemies ever since. And, you know, it would have been fine if they would have just gone their own ways, but all the Cato people have continually, you know, Tom Palmer and all these guys, They call us neo-Confederates and racists. It's a little bit tedious at a certain point in time. Luckily, over time, I think that people roll their eyes when they hear this. At this point, if you call someone a racist, I think the assumption is they're probably not.

2:01:59 They robbed the word of its power when it needs to be used for real cases so they ruined it Yeah totally No one that anymore Like it just ridiculous at this point Yeah so the Mises Institute however it has branches everywhere. For instance, there's a Swedish Mises Institute. But it doesn't have branches. These are independent groups. So when Doug French was president, he encouraged, other groups started approaching Mises because they were very popular because they had all the information. And so when Doug French was president and Jeff Tucker was still there and they still had an open copyright policy, you had different groups saying, hey, we would like to form a Mises Institute in Sweden or whatever.

2:02:50 And Doug just said, fine, go for it. So he gave them permission because, well, they didn't really need permission. It wasn't clear if they needed permission. But, you know, there's this sort of proprietary mentality in the world. Like, if I'm going to use your name, maybe I should ask your permission first. And so they did. So Dunn freely gave it. And that started the flowering of Mises Institutes around the world, but they were all independent. They sort of cooperated in the same mission, but they were all independent. And then when the Mises Institute sort of got rid of Doug and got rid of Jeff Tucker and started reversing course on their open policy, it was too late for them to stop it, which is a good thing in my view. So these groups still exist, and I think it's a beautiful thing. It's good that they still exist.

2:03:31 So there are a bunch of them around the world now, and there are a bunch of other groups like the Copton Center and the PFS, which are not technically Mises Institutes. And there's a Rothbard Institute in Brazil because there was a split there between the Mises, Brazil, and Gilio Beltrão, who was running that, and the Chioca brothers. So the Chioca brothers formed the Rothbard Institute. So there's different groups there. And by the way, unlike Bitcoin, I mean, Bitcoin is hoping to be a money. So there's a tendency towards one money in the world. But you don't need to have a tendency towards one think tank in the world or one movement in the world for liberty or Australian economies.

2:04:16 No, true. This whole thing reminds me of an encounter I had with a fellow Bitcoin author in Miami. I think this is 2023. So this guy called Jason Mayer, who just wrote a book at the time. Trace Mayer or Jason Mayer? No, no, Jason Mayer. Trace Mayer is completely different. Okay, I don't know Jason. He had written a book called Bitcoin for Progressives. Okay. And he was doing an official book signing at the Miami conference. And at the time I encountered him, there weren't any people lined up for that because simply there weren't very many progressives at the Bitcoin conference, I guess.

2:05:01 So I walked up to him and offered to barter one of my books for one of his books. And first he sort of didn't understand what I meant. And then like, oh, barter, you mean I give you mine, you give me yours? Yeah, exactly. We give each other signed books. And then, oh, that's a great idea. This is his response. And a second after that, he second-guessed himself and said, are we allowed to do that and so so without thinking i walked back to to uh to our booth and and picked up a copy of my book and i just realized that that single comment uh like highlights the problem with with progressivism in general like in one sentence he managed to encapsulate the issue with that entire movement, that they think that they have to ask for permission before doing anything.

2:05:57 They think we live by permission, not by right. And they think that unless you have permission to do something, that it's everything that is not forbidden. They think everything that is not permitted is forbidden. Whereas we think everything that's not forbidden is permitted. Yeah. And to Jason's credit, I pointed this out to him, of course, and he completely agreed and laughed about it. So it wasn't a big issue. But it was so spot on exactly why leftism is so misguided, as you say, because they think we live by permission and not by right.

2:06:40 Stefan, we've been going for more than two hours. Is there anything else you want to talk about before we round this off? No, I think we've covered a lot. I appreciated it. And I'm so glad we got to hang out together at two conferences in a row. That was nice. Man, so am I. So happy to get to know you. And it was absolutely fantastic, both of the conferences and especially that panel we had in Helsinki. I really enjoyed that. And I hope we get the chance to do many more panels together in the future and more conversations like this. So when will I next see you, by the way? Anything planned?

2:07:21 Is it Turkey next year? Could be Turkey, could be Lugano, maybe Lugano in two weeks. I don't know. I need to look into that now, but probably not. You should. But I don't know. We'll stay in touch. We'll figure it out. we certainly will and yeah fantastic so with that thank you Stefan and thank you guys for listening this has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show don't forget to like, subscribe and brush your teeth see you next time Thank you.