Welcome to episode one of Chris Blec conversations.
I'm extremely grateful to Foundation Devices
for being the inaugural sponsor of this podcast.
When it comes to beautiful air gapped,
open source Bitcoin hardware wallets,
this is a team that I look to.
Because I've really come to realize
it's not just about the hardware.
It's also just as important to look at the ethos
of the team that's building it.
You can have a crypto hardware wallet
that does exactly what you need.
But if the team decides to start developing
in a direction that you don't like,
for instance, like Trezor has by offering privacy tools
only to those who are government approved.
And Ledger has done by adding the ability
for hardware wallets to export their private keys.
It's not easy at all to make a change
once you're already entrenched with that hardware wallet.
The team at Foundation is focused
on more than just your Bitcoin.
They're focused on your sovereignty and your freedom.
And that's invaluable when you're looking
for a hardware wallet.
You can check out Foundation
and their passport Bitcoin wallet at foundationdevices.com.
On this episode, I speak with Andrew M. Bailey.
He's an associate professor of humanities
at Yale NUS College in Singapore.
He's a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
And he's a co-author on the upcoming book,
Resistance Money, a philosophical case for Bitcoin.
Let's get right into it.
I live in Singapore, so we get these tropical rainstorms,
maybe once a week, and they get pretty intense.
They're huge drops.
It makes this chat more intimate.
I feel like we're in the room together,
the rain's following the thunder, a couple of glasses of whiskey.
I feel like we're in the room together,
the rain's following the thunder, a couple of glasses of whiskey.
I feel like we're in the room together, the rain's following the thunder,
a couple of glasses of whiskey.
Dim the lights, turn on the fire,
and let's talk about why multi-cigs are amazing and good.
I love it, man.
I'm so glad that we get to talk because,
you know, I've been following you just on Twitter
and DMing you once in a while
when something interesting is going on.
You know, a philosophy...
I want to talk more about exactly what you do,
but a philosophy-related professor, right?
And you're writing books about the philosophy of Bitcoin.
And the fact that that's why I get really frustrated
with being in this space is when people don't get that side of it.
You know, when people don't understand that there is a philosophy
to this whole thing that maybe is completely separate from the tech in a way.
So tell me, like, what do you do related to philosophy
and how did you get to where we are here, like where we're talking today?
Could I actually just say why I'm interested in you and your work
and then maybe we can actually draw those together?
Yeah, sure. Hit me.
So I don't remember when I first became aware of you, Chris.
It was probably in 2020 or 2021.
And I started to see this pattern in what you would do on Twitter
and the particular threads you would pull on
and the ways you would poke people.
And it always came down to hidden trust.
You would identify in various systems points of trust
where we were simply asked, users of a system,
let's say it's a protocol or an L2 or an altcoin of some sort,
we're simply asked to trust that the people running the system are doing it well.
And I was at the time rethinking and kind of deepening my own understanding of Bitcoin.
I've been in Bitcoin for a long time from 2014 onwards,
but it was in the early COVID months that with my colleagues that I now write with,
we really started to get deep into, okay, what is the point of all this?
And it comes back to what Satoshi said about the fiat money system,
which is in the P2P Foundation announcement
where he was unleashing Bitcoin, the white paper in the world.
This is before he unleashed the actual program.
And he said the problem with the system is all the trust.
And that was kind of a key that unlocked a lot of things for me
was just returning to that idea of trust and of hidden trust
and when trust can betray or harm us.
So we see that in the fiat money system.
There are different kinds of trust there.
And the theme that I see in your work, and this just shows up, Chris,
and basically everything you say, I think, is that you find trust
and people either don't know it's there or worse,
they lie about it and deny that it's there.
And you're sounding the alarm bells warning people,
wait a minute, this is just the same thing Satoshi warned us about
in October of 2008. What are you doing, guys? Listen.
So that's the theme I see in your work.
And that's what draws me to not just follow you on Twitter,
but sort of to look closely and to take seriously sometimes your –
would it be wrong to call them, let's say, trollish engagements?
I know there's a point to it, right? But that is your style.
I mean, it depends how you define trollish.
But my philosophy, I guess, with all of this stuff, in real life too,
not just on Twitter, is just to say facts, right?
And to say things that are indisputably true
and frustrate people when they realize that they can't argue those facts effectively.
And that comes back to a philosophical – I mean, before Bitcoin,
and part of why I'm fascinated with you is the whole story of philosophy
and the benefits that it brings to these debates when you understand
the benefits of having questions like that that are really challenging to answer.
And that's really what I try to do,
and I definitely am not anywhere near perfect at it or good at it,
and it comes across as trollish and whatnot.
But you're right in that I think when you say hidden trust, that makes a lot –
it's not just trust alone, right? It's hidden trust.
Hidden trust is inherently deceitful, isn't it?
Because it implies that somebody knows that you need to trust them,
but they're not telling you that.
And I think that in today's world, there's –
people have lost sight of the fact that that's happening everywhere
in every aspect of their lives, right?
And keep it unmuted, man, because I want to hear the thunder. I like it.
Okay. Here we go.
You know, there's a connection here between what you and I share,
which is this suspicion of – let's call it demanded trust or hidden trust
when either somebody makes you trust them or they hide that fact.
There's a connection between that and the deep history of philosophy.
Western philosophy doesn't exactly begin with Socrates,
but that's an interesting flashpoint.
And Socrates was known in his day not as a troll.
The word they used then was gadfly.
So imagine this horse fly who kind of harasses the horse
and is hanging around his head and buzzing and sometimes biting
and just won't let the horse sleep.
That's what they said Socrates was.
And what were his bites? His bites were the questions.
Good. So, you know, philosophers in the Western tradition,
we love to be called gadflies because it means that we're doing what Socrates did.
At least that's the conceited – maybe that's a little bit egotistical
to think that you're like Socrates in that way.
But if you're annoying someone just by asking a question
or just by stating what is in fact a provable fact,
that usually means you're on the right track,
that there's something dubious happening that's worth uncovering further.
You know, don't let that horse sleep. Keep on biting. Keep on asking the questions.
That's what Socrates was all about and they killed him for it.
Somebody called me that once and I was offended because I didn't know what it was.
And I went and I Googled it and I saw the comparison to Socrates and all that
and I said, oh, all of a sudden this went from like an awful insult to a compliment somehow.
And that, yeah, I mean, that's what I definitely aim to do.
And I assume, I mean, you do it too, so don't just put it on me, man.
I mean, it's like it's, you know, putting questions –
It takes one to know one.
Putting questions out into the world that are hard to answer because they're mostly, if not totally factual.
And then they're not, for me, I guess they're not always questions.
You know, they're often just statements, you know.
I mean, Chainlink has a multisig.
Most of DeFi relies on Chainlink.
The multisig signers are anonymous.
Therefore, most of DeFi relies on some anonymous people, you know,
and it's billions and billions of dollars
and just these factual things that are objective
and there's nothing subjective about any of it.
And it just drives people crazy because it's not the way that people like to communicate anymore, right?
Especially when there's incentives involved.
And I guess that's where I want to get into with you is –
Well, first, we didn't really get the backstory of you,
which I think I don't even know the full backstory.
But I think you did get a little bit at least.
Well, I'm 39 years old, so there's more story than I care to share here.
I got into philosophy in college.
I wanted to be a lawyer at first, and philosophy was just a way to train, to learn how to argue.
But I really got the bug kind of deep.
And when I was going to take the LSAT, which is the admissions exam for law school,
I missed my exam date, and so I had to make other plans.
So I looked into grad school for philosophy, and that seemed like a fun way to spend some time.
So I did a PhD in philosophy, got a job, tenure.
And one thing that has surprised me about that trajectory
is the intellectual variety I've been able to have along the way.
Many academics study something, and then they teach that thing,
and then they do research and write about that thing basically forever, for 40 years,
an entire career from grad school onwards.
And I've been lucky to have a lot more variety than that.
I was trained in Western analytic metaphysics,
which is a very narrow branch of technical philosophy that's highly abstract.
But then I spent the next few years of my career teaching intercultural philosophy here in Singapore,
where we read and think about texts from Chinese, Indian, and European traditions.
And then I was asked to start leading our PPE major, philosophy, politics, and economics,
and I started teaching classes in money that was partly fueled by my prior interest in Bitcoin
and partly fueled by student demand.
The students just wanted to talk about the philosophy of money
and about new kinds of money that were emerging at the time.
This was 2016, 2017, when Bitcoin started to be in my students' radar.
So I've been tremendously lucky to be able to transition more than once in what I get to think about.
And right now, it's just Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin.
That's become a point of fixation.
But as you know, Chris, Bitcoin opens up many other things.
You could say you're fixated on Bitcoin,
but in fact, it's a window with the rest of the world on the other side of it
because everything connects to money.
It's philosophy, politics, and economics,
and thinking about institutions and computer science and cryptography.
It's really everything.
So endless fascination and fractals to look into.
The closer you look, the harder the problems are and the weirder they are.
But then you see patterns, too,
and they start to resemble the bigger picture that you've seen, too, much like a fractal.
So you're already very much down the philosophy rabbit hole before you discovered Bitcoin.
So that's basically, I mean, was it the philosophy behind Bitcoin that sort of drew you to it?
Or did you discover later?
Not at first.
OK. How did that evolve?
It was number go up, Chris.
That was the first thing.
My best friend told me in 2013, you should buy some Bitcoin.
And I didn't.
And then it crashed and I felt good for not having bought Bitcoin.
And then he told me, Andrew, you really need to buy some Bitcoin.
So I did.
And once you have some, then you have to learn about it.
So I did.
And the rest fell into place.
I started to realize that it's much more strange than I thought it was.
I thought it was digital money.
It's not, though.
It's digital cash.
And there's a difference.
Digital money is nothing special.
Bank deposits are digital.
Most money is digital.
Digital money is older than I am.
Digital cash, though, a bearer instrument that has value that you can move over the Internet,
that is so different and still in some ways unachieved.
You know, Bitcoin strives to be digital cash, but doesn't have all the key properties of cash that we might like.
But seeing that difference, like, oh, this is this is so much more than just a speculative bet.
This is a new kind of thing that might just change our world.
Yeah, it's funny.
The parallels, because I can totally relate because I first heard about it in the same way.
People were just saying I should buy it.
But it was interesting because at that time I was actually working for a guy named Glenn Beck.
And he had left Fox News as a television host.
And he started his own television network called The Blaze.
And this is around that time in 2016.
Same time.
And one of my coworkers in particular was always telling me I should check out Bitcoin.
And at the time, Glenn Beck was going on his TV show and talking about prepping and, you know, and the Fed and all of these very closely related issues.
And it wasn't until I left there and was working with a startup in a coworking spot where we happened to share a coworking space with a company called Blockstack, which is now known as Stacks.
And this was in 2016, 2017, when they were just starting up.
So it was Munib around in that in that space at the time.
Munib and Ryan and Jude and yeah, the first iteration.
Yeah.
And they were just getting started and we were sharing the office with them, us and one other company.
And I was just overhearing them talking about it.
You know, and so it's and then after that, I started to understand what really drew me in, which was obviously the stuff you're talking about and the philosophical side and the the the larger ramifications of just this entire idea of minimizing trust and having digital cash like you're talking about.
And I guess that's yeah, like so that's why I've been really interested in what you're doing.
And I the first exposure I had to you outside Twitter was through your resistance money website, which is fantastic.
Like you have so many awesome papers on there.
I don't know.
You wrote those things with the other.
What is resistance money?
I know it's like more than just a website.
We call it a research collective.
What that means is three guys who like to write together and publish together and our fates are sort of bound up.
So we have a website where we share all of our stuff together and basically a all for one one for all kind of situation in the social sciences or hard sciences, we would be a lab, you know, we'd have a shared workspace where we do our experiments together.
But we're philosophy professors, so we don't have experiments.
We have thought experiments, and we have Google Docs that we share together instead.
Gotcha.
Because yeah, I mean, there's some fantastic stuff on there.
Thank you.
I went through and it's it's you know, like some some titles.
Why Bitcoin needs philosophy Bitcoin and financial injustice.
Hard forks are fan fiction like all this cool stuff.
And it, it's the kind of stuff that I gravitate to because.
Like I said before, like, you know, and you know this too, like when you first got in to this space like I did, like it was really it's hard to get past the initial idea that this is just about number go up.
Right. It's like, it's hard to get to that point where you realize how much of a larger world there is out there.
And just like you said before, digital cash, like that idea alone is mind blowing.
Just once you once you wrap your head around what it means, you know, I guess where I get concerned right now is I feel like most people don't have that knowledge, and they don't even want that knowledge.
And I'm not talking about people like they're using defy or using Bitcoin. I'm talking about the other 99% of the world, especially the people who are like coming up with the laws.
The regulations, like, do you feel like people are getting it or do you feel like we're going to never reach the point where people can really get down that rabbit hole and understand it.
If Bitcoin is what I think it is, namely resistance money, that is a kind of money that enables people to resist institutions and their authority and influence our lives.
If Bitcoin really is that, then I think it's inevitable that people in power, if they understand it, will fight back.
Because it's a tool that can be used to undermine their power. And nobody wants their power to be undermined.
So I actually find, let's say regulatory clapback to be vindication in a way. If Bitcoin really is what I think it is, then we should expect there to be clapback from both corporate and state sectors.
Do you think Elizabeth Warren really understands Bitcoin? Like when she's out there spouting off about it, do you think that she understands the idea of digital cash and censorship, censorship, resistance, etc.
Or does she just think this is just another stock or another currency that's just an illegal currency? Like, where do you think people like her at on it?
Warren in particular is hard to pin down. My own sense, this is pretty subjective, but I've paid attention to her career since she first emerged maybe 2012 or so.
I think she's kind of lost. I think she had a vision when she first came to the Senate. And she was going to be one of the people to bring the banks into line.
This is post-financial crisis.
And if she had kept to that vision, then I think she would see Bitcoin as a powerful tool to keep banks in line because Bitcoin is outside of their purview.
It's something that neither central nor commercial banks nor the financial infrastructure has built atop them can command or control.
So that's the trajectory. If you just looked at Elizabeth Warren of 2008 to 2012, you thought, okay, this is someone who just might get it.
But here's something that happens to everybody who gets in the Senate and who stays for two, three, four terms. They change.
They respond to incentives. They seek reelection. They seek funding for reelection. And they start to compromise.
I think this is this is true of 97 out of 100 senators. There are very, very few exceptions to this rule.
I don't know what's happening subjectively inside her head. Does she get it? Does she not?
But from the outside, it looks like she once was in a position to get it and is simply just like everybody else would, has responded to the incentives around here and now simps for power.
She simps for existing authorities. She simps for the status quo, just like most other senators.
Nobody really wants to change anything when you're on top. If you've made it that far, if you've been elected two, three terms, then you don't want to change anything.
Doesn't that mean she gets it though? Doesn't that mean she gets it if she's resisting, if she's clinging to the status quo?
I guess that's what I was getting at. Like, do these people actually understand the power of the technology?
You know, like, do they actually fear it because they should fear it, right?
If they understand it and they're in power and they want to maintain that power, then they should fear it and they should resist it.
And there's some of these lawmakers that I guess I guess that's what I'm getting at. I feel like people aren't afraid enough yet.
And she's one person who I'm not sure, you know, and she's like the main opposition in this in the Congress right now as far as like the face of the anti crypto movement.
But I almost feel like she's not the final boss, at least in the US.
And I'm not sure that's emerged yet.
I think you're helping me see more clearly my view about Senator Warren. I don't know what's going on inside her head.
And so I take a kind of behaviorist view where I just don't try to guess what's going on inside there, but simply state the behavioral facts.
The behavioral facts look like somebody who gets it and who wants to stop Bitcoin because she realizes that it's a threat.
Maybe maybe that's not true subjectively, though.
Here's maybe an amusing anecdote.
The opening line of our forthcoming book about Bitcoin is our opening sentence is Bitcoin is for criminals.
We wanted to start with something bold.
And we had this book workshop where 15 social scientists were giving us comments on the manuscript, really ripping it apart and helping us improve it.
And we spent half hour discussing this opening line.
And one of the guys there is like, Andrew, Brad, Craig, you cannot use this opening line.
Senator Warren is going to pick up your book and quote it on the Senate floor and say, see, I told you Bitcoin is for criminals.
And we just look at each other like, yes, yes, that JPEG.
If somebody in the Senate floor says Bitcoin is for criminals and what they mean there is not just drugs, assassination markets, sex work,
but they mean criminals of all kinds like Alexei Navalny, too.
MLK was a criminal convicted.
Roya Mabub may have been a criminal for her business dealings in Afghanistan.
Edward Snowden is a criminal, though not convicted, probably guilty of crimes.
Nothing wrong with being a criminal.
The laws are bad. It's good to be a criminal.
So I would love to see that message actually be stated clearly because I think that's part of what makes Bitcoin what it is, is that it is indeed for criminals.
It's for people on the margins who wish to resist institutions.
And that includes both good people and bad people doing both good and bad things.
That's just the plain fact of it.
Yeah. The book is awesome, by the way.
I got to see an early copy or a draft.
Thank you.
We've had so much fun. It is, Chris, it is insane the amount of work we put into this.
It's the hardest thing we've ever done.
There's over 500 sources in the bibliography.
It's hundreds of pages.
We really tried to be responsible to not just go raw, raw Bitcoin and not just FUD Bitcoin,
but really weigh things, pros and cons, and think about it in quite intellectually serious way.
And that's proven to be super hard.
Yeah.
I'm proud of it. And I can't wait to see people tear into it on Twitter and elsewhere,
even on the floor of the Senate, maybe. Who knows?
Yeah. I was actually going through it again before we talked.
And when is it coming out soon, by the way, the book?
We hope by the very end of this calendar year.
But it's an academic book. These things are slow.
There's a long review process.
We've gone through most of that now, but there's still months ahead of us to go.
I pulled out one quote that I found really interesting, made me think a lot,
which was in the part about privacy.
And it says, privacy is the ability to selectively disclose oneself to the world
and that means an important good, even if we have no unqualified right to it.
And that made me sit there and think, like, you know, it's nice to think that we have a right to privacy.
But do we? And then I suddenly realized, wait a minute, we kind of do, right?
We kind of do have a right to privacy, but we can only exercise that right fully through inaction, right?
Through not participating in society, I guess, like, you know, the things that people enjoy,
the fruits of a technological society.
But once we make the conscious decision to participate with tech, with social media,
with mobile phones, with, you know, whatever it might be, once we choose to participate,
then all of a sudden we start to willfully give up that right to privacy.
So I guess I'm not sure if we're fighting for simply the right to privacy
or the right to stay private even when we no longer have that right.
If that makes sense. You know, but it made me think about that a little bit because it's important, I think,
because we make conscious decisions every day that trade away our privacy without really even thinking about it.
I don't know. What do you think about that? Or do you think anything about that?
Oh, I have lots of thoughts about that. Thank you for asking.
The line, the first sentence of the line you quoted is a direct reference to, as you probably know,
the Cypherpunks Manifesto by Eric Hughes, wonderful document from 1992 that lays out the cypherpunk agenda.
And one of the things that I found so insightful from the Hughes definition of privacy is that it distinguishes being hidden from privacy.
So being hidden is when something secret, when it's kept from others.
That's not quite how I think about privacy. And I'm inspired here by by Hughes.
I think privacy is all about consent. So when you consent to have information disclosed, that is not a violation of privacy.
You're no longer hidden, of course. It's no longer secret, but it's not a violation of privacy.
Violations of privacy happen when information is extracted without your consent.
And consent is important. It's very morally important.
So think about the difference between some things that we think are perfectly good, but that can turn bad when there's no consent.
So, for example, exchanging goods and services and money. That's totally good when there's consent.
But when somebody just takes stuff from you without your consent, OK, that's bad.
Having sex with someone, that can be great. It can be good when there's consent.
But when there's not consent, it turns into something else entirely.
I think something is similar, true about information exchange, that consent is morally transformative.
So what matters here is not just being hidden or not.
It's that we have the capacity to choose when and how to be hidden or not.
That's what privacy is all about for the early cypherpunks like Eric Hughes.
And I think that's a really helpful perspective.
Where did he and where do you draw the line, though, with consent?
Because obviously the companies that are impacting our privacy the most and the governments that are impacting our privacy the most today
would say we have consented by agreeing to terms and conditions, agreeing to their privacy policy.
Just by using their product, we're opting into whatever kind of nonsense that they put in the legalese in the small print.
That's another almost philosophical question.
What is consent?
As the expert here in philosophy, where's the best place to reference?
Where are the best dialogues taking place when it comes to what constitutes consent in the technological age?
Or is that conversation even really happening?
It's happening a little bit, but in my view it's somewhat immature, surprisingly immature, given the threats to privacy that now exist in the digital age.
Here's one distinction I found useful when thinking about how privacy can morally transform the things that we do and that happen to us.
It's the distinction between extracted consent and affirmative consent.
Maybe a good example for this is the difference between software that asks you before you could do anything at all in the software.
You have to read through the five pages or 50 pages and then click yes.
That is closer to what I would call extracted consent because it's basically saying you don't get any of this good stuff until you click yes.
Now here's a more affirmative model.
This is the one that Apple has moved, perhaps surprisingly, towards in many of its products, which is by default to share very, very little at all
and to require the user to take affirmative positive steps to in fact share.
So you have to turn on location sharing.
You have to turn on microphone sharing.
You have to turn on your camera sharing when interacting with an app, let's say.
I think affirmative consent is more morally powerful than extracted consent because then we have maybe we just call it more real consent.
It's not someone saying, oh, well, okay, I'll go with it.
It's more like they are positively saying, yes, this is what I want.
Please give it to me.
So maybe we can consider the parallel to sexual ethics.
Someone who says, oh, yeah, I guess it's okay.
That is not enthusiastic consent and that's not great to have in a sexual partner.
But someone who says, yes, please, I want this from you.
Well, that's much better.
That's a better situation for all, morally speaking and otherwise, too, when it's actually enthusiastic and an affirmative.
But that's almost the trade off people make when they use free products, right?
Because yes, free products aren't really free.
They're buying your information, as we all know.
And you're the product and all that stuff that you always ignore when people tell you.
Right. But, you know, you pay for that iPhone.
You pay a lot of money for that iPhone.
So Apple wants to give you ownership over the tech, which is a solid move.
But you you aren't paying for your Gmail.
You aren't paying to use Google search.
You know, you aren't you may be paying to use Twitter.
Hey, even if you're paying to use Twitter, they're extracting your data.
So I guess that's a double fail.
But do you think because where I get nervous about all this is that no matter what we do, like 99 percent of people just won't care.
You know, and they'll just continue to use whatever is easiest, whatever is cheapest, whatever makes their life simpler.
And then there's going to be people like us being like, well, but your privacy, but your privacy.
And this also this isn't just privacy.
This is like this is everything related to trust.
Right. I guess this goes full circle almost back to the whole trust issue.
Because people are trusting that Google, for instance, is going to do right by them when it comes to using their information.
That's why they're willing to give it up.
If people people went to Google and saw on the home page, you're giving us all this information and there's a solid chance or rather you have to trust us that we're not going to use it for evil.
But we can't guarantee that and we can't promise that and we can't tell you how we're going to use it exactly.
We might end up losing it even to a hacker.
And you might even get your identity stolen as a result of you using this product.
You might lose your life savings.
You might lose.
You know, you might lose your job.
There's a lot of things that could go wrong.
But we want you to go ahead and search for that item.
Now, if that popped up on the home screen, there might be more people that would be wondering, should I really be using this or should I maybe think about this a little bit more?
Right. And that's the case.
I try to make with DeFi, too.
It's like people go and they use these these crypto Web 3 DeFi products and they know in the back of their mind that there's something going on.
They know that they're having to trust something or somebody or they know it's not perfect, but they don't know and they don't stop to think that, hey, if you use this,
if you put twenty five thousand dollars of your own money into this DeFi app right now, like you're about to do to earn three percent interest, there's four guys sitting in Russia that have multi sig keys that have access to that money, could pull it out, could run away to a desert island, change their identity and never be heard from again.
And why would they do that? Because it's like a hundred million dollars. That's why they would do it.
Like if that was on the home page of the DeFi app, people might think twice.
Right. But do you think that like, I don't know, where do you stand on this issue?
Like, do you think that people will ever care unless they're they're forced to be exposed to that information? Because this this goes to my this goes against my libertarian side. You know, it's a force. These these companies to educate people.
But I don't know how else we can get there.
This is a difficult cluster of problems. I have two thoughts.
The first is a very pragmatic one, which is just that for most of us, pain is not just the best teacher. Pain is the only teacher.
If you're like me, and many of us are the only way you ever learn anything is to suffer.
So this is an old message. This goes back to the Greek tragedies out of suffering wisdom.
And we could flip it around and say only out of suffering wisdom. The only way to become wise to not be a fool is to suffer.
So that's basically true of all humanity for all time.
And I think it's especially true in cases like this, that until you've lost, until you've been rugged, until you've been hurt, you just don't learn these lessons.
So that is a maybe not a happy truth to acknowledge. But I think it's just the pragmatic fact of human nature.
This is the only teacher that we listen to is not just the teacher that is experience, but the teacher that is painful experience.
There's a second thought that maybe is a bit more hopeful, which is that sometimes people can be inspired to use, let's say, freedom technology of various kinds.
And not just from the fear of losing or the fear of pain. Sometimes it is easier or more profitable to use freedom technology.
And think about what's a good example. Signal is actually easier and better to use than many other chat apps.
It has a better user interface and every time they improve on some margin, it makes it more likely that somebody will use Signal who's not some privacy buff.
So there's a case where you're using it because it has unlimited video storage or makes it really easy to share this, that, or the other thing with your friends, or because there's a network effect, or there's a great group chat that you want to be a part of.
But as a kind of side benefit, all of a sudden, your freedom just went up. Your privacy just went up.
Now, maybe the best example of this is actually Bitcoin itself. What is the main incentives that so many of us had to at least begin using Bitcoin?
Number go up. It's because we wanted to profit. Yeah.
And so because it was to our benefit to buy Bitcoin, we actually acquired a little bit of something else on the side that we maybe didn't even know we were getting at first, which is a little more sovereignty, a little more freedom, a little more privacy, a little more independence from the institutions that we'd otherwise be forced to trust to make our money, to manage it for us or to mediate our transactions.
So of course, pain is the best teacher, sometimes the only teacher, but there are other tools. And I think this is one of Satoshi's genius.
One of the things that makes him a genius is using that extra tool of concrete positive benefits to actually drive people into using freedom technology.
Like a Trojan horse, basically, is what a Trojan horse of.
I guess what are other examples of that though? Like what are other examples of new tech that's come along and lured people in and they ended up getting more freedom from it?
Let's let's think about.
Here's an example. I don't like paying for a VPN, but sometimes I need one.
I use Tor a lot. When Tor is working well, and right now it's working well, it is better and easier to use than most VPNs.
You can rotate IP addresses easily between you just change your exit node.
It's one app that's fully integrated. And as long as you're doing stuff within that app, there's low risk of leakage.
You know, your IP being leaked out through other network traffic because you're doing it all inside that little browser window.
So there's a case where cheap and convenient because it's all within one app.
I just double click and then I use it.
Something that is kind of superficially attractive turns out to have deeper freedom benefits to that may be unknown to some users.
Not all Tor users need and are seeking high powered anonymity.
And yet they get it. They get it when they use Tor.
It's a good example, but I feel like crypto.
Well, I should say Bitcoin. But I mean, there are other examples of cryptocurrencies.
I think that fall into these categories that they're unique in this sense.
And that I can't really think of as good of an example in at least in the past hundred years.
I could be missing something and maybe even longer of a technology that that served as such a good Trojan horse for for liberty and for separation from tyrants, you know,
and from governments that we don't really need and things like that.
And it's only it's only working that way because it is a form of money and because it's been adopted as a form of money and believed to be a form of money.
And other technologies that have come up in the past, you know, Tor and just the Internet in general, right, have been tools that, you know,
and I guess the Internet is probably the next best good comparison where people most people like not you and me, but most people started using the Internet for specific reason.
Right. Maybe they needed to for work. Maybe they wanted to go to this website.
You know, maybe they wanted to do this or that specific activity.
And then they get sucked into all the rest of of it. Unlike me, who was in 1993 at Cornell University, like getting in line to get my email address.
It was like 200 people long at the library.
Like you had to line up and they would hand you a piece of paper. Here's your email address.
Go back to your computer and here's here's how you can log in. You log in. There's nothing there.
Like, what is this? And then you go on Gopher and try to find things to do.
I loved Gopher in the early 90s. I had access through my dad who got it through the University of the Pacific.
This is 90, 93 about the same time I was I was younger than you.
But yeah, opened up new vistas just like, oh, my God, there's so much stuff out there through bulletin board systems and then Gopher and email and eventually the Web.
Those were fun days, man. And I still have like I found in my parents basement, I think it was from like 94 or 95.
It was like it was called the Yellow Pages of the Internet and it had every single Web site.
Yes, listed. Yes. You could fit every Web site into a book that was maybe 100 pages.
It's amazing. And that was a lot for that time. I mean, it's like they were they were it was it was awesome.
It was fun to look at that and be like, oh, my God, this was the whole Internet back then.
Gopher was crazy for the time. Usenet obviously was where all the freaks hung out.
That's where I learned how to argue online was the mid to late 90s on Usenet just fighting endlessly with random people whose names I still remember in some cases.
Oh, man. That's awesome. Yeah. Usenet was like, yeah, you could download that was that was the original place to get like stuff that you you couldn't or you weren't supposed to have, let's say, you know, digital contraband of all kinds.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Except instead of in the in those days, instead of just downloading a file, you had to you had to basically download a whole bunch of text and then have some other program to decode the text into a file and then figure out what to do with it from there.
The good old days, man. And then tell that's a whole nother story. Tell that I was into going in trolling some of the chat rooms that were on telnet and stuff like that.
Yeah, for me, that was the transition from the BBS days into the internet was it was a very similar experience when you would tell that into a server basically like a BBS, except you didn't have to call it.
You just did it over your internet connection. So for me, it was like a stepping stone from racking up long distance charges on my parents phone for BBS is to tell net with a local number.
We would dial into the University of the Pacific to get access to their servers. We've come a long way, man. We've come a long way. Do you think we're boomers now? The people who remember this?
I think you're Gen X. I'm old millennial, but everybody else, we're just boomers.
I guess so. But I actually think there's something valuable about that that I try to bring you and I remember a more decentralized internet.
You and I remember when if you want to talk about X, you would go to a forum dedicated to X. And if you want to talk about why there'd be another forum about why different servers run by different people with different moderation rules, some more sensorious than others.
And that's very different than the internet now, whereas if you want to talk about X, you go to the subreddit dedicated to X or you search for the X hashtag on Twitter.
Very different structure, much more centralized. Now, I think there's something precious about the early internet and it's much more decentralized structure, at least in those respects decentralized.
That's worth remembering. And when we can recovering.
So there's my boomer pitch. Well, when you're when you're going through that life cycle, it goes back farther though. And it's funny because if you think about like CompuServe and AOL and the chat rooms and the message boards and whatever they had back then.
And then you think about how that sort of evolved into the internet and the internet in the early days was like you're saying like totally free, totally, you know, anything goes.
And then you think about where we are now it's doesn't it almost start to feel like a circle.
Doesn't almost start to feel like we've somehow over the past 30 years figured out how to just go back and sort of almost recreate the walled garden.
You know when you think about Apple and their their app store and you think about Twitter being you know basically owning the conversation.
That's just prodigy all over again. That's CompuServe or maybe you remember this one eWorld during that one.
Apples, Apples little walled garden.
It only ever had half a million users and I think it closed to 95 is short lived.
Okay. Okay. Now I was a CompuServe guy still have my CompuServe address ingrained into my head. It was like nine digits or something like that.
It's funny how it's sort of you know the freest period of the internet was was at its launch right when you know you actually it was after its launch because at its launch it was mostly controlled by universities and that's right 13 universities.
Yeah, like you couldn't do.
You actually couldn't go on the internet in 93 and just post whatever you want because you didn't have access to to do that you know and then the web came along and you you had actually well you could you could have FTP server or whatnot but nobody would see it.
I guess that's the key. It's like people need to be able to see it you know and then as years went on you began to get accessible tools to be able to deploy your website and actually have people see your stuff.
And there are some similarities to what we're seeing now I guess you know with Bitcoin and the way that things have come along and you know in 2016 2017 people were just creating your seat erc 20s like they were candy and just doing ICOs and selling them and that was like you know and like up until now it's been almost like you could do whatever the hell you want.
And then Shopify was like the Wild West the past couple years with people just cranking out smart contracts and 10 million 100 million being deposited anything goes.
And now you know we're starting to see the regulation people are waking up you know everybody's starting to realize even the developers are capitulating they're like okay we're going to have to capitulate to the people that want to control us we're going to have to centralize this to a certain extent and we're going to have to be you know just go against the original ethos of this thing.
And the parallels are almost eerie when you think about it like that you know because it's going to end up coming full circle except a lot faster than the internet did you know it goes from fiat to you know to Bitcoin and the defy and it were quickly going to go full circle into the CBDC world.
You know and and I wanted to you know while we had time I wanted to get some of your thoughts on that and like the way things are shaping up and I mean obviously I think it's the biggest threat to our liberty that exists.
I think it period is the idea of a fully government controlled central bank digital currency.
Do you think I'm overreacting to it or do you do you share that concern.
Oh Chris I share that concern.
Before we move to CBDC's could I comment on the the previous theme.
We were observing let's say expansions and contractions of centralization for network computers.
And I think the pre internet BBS era is a highly decentralized era where anyone can run a BBS you just turn on your modem and people dial into it maybe one or two at a time.
And then you have the internet slightly more centralized around universities.
Maybe there is an expansion of decentralization along the way as you have non walled gardens start to emerge and maybe we're seeing that contract and centralized now.
If I had to guess and this is a hopeful guess not exactly a prediction let's call it a hopeful guess.
I think people are waking up now in new ways to the dangers of centralization.
When I see my friends get on Mark Zuckerberg's new app threads and they post stuff they want to post and then it gets deleted.
They get super pissed off.
Why.
Well because people want to post what they want to post and they don't really like the fact that you can't really talk about anything interesting on threads that it has to be happy pictures of people with coffee on beaches and with kids in beautiful clothes.
They actually want to do something a little bit more interesting more Twitter like.
That is the teacher of pain speaking right there. Now it's a small pinprick you know this is not the pain of having your bank account shut down.
But it's a small harbinger of the pain that centralization and centralized power can cause.
So there's one dynamic I see is let's say let's say normies waking up in various ways to the threats of decentralized social media and app stores and so on.
Now here's another trend that I observe.
We are getting better and better at non Bitcoin freedom technologies and let me give you one that I really care about a sector which I call data sovereignty.
Each of us over the years acquires tons of data years and years of pictures of MP3 is that you've collected of videos you've recorded of your children of your family.
Hundreds maybe thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of emails collected over a lifetime of work.
Do you entrust all that data just to the cloud I eat justice someone else's computers.
Well when Google shuts down people's accounts when Facebook shuts down people's accounts they lose access to years and years of pictures pain is teaching them to care about data sovereignty.
Now here's the good news is that there are better and better tools for data sovereignty things like the start nine these little and there are others as well little servers you basically just keep in your closet that stores all your shit for you.
Right. They're getting easier and easier to use almost as easy as Google photos.
And at that point well you might as well. It's actually on the margin maybe even easier if you have more than a terabyte of photos to just store it yourself instead of paying Google to do it for you you have a once off fee and you have a little computer in your closet does it for you.
So I see the emergence of that kind of technology that makes the user experience super easy for data sovereignty as a very happy trend that could unite with people becoming dissatisfied with centralization of data to have a kind of happy result.
Now special bonus those little servers in your closet could also be your bitcoin node could also be your lightning router could be other cool stuff for you besides.
Yeah. But my my concern I guess I'm pretty cynical on this topic because I totally agree that you know as people feel as people have personal challenges with tech they start to research other ways to do it right like you're talking about like start nine or next cloud or you know whatever self hosting like those are all great solutions signal etc.
I don't feel like most people will ever get there you know and I guess the challenge is they would need to get there before the next big power grab occurs because these power grabs occur all at once and they happen when society is going through a period usually a fear.
Right and we think about we think about all the rights we lost over the past three years since the cove and stuff began that we're never going to get back think about you know a lot of I mean yes we have fought back on a lot of it.
But that if that happens again you know I feel like we're still in a position where we're going to be heavily restricted in ways that we previously thought were unimaginable.
If you think about 9-11 and everything that happened after that and all the rights that we lost that we never got back this is going to keep happening and it's probably going to keep happening with greater frequency and for people like you and me and whoever is listening to this like we know that we have tools we have ways to do what we want to do for now at least.
But the problem is as time goes on the other 98% of the world is going to be told that we're the enemy.
Right and they're going to be told that we're the bad guys and we're already there with Bitcoin like the average person is having you know is probably not where we are as far as like thinking like Bitcoin's freedom money Bitcoin's great for the world with most people are thinking still Bitcoin is for drug dealers Bitcoin is for you know.
This or that and all the stuff that Elizabeth Warren says because they listen to CNN and that's where you know MSNBC and that's where her big fat head pops up it says stupid stuff.
So that's where I get a little cynical on the idea that because we have these options today that they're really going to matter in the long term.
I don't know does that make sense there's an there's an old lesson here it was one that the American founders knew well and many of them wrote about it some with with great passion and persuasiveness which is that the fight for Liberty is never a one soft thing you can never be done eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
And I guess what they knew then is still true today that you can never achieve privacy or Liberty or self sovereignty you can never achieve it once and for all takes ongoing vigilance ongoing software development yes ongoing activism and more.
Now Chris I'm actually not quite as pessimistic as you about one thing you said there like you I was alarmed and watched with great interest the expansion of state power during the covert era and like you I predicted that it wouldn't contract that was my my base case was that it wouldn't contract.
So let me give you some examples in Singapore of things that expansions of state power. Just to give you a flavor what I had in mind you couldn't go to a store without checking in on your phone.
You couldn't be in a group at a table without scanning the QR code at that table and you couldn't have groups of more than two.
That was after restaurants reopened. You couldn't have people into your home without them scanning a QR code on an app.
So our every movement was tracked on a centralized database.
We were all masked couldn't do much at all. And this lasted for about two years longer than it did most parts of the world.
But now I live and work in Singapore now I can walk around wherever I like I don't scan any codes. The app has been deleted.
There's no masking. There's no social distancing requirements or anything. So I thought once the government has that power and has the infrastructure set up it's going to last for a long time.
It actually kind of disappeared and that's even in a place that's not particularly free of Singapore.
So I found that oddly encouraging that all these covert era restrictions didn't keep inertia the way that post 9 11 restrictions on travel did.
So I'm with you on the 9 11 case and maybe some others the covert case was slightly more encouraging than I would have guessed.
But but in general I'm with you went when institutions expand authority they rarely contract until we make them. They require discipline.
I guess where I get stuck is what you just described does not sound like authority contracted.
It sounds like authority still has that switch the on off switch right. And they can flip that switch whenever they want.
And they already know they did it for two years. They left the switch on. People stayed home.
They success you know a few hundred people in government successfully controlled through technology and fear millions of people.
And then one day they decided to switch that flip that switch off.
And when they flip that switch off it's not a switch off on their authority.
It's just them exerting more control. And that's my that's the heart of my concern is is everywhere.
Not just in Singapore and not just in the US but everywhere governments learned that they have power that most people will follow in times of fear and that they can use technology to to exert that level of control.
And even you know Joe Biden references during during the pandemic.
I remember at one point he said we have knobs we can turn we can dial it up we can dial it down. That whole concept is is horrifying when you connect it to the type of allegedly decentralized tech that's being built especially with regards to decentralized identity.
And you realize that that can be perfectly controlled by a knob in a you know in a way that they can't do today.
You know they can if you have your decentralized identity in a wallet you know with your you know vaccine status and your driver's license and all these different things that it's promoted as oh this is good for you and good for freedom because you don't have to show your whole medical history if you want to go in the grocery store.
You only have to let them scan this QR code that tells them yes he's vaccinated no he's not.
But the problem is that means that that can be fine tuned by the government so the government can say okay today we're changing the rule if your vaccine is not is more than two days old you can't enter the store.
Well yesterday it was fine today it's not.
Guess what if you posted this on Twitter you know we're automatically revoking your access to the store.
It's that kind of stuff that concerns me and I think that we haven't seen signs of that power receding and with you know the final thing with CBDC.
I see that all being connected and that's why I think CBDC is the greatest threat to our liberty because it gives the people in positions of authority which basically means the people who control all the guns.
It gives them the ability to fine tune our monetary life which by the way controls how much you can eat whether you can pay for a roof over your head whether you can pay for clean water pretty much everything you need for survival in the modern world.
So where do you where do you stand on that?
You're unlikely to find disagreement for me about anything you just said about CBDCs.
I view them with alarm.
Now there is one one way it could be okay.
Suppose CBDCs launched but had strong cryptographic privacy protections suppose that they were Chameon ecash mints where the issuer cannot even in principle know when tokens are spent or who they're spent to or how or even when.
Now that would be amazing.
That would be the best case scenario.
There are a few white papers coming from central banks that talk about how to use blind signatures or a Chameon mint to accomplish that so they are aware of this.
But the more realistic side of my mind says wait a minute.
This isn't going to happen.
That is a 5% outlier scenario.
It might happen from some like you know small maybe Switzerland will do it.
Well yeah or some you know it could be used as a way to attract investments you know or to attract like for a small country like El Salvador or something like that you know that.
But I mean from the powerhouses of the world that don't need to appease people because they already have them as prisoners i.e. the United States of America.
I don't think there's any precedent for that.
I just don't there is there's one in the physical case which is cash.
Governments across the world through their central banks issue a very powerful form of freedom technology which is physical cash.
So it does exist it has existed.
I hope it will continue to continue to exist for a long time.
But they didn't.
Is that.
They didn't create cash as a way to enhance our freedom.
They just cash exists because it was the only way to do it.
Right. It's like when cash was invented or even if you want to go back to Fiat you know there was no way to do digital yet.
And so that's a relic now.
It's a relic of a time when there was just no other way to do it.
So that's the justification they're going to use to get rid of it.
But I don't think that there's any precedent for a government that has the level of power of the United States or the EU sitting down and saying you know what we're going to give up control.
We're going to give up this level of power so that people can enjoy freedom from any sort any level of tyranny that we may choose to implement over the next 50 to 100 years.
You know I just don't think that there's precedent for that even though some politicians say it and they say they want to do it.
I just don't think there's precedent in human history for it and that's bold I guess human history is a long time.
But I mean at least in modern history governments haven't done that.
You know so that's why I don't have high hopes for CBDC and I'm actually thinking the opposite.
You know it's almost like what's your exit strategy.
How do you get as far away from this as you can in my head.
But I think you're right about human history.
Most people are unwilling to give up power and the few people who have done so in a important significant way are actually notable precisely because they did it.
So you know the Roman general Cincinnati stepped aside to return to his farm.
We know that story and we admire him as the great symbol of the Roman Republic for what it could have been what it was.
Precisely because he was unique he was the only guy who did it.
Same for General George Washington who didn't become king of the new United States though he could have.
We only admire him and name states and districts and more things after him precisely because he was so unique.
So yes very few step away from power.
I spent a lot of time reading central bank white papers about what CBDC's could or might or would be all of them talk about privacy at least a little bit.
Nine times out of 10 though the privacy guarantees they make come down to just two words trust us.
It's like oh yes of course there'll be privacy there'll be a database that is protected and that only the people who really need to know will know who is spending money.
What and what amounts and how and when and where precisely that is nothing more than trust us.
And anyone who demands to be trusted is dangerous in my opinion.
Now trust is a great thing when it's earned but when it is asked or demanded by someone in power run away or better yet build alternatives that make it possible for you to live without trusting them.
Of course this is just music to the cypher punk's ears right.
That's the whole program for 30 years now is to shame the people who say trust us but not just that.
You have to build alternatives to to allow us in practical ways to step away from the would-be tyrants who demand that we trust them.
Amen to that.
Well hey man thanks for thanks for doing this.
This has been a great chat we should do it again sometime.
I agree on both fronts great chat with you Chris.