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You can check out Foundation and their Passport Bitcoin Wallet at foundationdevices.com.
On today's episode, I have a really thought provoking conversation with Lynn Alden, who
is the founder of the Lynn Alden Investment Strategy, a great blog at LynnAlden.com and
the author of the upcoming book, Broken Money, about the history of monetary technologies.
We're both Bitcoin fans, but I think you'll be surprised by some of the topics we get
into here.
Check it out.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thanks for joining me, Lynn.
I, I really appreciate it.
The insights that you offer on Twitter and on your blog and you're one of the people,
you're one of the few people in crypto.
I know you go beyond crypto, but you're one of the few people who seems to be universally
respected.
I try my best.
It's definitely not universal.
There are certain pockets, especially among some of the less decentralized cryptos.
They don't like my criticism, so I'm not really well respected from those groups, but I think
I'm respected from most people I care about.
It's interesting because I don't see that.
Twitter doesn't show me that part of you.
Twitter just shows me, oh wait, X.
X are we ever going to get used to it, man?
Are we ever going to get used to calling it X?
I think I'm going to keep calling it Twitter.
And I try to choose my battles, and so I've taken some swipes at certain cryptos, but
I guess because I don't do it too frequently, I'm not often having those kind of challenges,
but it kind of comes in waves.
If I make a particularly harsh criticism of one of the cryptos, I'll get that crypto army
coming after me.
But other than that, yeah, I don't really make that many enemies.
You tweeted the other day that you...
Wait, let me find it.
You said, you all see my published tweets.
The unpublished ones are the funniest ones, but I've been too nice to post most of them.
So what are we missing?
What's in the drafts?
I think if someone has seen some of my criticisms of Elon and Twitter, they'd probably get an
idea what some of my other unpublished tweets are.
Those are some of the ones I managed to publish.
I've been pretty critical of Elon because I think one of the things that tends to annoy
me is dishonesty.
So if there are people I disagree with, but I think that they believe what they're saying
and they're intellectually honest, even though I see the world differently, I feel like I
can relate to that person.
But I feel like if someone is playing a role or is trolling or is doing things like that,
that tends to annoy me more than the other way around.
And especially because he's now running the platform.
And so I'm not going to take swipes at most people, but when the guy is running the platform,
I'm willing to punch up, in other words.
So why does it bother you?
What is it about it that eats at you?
Do you feel like he's being a scammer or do you feel like he has ulterior motives or what
is it?
I think it's partially hypocrisy.
So he's historically been a very good marketer.
For much of the Tesla period, he's been really focusing on the green angle and usually generally
over-promising either in terms of Tesla or solar things that he's going to do.
And so he's been very effective at selling equity, which has really helped the fundamentals
of his companies.
And then when Bitcoin was having its bull run, he played into the Bitcoin theme and
he got Bitcoiners to like him a lot.
But then he shifted over to Doge and would troll around with Doge, which actually would
in many ways cost a lot of people money.
He was basically making these traps for people.
And then in the current era, I think he's playing politics in a way that he's purposely
rolling up certain bases and provoking other bases and in all of these different things,
whether he's playing around with ESG narratives, whether he's playing around with Bitcoin or
crypto, whether he's playing around with politics, he's pushing buttons, I think, strategically
rather than because he feels a certain way.
And one of the, I think, hypocritical aspects of Twitter is that if you look at some of
the statistics, he complot...
So he's operating on a free speech theme compared to the prior management.
And in some areas that's true, but then in other areas, especially outside of the US,
Twitter's compliance with government takedown requests has increased under Elon's watch.
And one of the complications is that because Twitter is not his largest business, so Tesla
and SpaceX are more important, there is a conflict of interest there where if the people
running Turkey or India, countries like that, if they reach out and say, hey, can you take
this off Twitter?
He's very quickly to comply because what he ultimately wants to do is sell Teslas and
rockets in those countries.
That's more financially important to him.
And so there's a conflict of interest when you run a media platform and have other bigger
business interests.
I would argue that it's similar or worse than, say, corporate media when they have all sorts
of major corporate sponsors, like pharmaceutical sponsors, for example, whatever the case may
be, they're obviously going to be biased towards their major sponsors.
While in Elon's case, his biggest, quote unquote, sponsors are the rocket company and the car
company.
And he will make deals with those countries.
And then those tend to be the countries that he also has the most rapid takedown requests
with.
He basically complies.
He doesn't fight back.
And even years ago on Twitter, India or Turkey would ask them to take stuff down and they
would say no.
And they would challenge it in their courts and stuff and sometimes win.
And Elon has generally folded over quicker in those jurisdictions.
But the market where he has leverage is the United States.
And that's where he's playing that what I view as a free speech game.
It's not true free speech, but he's using that as his current theme in a similar way
that he's used prior themes.
And then there's obviously, there's things like the whole substack fiasco.
You couldn't even like a post that would mention substack for a period of time.
There's been like a weird set of behaviors that is not consistent with the angle that
he's going on.
And so I've been generally pointing them out.
Isn't this though like what every company does now?
Isn't this, I feel like global capitalism has resulted in if you're not a hypocrite
in this way that you're describing, that you're almost betraying your shareholders
because you're not seeking out the strongest profit route.
You're giving up money if you're not doing this kind of stuff.
So isn't this kind of like a global thing?
Is it unique to Elon?
So I think the thing that's unique is the delta, the difference between what people
think he's doing and what he's actually doing.
So for example, if we take Tim Cook as an example, Apple, not many people these days
have illusions that Tim Cook is...
Yeah, basically I think what Tim Cook's doing and what the perception of Tim Cook's doing
are roughly in line.
I think everybody knows he's got to do certain things to not piss off China, not piss off
all the different major markets that he cares about.
And he's got to be this kind of very controlled figure.
And I have been critical of Apple.
Like when they remove certain things in the app store, I think that they have that kind
of monopoly power and they kind of go against their...
They're almost the inverse of their 1984 commercial.
They're now the big entity that's kind of...
They'll take down certain apps and they'll say, you can't have like Nostr zaps in the
app store, for example, because it violates that they get a cut of 30% of everything or
that even if it's just a tip, it's not actually paying for content.
And so I think critical of Apple, but I've not been as aggressive at most of these companies.
And I think the issue with Elon is that unlike many other CEOs, a lot of people are actually
fooled by it.
Whereas no one's really fooled by Tim Cook.
They're not even really trying to fool people that much, but Elon is more successful at
it.
And so I generally push back where I think there's a gap or a delta that's worth pointing
back to because otherwise you're just preaching to the choir.
If I just come out and say, hey, Apple's not a...
They're basically a giant corporate tool like all other giant corporations.
People are like, well, yeah, what else is new?
So I generally only go after things where I think there's a mismatch.
And also I think just naturally because my social media platform of choice is Twitter
and Elon obviously has a very big presence on Twitter.
So I would come across Elon more than I would say come across most other CEOs in terms of
content.
Yeah.
I just wonder, like I'm thinking about, okay, Tim Cook, for instance, a good example, Apple's
pretty consistent with what they do and what they preach and what they actually execute.
But that's because that's their strategy almost.
They've taken the human element out of leadership in a way, at least publicly, right?
So Tim Cook obviously has a lot more views than he says to us, right?
He's just not out there spouting out everything that he thinks.
And then when he brings that stuff into the boardroom, the leadership of the company is
able to shoot it down and make sure he's...
It's not the Tim Cook show.
Apple would never allow that to happen.
Now it was the Steve Jobs show, right?
So it's interesting how Apple has evolved and sort of learned its lesson from those
days because I'm sure you'd agree like the Steve Jobs Apple was a lot more like the Elon,
Tesla, SpaceX, X Twitter than Tim Cook Apple is, right?
So it seems like Apple's made that strategic decision.
So are there other...I just feel like though that there's almost like a balance...like
do you feel like Apple struck the right balance there or should there be more humanity and
less politics into the leadership of a company like that?
Well, I think it's somewhat inevitable.
When you're a $3 trillion company, I just think mainly it's not that I want to necessarily
give Apple advice other than to criticize them for certain areas sometimes where I think
it kind of interferes with decentralization or kind of makes a mockery of their prior
themes, which is fairly uncommon but still pops up.
And even the Steve Jobs era, I mean, I'm not someone who's ever really been that critical
Steve Jobs.
I mean, he has certain parts of his personality that I think people are critical of, rightfully,
but I wouldn't really put him in quite in the same camp as Elon.
He's certainly a colorful founder and larger than life character, but I don't think that
he had that as big of a mismatch between what he would say and what he would really think
as Elon does.
And so I mainly just focus on where I think there's a gap.
And it's a combination of focusing on where there's a gap and just focusing on what's
around me and because I'm on Twitter, Elon's around more than say Zuckerberg is, for example.
And I've been critical of Zuckerberg in the past, but I think in this kind of current,
the past few years, I've generally found that the Elon mismatch, I think, is the most interesting
one for me to criticize at least.
I mean, there's other world leaders or figures out there that I would obviously dislike more
than Elon, but I feel like anything I would say about them is not particularly different
than what the consensus seems to be.
So it's less worth saying.
Yeah.
I think a lot of what you're saying is there's direct connections to the stuff that I've
been saying about the stuff that's going on with Ethereum and the DeFi slash Web3 stuff
that's being built and it's being promoted as decentralized.
And it's clearly not when you dig in and you find these chain link things and you find
these different things that completely almost centralize it just by the essence of that
one fact.
And my take is always, look, if you're going to do this stuff, be transparent about it
and don't just be transparent, like stick it on page 300 of your docs, but don't go
out to the world, don't go out to the press and say, hey, this is decentralized.
It's the first time in the world we're seeing stuff like this.
This is going to remove middlemen from the equation when you know it's not true.
You're actually out there lying to people sometimes through omission and sometimes by
actually lying with words.
And I think the common theme between what you're saying and what I'm saying with this
stuff is about being transparent with your motives, at least to the point where people
aren't getting scammed.
And I think that it does, and I've been using the word scam a lot lately.
I'm curious how you think about it, but I just think about it now as just dishonesty,
dishonesty and a deliberate lack of transparency so that the people that are using a product
or they're using a service don't really understand the ramifications of what they're using.
Do you think that makes sense as far as calling something a scam?
Yeah, so to unpack that a little bit, I think to start with, I think that whole comparison
is correct, meaning that my criticisms of Elon are similar to your criticisms of crypto.
Basically, you notice a gap between what is said and what you evidence is true.
And maybe there's a number of categories where you might cover that, but you happen to have
certain things you cover more.
So it's crypto in this case.
And so that's where people ask, why do you spend so much attention on this?
And you can articulate better than I can, but you point out that, well, it's because
there's a gap between what they're saying and what is true.
And so you've been putting some effort into focusing on that.
I don't put as much effort into the whole Elon Tesla thing.
I just kind of point that out as something that I tend to be a little rougher on because
that's the gap that tends to get my attention significantly.
I think it's for similar reasons.
And for both crypto and say, Elon companies, I try to be targeted.
So for example, I don't criticize SpaceX that often, whereas it's not an area where it's
not like if a rocket blows up, I'm out there like, hey, look at this.
I'm not that critical of SpaceX.
It's more been directed at certain aspects of Tesla, like certain false promises there,
or more recently, certain false promises with free speech or the gap between what he's doing
in the US versus elsewhere and these conflicts of interest and stuff.
So it's a targeted type of criticism.
And when I focus on crypto, I generally, I kind of start by painting with a broad brush
because out of the tens of thousands of coins, most things are garbage and the burden of
proofs always on the project to demonstrate some degree of value.
But when I'm criticizing a specific project, I try to use the word scam a little bit selectively.
I tend to reserve that for what I would define or describe as projects that from the inception
are intentionally malicious projects purely to capture money, which is a lot of them.
And I try not to use scams for projects that have a little bit of something there or that
I can see why the creators honestly thought something that they're doing is interesting,
but then are over marketing or overstating it or probably in some cases believing their
own narrative.
I generally criticize that in other ways rather than kind of outright calling them a scam
because if I call everything a scam, then I dilute the word scam.
And so if there's like a more obvious scam, then what word do I use for it?
So I try to, usually when possible, I try to target appropriately or pick my words carefully.
But I think scam is probably the right word for most projects in crypto.
Yeah.
What do you do when everything is a scam?
What do you do then?
Well, that's one of the criticisms that people level at me is they say I'm a Bitcoin maxi,
which is, I'm certainly, I guess, Bitcoin maxi adjacent.
I like Bitcoin as a network.
I've been constructive on stable coins because there's real demand for them in certain markets.
But outside of certain areas like that, I've been very critical of the broad space because
I think the long tail of almost all of it is affinity scams, essentially.
Yeah.
I came from the Bitcoin mindset and I brought that to the Ethereum stuff that I'm looking
at.
And it's interesting.
It's an interesting evolution actually over the last six, seven years.
The core principles have stayed the same as far as the measuring stick, although Bitcoin
does have some concerns for me long term.
I want to talk to you about that later.
But as far as the Ethereum stuff goes, what I've been noticing about myself is, well,
not about myself as much as other people, I guess, is that people come into anything
that's called blockchain or decentralized or whatever they call it that gives you that
idea that it's something different, something new.
People come into it assuming that it inherits a lot of the properties of Bitcoin as far
as trust minimization and the ethos of it and the intent behind the project.
People come in with that mindset.
And in Ethereum, it's almost never the case.
There's always these points of centralization that would be absolutely intolerable in Bitcoin.
And so this is what I go to the developers and I say, you're not explaining this clearly
enough so that a new user will get it.
But they say, then they point to page 300 of the docs and they say, well, it's right
there.
I say, do you think that a new user is really going to read your docs and even get to page
two?
No, they're not going to know what you're talking about.
And then I switch into a regulator mode.
I switch into a government mind where I'm like, the only way that you can make this
not a scam, in my opinion, is to on your homepage in plain English with a big yellow triangle
or a big red siren, say to the user, there are centralized parts of this that you may
not understand.
This is who you have to trust.
This is what you have to... and almost make it so obvious that you can't possibly miss
it.
But then I realize, okay, nobody's going to willingly do that.
The only way you can do that is if you force them to do that.
So I get to that point where I go from Bitcoin maxi to full on, I want to use the force of
the state to force them to be honest.
But it's interesting because that's what they do.
It's almost inevitable, I think.
Don't you think that that kind of regulation, that's exactly why regulators exist.
And they're going to look at this stuff once it reaches critical mass and be like, you
have to do this.
Does that make sense?
Well, that's what we've been seeing recently.
The SEC has been at least trying to do that.
I think the way I characterize it is that I say, if we take politics out for a second,
wherever someone is on the political spectrum, whether they're in favor of regulation or
whether they're in favor of no regulation, I think a lot of people would agree on consistency
in regulation.
So if you're arguing there should be zero regulation in crypto, you can also argue things
like there should be zero regulation in mail spam or mail fraud, or there should be zero
regulation in mailing penny stock things to senior homes and stuff like that.
Basically you don't see people consistently arguing across the board.
Crypto is kind of the current battleground.
And so I think one way to think about it is that there's been a trend of gatekeepers being
taken down.
Before, to publish a book, you generally would have to go through a traditional publisher.
Over time, self-publishing got easier.
But of course, the upside is it's nice not to have gatekeepers, but the downside is the
long tail of low quality books is going to be bigger because the filter is non-existent
now.
The same thing is true for games, or the same thing is true for music, where when you basically
enhance technology and allow people to go to market more directly, it's good.
But then users have to understand that there's going to be a longer tail of bad content with
those gatekeepers gone.
And what blockchain did was allow basically peer-to-peer security issuance.
So instead of penny stocks having to go through the SEC, you basically make these penny stocks
that go right to retail, and then regulators have had to kind of catch up to that and then
decide how they want to apply existing securities laws to these types of assets.
So I think in general, if someone's not in favor of any crypto regulation, you'd have
to basically argue that you're in favor of the SEC being abolished or diminished in some
way.
Whereas I think if you're in favor of consistency, you say, well, however tight or loose the
regulation should be, they should at least be applied as consistently as possible, which
is basically my position that I think countries can have different levels of strictness, but
I think consistency is important.
Yeah, looking at it from that point of view where you can see the gatekeepers are being
eliminated, as far as, like you said, books, stocks, sort of, like with crypto.
I guess they are kind of like worthless penny stocks.
You're just flipping tokens basically with penny stocks too.
But people don't seem smart enough now to be able to filter out these types of dishonest
schemes when it comes to crypto.
And I think a lot of it has to do with the way that people have been infantilized almost
like by the government over the past hundred years or governments around the world.
I think that people just don't, they are too trusting, I guess.
I always like to say misplaced trust is the root of all evil because it is, if you're
not skeptical at the right moments of your life, your life can be absolutely ruined and
you can be turned into an evil person yourself.
So do you think that there's hope for people to be able to do this, to filter through this
type of stuff without state actors coming in and making those decisions for the market
or is it inevitable that the state is going to get involved and start to pick this thing
apart?
So I think these things tend to come in waves and as people experience it more and more
and more, it starts to become ingrained in culture, at least not to everyone obviously,
but it becomes more understood.
The heuristics that crypto is a scam I think is widely being adopted.
But it takes time, it takes iterations and takes multiple failed examples.
Basically, you have to see multiple different wrong answers.
And so an example is that older people will fall for email phishing attempts at a higher
rate than younger, more internet savvy people because they grew up in this environment.
It's more just obvious to them and that's just a generational learning thing.
So I think a lot of those things go through that route.
But of course, to the extent that regulators exist, their job is to try to apply the law
consistently.
And so if they're saying you can't issue a security and then someone says, well, I issued
a security in digital form, it's like, well, you're still issuing a security then if it
meets the description of a security.
And maybe, for example, some country like Singapore or Dubai will have weaker laws.
And maybe that's a good thing or a bad thing, but at least if they're consistent about it
versus maybe the US or maybe the UK or whatever jurisdiction it might be, might have stricter
laws.
I'm not sure, I think people will debate along their own political lines where the right
resting point is, but I think consistency is important.
And I think that people can focus on what they control.
So regulators are going to regulate and those of us that are just private market participants,
instead it becomes more about social pressure or just warnings and educational content,
the people that take the time to call out the scams or the bad marketing or the traps
or things like that.
It's important that people do that because that's part of the signal and that's part
of the generational knowledge accumulation that helps a higher percentage of people avoid
those types of traps.
Yeah.
But then you look at things like the Richard Hart thing recently with Hex and all that,
and you look at other things going on and you realize you can't save people from themselves
almost.
So it's like human nature is devolved to the point where people are using their money to
join a cult basically, stuff like that.
You could even make that comparison to certain cryptocurrencies where there's maximalism
to the point where people will just stay there and like drive it, they'll follow it to zero.
And then these are the things that are going to be discussed in Congress.
These are the examples that Elizabeth Warren is going to provide when she's advocating
for crackdowns on banks to stop allowing people to purchase crypto and stuff like that.
So I start to lose hope in the current set of humans on the earth.
This is where I've been going lately.
I've been going in a direction very, very kind of nihilistic way.
I see the WorldCoin lines and I see the videos that are coming out now with biometric scanning
and Whole Foods and stuff like that.
And I start to realize, oh my God, the world's splitting between, it's just like there's
some of us that can see it.
It's They Live.
Have you seen They Live, the old movie from the 80s or whatever?
It's familiar, but I'm not sure I've actually seen it.
Oh my God, you got to see this movie.
It's still good today.
It's about this guy who's basically starting to realize that there's almost like these
aliens among the population.
They just look like normal humans, but they're aliens and you can only see them if you wear
this special set of sunglasses.
And when you put on this special set of sunglasses, you can see who the aliens are.
And you can also see that all around you is written all these messages that are like brainwashing
people into just being complacent and stupid and stuff like that.
And then when the aliens start to figure out he's got these special sunglasses, they try
to kill him in this whole thing.
It's so good.
Please watch it.
I think you'll like it a lot.
Interesting.
I'll check it out.
I think to your broader point, I fall prey to nihilism sometimes.
I think one thing I try to do is snap myself out of it by saying to myself not to fall
for like recency bias.
So whenever we're in a certain generation and so our generation has our focus on the
current problems and it seems like worse than prior times.
But I mean, if you look back in history, there were some truly awful periods in history.
You just think how could people ever get so dumb and how could they ever recover from
that?
And then they did in some way.
I think basically eventually it got so bad it ran its course and then there were some
degree of societal adjustment around that.
And so if right now a lot of that is this digital form, it's biometrics, it's tracking,
it's lack of privacy, it's just low information, it's people getting caught in echo chambers
of various types.
Those are some of the modern problems today and they're unique problems, but they're
kind of rhymes of problems of prior generations and sometimes worse problems.
Yeah.
To me it's like all roads with all this stuff and my main concern and the reason that I
care about all this is because of this idea that's sort of been lumped under the term
of the CBDC, the central bank digital currency, which now nobody actually even knows what
it means anymore.
It's just like this almost umbrella term for basically total government control of the
money supply from the point of minting to being connected directly to your account with
the central bank.
And I think that's the way I think about it.
I don't know how others think about it at this point, but to me that's the idea.
The idea that no matter how many central banks, no matter how many central bankers tell you
it's never going to happen, it's going to happen because technology never stops and
the government never stops abusing it.
So the idea is you got a central bank, you've got your digital wallet, whatever it looks
like at the point that this is launched.
Central bank mints money, it goes straight into your wallet.
There is no third party retail bank and if it exists, it's almost inconsequential.
It's like an arm of the government at that point and the government can add money to
your wallet.
They can remove money from your wallet.
This wallet is connected to your biometrics, it's connected to your social credit, it's
connected to your medical history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
All through what people are calling decentralized identities, ZK proofs, et cetera.
Do you give this stuff much thought?
Where does it stand on your priority list?
Well, to give an idea of how much thought I give it, I just finished writing a 500 page
book that's adjacent to this topic.
It's coming out later this month actually, so I guess it's an accidental plug, but it's
called Broken Money.
It discusses the problems that I view that money currently has and how we got to this
point and a big theme throughout the book is the past more than a century and a half
of further and further centralization of finance.
Of course, the later chapters get into central bank digital currencies and things like that.
Certainly writing a book is not the most lucrative thing you can do.
Obviously, some authors get a lot of value out of it, but in general, it's not the best
return on investment compared to...
I focused a lot of my spare time this year on the book and to some extent, I had to give
up growth parts of my business.
It's not the most lucrative thing by far that I could have focused on, but I did it because
I felt like I had to.
The culmination of a lot of my research over the past five years or so and I felt like
I had a unique angle or a certain story I wanted to tell.
It's not a book that I felt like I just chose to write, it's something I just felt like
I had to write.
Basically, to answer your question, the centralization of money including things like CBDCs as the
ultimate expression of that is something that has been top of mind to me for the past several
years.
How imminent do you think the threat is?
I think it depends on a jurisdiction.
I think it's a very different answer between China and the United States, for example.
I'm somewhat heartened by seeing what's been happening in Nigeria because they launched
a CBDC and it has had very low adoption for, I think it's over a year and a half now, maybe
approaching two years.
It shows that governments don't always succeed when they launch one.
Now, obviously, Nigeria might have less success than China or the United States that has more
resources to deploy in the success of their CBDC.
I think China has a much higher likelihood of being successful as they continue to roll
out their CBDC.
Basically, I think that answer is very jurisdiction specific.
I think that China is many steps ahead of the United States.
The United States benefits from, you'd have to change the Federal Reserve Act probably,
you'd have to go through a very polarized Congress.
Whereas generally, when you see big sweeping changes, like let's say when FDR banned gold,
we had a super majority in Congress.
You had such a landslide, it was the biggest landslide ever, or at least in the past 150
years or whatever, just a huge landslide.
That's how you get these major changes.
If you don't have that type of political consensus, then there's a lot more blocks in the gears
that prevent those types of big things from happening.
Whereas if you're in more of an autocratic country like China, there are fewer things
between the enactment and the outcome.
China's been able to move somewhat quicker, whereas other countries are going to have
all different degrees of speed based on their own specific legal roadblocks and frameworks
that can slow it down.
That's what I wonder sometimes, can we ever really reverse these trends or can we just
slow them down?
Because the technology doesn't go back in the box.
Once it's out of the box, somebody's going to use it at some point.
I think the only defense is other technologies that are out of the box, things like Bitcoin
or other encryption in general, sorts of decentralizing technologies.
One of the themes I touch on in the book is that a lot of banking developed because precious
metals has certain limitations of authentication, portability.
A lot of these proto banking channels would be set up many centuries ago, basically ways,
early versions of bills of exchange, ways to send money long distances, ways to transfer
value without having to actually transfer gold every time.
Then of course, it got more and more sophisticated over time.
You got more and more full service banking.
Then in the second half of the 19th century with the invention of the telegraph and the
deployment of the telegraph throughout the 1860s, for example, you had now the ability
to send information around the world nearly at the speed of light, which means you can
send transactions at the speed of light, but of course, you can't send settlements.
You can't send physical gold at the speed of light.
You had more and more abstraction between transactions and settlements, and that results
in more and more centralization.
Then of course, that only expanded with credit cards, the internet, and everything else as
it got faster and faster.
What's interesting about strong encryption and what's interesting about Bitcoin is that
well, Bitcoin now speeds up settlements to nearly the speed of light to varying degrees.
In some ways, it's one of the first financial innovations that might reverse the multi-century
trend where previously everything that made money more convenient tended to centralize
it more, whereas now in some ways, this makes it more convenient but also decentralizes
it or at least gives tools to decentralize it or gives escape valves to the existing
trend of centralization, gives people ways to opt out, gives governments frictions if
they want to go after them.
You have to try to get people not to run nodes or not to buy it from exchanges.
Then they cut it off from their country's banks, but then you see in Nigeria and Argentina,
they get it cut off from their banks and they still manage to acquire it.
They buy it peer to peer because they're in environments where it's more obvious to them
that they need it.
I think to some extent, I'm a technological determinist, which is that most things that
can exist will exist over time.
It is true that things like centralizing technologies, like central bank digital currencies, once
they are an option now, they're always a threat forever.
At the same time, now that certain decentralized peer to peer technologies are existent and
known, they're also an alternative forever and they can keep propping up whenever people
feel like they need them.
Now it's like a battle between can the bottom up decentralized people build faster and build
more robust solutions or are the top down people going to win?
I think in terms of culture, I think the decentralization is doing well around the margins.
Basically the faith that people have throughout much of the world in institutions is low.
It's been dwindling for a long time.
That's politics, that's media.
All the things that say our parents and grandparents would trust more than we trust now, we've
had a degradation, I would argue both in the quality of those institutions, but then certainly
measurably the perception of those institutions.
That certainly weakens the top down ability, at least in many jurisdictions, to implement
these things successfully.
But then to your point also shows how gullible or ill informed a lot of people can be.
When they have pain points in their lives or things aren't going well, they are pretty
easy to turn to big government promises for things.
So I think what gives me some of your hope is that while the centralizing technologies
will keep getting better, now there at least are some decent tools to push back.
Yeah.
That's the reason I got into Bitcoin.
It was about having an escape hatch, right?
Having an alternate path.
It wasn't about the investment opportunity.
It was about having some separation from this group of people in Washington DC that want
to control my life with money.
It offered that to me.
That was definitely responsible for the early growth, the creation of course, and then the
early growth of Bitcoin.
But what I've come to realize as time goes on, years into this journey, is that idea,
just like the Bill of Rights almost, just like the US Constitution, just like any form
of rights that we have, it's all only there as long as we actively defend it and actively
fight for it.
One of my concerns with Bitcoin, it's great that we now have...
Bitcoin, I like to say, it was not a technological revolution.
It was an intellectual revolution, right?
Because there was no new crazy tech, no new microchip that made it possible.
It was an idea that came along and all the pieces were already there.
It just took putting them together to make it happen.
That idea was great for 2008.
It was 2009 when things started to come together.
But as time has gone on, we've seen most Bitcoin holders don't value it.
Would you agree with that?
Most Bitcoin holders don't value decentralization like you and I?
Well, I think, yeah, the average Bitcoin holder just holds a little bit of Bitcoin in their
Coinbase account.
I think someone who identifies as a Bitcoiner, which most holders of Bitcoin don't, they
don't identify as a holder of Coca-Cola stock or Apple stock or Tesla stock or Bitcoin.
But I think people working in the Bitcoin space generally have a decent view of decentralization.
That's in large part why they're in the Bitcoin space and not the broader crypto space.
But yeah, the average person that just has 300 bucks of Bitcoin on Coinbase along with
some Doge or something like that is not really thinking too often about decentralization.
But I think sometimes, in many cases, the surrounding environment encourages certain
behavior.
So when you look at the, I don't really like chain analysis too much, but they have that
chain analysis crypto adoption index.
And I think the last time I looked, 18 out of the top 20 countries by crypto adoption
were, and they don't really separate Bitcoin and crypto, so a lot of that's going to be
Bitcoin and stable coins, but 18 out of 20 of their crypto adoption index were developing
countries.
And that's understandable because people in developing countries on average have worse
currency problems.
And in many cases, their bank accounts are more likely to be shut down.
There's authoritarian countries, there's inflationary countries, there's ones that are both, but
there's a whole spectrum to deal with.
And so it's not shocking that more Argentinians as a percentage care deeply about things like
Bitcoin and stable coins because for them, it's not a theory of why it's useful.
It's like either you have them or you're getting devalued.
Whereas Americans, for example, have a little bit more luxury to not be as cognizant of
it.
So if things start to get worse in some of these countries, I think then those types
of adoptions take off.
For example, when Canada was freezing bank accounts and stuff, there's a little bit of
a mini wave of Bitcoin adoption in Canada.
There are a number of some prominent people that came out and said, well, I didn't really
get Bitcoin and this event made me see it.
And I think that basically the worst a currency gets either because it's losing value quicker
or because something happens to them or something that provokes them directly.
There are other things that maybe could have provoked them but didn't and something finally
does or something happens to them is when a light bulb goes off.
And so in some ways, the worse that fiat currencies or CBDCs get, the more it can incur
this type of adoption.
Now certain societies are so locked down that it's harder to make happen.
I mean, one end of the spectrum is North Korea.
You have China a little further in the spectrum and of course you have other ends of the spectrum.
But if someone starts in a pretty free environment and these things start chipping away at it
while there's an alternative and there's an army of people kind of like shouting and
advertising that this alternative exists, that makes me somewhat hopeful.
And of course, developers are constantly trying to make the network better and more usable.
I mean, it's certainly more usable now than it was five or 10 years ago.
And I see a future wave of tools coming out.
And I'm also active in a little bit in startups and venture capital.
So I try to do my small part to help bring forward some of those tools and find things
that I find interesting.
And so I think that's kind of the best we can do is just try to build the tools or build
the world or send out a message, whatever our skill set might be, to do our small part
to change some minds.
Yeah.
It's so tricky when you can't offer stable value.
We haven't yet figured out how to offer stable value, stable buying power that's decentralized.
And there's been attempts, like within the Ethereum ecosystem, there's been attempts
and some of them are working and some of them are not, but they still rely on crypto.
But it seems like that's the main problem, the main barrier to adoption for decentralized
form of cryptocurrency to the extent that Bitcoin is decentralized is the volatility.
That's at least in my experience, people, and this happened to people, look at El Salvador.
El Salvador bought tons of Bitcoin and now it's worth half of what they bought it for.
And we're talking about a national reserve, a national treasury where we're talking about
millions or billions of dollars.
And I understand that there's a, well, just hold it, it'll be okay attitude.
But at the same time, for somebody who's trying to just buy food for their kids, for somebody
who doesn't have time to think about the philosophical benefits of decentralization, it seems like
that's the biggest barrier.
And I don't know how we can ever get there, or at least in the near term.
In the long term, you may be, but in the near term, the CBDC is definitely going to beat
us to that.
It seems like, at least for the average person.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to get to stable decentralized value anytime soon.
I think it's going to be a long process.
The reason that developed market fiat currencies are somewhat stable is because they're centrally
managed.
So they basically sacrifice most of their other attributes.
And there's like a central group that's running this control function.
If inflation starts to get hot, they use their various tools to try to tame it.
If inflation is below their target, they actually try to encourage more inflation, which I think
is silly, but that's the policies they use.
And so the cost of that partial stability is that you constantly bleed out value.
And you're also, the central policymakers are prone to making centralized mistakes.
In crypto land, they generally rely on oracles to try to do decentralization.
There's various techniques to try to do stable value that they view as somewhat decentralized.
And there's a little bit of a spectrum there.
But if you really emphasize decentralization, you have to minimize how much contact you
have with the outside world.
If you're trying to read outside data, for example, you're going through an oracle.
And so Bitcoin is kind of the example of one that it's as self-referential as possible.
It's not completely self-referential, but it's about as close of a system as you can
get.
And the downside is that there's no attempts at stabilization.
There's no attempts to read the outside world and then kind of fluctuate the supply or change
certain things to stabilize it.
But that's also what makes it the most immutable, the simplest rule set that's not really as
prone to as many gaming or changes as other things or kind of specific models.
And I think in Bitcoin's case, to the extent that volatility in the long run will go down,
I think it's a larger matter of adoption.
So if Bitcoin was 10 times more widely held and had 10 times liquidity, I think it would
be somewhat less volatile.
And I think basically the larger it gets in time and the less upside potential it has,
the less certain types of leverage is likely to exist on it.
And then also, as we've run out of these various types of crypto scams and re-hype authentication
and things like that, I think people get trained to avoid these types of leverage blowups.
And so I think we have to keep in mind it's still less than a 15-year-old asset class.
And you can't really go from zero to trillions of market capitalization without volatility
along the way.
One analogy that I've used is like, or at least comparison, not really analogy, but
comparison is if you look at most technological adoptions, most of them are non-monetary.
So when electricity is invented, there are very few people that switch to electricity
and then switch back.
It's almost a one-way move.
Unless you get really poor or something, you don't go back to not having electricity.
Same thing is like once you have a radio, you don't go back to not having a radio.
Once you have air conditioning, you don't go back to not having it.
And same thing for smartphones.
People don't go from flip phones to smartphones and then go back again.
And the challenge with something like Bitcoin is that because there's one, leverage, and
two, just bad investor behavior, they get euphoric at tops and despondent at bottoms,
a monetary technology like that is one where it's going to have these big adoption cycles,
but then it's going to get over-leveraged, over-euphoric, and then it's going to have
a multi-year bear market.
And I don't really see how a monetary technology, especially where the unit of account fluctuates,
is openly tradable, can adopt quickly.
I think in some ways it has a speed limit on how quickly it can realistically adopt
because it has to go through multiple of these cycles.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you, as we think about the future of Bitcoin, I wanted to ask you
about something that's been on my mind lately.
I recently did a podcast with Jameson Lopp and we were talking about this possibility.
As we all know, Ethereum moved to a proof of stake consensus system, which basically
allows the wealthiest Ethereum holders to control the network to a certain extent at
least.
Bitcoin doesn't have that problem.
And a lot of the reason Bitcoin doesn't go to proof of stake is because proof of work
prevents or it adds in a game mechanic that's really critical to decentralization, having
these competing incentives between various parties.
But people tend to ignore the fact that that game mechanic that proof of work offers us
is really only effective from the inside looking out almost.
It's like within the game, within the universe of Bitcoin as it currently exists, that game
mechanic matters.
But if you're able to look at it from the outside and you're able to almost like slice
the atom that is Bitcoin, like just have god mode control, then you can do whatever you
want.
And you can achieve that god mode control when you, arguably, and this is what I want
to talk about with you, arguably when you hold most of the value as custodians now are
doing, centralized exchanges holding Bitcoin to the extent, I'm not sure what the percentage
is now, but I know it's a huge percentage that they're controlling and it's growing
because most people don't care about decentralization.
They're willing to leave it on an exchange.
So when you reach a point where the Coinbase is and the Binance is and the Bitgoes and
all the custodians of the world are holding, and eventually the JP Morgan's and whoever
else are holding most of the value and they decide, you know what, it would be better
for us if we hard fork Bitcoin and we change the consensus mechanism and make it eco-friendly.
We want to do this and that.
We want it to be a different system.
They begin to accumulate that power.
They have most of the world behind them because most of the world has Bitcoin in their custody.
And as we all know, anybody can hard fork Bitcoin.
It's all about who can win the hearts and minds of the users.
What does that world look like?
To me, that's inevitable.
I mean, I'm totally willing to debate whether that can happen, but I'm pretty sure it can.
But what happens once that happens?
Are we now the Bitcoiners who are just clinging to a sinking pirate ship in that world?
What is that dystopian scene?
How does it play out for you?
Well, I think it can happen, but I think there's a couple ways to think about it.
So one is, the block size war was kind of the first attempt at that because you had
the majority of exchanges on the side of the bigger blocks.
You had the majority of hash rate on the side of the bigger blocks.
You had the biggest maker of Bitcoin miners on the side of the bigger blocks and it didn't
work.
So now because it didn't work that time doesn't mean it won't work anytime, but I think it
was a heartening example.
And it also shows that Bitcoin survived a really big attack on its decentralization
in a way that many other cryptocurrencies have not survived or not had to deal with.
So I think it's a constructive example to analyze and people are going to form different
views on it, but I think that's a useful example to analyze.
If it's like a current statistics, according to say, Glassnode data, less than 12% of Bitcoin
is on exchanges.
Now that number is higher if we include pure custodians like the Fidelities or NIDIG, kind
of these other types of non-exchanges, but there's still a pretty significant degree
of decentralization.
And generally, you've seen the exchange balance go down over time.
Now some of that wound up in GBTC, some of that wound up in like wrapped Bitcoin.
So there's certain other honeypots that kind of got stuck in.
But in general, the trend has been gradually in Bitcoin's lifetime, there's been a gradual
distribution.
So a little bit more distribution of coins over time, a little bit away from whales.
Eventually a whale gets so rich they want to sell out, those coins kind of spill out,
decentralize a little bit, more people come in.
There's no guarantee that that trend will continue, but that has so far been the current
trend.
In general, I think one way to look about this is what happens post fork.
So let's say a lot of coins are held by major custodians and BlackRock and a bunch of them
try to initiate some sort of fork that is more centralizing and has more problems associated
with it, but is more endorsed by institutions.
Now maybe that would be more of a credible challenge on Bitcoin than the block size war
was.
But we have to think in mind then what?
So when they have that more centralized blockchain, what happens to it?
Does it actually get censored?
Does that lack of decentralization begin to matter?
Because if it does, it starts to become a worse network for many types of users.
And so if they try to fork it and say make the supply more inflationary, if they try
to fork it and make it easier for censorship to happen, then it becomes a worse system.
And that's where I think literally culture becomes important, kind of like how Congress
has like a 15% approval rating and news has like what, like a 20% approval rating.
I don't even know the current numbers.
All these major kind of corporatey government institutions are having really bad outcomes.
People memed ESG so hard that even the CEO of BlackRock admits that that term is kind
of dead now.
Like they lost the marketing war on the term ESG.
And I think the same thing is going to happen to CBDC.
I think that they're going to like literally memes change, you know, memes in their current
form are what they are.
But I mean slogans and memes and satire, different ways to change minds have been prevalent for
you know, the dawn of language and writing and communication and poetry and satire.
And so I think that basically you could have certain long drawn out battles, but whenever
they're trying to make the system worse and then especially if it's like the corporate
tools doing it, they have more capital, but they have in many ways less sophisticated
messaging and less truth on their side.
And so I still think that there's a significant degree of ammo or weaponry on the other side
to push back on that.
Yeah, I can see that there's greater distribution like among custodians like you were mentioning
before.
I guess the point I was trying to make was that they're all subject to the same set of
regulations for the most part, you know, and they're all subjects of the same, even foreign,
even ones that aren't based in the US still succumb to US force.
You know, so the scenarios that I'm thinking about involve the US realizing that they're
losing the battle.
They realize that Bitcoin poses a threat.
They begin to push regulators and push corporations in a certain way that makes them realize,
you know what, maybe we should take these steps to change the way that this works and
then combine all of that with the type of media brainwashing that we've seen over the
last three, four years.
You know, as we know, when the government gets on a certain note, when they want to
push a certain agenda, they're able to get the media behind them.
They're able to, or at least they were able to control social media and really like you
and me and anybody listening to this probably is going to be on the side that understands
like, wow, this is a total Psyop.
But then you got the other 99% of the world that just does whatever they're told.
You know, and then you start to get Bitcoin, the old Bitcoin is the enemy, you know, that
anybody who uses it is a criminal.
The new Bitcoin, this is what you need in order to buy your bread.
This is what you need in order to be a good citizen.
You know, and that's what I get worried about with the Bitcoin because Bitcoin, ultimately
Bitcoin is a meme too, isn't it?
It's just an idea, you know, and it's about who owns the idea at any given point.
And I get concerned that we're not going to be able to keep ownership of it in the long
term.
No, I think it's a good risk.
I think it's a it's meme plus truth.
So like, you know, if like Dogecoin is a meme, but there's less truth behind it than there
is with Bitcoin, I would argue.
And so you need both the fundamentals and then you need people to be aware of the fundamentals
to market it and to fight for it.
You know, again, if you look at like, say, Nigeria, I mean, they launched their CBDC,
they have like 1% adoption and something like 40% of people have owned crypto.
You know, probably a lot of that's Bitcoin and stable coins.
And so it shows that in their case, the government messaging is failing.
Same thing in a lot of cases in Argentina and other countries.
And you know, how many people five years ago would have thought that the CEO of BlackRock
would admit that ESG is kind of a dead term now, like it's been so hurt.
And part of that was like relentless memeing.
But then other parts of it is truth.
Like, for example, you know, some of Germany's energy policy decisions have come back to
haunt them.
And these matter for people's outcomes.
And then eventually their voting behavior and their polls and things like that.
And so I can imagine a situation where they say they fork Bitcoin and some people have,
you know, like walled garden, like struggle Bitcoin and other people have real Bitcoin.
And that could be a battle.
But to the extent that there's consequences with having the walled garden Bitcoin, people
will begin experiencing those consequences.
And meanwhile, the other Bitcoin will still exist.
And then it becomes a battle between like the controlled one with the people that lost
the ESG meme kind of culture war.
And they're the ones with the failing institutions, the ones with just poll numbers that keep
going down.
And then when we look at, say, US presidential candidates, it's funny that the top two,
so Trump and Biden, they've not been very favorable on Bitcoin slash the whole space.
Whereas when you look at pretty much all the other major candidates, you know, you look
at you look at Kennedy, you look at DeSantis, you look at, you know, Rama Swamy, like Swam
Swami, the whole a lot of them are actually pro Bitcoin.
And so I think over time, it's seeping into culture and politics a little bit more.
And then one thing I've been interested, because I follow a lot the Bitcoin energy argument
because, you know, I'm initially a electrical engineer by education and my kind of my first
decade of career.
And so I've generally taken more attention towards the energy angle to defend why Bitcoin
energy expenditure is well spent and important.
And a few years ago, you know, the narrative was generally not looking great.
But enough people have put out content and have criticized bad journalistic content that
I'm actually seeing a pretty significant trend change.
And one of the things I focused on over the past, like, say, 18 months is there was a
rise of progressive Bitcoiners, which I found interesting because Bitcoin has historically
been more associated with libertarians and conservatives.
And of course, it's a global phenomenon.
So there's people from all sorts of different political persuasions.
But generally, especially on the energy side, a lot of the criticism came from people that
would identify with more progressive.
But then there's like this wave of progressive Bitcoiners that came.
And for example, Jason Meyer just published a book, A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin.
So he's like a progressive schoolteacher who likes Bitcoin and is really good articulating
around it, both in interviews and with his book.
And they're sending that to all the progressive politicians.
Whenever you see a New York Times article or a Greenpeace thread and they're criticizing
Bitcoin energy usage, if you actually go look in the comments now, there's a bunch of progressives
in there that are ridiculing it.
And so it's still a much smaller component.
But now there's this left flank of Bitcoin, which is interesting because it's more firmly
been on the right.
And now it's like there's this growing little node on the left there.
And when it comes to highly polarized environments where Senates are split 50-50 or Congress
is split 50-50 or things can't get through filibuster, any little pool of a little node
you can get or a little group like that is important.
So I think the fact that it's become a little bit more bipartisan or a little bit less clear
cleanly among party lines, I think is good.
And it's something I've been trying to fuel the flames of a little bit to keep that alive
because I think that flank attack is useful.
And so I think the main thing is to focus on low-hanging fruit and keep that decentralization
marketing and I would say truth-telling alive and well.
See, I like speaking with you.
It's like therapy for me.
This is good.
I'm getting because I'm bouncing all my nihilistic nonsense off of you and you're giving me all
the reasons that I should all the things that I might be missing.
I think there's a lot of you're right as far as like the other points of view that are
coming in and I just can't like in the back of my mind, I just have this like constant
this constant just I don't want to call it a fear, but this premonition that in the next
10, 20 years Bitcoin is going to get political somehow.
Like there's going to be and hey, maybe it's even going to be with the new progressive
sort of crowd that's coming in and making sense of it all.
I just don't like the way that humans work.
We're just never happy with leaving things alone.
If we can tweak knobs, we love to tweak knobs and we've seen it with the United States,
but I think the parallels are uncanny between the US Constitution and the way that it was
meant to set up rails to the best that technology would allow in the late 1700s.
Compare that to the spirit behind the genesis of Bitcoin where to the best that technology
would allow in 2009, Bitcoin sets the rails for this financial system.
That gives you an alternative to central banking.
In both cases, I feel like the Constitution was sort of thought of as settled for so many
centuries and then all of a sudden you realize it's not so settled because humans can just
do whatever the hell they want.
With Bitcoin, I feel like it's settled, but it's not so settled.
I feel like the narrative is what's up for grabs.
It's going to be so interesting to see.
I hope I'm alive to see most of it over the next few decades.
For me, it all just comes down to who owns the story.
I think it's important to be critical.
I think it's important for some people to be constructive and other people to be critical
and ideally for us to all be both.
We all want to be critical of what we might be missing or what weaknesses might be and
then try to do our best to address those weaknesses, which is why I try to pick off things that
I think are lower hanging fruit and try to fuel those flames a little bit.
I think the Constitution analogy is good because the Constitution is one of those things where
I think it worked because it had certain truths to it.
It was like time for it to exist.
It filled up a certain critical mass and then it was designed well enough that it was hard
to change by design.
Even as politics changed throughout the country so much, that core Constitution was very challenging
to change.
In order to do amendment to the Constitution, you have to get a super majority in Congress
and a super majority of individual states to agree to it.
That's why I've not had an amendment for decades because we're in a very polarized environment.
What do we all agree on?
That's been a very useful document that is not incorruptible, but it has a high level
of corruption resistance.
At the end of the day, there's still a social layer to defend it, but the combination of
a social layer and then the fact that the status quo is that it's very hard to change.
When it comes to narratives, I think they're going to change over time.
It depends what's happening.
We have to remember that there's something like 200 countries in the world.
Obviously, some countries have a much bigger sway on global order and global law than others,
but there is all these little pockets of safe havens and different views out there.
Even if Bitcoin struggles in some jurisdictions, it can potentially flourish in other jurisdictions
and still have that foothold to try to keep growing from.
What I find interesting about the political divide in the US is that the narratives around
Bitcoin will be somewhat different.
The libertarian slash conservative view historically has been it protects you from state overreach.
It gives you centers that resist in money.
It's resistant to inflation.
Some of these progressive ones are saying, well, it's also protection against corporate
cronyism because at the end of the day, state overreach and corporate mixing with the government
are in some ways the same problem.
Like Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were two sides of the same coin in a way.
One side is mad at Wall Street, one side is mad at government bailouts and deficits and
debt, and they're all intertwined.
The narratives are why someone might use Bitcoin based on their politics might differ a little
bit, but there are ways.
I can make an argument to a progressive why Bitcoin is useful to them.
I can make an argument to a conservative why Bitcoin is useful to them.
I can make an argument to a libertarian why Bitcoin is useful to them.
That's probably the easiest.
I can make an argument to a person in China, a person in Nigeria, Argentina.
You can tailor the argument and there are people that either live in those jurisdictions
or they're members of those political parties and so they tend to focus the best on constructing
those narratives.
That gives me some hope, but of course, I don't know what the future is going to look
like in 20 years and I think it's important to be critical of stuff and then just to build
and work towards what we think the future should be.
Yeah.
Amen to that.
I hope I'm being constructive with my criticism.
I try.
I think you are.
Sometimes I have my doubts, but sometimes it doesn't feel constructive, but then I think
to myself, well, all I want to do is make people think.
I think you're the same way.
I just want people to think.
I just want people to think about possibilities, even the uncomfortable ones, because what
I do know is that if we only focus on what we think is going to be the good outcomes,
just have rose colored glasses with everything, then we're going to fail because history has
shown that that is not how you do this.
When the founders of the United States were sitting down to write the constitution, they
weren't thinking about humanity always doing the right thing.
They were thinking about humanity screwing up over and over and over and over and over
the last like thousand years and all the ways that people have screwed up everything.
So understanding that humans are fallible and messed up and are oftentimes going to
do the wrong thing.
I feel like people want to ignore that when they're thinking about the future, but to
ignore that is a recipe for disaster.
But I'm so glad you joined me here.
What's the name of… do you have a name for the book that's coming up?
Because by the time people hear this, it might be out.
It's called Broken Money and it's expected to come out in late August or early September.
It tracks a lot of what we're talking about here, the historical centralization of money
and some of the tools we have to potentially try to decentralize it.
I've written articles in the past that have been critical of Ethereum, for example, and
it's not because I set out to make people angry.
It's that I set out to say, okay, here's why I don't think this system is decentralized
and robust enough to survive government capture, for example.
If I looked across the full spectrum of crypto, I view Bitcoin as the best current chance
we have.
I still think there's more tools that can be added to it to make it say more private
or more decentralized, not necessarily on the base layer, but just different tools that
are stratum V2 for mining or fediment for custody and privacy.
There's different tools we can add throughout the ecosystem.
I think that whether people are capital allocators or developers or just interested in the subject,
maybe they're political and they vote and so their vote matters.
Whatever they do in life, I think that if they're interested in the subject, they should
learn about it and then do whatever small part they play, especially if they're listening
to a podcast like this where they probably agree with us to some extent to go out and
see what little part they can play to try to make a more decentralized world more likely
than a more centralized world.
Yeah.
No, I totally agree with that.
I think that if people take the time to learn and they get educated and they actually dive
in and get down the rabbit hole, once you do that, you're sold.
That's not my concern at all once people are there.
My concern is that most people will never get there.
My concern is that people just don't have the curiosity, don't have the intellectual
curiosity to even approach it because they're too busy trying to just feed their kids.
They're too busy just trying to survive in the world.
It's such an exciting thing to think about how it's going to play out and whether we
can overcome that apathy I feel like that most of the world has when it comes to money.
I guess that's what we're all trying to do.
Just say, that's why I have a podcast, man, just to see if people will listen and try
to think these things through.
I want to thank you again, any closing thoughts?
No, just thank you for having me and thanks for doing what you're doing with, you know,
trying to bring attention to the issues you care about.
Thanks to you too.