May 4, 2023 • 59 mins
In the first part of this two-episode series, the guys interviewed tech expert Jonathan Strickland on the mechanics of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In this episode, Jonathan returns to field some of the weirdest, funniest and most disturbing conspiracy theories orbiting the world of digital currency.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. As we said earlier this week, we're
doing a couple of extra episodes. We went and went,
did a cavalcade of podcasting team ups with our pals
at Lava for Good, and we didn't ask them about cryptocurrency.
But maybe we can get to that when we have
(00:21):
them on for interviews.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Absolutely, that's coming very soon as well. But for now,
let's get to cryptocurrency Part two with Jonathan Strickland or
we talk a bit about the nuts and bolts of
coins such as Bitcoin, the more popular ones, the advantages
of the technology, and some of the flaws in the
system that have really kind of borne out over time
(00:43):
since these episodes were released back in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah, let's see if we predicted it a thing. I
think we got kind of close. Let's get to it.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learned this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nol.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's good to have you back.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yes, agreed, they call me Ben.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
We are joined with.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Our super producer Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are here.
You are you that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Cryptocurrencies Part two. I just followed through
with that because it Rhyan had a bit of a flow.
But we are not alone today. No, we are joined
again with our longtime friend Slash, nemesis of the show,
(01:46):
recurring guests who I think may have been on, may
have been the guest with the most appearances on stuff
they don't want you to know.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
Yeah, we've got a jacket for you, Alla, SNL. It's
really fun.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
We get to go to the join the Five Times Club.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah, you get to meet Steve Martin, but you have
to also meet Chevy Chase, ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 6 (02:09):
Hey, and just like love, I was inside you all along.
What Yeah, it's just dating.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
I've been meaning to check that. I get that checked out.
Speaker 6 (02:18):
Sorry, Yeah, are you doing a reference? What so so?
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Jonathan, thank you so much, Thank you so much for
coming back on the show. In our previous episode, we
we discuss the nuts and bolts of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 6 (02:37):
Yeah, and blockchain technology.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And one of the things that we agree would would
probably be the best move for you listeners, friends, and neighbors.
If you are not familiar with cryptocurrency, please check out
episode one before you go to this episode, because we're
gonna we're gonna cut past that. We're gonna cut past
that blockchain drive.
Speaker 6 (02:59):
Sure.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
Yeah, and on other past episodes we've discussed some of
the darker sides of what cryptocurrency might be, and you're
here to really shine a light in some of that darkness.
Let's see what's real it's not.
Speaker 6 (03:12):
Yeah, I'm happy to at least to impart to you
what I know, and I wholly admit there are things
I do not know, but I don't know what those are.
So here we are.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
You got unknown unknowns. Yeah, so for a peak behind
the curtain. Several weeks ago, Matt Nol and I began
talking about doing something on cryptocurrency conspiracies, and I think
a lot Noel you had come with this idea, and
I think a lot of it was inspired by conversations
(03:49):
we'd all been having, both together and as individuals, about
speculation and booms and busts in cryptocurrency and the proliferation
of non bitcoin cryptocurrency. And one of the things that
we wanted to do with this episode is get your
take on some of the allegations that Matt has mentioned
(04:12):
about different well rumors, allegations perhaps stereotypes of cryptocurrency. The
first one, which is probably the most apparent and something
I think you've probably remarked upon in Tech Stuff as well,
which is one of Jonathan's other podcasts available wherever you
find your favorite shows. One of those topics is cryptocurrency
(04:35):
and crime. So how much truth is there to the
characterization of cryptocurrency as like a cash for criminals?
Speaker 6 (04:42):
So there's certainly some legitimacy to that in the sense
that the very nature of cryptocurrency allows you to make
somewhat anonymous transactions. If you are super super deductive and
you are really paying attention to patterns and you're really
tracking which accounts are getting transfers at what time, you
(05:04):
could probably draw some conclusions that could narrow you down
to a specific person. But generally speaking, these are anonymous, right,
So it's an ideal currency for someone who wants to
purchase something that otherwise would be illegal because it's not
easily going to be tied to that person.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
When it's a currency that's used a lot on like
the Dark Web, and drugs or anything like that.
Speaker 6 (05:29):
Yeah, the Silk Road, which was, you know, one of
the many black markets on the dark web, which has
been shut down and opened up again and shut down repeatedly.
That was one of the places known for accepting bitcoin
currency from pretty much the start of bitcoin, once it
really got going, So a lot of people immediately began
(05:50):
to associate bitcoin with this concept of the currency you
want to use when you want to do something illegal,
whether that might be purchasing drugs or weapons, or paying
someone to do something terrible to someone else. All of
those were allegations.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Like pranking them or something more.
Speaker 6 (06:10):
Pranking to death, Yes, pranking to death. He's been pranked
to death. Yeah, it was a lethal banana pie to
the face, except way more violent and splatting.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
So is this like law and Order carrot top, Yes.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
It's or Gallagher. Yeah, it was hit by the watermelon
smashing mallet. So seriously though, that was certainly an element,
and it very quickly got this reputation in those early days,
and it's somewhat earned, not entirely. I would argue that
bitcoin kind of falls victim to the same thing that
(06:44):
peer to peer networks fall victim too. Which is that
both technologies can have their uses in illegal activities, but
that wasn't necessarily what they were made to do. Peer
to peer networks were created so that would be easy
to distribute files quickly across the network, big files, and
that doesn't necessarily mean something like a movie that you
(07:06):
don't have the rights to. It might be something that
you can freely distribute. It's just that to do so
in normal means would take too long.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
It's just an efficient way of transferring files over the
Internet that doesn't require a one to one transfer of
a single file. It's just a little bit more efficient
and makes best It makes better use of the pipeline.
Speaker 6 (07:27):
And blockchain technology in general is a great way of
keeping record of transactions because every single transaction becomes part
of that shared ledger. It's part of that shared history
and it's there forever right, so you can track ownership
through blockchain technology if you want so. For example, if
you wanted to use blockchain to keep a record of
(07:48):
real estate deals, you would definitely know who owned that
or at least what account own that last real estate deal.
I'll own that parcel of real estate because it would
be in that shared Ledger, there'd be no getting around.
In fact, a lot of people have talked about using
blockchain for stuff beyond just cryptocurrencies, So there are legitimate
uses for it, but it's hard to escape that reputation
(08:10):
once you get it. Certainly there are still people who
are using bitcoin to do stuff that is extra legal.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Okay, So then if we were to say on the
validity of this on a scale of one to ten,
it sounds like it's about a five or six.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly something that has been an issue,
and you know, people who wanted to commit any kind
of criminal act, whether it was purchasing something or paying
someone to do something, certainly bitcoin would be an attractive
alternative to using a currency that could be traced back
to you. Really, it's not the currency so much that's
(08:50):
traced back to you, it's the transaction itself, right, because
often these transactions have to pass through a third party.
It's that third party that is the barrier for a
lot of people.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Isn't this a thing though, where like you know, with Facebook,
you're constantly having to accept updated terms of service and
things like that. Obviously, using something like bitcoin or being
part of one of these exchanges, there's no such protection.
So who are we to say that, you know, all
of a sudden that anonymity goes out the window or
something fundamentally changes about the way business is done.
Speaker 6 (09:22):
I mean, it all depends on how you've set up
your wallet, right, Like, if you've got your wallet with
an exchange, then there are a lot of dangers there.
There's the danger that you may your identity may never
be revealed, but someone might get hold of your money.
So it's a complicated affair. But that's the case with
any kind of currency or commodity. I mean, there's always
(09:44):
going to be some element of risk there because there's
no such thing as a perfect system. Systems are being
made by human beings, and so far we have not
created the perfect human being.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Well, the most popular wallet is coin base, I believe,
and they've been having they were having some troubles, I
believe earlier this year.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
Every single one of these these digital wallet companies have
had some sort of issues. Sometimes they've been relatively minor,
like people reporting that they suddenly could not access their
wallets for a given amount of time. Other times it
gets way worse, where people can't access their wallets and
they find out two weeks later. The reason is all
that information was stolen.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Nice, and it's because it's a unique thing it can
be stolen to, meaning that it's not so like if
your if you're quote unquote stealing a movie by you know,
downloading it through a peer to peer thing. You're getting
a copy of it, right, physically taking it, but the
original still exists, right, But in this case, the original
is long.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
It's because what you what you have stolen is you
have stolen the end point of the last transaction for
that bitcoin, right, or that part of a bitcoin, depending
upon how much was being spent. So what you are,
what you're effectively stealing is the destination that bitcoin went to.
So again, bitcoin coins do not exist in any sort
(11:02):
of physical reality, right, You're what you're doing is you've
got a record of transactions. It's and in fact, this
isn't that hard to imagine. If you've dealt with money
on any digital scale, like just regular cash dollars, if
you do a transfer from your bank account to some
other account, they're not sending suitcases filled with bills. They're
(11:24):
wiring over a notification saying this transfer has taken place.
This represents this amount of wealth going to this person.
Same thing with bitcoin. So what you have done if
you've stolen is that you've stolen that account saying you
know you you now own the wallet where it says
this is where those bitcoins went last. And because most
(11:44):
people are using bitcoin anonymously, it gets really hard to say,
well that that specific one doesn't belong to you. It's
it gets real muddy.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Speaking of yeah, anonymity here one thing that's one thing
that we discussed in previous episode was the identity or
identities of the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto, yeah, pioneer of bitcoin.
We also found some pretty interesting allegations or pretty interesting
(12:15):
arguments that bitcoin some people believe may be a tool
of intelligence agencies or state actors.
Speaker 6 (12:23):
Have you heard this interesting? I had not specifically heard that.
It's very interesting because the at least the stated purpose
for bitcoin is so antithetical to that. But then you
could argue, well, that's the perfect cover, right, the idea
that oh, if I go out there and tell everyone,
this is the perfect currency to adopt because it doesn't
(12:45):
involve a state actor, it doesn't have any third party,
it's all direct transfers between people within the system and
therefore no one needs to know apart from the two
parties involved, except for the fact that, of course every
single trend action becomes part of this shared ledger.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Would that be like for off the books like black
ops and things like that? Is that the idea here?
Speaker 5 (13:06):
Yeah, well, it all originates from this person, Natalia Kasperski.
She was giving a lecture at university in Saint Petersburg,
and you know, somebody snapped photos, as you tend to
do sometimes, of the slides as she was giving the presentation,
and one of them was discussing bitcoin in particular. And
this is just a quote that was taken from this.
(13:27):
It was in Russian, or it was not written in English.
This is a translation, but it was. Bitcoin is a
project of American intelligence agencies which was designed to provide
quick funding for US, British and Canadian intelligence activities in
different countries. So the idea that you could wire money
essentially not untraceable, but you could wire money easily that
(13:50):
is not in the currency of some other country. Depending
on where you're transferring it to, it doesn't need to
be exchanged.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
Its plausible deniability that if like saying, oh well, this
actors who, for example, snuck into an Iranian nuclear facility
and installed viral software upon centrifuges. They weren't paid in
any any countries currency, so therefore it's harder to trace
(14:16):
back something like that.
Speaker 5 (14:17):
Yeah, and it's also interesting, so that would be really
good cover for that kind of thing. And then also
if you're having a very large transaction to maybe another
intelligence agency or someone you're working in tandem with, you
don't have to exchange you know, a huge transaction anywhere.
It's only a couple of bitcoins really, or you know,
one hundred bitcoins here, and you're like, that's a massive transaction.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Like the example I heard would be the CIA interacting
with ISI to support something that would technically be US
support of known terror groups.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Sure, so that yeah, kind of kind of also, like
when you get into two past scandals like the the
Iran contra, that sort of stuff. Well, let me say this,
it wouldn't surprise me if there were various agencies intelligence
agencies making use of cryptocurrencies for this sort of thing.
(15:15):
I don't think they would have had a hand in
creating them necessarily, but I certainly don't wouldn't find it
surprising to hear about them leveraging it. You got to
remember that ultimately, in order to get units of that
currency in the first place, you either have to mine it,
which means, assuming your system is on the up and up,
(15:35):
you have to dedicate a lot of computing power to that.
And knowing that once that secret is out, you know,
once everyone knows, and you know, the system depends upon
everyone knowing. Once everyone knows how the mining process works,
there are going to be lots of people working very
hard to be really good at that because that's how
they earn money. Or you've got to actually exchange real
world money for those units of currency, right, So, ultimately,
(15:59):
if you get to a point where someone is exchanging
large amounts of their current currency, their state sponsored currency,
for bitcoin, that could be traceable. So you really all
you've done is shifted things.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
How can it be.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
Traceable though, because you're actually going to have a budget
item somewhere under someone's budget saying this X amount of
money was spent from our budget.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Not if it's a black budget.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
It's classified, Jonathan, Come on.
Speaker 6 (16:25):
Yeah, that doesn't mean that it's not written down somewhere, buddy.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Sometimes it does, I would think so, and all I'm
saying too is like, you know, in the same vein,
sure as hell, it feels like a good way to
launder money.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
Oh sure, No, that's another element of the criminal aspect,
is the idea of using bitcoin to launder money.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
With a way more effective than a car wash. Also,
you got to wonder what the rates are, you know,
is it fifteen percent? Is it twenty? And then like
at what point should you just pay taxes on it?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
And are these criminals and order the government? Do they
do you have to use a thing like coinbase or
is there another entry way into this?
Speaker 6 (17:05):
I mean, you can have a wallet on your hard drive.
That's why people have their hard drives, and they lose
them and they're like, I lost seven hundred million dollars
on my hard drive. That can happen.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
So we're going to follow up with more of this
conversation after a word from our sponsors, assuming we don't
get black bagged. Holy smoked, we made it.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
Noel stole my bit.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
I thout if we all did it, we just all
had black bags on.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
We could do it again.
Speaker 6 (17:43):
No, no, no, I think we're good. Let's keep going.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
I have four black bags in my bag. At all times.
Speaker 6 (17:48):
I'm not at all surprised by that, and yet still terrified.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Look, it's it just it's like somebody using bitcoin. Just
because I have that doesn't mean I'm a criminal.
Speaker 6 (17:57):
One thing I want to refer back to in our
previous little discussion, he said, ignoring the previous statement, right,
is that is that just because there's someone who's giving
a presentation doesn't necessarily mean that there's any actual evidence
to back that up. I am highly skeptical of a
(18:18):
presentation happening in Russia, in Russian to Russian audiences blaming
United States intelligence agencies for the creation of cryptocurrencies, or
at least the use of cryptocurrencies to fund black ops operations,
because there may be and I hesitate to say this,
but there may be a bias.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
What.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point, because one
thing that happens to depending on people's ideological viewpoints, is
we will sometimes tend to pick on one organization over
another that would do essentially the same thing. Sure, so
it's a real tall milkshake to say that one intelligence
(18:58):
agency did something and the other intelligence agencies A did
not know about it, or B did know about it.
And also didn't try to do something like it or.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
See, yeah, it wasn't already doing exactly the same thing.
Like it is not a stretch of the imagination to
think that. Like I said before, I would not be
shocked to find out that there had been use of
cryptocurrencies for these sort of black ops operations, because by
the very nature everything is being is trying to avoid
(19:28):
detection from the get go. But I also would not
be shocked to hear that, say, the KGB had used
cryptocurrencies to pay I don't know, hackers in North Korea.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
I'm trying to go out on a limon and say,
there's no way that's not happening at least a little bit. Yeah, man,
Like it just seems rife for that kind of stuff,
And like, you know, that's what these black ops are
all about, is that kind of freewheel and attitude where
it's just like improvising and figuring out different ways to
do things, and you know, it's all about being up
on the latest technology. And I don't know, it just
seems it rings true.
Speaker 6 (19:59):
I mean, yeah, if they want to use the cryptocurrency
spy cred, that would probably be.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
In here's another aspect of this that I think argues
in favor of this behavior. It's that we're now as
a species and as a conglomeration as state actors, seeing
a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare. Right, we
(20:24):
know that there is a ticking time limit to the
usefulness or efficacy of cruise ships. Right, we know that
for several decades, with great success, countries that would not
normally be able to fight in a conventional war have
successfully funneled time, blood, sweat and tears and plenty of
R and D into asymmetrical warfare. Which is why we
(20:47):
see you know, so called hacker or bought armies influencing
opinion through soft power stuff like propaganda. The new war
or the new theater of war. People the Pentagon are
always said, is informational.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
Well, I mean you've already seen over the past decade,
we've seen numerous examples here in the United States of
foreign actors who have infiltrated various information systems.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Oh, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
That's more of an overt one, but I was thinking
of things like in the electric grid, the power grid.
There have been numerous occasions where security experts have looked
at the different systems and various major power companies and
throughout the power grid in the United States and said,
there's evidence here of foreign hackers putting in code to
(21:41):
help infiltrate the infrastructure. To what purpose, who's to say,
but it's not a stretch to imagine that these are
all kind of little trigger points that should should someone
want to do serious damage to the United States. You
flip a switch and you overload a power you make
it so that it is going beyond its capabilities. You know,
(22:05):
you could actually physically snap power cables if you're sending
enough juice through you get to a point like that,
you cripple the the infrastructure, and it creates enough chaos
for you to get away with other stuff if you
need to. So there's entirely that possibility. Now, the fact
that nothing like that has actually happened, we haven't seen
(22:27):
any you know, rolling blackouts due to this means that
whatever they were trying to do, they had not actually
you know, they hadn't actually pulled that switch, but they
had started to lay the groundwork. Well, that stuff's happening
all the time everywhere the United States. You know, obviously
we're focused on it because we live here, but it's
happening all over the world from various actors all working
(22:50):
at cross purposes against each other and.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Sort of an ensemble cast.
Speaker 6 (22:55):
Yeah yeah, I mean, you know, we've got we've got
things like stocks net, which certainly seems to have the
United States fingerprints on it. It would be hard to
deny that based upon the code that was used in it.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Let's give us a little bit of a rundown on
st Ducks.
Speaker 6 (23:09):
So stucks Net was a virus specifically, all right, is
a virus. So nuclear power plants one of the things
they have are centrifuges that spend at a certain RPMs, right,
and they spin at that certain RPMs because if you
spend too slowly or too quickly, then things go wrong.
And Stuck's net effectively, what it did was it made
(23:31):
the centrifuges turn at a speed that was wrong, too
fast for what it was supposed to do. The idea
being that would cause failures in Iran's nuclear power capabilities,
and it.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Kind of worked.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
It's tough to do because these facilities mostly have air gaps.
Air gaps are where you do not have a connection
between your internal system and an external system, so it
meant that you had to get physical access to the
the the location.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
In the form of a thumb drive.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
You could do a thumb drive. Yeah, just do a
thumb drive. And even if you're just doing a thumb
drive where you're sending it to, you know, it doesn't
necessarily have to have been someone on the inside who
was compromised. You could send a thumb drive to let's
say the person at the front desk and say, uh,
there's a new update to the operating system. Just plug
this in and that'll do it. And then it could
infect the internal network, which could then go and affect
(24:24):
whatever systems you need to compromise, but you wouldn't have.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Like remote control over it. Instructions that would like.
Speaker 6 (24:31):
It's good, good old coding. You're just writing in the
code like when this happens, do execute this line of code.
So it's it's in some ways it's really sophisticated. In
other ways it's very basic.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
But it's it's brilliant in the in this simplicity of application.
But there's a lot of very elegant code going in there.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
Yeah, and the code, yes, it was definitely advanced and
so that the people argue, because the advanced nature of
the code, it narrows down the suspect list of who
could have done it. And because the very nature of
the code itself. A lot of people have said, this
looks an awful lot like stuff that comes out of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Maybe, and also Israel, and also Israel. Israel and the
US work together.
Speaker 6 (25:13):
That's the that's the common thread. Yeah. So and you know,
of course, no one's going to come forward and say, yeah,
got us, it was us, But it does definitely seem
to point that way. Now, does that mean that it's
definitely US and Israel? Well, I mean, we we can't
speak in certainties, but it seems fairly fairly sure like
(25:37):
it's hard to deny it. Now in that world where
we've got all these different parties working at cross purposes
infiltrating different systems, plausible deniability very important, right, Like we've
we're seeing it through everything from the accusations of interfering
with election cycles to uh yeah exactly, to affecting entire systems,
(26:04):
you know. And the usual suspects that pop up for
things that are happening in the United States are Russia,
North Korea, and China. Those are your three big ones,
so you could you know, And then of course you've
got the States saying it's not us, we didn't authorize this.
If you use something like a cryptocurrency to pay the
(26:26):
people who are actually creating the code and executing the
code and overseeing the botnets and actually doing the work,
then you've got that level of plausible deniability. You don't
know who paid whom. It could be that you have
an outside organization, someone who's not even remotely connected to
the governments of those of those countries. They say, let's
(26:49):
just make use of them, because one they have the technology,
two they have the education and know how on how
to do it, and three it takes all the heat
off us because they'll never know it was. We were
surprised as you are. Yeah, we just paid those guys,
and we paid them with a type of currency that
can't be traced back to us.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
We're basically watching the sixth sense with you for the
first time.
Speaker 6 (27:11):
All we're doing is putting on all of those graphics
processing units to work.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
It's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. You say this
because one of the controversial practices in China that the
governments of the United States and China disagree on is
who's paying documented Chinese hacking forces because they're not government employees.
And the Chinese position for some time has been this
(27:40):
is just a group of idealistic national not very nationalistic people.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
These are people who identify with China's philosophies, but they
are not in any way sponsored by or endorsed by
the government. For example, when Sony had their massive data
breach where gigabye of data, mostly in the form of movies,
but lots of other stuff too, including like records of
(28:05):
executives and actors and all this other stuff that got
leaked out. Uh, there were a couple of different arguments
about where that came from. One was the possibility of
it being from North Korean hackers, because it was in
response to a film that was coming out that was
The Interview. Yeah, it was the Interview. It was a
little a little bit of a spoof on North Korea's leader,
(28:27):
and North Korea had condemned it. So there was an
argument like, well, clearly you had already said that, you know,
you objected strongly, strongly to the movie. Apparently you objected
strongly enough to fund hackers to attack and this this company,
this global company.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Which the movie wasn't even very good.
Speaker 6 (28:44):
It's not that good. I've seen it.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
It was fine.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
We did an episode on this that you appeared on,
John that this, this idea of sophisticated coding and the
separation of the true actor from the appearance of an
actor leads us to another very strange question. So far,
(29:09):
when we've been talking about hidden hands behind cryptocurrency, sure,
we've been talking about humans.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
Well, why are we going to talk about raccoons?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yes, badgers.
Speaker 6 (29:22):
Sticking badgers? Oh roh wo badgers?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
What if? What if?
Speaker 6 (29:28):
Okay, hear me out? Yeah, hit me?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
What if a rogue artificial intelligence created bitcoin for the
express purpose of siphoning electricity to feed its nefarious dark engines?
Speaker 4 (29:49):
Wait wait, hold on, yeah it eats electricity.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Awesome.
Speaker 6 (29:55):
Well, I mean, if it's an artificial intelligence, it's presumably
on silicon based hardware and thus needs electricity to run.
So electricity would mean power. Power is what allows it
to process information.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
It needs a lot of it.
Speaker 6 (30:15):
I'm trying, I'm trying so hard to not just call
nonsense on this.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
But the reason, let's also use is an opportunity to
talk about how much bloody power and energy that mining
for bitcoin consumed. I think this is a good job.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
Right well, well, and I mentioned in the previous episodes,
So when you're when you're mining bitcoins, what you're really
doing is you're trying to solve very difficult mathematical problems
in order to validate past transactions, the ones that have
just happened to add the next block to the blockchain.
And if you managed to do that, you get rewarded
not just with whatever coins are mined at that time,
(30:54):
which is predetermined, and every few years the number has
per block I think's mind.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Currently bitcoin miners generate around seventy five bitcoins per hour.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
Every and when you look at that by per block,
it breaks down even further obviously because it's every ten
minutes is another block, right, right, So but every few
years that number is cut in half until you finally
get to the point where all bitcoins that'll ever exist
are in the system. And at that point it's just
transaction fees that keep things going.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
While energy spent on mining bitcoins is increasing well to
a point to a point.
Speaker 6 (31:33):
So if you get to a point where the number
of bitcoins you get per transaction completed is small enough,
then you have to reconcile that with how much money
you are spending on the electricity being used for the
processing power. And if you're spending more money on electricity,
then you're making money in the bitcoins you're mining as
(31:56):
a losing proposition, and people are going to start to
back off.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Here's a thing, though, to an article on Motherboard right now,
with the trajectory of bitcoin value being what it is,
they say it would be profitable for minors on the
whole to burn through more than twenty four tarawatt hours
of electricity in a year's time.
Speaker 6 (32:19):
Sure, yeah, and that's but these are making lots of assumptions.
Assumption number one is that the value of bitcoin is
going to continue to be high enough for that to
be true. And we don't necessarily know that, I suspect
it is going to be true. But over time, that is,
by the nature of what bitcoin is going to decrease.
It has to, because that's just how unless bitcoin's value
(32:41):
just continuously skyrockets and just keeps on building and never
takes enough of a backtrack to settle back down to whatever,
like ten thousand dollars per bitcoin, which is still a
huge amount, no doubt about it. Then you do eventually
get to a point where you're getting you're getting a
decimal like like ten thousandth of a bitcoin when you
(33:03):
successfully mine a block. It doesn't make sense for you
to continuously use that much power because you will be
spending more money than you get. That that's down the
road though, because it's when you've gone a few years
where this number keeps having until it gets down to
this tiny, tiny number. But eventually you get to a
point where it won't make sense to spend that much electricity.
(33:25):
In the short term, however, you're seeing massive amounts of
electricity being used to mine these coins.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
That number I said is apparently about the amount of
energy that Nigeria uses in a year, and that's the
country of one hundred and eighty six million people.
Speaker 6 (33:40):
Yeah, and it's it's not a surprise. But what will
happen is you'll eventually, at least the idea is that
you'll eventually reach a peak, you know, peak bitcoin, where
assuming again, assuming the value of the bitcoin doesn't skyrocket again,
that more and more people will start to back off,
and once they back off, the difficulty of that problem
(34:01):
will decrease, and people who are running more modest hardware
will be able to mind bitcoins and it won't be
as big of a yield per block mind. But at
the same time, they're also not the ones who would
otherwise be spending thousands of dollars just on electricity bills.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Until the machine consciousness is stated, at which point there
would be no reason to continue this charade, right.
Speaker 6 (34:26):
I find it very difficult to believe that an artificial
intelligence is in fact responsible for this, but I will
support that argument. After you take a break to thank
your sponsors.
Speaker 7 (34:41):
Who such cheek Jonathan, I am cheeky the sand Sorry, guys.
Speaker 6 (34:55):
I saw an opportunity and I went for it, so
I said that I was going to support my argument.
So the biggest argument I would make is just that
artificial intelligence is nowhere near the level of sophistication necessary
to create a system anywhere close to that complicated. I mean,
I follow the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, and there's
(35:20):
some amazing stuff in machine learning. There's amazing stuff in
various aspects of intelligence, but they're all very very narrow applications. So,
for example, image recognition we're getting really good at that
voice recognition, We're getting really good at it. But these
are all just tiny little slivers of intelligence. When it
(35:40):
comes to innovation, we're really lagging behind as far as
machine intelligence is concerned. And an example of this is
if you ever try and use the tool chef Watson.
Chef Watson uses the same platform as Watson that went
on Jeopardy and that Jeopardy right, and the way it
we're is that it was fed a whole bunch of
(36:02):
different recipe books and then it takes all that information
and it starts to really analyze it and try to
figure out which cooking techniques go with which ingredients, which
ingredients complement one another, based upon their appearance in various recipes.
And then what you do is you tell it what
kind of stuff you have at your disposal, and it
(36:25):
suggests recipes for you to cook and they're Bonker's crazy.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
What's an example.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
So, for example, there's cauliflower fricacy. One of the optional
ingredients in califlower frecacy is cauliflower. I'm serious, Like, I'm
going through the list of recipes and this is cauliflower optional.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Like, so burning question. Yeah, I've always wondered what constitutes
a frecacy.
Speaker 6 (36:50):
You know, an excellent question that I am not prepared
to answer, but I will tell you this that Chef
Watson is. It's dynamically creating these recipes. So if you
were to put the exact same recipes in or exact
same ingredients in as I did, you would get a
different recipe. If I did it twice in a row,
I would get two different recipes, and there would be
recipes that were created on the spot at that moment,
(37:13):
not like stored in some database and then retrieved. So
it's not like search results.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Just goes to show that Watson has moods.
Speaker 6 (37:19):
Man, Well, my point being that Watson hasn't quite nailed
it yet. Sure, this is about cooking a meal that
is edible to human beings. Creating an entire cryptocurrency system
in order to mask the consumption of energy is an
order of magnitude more complicated, and I just cannot conceive
(37:42):
of that being in the realm of possibility.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Well, of course not, man, you have a meat brain.
Speaker 6 (37:47):
Yeah, maybe that's the problem.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
What if said Tooshi Knakamoto, is working with the machines,
is aiding the machines in this endeavor because he wants
to be the number one meat bag and the takeover happens.
Speaker 6 (38:02):
He doesn't want to get caught in that sky net.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
It's made of lasers.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Yeah, we're doing references today, folks.
Speaker 6 (38:10):
Sorry you invited me on the show.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
I knew what happens, we knew what we were getting into,
and we welcome it.
Speaker 6 (38:16):
I think this is a fascinating idea, the idea that
there could like. To me, this is on the same
level as someone who suggested, and I mentioned this in
our previous episode two, someone who suggested that the reason
why the Large Hadron Collider suffered so many setbacks early
on when it was first going to come online was
(38:36):
that supposedly, uh, the someone from the future, some entity
from the future was traveling back in time to sabotage
the Large Hadron Collider because once it turned on, it
would cause some sort of calamitous event that would perhaps
extinguish the human race. And so there were Whether those
were theories that were that were expressed in jest or seriously,
(39:00):
I don't know. I mean, they seem tongue in cheek
to me, but I can never tell if someone's being
serious or not, which is why I am so awful
whenever I go to stand up. But the fact that
those were put forward, it seems very similar to this
kind of suggestion. And while it's fun to think about,
and I certainly think it's a great premise for like
(39:23):
a science fiction story, is just not quite within the
scope of what we're capable of doing.
Speaker 4 (39:28):
Right now, what do you think that I think it's
just hiding.
Speaker 6 (39:32):
You just think the artificial intelligence is hiding.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
Yeah, well, look at all this energy usage. I'm not
in here, I'm not inside to what ends. Well, it's
hiding till one day we get all of those slivers
that we're talking about of innovation into one unique piece
of just what it means to be a human.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
Then it will know, and then it will become.
Speaker 6 (39:53):
I think any artificial intelligence of that sophistication would be
able to essentially and would have already infected all networks
and distributed itself to a point where we are already superfluous.
And uh, why did the lights just flicker? Okay, well,
never mind. You know, I'm just gonna I'm gonna drop off.
I'm going to drop off on that line of line
(40:14):
of logic right now.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I'll tell you. The problem there though, is inherently artificial
intelligences don't have hands what with to build stuff, right,
so they need they need us for a time and
then you know, it's lights out.
Speaker 6 (40:27):
Until when they get better. Robus the robots.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
These days, I mean, they they're hard pressed to, like,
you know, walk across the room clunky.
Speaker 6 (40:36):
That's again why I sit there and say that there
our ability to create an artificial intelligence of sophistication that
would be able to do this is kind of laughable
because we're still at a point where a robot that
is designed to learn how to open doors will sit
and stare at a door for six hours and then
reach out and pull a door that's meant to be pushed.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
And I have a different hand.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I do that all the time.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yeah, I literally ran into a door yesterday.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
No.
Speaker 6 (41:04):
Well, I also don't expect you to create a cryptocurrency
to hide how much power you are consumer.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Hey, I make no secret about my yesh.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Don't sell it, don't sell. In short, so we are
we've looked at three of or at least three of
the really really big ideas right that somehow on this
on this idea of artificial intelligence or machine consciousness. Maybe there,
maybe there isn't some sort of proto sky net entity
(41:36):
out there, But would you be as quick to dismiss
the idea of, you know, the idea of some of
the same lessons learned from high frequency trading or algorithm studies,
like I know, sure is using algorithm I mean, sorry,
bitcoin mining is using algorithms.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean that certainly people are using are
the intelligence in order to work with bitcoin, But I
don't think bitcoin itself is a product or is the
is being manipulated that on that grand a scale by
artificial intelligence. But yes, as you mentioned high frequency trading,
that's where you've got computer algorithms that are making thousands
(42:19):
of trades per second, really far faster than what any
human can do, and you end up seeing little mini
crashes and bubbles in the stock market as a result.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
I can't believe we almost forgot in the first episode.
We left off at the very end with something we
need to get to, even if it's just at the
end of this episode. Wales.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
Oh so yeah, I'm happy to talk about whales because
we you know, you guys were talking about different questions
to ask and one of the questions you had was
could there possibly be any entity or organization that could
really work to leverage bitcoin in some way that could
be harmful to others. That leads us to the discussion
(43:04):
of wales. What are whales? Why do we call them whales? Wales?
That's a term within the bitcoin sphere for organizations or
people who own a large number of bitcoins. And it
is estimated Bloomberg did a piece on this in twenty
seventeen that one thousand people own forty percent of all
(43:26):
the bitcoins out there.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
There's already economic inequality.
Speaker 6 (43:30):
Yeah, so you think about that forty percent, nearly half
of all bitcoins belong to just one thousand people. So
keeping that in mind, and remember bitcoin, don't I argue
it's not really effective as a currency. It's more like
a commodity. In my mind. Let's say that you got
these one thousand people, and through their circles, they just
(43:53):
have learned, even if it's only a portion of them,
learn who the others are.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
OK.
Speaker 6 (43:59):
So it's a a loose confederation of bitcoin owners and
they all watch very carefully as the value of bitcoin climbs,
and they're thinking, all right, I feel like at let's
say seventeen thousand dollars. That's going to be the peak
before we hit the next plateau or maybe even a
drop off. What we're going to do collectively so that
(44:19):
we can really cash in is we're all agreeing at
x amount of time, we're all going to liquefy our
bitcoins so that we can maximize our profit and then
get out before the crash. Which means that they would
actually be causing a crash because they'd be dumping thousands, thousands,
hundreds of thousands of bitcoins on the market simultaneously, which
(44:43):
would devalue it suddenly. The demand would be far lower
than the supply, right, It's typically the other way around,
and you could see an entire market collapse. This is
the same sort of concept as someone who's dealing with
insider trading, right that they have the for knowledge that
something big is gonna happen, and they either buy up
(45:04):
a lot of stock or sell off a lot of
stock before the announcement hits so that they can maximize
their profit from it. That's the fear that this one
thousand people who own almost half of all the bitcoins.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Which is about seventy four billion dollars.
Speaker 6 (45:19):
Yeah, seventy four billion dollars worth could collectively make the
decision to get out of the game and maximize their
profits because I mean, you know, they could they could
just convert it to whatever currency they wanted to, because
I mean.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Surely they're in some kind of underground like torture club together.
Speaker 6 (45:36):
There's probably a fight club, probably a bitcoin fight club.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
I'm just saying, like you'd think players of that level,
as anonymous as it all is, are more likely to
be aware of each other than say some of the
smaller players.
Speaker 6 (45:49):
Well, there's certainly like they're online discussion groups about bitcoin
where where people who adopted it early certainly know each
other or at least know each other by handle, if
not by name.
Speaker 5 (45:58):
You kind of think there's some younger people, much younger
than you would imagine, sure, being old enough to have
that much money.
Speaker 6 (46:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's really it's especially for the
early days again before the computing demands got so high,
because the computational problems got so complicated, and obviously if
you got in on the ground floor and you were
constantly using at least some of your bitcoins to help
supply the need for more advanced computing equipment. You could
(46:28):
just continuously build out your your mining rig to mine more.
So as long as you're mining more coins than you're
spending on your mining rig, you're in the winning situation. Right. Well,
if this group of people all decided that they were
going to do that, it could be a total catastrophe
for the currency as a whole. And there have been
some folks who have said that bitcoin is in a
(46:50):
bubble and that bubble is going to burst, And one
of the things that could cause that is a tacit
agreement among the whales to get out of the game
rather than watch their investment balloon up in value and
then deflate and then balloon up and deflate. I mean,
(47:10):
I can't imagine what that would do to me. Like
if I were sitting there looking at my digital wallet
and thinking, all right, I've got twenty bitcoins. Wow, today
it's two hundred thousand dollars and then the next ac no,
it's down to twenty thousand dollars. I lost eighty grand overnight. Like,
it would drive me crazy. So that is a real fear.
Whether or not it would ever happen is a totally
(47:32):
I mean, it's still a hypothetical. It's not like it's
actually happened, but it's still a possibility.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Supposedly, there's a lot of work being done with neural
networks being used to predict the change in bitcoin price.
Speaker 6 (47:45):
Yeah, And honestly, now we're getting to a level of
technology that is I mean, it's fascinating to me. Neural
networks are amazing. I love neural networks. But you're getting
to a point where you're taking technology, which is something
I understand pretty well well, and you're applying it to
market theory, which is something that is like witchcraft to me.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Even to the experts, it's like witchcraft. Yeah, I mean
you have these like high level economists who just completely
contradict each other all the time.
Speaker 6 (48:13):
It makes me feel like string theory. Yeah, because you
talk to someone who's an expert in string theory and
you say, you keep asking questions, you will eventually get
to a question where they say like, yeah, I the
math tells me what it is, but I don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
That's the thing. When you're at the bleeding edge of something,
to use the phrase you had established earlier, When you're
at that edge, people are guessing and it becomes very
close to ideology. They're economists that have clearly been demonstrably
wrong over decades, and they're sticking to the model.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
And the nature of an edge is that it's not
that hard to fall off.
Speaker 4 (48:51):
That's true.
Speaker 6 (48:52):
That's true. It's really I like that. I want it
on a bubber sticker.
Speaker 5 (48:55):
So it just really fascinated something that I didn't understand
before we did this episode. Yeah, that exactly how many
cryptocurrencies exist, and you know, we keep saying that there
are a lot of them.
Speaker 4 (49:05):
Did you guys mention how many?
Speaker 6 (49:06):
I just all I did was okay.
Speaker 5 (49:10):
So according to coin marketcap dot com, which tracks all
of them, and it gives you it gives you their
market cap, it gives you the price of a single one,
the volume, the circulating supply. It's really interesting. It gives
you a change over time for a twenty four hour period.
You can get really deep into it if you want to,
the way you would a stock market. Just a currency exchange.
(49:30):
It has almost fifteen hundred different currencies that are out
there right now. That's that's insane to me. I was
I would only I've only ever been aware of for
I think right.
Speaker 6 (49:41):
Like ethereum and bitcoin.
Speaker 5 (49:43):
Yeah, that they're that many. And if you look through
this list on this website, it's so much money just
wrapped up in these ethereal things.
Speaker 6 (49:54):
It's so much wealth.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
Read those white read those white papers, Matt, sign up.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
That's my thing that what makes one more attractive than another?
Is it just that it has a cooler name, Like
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (50:03):
I mean it's it's honestly, when you when you really
boil it down, it's it's the ones that people feel
are valuable. Yeah, I mean it's the same thing as
really any again, any currency. Like if we go way
back in time where we get to bartering, then we
can have little philosophical discussions like like, Ben, really, do
(50:25):
you think that this laptop I have is worth only
two chickens? I don't care how close you are to
your chickens. I'm going to need more than two chickens
for this laptop.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
He's very close.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
You don't even know their names, man, No, how dare you?
Speaker 6 (50:39):
Yeah? Do you know my laptop's name?
Speaker 1 (50:41):
Yes, Dell, it's actually Lappy.
Speaker 6 (50:46):
I named him after Strong Bad's laptop. But no, it's yeah,
it's a good point, but but we could You know
that that gets to a point where you argue, all right,
well how much how much is the thing that you
make worth the thing that I make? Because I need
what you have and you need what I have. And
then the problem that came in is when let's say
that I need a table and the guy the carpenter, Nole,
(51:07):
you're the carpenter. I'm going to go to you, and
I'm like, I need a table. I am a goat farmer.
I can give you goat milk, and you're like, dude,
I do not like goat smoke. Well, now I have
to either find someone else who makes something you do need,
trade the goat smoke for the thing that you like, nol,
and then bring that to you and then get my table.
Or we have to invent a currency because this is
(51:28):
just too crazy. I need some other means of transaction.
Speaker 1 (51:32):
Let's just start a cult.
Speaker 5 (51:37):
Yes, and just last thing there right now, in all
these different cryptocurrencies, there is over half a trillion dollars
circulating in this just vapor somewhat vapor aware of money.
Speaker 6 (51:51):
Yeah, I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but seriously,
when you when you really look at all currencies, you
realize that there's there's only like a half step of
difference between the quote unquote real currencies of like dollars
and pounds in euros and things like that, and digital currencies.
It's it's it seems like there's more because you can
(52:13):
hold things, you know, most of them have physical versions
of them, like dollars you can buy you can get
a dollar bill, and since you hold in your hand,
it has permanence and you think of it as being
a real thing. But when you really really look beyond that,
you realize, wow, we're all just pretending. And as long
as everyone keeps pretending, everything's fine. But if we ever
(52:34):
come to a day where we decide to stop pretending,
we're bone.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
We're all we're all elmer FuG yeah, or Daffy Duck
walking off the cliff right before they look down.
Speaker 6 (52:46):
As long as you don't look down, you don't fall. Well.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
But if you think about it, though, too, if you
really want to go down that rabbit hole. It's like
the reality that we all accept comes with kind of
being part of a police state. Because as soon as
you step outside of your lane and say, I don't
accept this anymore. I want more, I should have this
much money, I'm gonna take it, you get shot or
you getting put in jail, Like, there are very real
(53:09):
boundaries that force us to be a part of this
system and accept it. So it's a lot easier to
accept it knowing that if you don't, you're boned too.
So it's kind of a boned if you do, boned
if you don't.
Speaker 6 (53:21):
What it comes down to is our confidence in the
method of transaction, and if our confidence is sound, it
doesn't really matter what we call it, or whether it's
digital or physical, if we're confident in it that the
thing that I have in my hand will be able
to purchase the goods or services that I want, and
then tomorrow it's just as good, and the next day
(53:42):
and the next we're fine. It's when you sit there
and say, this thing we've all been pretending has value,
I just realized it doesn't, and now everyone else has
realized that, and then suddenly the value just disappears because
we've gotten rid of our shared delusion.
Speaker 1 (53:58):
We did an episode asking whether money is a religion,
and it's still One of the things we always took
away from that and found interesting was that, you know,
there's a reason genres of some religions and versions of
some currencies are referred to as denominations. Yeah, it's not
(54:18):
for nothing does etymology exist.
Speaker 6 (54:20):
Also, remember it's not money that's the root of all evil.
It's the love of money that's the root of all evil.
Speaker 1 (54:26):
All right, Well, we have like three emotions a year,
so you don't need to worry about that.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Speak for yourself, Toddy.
Speaker 4 (54:31):
I found two currencies that are tracked on here.
Speaker 6 (54:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (54:33):
The first one is called snake eyes okay, and it
just goes by the handle snake. So you got I
got like twenty snake man. I think that's awesome. That
needs to catch on right now. It's like worthless, so
I just need to get that back up.
Speaker 6 (54:45):
I just see thousands of snakes wearing eye patches.
Speaker 5 (54:48):
And this one it's just it says it gay money,
that's what it says.
Speaker 4 (54:52):
So you know, maybe more power.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Well, if there's fifteen hundred of these, then I see
no reason why we can't get n bucks on the board.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
All right, and thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (55:03):
Let's end with that.
Speaker 6 (55:04):
How do you do it?
Speaker 2 (55:04):
How do we go from bend bucks the notion to
ben bucks the publicly traded tradeable available cryptocurrency we do have.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
We do have tangible bend bucks by the way, well
glad to make the switch.
Speaker 6 (55:18):
Yeah, you definitely don't need tangible ones. So what you
would need to do is you would have to set
up a network. You would have to create the software
that would allow you to create the blocks of transactions,
just as Bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies use. So
you would have this technology where it would be proprietary
to bend bucks. Where you know, the method we use
(55:39):
to create the math problem that the various computers on
the network have to solve in order to verify transactions
is unique and one that we could scale up or
scale down.
Speaker 2 (55:50):
We can't trade snake eyes for ben bucks.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
You could, actually, I mean certainly there can be. I
mean that's why exchanges exist, right The exchange exchange is
purpose is to determine what is the relative value of
all these different currencies so that you can make those exchanges.
Although all it really means is that you're handing the
units of bend bucks over to the exchange, The exchange
(56:15):
hands units of equivalent or snake guys to you, and
then the exchange has your bend bucks.
Speaker 1 (56:22):
So this is totally possible.
Speaker 6 (56:24):
Oh, it's possible, it would be. I mean, do we
have any computers in the office that aren't currently being
used for anything?
Speaker 1 (56:31):
I hope those words taste good when you eat them later.
Speaker 6 (56:34):
Because I'm just saying I mean, I mean, I got
a gaming rig, which means that I can be like
the number one minor of bit Bucks, which means I
can be.
Speaker 2 (56:43):
Getting in on the ground floor.
Speaker 1 (56:45):
We're taking all our We're taking all our old gaming consoles,
pulling a Pentagon and networking them together. Remember when the
when the Pentagon brought like or do o D excuse me,
got like two.
Speaker 6 (56:55):
S the OLDPS two.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
Contribute.
Speaker 1 (56:59):
I haven't too let's so well.
Speaker 6 (57:00):
You know, the thing was that Sony eventually made a
change in the firmware that removed the ability to boot
into Linux using PS twos. But they were actually being
used as supercomputers when they were networked together by the
US government and others. It's pretty cool we.
Speaker 4 (57:13):
Could flash firmware or something, right.
Speaker 6 (57:15):
Yeah, yeah, I think they might have finally lifted it. Honestly,
I haven't kept up because PS twos are so twenty
years ago.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
So let's put an air gap in this conversation for now,
thank you again so much for coming on the show
and walking us through crypto conspiracies.
Speaker 6 (57:37):
Jonathan, Now, thank you so much for having me. I
am now going to go home look at my paycheck
and wonder what is happening.
Speaker 4 (57:44):
I think we're all going to do that.
Speaker 6 (57:46):
You're all going to look at my paycheck. That's totally
again company.
Speaker 4 (57:49):
You get a check, weird? Yeah, I just get snake it.
Speaker 6 (57:52):
Actually, I just get a guy at my door saying
you're good, and then he walks away.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
It's called pain for protection.
Speaker 1 (57:59):
My man, Is that the guy who touches your face
when he talks to you?
Speaker 6 (58:03):
No, I.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
Kid say to you on both cheeks.
Speaker 6 (58:06):
I suspect that's Josh. He went from walking up behind
me and inhaling deeply where he would take in my scent. This,
by the way, totally not a joke. Josh Clark of
stuff you should know, used to come behind me and
sniff me. I think it might be him, but he
just disguises his features, so it's just a guess at
this point.
Speaker 1 (58:26):
Speaking of fantastic segues, you can find Jonathan Strickland on
tech Stuff. You can check out his excellent his excellent
work on YouTube where he introduces you to concepts of
everyday science and brain stuff, and where he gives you
a much more optimistic look at the future than we
do in his video series Forward Thinking.
Speaker 6 (58:48):
Thank you if you.
Speaker 5 (58:49):
Have any thoughts, and that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
st d WYTK. If you don't want to do that,
you can send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (59:10):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 5 (59:14):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. As we said earlier this week, we're
doing a couple of extra episodes. We went and went,
did a cavalcade of podcasting team ups with our pals
at Lava for Good, and we didn't ask them about cryptocurrency.
But maybe we can get to that when we have
(00:21):
them on for interviews.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Absolutely, that's coming very soon as well. But for now,
let's get to cryptocurrency Part two with Jonathan Strickland or
we talk a bit about the nuts and bolts of
coins such as Bitcoin, the more popular ones, the advantages
of the technology, and some of the flaws in the
system that have really kind of borne out over time
(00:43):
since these episodes were released back in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah, let's see if we predicted it a thing. I
think we got kind of close. Let's get to it.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learned this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nol.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's good to have you back.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yes, agreed, they call me Ben.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
We are joined with.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Our super producer Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are here.
You are you that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Cryptocurrencies Part two. I just followed through
with that because it Rhyan had a bit of a flow.
But we are not alone today. No, we are joined
again with our longtime friend Slash, nemesis of the show,
(01:46):
recurring guests who I think may have been on, may
have been the guest with the most appearances on stuff
they don't want you to know.
Speaker 5 (01:54):
Yeah, we've got a jacket for you, Alla, SNL. It's
really fun.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
We get to go to the join the Five Times Club.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah, you get to meet Steve Martin, but you have
to also meet Chevy Chase, ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 6 (02:09):
Hey, and just like love, I was inside you all along.
What Yeah, it's just dating.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
I've been meaning to check that. I get that checked out.
Speaker 6 (02:18):
Sorry, Yeah, are you doing a reference? What so so?
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Jonathan, thank you so much, Thank you so much for
coming back on the show. In our previous episode, we
we discuss the nuts and bolts of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 6 (02:37):
Yeah, and blockchain technology.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And one of the things that we agree would would
probably be the best move for you listeners, friends, and neighbors.
If you are not familiar with cryptocurrency, please check out
episode one before you go to this episode, because we're
gonna we're gonna cut past that. We're gonna cut past
that blockchain drive.
Speaker 6 (02:59):
Sure.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
Yeah, and on other past episodes we've discussed some of
the darker sides of what cryptocurrency might be, and you're
here to really shine a light in some of that darkness.
Let's see what's real it's not.
Speaker 6 (03:12):
Yeah, I'm happy to at least to impart to you
what I know, and I wholly admit there are things
I do not know, but I don't know what those are.
So here we are.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
You got unknown unknowns. Yeah, so for a peak behind
the curtain. Several weeks ago, Matt Nol and I began
talking about doing something on cryptocurrency conspiracies, and I think
a lot Noel you had come with this idea, and
I think a lot of it was inspired by conversations
(03:49):
we'd all been having, both together and as individuals, about
speculation and booms and busts in cryptocurrency and the proliferation
of non bitcoin cryptocurrency. And one of the things that
we wanted to do with this episode is get your
take on some of the allegations that Matt has mentioned
(04:12):
about different well rumors, allegations perhaps stereotypes of cryptocurrency. The
first one, which is probably the most apparent and something
I think you've probably remarked upon in Tech Stuff as well,
which is one of Jonathan's other podcasts available wherever you
find your favorite shows. One of those topics is cryptocurrency
(04:35):
and crime. So how much truth is there to the
characterization of cryptocurrency as like a cash for criminals?
Speaker 6 (04:42):
So there's certainly some legitimacy to that in the sense
that the very nature of cryptocurrency allows you to make
somewhat anonymous transactions. If you are super super deductive and
you are really paying attention to patterns and you're really
tracking which accounts are getting transfers at what time, you
(05:04):
could probably draw some conclusions that could narrow you down
to a specific person. But generally speaking, these are anonymous, right,
So it's an ideal currency for someone who wants to
purchase something that otherwise would be illegal because it's not
easily going to be tied to that person.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
When it's a currency that's used a lot on like
the Dark Web, and drugs or anything like that.
Speaker 6 (05:29):
Yeah, the Silk Road, which was, you know, one of
the many black markets on the dark web, which has
been shut down and opened up again and shut down repeatedly.
That was one of the places known for accepting bitcoin
currency from pretty much the start of bitcoin, once it
really got going, So a lot of people immediately began
(05:50):
to associate bitcoin with this concept of the currency you
want to use when you want to do something illegal,
whether that might be purchasing drugs or weapons, or paying
someone to do something terrible to someone else. All of
those were allegations.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Like pranking them or something more.
Speaker 6 (06:10):
Pranking to death, Yes, pranking to death. He's been pranked
to death. Yeah, it was a lethal banana pie to
the face, except way more violent and splatting.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
So is this like law and Order carrot top, Yes.
Speaker 6 (06:24):
It's or Gallagher. Yeah, it was hit by the watermelon
smashing mallet. So seriously though, that was certainly an element,
and it very quickly got this reputation in those early days,
and it's somewhat earned, not entirely. I would argue that
bitcoin kind of falls victim to the same thing that
(06:44):
peer to peer networks fall victim too. Which is that
both technologies can have their uses in illegal activities, but
that wasn't necessarily what they were made to do. Peer
to peer networks were created so that would be easy
to distribute files quickly across the network, big files, and
that doesn't necessarily mean something like a movie that you
(07:06):
don't have the rights to. It might be something that
you can freely distribute. It's just that to do so
in normal means would take too long.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
It's just an efficient way of transferring files over the
Internet that doesn't require a one to one transfer of
a single file. It's just a little bit more efficient
and makes best It makes better use of the pipeline.
Speaker 6 (07:27):
And blockchain technology in general is a great way of
keeping record of transactions because every single transaction becomes part
of that shared ledger. It's part of that shared history
and it's there forever right, so you can track ownership
through blockchain technology if you want so. For example, if
you wanted to use blockchain to keep a record of
(07:48):
real estate deals, you would definitely know who owned that
or at least what account own that last real estate deal.
I'll own that parcel of real estate because it would
be in that shared Ledger, there'd be no getting around.
In fact, a lot of people have talked about using
blockchain for stuff beyond just cryptocurrencies, So there are legitimate
uses for it, but it's hard to escape that reputation
(08:10):
once you get it. Certainly there are still people who
are using bitcoin to do stuff that is extra legal.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Okay, So then if we were to say on the
validity of this on a scale of one to ten,
it sounds like it's about a five or six.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly something that has been an issue,
and you know, people who wanted to commit any kind
of criminal act, whether it was purchasing something or paying
someone to do something, certainly bitcoin would be an attractive
alternative to using a currency that could be traced back
to you. Really, it's not the currency so much that's
(08:50):
traced back to you, it's the transaction itself, right, because
often these transactions have to pass through a third party.
It's that third party that is the barrier for a
lot of people.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Isn't this a thing though, where like you know, with Facebook,
you're constantly having to accept updated terms of service and
things like that. Obviously, using something like bitcoin or being
part of one of these exchanges, there's no such protection.
So who are we to say that, you know, all
of a sudden that anonymity goes out the window or
something fundamentally changes about the way business is done.
Speaker 6 (09:22):
I mean, it all depends on how you've set up
your wallet, right, Like, if you've got your wallet with
an exchange, then there are a lot of dangers there.
There's the danger that you may your identity may never
be revealed, but someone might get hold of your money.
So it's a complicated affair. But that's the case with
any kind of currency or commodity. I mean, there's always
(09:44):
going to be some element of risk there because there's
no such thing as a perfect system. Systems are being
made by human beings, and so far we have not
created the perfect human being.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Well, the most popular wallet is coin base, I believe,
and they've been having they were having some troubles, I
believe earlier this year.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
Every single one of these these digital wallet companies have
had some sort of issues. Sometimes they've been relatively minor,
like people reporting that they suddenly could not access their
wallets for a given amount of time. Other times it
gets way worse, where people can't access their wallets and
they find out two weeks later. The reason is all
that information was stolen.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Nice, and it's because it's a unique thing it can
be stolen to, meaning that it's not so like if
your if you're quote unquote stealing a movie by you know,
downloading it through a peer to peer thing. You're getting
a copy of it, right, physically taking it, but the
original still exists, right, But in this case, the original
is long.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
It's because what you what you have stolen is you
have stolen the end point of the last transaction for
that bitcoin, right, or that part of a bitcoin, depending
upon how much was being spent. So what you are,
what you're effectively stealing is the destination that bitcoin went to.
So again, bitcoin coins do not exist in any sort
(11:02):
of physical reality, right, You're what you're doing is you've
got a record of transactions. It's and in fact, this
isn't that hard to imagine. If you've dealt with money
on any digital scale, like just regular cash dollars, if
you do a transfer from your bank account to some
other account, they're not sending suitcases filled with bills. They're
(11:24):
wiring over a notification saying this transfer has taken place.
This represents this amount of wealth going to this person.
Same thing with bitcoin. So what you have done if
you've stolen is that you've stolen that account saying you
know you you now own the wallet where it says
this is where those bitcoins went last. And because most
(11:44):
people are using bitcoin anonymously, it gets really hard to say,
well that that specific one doesn't belong to you. It's
it gets real muddy.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Speaking of yeah, anonymity here one thing that's one thing
that we discussed in previous episode was the identity or
identities of the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto, yeah, pioneer of bitcoin.
We also found some pretty interesting allegations or pretty interesting
(12:15):
arguments that bitcoin some people believe may be a tool
of intelligence agencies or state actors.
Speaker 6 (12:23):
Have you heard this interesting? I had not specifically heard that.
It's very interesting because the at least the stated purpose
for bitcoin is so antithetical to that. But then you
could argue, well, that's the perfect cover, right, the idea
that oh, if I go out there and tell everyone,
this is the perfect currency to adopt because it doesn't
(12:45):
involve a state actor, it doesn't have any third party,
it's all direct transfers between people within the system and
therefore no one needs to know apart from the two
parties involved, except for the fact that, of course every
single trend action becomes part of this shared ledger.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Would that be like for off the books like black
ops and things like that? Is that the idea here?
Speaker 5 (13:06):
Yeah, well, it all originates from this person, Natalia Kasperski.
She was giving a lecture at university in Saint Petersburg,
and you know, somebody snapped photos, as you tend to
do sometimes, of the slides as she was giving the presentation,
and one of them was discussing bitcoin in particular. And
this is just a quote that was taken from this.
(13:27):
It was in Russian, or it was not written in English.
This is a translation, but it was. Bitcoin is a
project of American intelligence agencies which was designed to provide
quick funding for US, British and Canadian intelligence activities in
different countries. So the idea that you could wire money
essentially not untraceable, but you could wire money easily that
(13:50):
is not in the currency of some other country. Depending
on where you're transferring it to, it doesn't need to
be exchanged.
Speaker 6 (13:55):
Its plausible deniability that if like saying, oh well, this
actors who, for example, snuck into an Iranian nuclear facility
and installed viral software upon centrifuges. They weren't paid in
any any countries currency, so therefore it's harder to trace
(14:16):
back something like that.
Speaker 5 (14:17):
Yeah, and it's also interesting, so that would be really
good cover for that kind of thing. And then also
if you're having a very large transaction to maybe another
intelligence agency or someone you're working in tandem with, you
don't have to exchange you know, a huge transaction anywhere.
It's only a couple of bitcoins really, or you know,
one hundred bitcoins here, and you're like, that's a massive transaction.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Like the example I heard would be the CIA interacting
with ISI to support something that would technically be US
support of known terror groups.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Sure, so that yeah, kind of kind of also, like
when you get into two past scandals like the the
Iran contra, that sort of stuff. Well, let me say this,
it wouldn't surprise me if there were various agencies intelligence
agencies making use of cryptocurrencies for this sort of thing.
(15:15):
I don't think they would have had a hand in
creating them necessarily, but I certainly don't wouldn't find it
surprising to hear about them leveraging it. You got to
remember that ultimately, in order to get units of that
currency in the first place, you either have to mine it,
which means, assuming your system is on the up and up,
(15:35):
you have to dedicate a lot of computing power to that.
And knowing that once that secret is out, you know,
once everyone knows, and you know, the system depends upon
everyone knowing. Once everyone knows how the mining process works,
there are going to be lots of people working very
hard to be really good at that because that's how
they earn money. Or you've got to actually exchange real
world money for those units of currency, right, So, ultimately,
(15:59):
if you get to a point where someone is exchanging
large amounts of their current currency, their state sponsored currency,
for bitcoin, that could be traceable. So you really all
you've done is shifted things.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
How can it be.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
Traceable though, because you're actually going to have a budget
item somewhere under someone's budget saying this X amount of
money was spent from our budget.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Not if it's a black budget.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
It's classified, Jonathan, Come on.
Speaker 6 (16:25):
Yeah, that doesn't mean that it's not written down somewhere, buddy.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Sometimes it does, I would think so, and all I'm
saying too is like, you know, in the same vein,
sure as hell, it feels like a good way to
launder money.
Speaker 6 (16:38):
Oh sure, No, that's another element of the criminal aspect,
is the idea of using bitcoin to launder money.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
With a way more effective than a car wash. Also,
you got to wonder what the rates are, you know,
is it fifteen percent? Is it twenty? And then like
at what point should you just pay taxes on it?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
And are these criminals and order the government? Do they
do you have to use a thing like coinbase or
is there another entry way into this?
Speaker 6 (17:05):
I mean, you can have a wallet on your hard drive.
That's why people have their hard drives, and they lose
them and they're like, I lost seven hundred million dollars
on my hard drive. That can happen.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
So we're going to follow up with more of this
conversation after a word from our sponsors, assuming we don't
get black bagged. Holy smoked, we made it.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
Noel stole my bit.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
I thout if we all did it, we just all
had black bags on.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
We could do it again.
Speaker 6 (17:43):
No, no, no, I think we're good. Let's keep going.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
I have four black bags in my bag. At all times.
Speaker 6 (17:48):
I'm not at all surprised by that, and yet still terrified.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Look, it's it just it's like somebody using bitcoin. Just
because I have that doesn't mean I'm a criminal.
Speaker 6 (17:57):
One thing I want to refer back to in our
previous little discussion, he said, ignoring the previous statement, right,
is that is that just because there's someone who's giving
a presentation doesn't necessarily mean that there's any actual evidence
to back that up. I am highly skeptical of a
(18:18):
presentation happening in Russia, in Russian to Russian audiences blaming
United States intelligence agencies for the creation of cryptocurrencies, or
at least the use of cryptocurrencies to fund black ops operations,
because there may be and I hesitate to say this,
but there may be a bias.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
What.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point, because one
thing that happens to depending on people's ideological viewpoints, is
we will sometimes tend to pick on one organization over
another that would do essentially the same thing. Sure, so
it's a real tall milkshake to say that one intelligence
(18:58):
agency did something and the other intelligence agencies A did
not know about it, or B did know about it.
And also didn't try to do something like it or.
Speaker 6 (19:08):
See, yeah, it wasn't already doing exactly the same thing.
Like it is not a stretch of the imagination to
think that. Like I said before, I would not be
shocked to find out that there had been use of
cryptocurrencies for these sort of black ops operations, because by
the very nature everything is being is trying to avoid
(19:28):
detection from the get go. But I also would not
be shocked to hear that, say, the KGB had used
cryptocurrencies to pay I don't know, hackers in North Korea.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
I'm trying to go out on a limon and say,
there's no way that's not happening at least a little bit. Yeah, man,
Like it just seems rife for that kind of stuff,
And like, you know, that's what these black ops are
all about, is that kind of freewheel and attitude where
it's just like improvising and figuring out different ways to
do things, and you know, it's all about being up
on the latest technology. And I don't know, it just
seems it rings true.
Speaker 6 (19:59):
I mean, yeah, if they want to use the cryptocurrency
spy cred, that would probably be.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
In here's another aspect of this that I think argues
in favor of this behavior. It's that we're now as
a species and as a conglomeration as state actors, seeing
a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare. Right, we
(20:24):
know that there is a ticking time limit to the
usefulness or efficacy of cruise ships. Right, we know that
for several decades, with great success, countries that would not
normally be able to fight in a conventional war have
successfully funneled time, blood, sweat and tears and plenty of
R and D into asymmetrical warfare. Which is why we
(20:47):
see you know, so called hacker or bought armies influencing
opinion through soft power stuff like propaganda. The new war
or the new theater of war. People the Pentagon are
always said, is informational.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
Well, I mean you've already seen over the past decade,
we've seen numerous examples here in the United States of
foreign actors who have infiltrated various information systems.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Oh, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
That's more of an overt one, but I was thinking
of things like in the electric grid, the power grid.
There have been numerous occasions where security experts have looked
at the different systems and various major power companies and
throughout the power grid in the United States and said,
there's evidence here of foreign hackers putting in code to
(21:41):
help infiltrate the infrastructure. To what purpose, who's to say,
but it's not a stretch to imagine that these are
all kind of little trigger points that should should someone
want to do serious damage to the United States. You
flip a switch and you overload a power you make
it so that it is going beyond its capabilities. You know,
(22:05):
you could actually physically snap power cables if you're sending
enough juice through you get to a point like that,
you cripple the the infrastructure, and it creates enough chaos
for you to get away with other stuff if you
need to. So there's entirely that possibility. Now, the fact
that nothing like that has actually happened, we haven't seen
(22:27):
any you know, rolling blackouts due to this means that
whatever they were trying to do, they had not actually
you know, they hadn't actually pulled that switch, but they
had started to lay the groundwork. Well, that stuff's happening
all the time everywhere the United States. You know, obviously
we're focused on it because we live here, but it's
happening all over the world from various actors all working
(22:50):
at cross purposes against each other and.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Sort of an ensemble cast.
Speaker 6 (22:55):
Yeah yeah, I mean, you know, we've got we've got
things like stocks net, which certainly seems to have the
United States fingerprints on it. It would be hard to
deny that based upon the code that was used in it.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Let's give us a little bit of a rundown on
st Ducks.
Speaker 6 (23:09):
So stucks Net was a virus specifically, all right, is
a virus. So nuclear power plants one of the things
they have are centrifuges that spend at a certain RPMs, right,
and they spin at that certain RPMs because if you
spend too slowly or too quickly, then things go wrong.
And Stuck's net effectively, what it did was it made
(23:31):
the centrifuges turn at a speed that was wrong, too
fast for what it was supposed to do. The idea
being that would cause failures in Iran's nuclear power capabilities,
and it.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Kind of worked.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
It's tough to do because these facilities mostly have air gaps.
Air gaps are where you do not have a connection
between your internal system and an external system, so it
meant that you had to get physical access to the
the the location.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
In the form of a thumb drive.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
You could do a thumb drive. Yeah, just do a
thumb drive. And even if you're just doing a thumb
drive where you're sending it to, you know, it doesn't
necessarily have to have been someone on the inside who
was compromised. You could send a thumb drive to let's
say the person at the front desk and say, uh,
there's a new update to the operating system. Just plug
this in and that'll do it. And then it could
infect the internal network, which could then go and affect
(24:24):
whatever systems you need to compromise, but you wouldn't have.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Like remote control over it. Instructions that would like.
Speaker 6 (24:31):
It's good, good old coding. You're just writing in the
code like when this happens, do execute this line of code.
So it's it's in some ways it's really sophisticated. In
other ways it's very basic.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
But it's it's brilliant in the in this simplicity of application.
But there's a lot of very elegant code going in there.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
Yeah, and the code, yes, it was definitely advanced and
so that the people argue, because the advanced nature of
the code, it narrows down the suspect list of who
could have done it. And because the very nature of
the code itself. A lot of people have said, this
looks an awful lot like stuff that comes out of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Maybe, and also Israel, and also Israel. Israel and the
US work together.
Speaker 6 (25:13):
That's the that's the common thread. Yeah. So and you know,
of course, no one's going to come forward and say, yeah,
got us, it was us, But it does definitely seem
to point that way. Now, does that mean that it's
definitely US and Israel? Well, I mean, we we can't
speak in certainties, but it seems fairly fairly sure like
(25:37):
it's hard to deny it. Now in that world where
we've got all these different parties working at cross purposes
infiltrating different systems, plausible deniability very important, right, Like we've
we're seeing it through everything from the accusations of interfering
with election cycles to uh yeah exactly, to affecting entire systems,
(26:04):
you know. And the usual suspects that pop up for
things that are happening in the United States are Russia,
North Korea, and China. Those are your three big ones,
so you could you know, And then of course you've
got the States saying it's not us, we didn't authorize this.
If you use something like a cryptocurrency to pay the
(26:26):
people who are actually creating the code and executing the
code and overseeing the botnets and actually doing the work,
then you've got that level of plausible deniability. You don't
know who paid whom. It could be that you have
an outside organization, someone who's not even remotely connected to
the governments of those of those countries. They say, let's
(26:49):
just make use of them, because one they have the technology,
two they have the education and know how on how
to do it, and three it takes all the heat
off us because they'll never know it was. We were
surprised as you are. Yeah, we just paid those guys,
and we paid them with a type of currency that
can't be traced back to us.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
We're basically watching the sixth sense with you for the
first time.
Speaker 6 (27:11):
All we're doing is putting on all of those graphics
processing units to work.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
It's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. You say this
because one of the controversial practices in China that the
governments of the United States and China disagree on is
who's paying documented Chinese hacking forces because they're not government employees.
And the Chinese position for some time has been this
(27:40):
is just a group of idealistic national not very nationalistic people.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
These are people who identify with China's philosophies, but they
are not in any way sponsored by or endorsed by
the government. For example, when Sony had their massive data
breach where gigabye of data, mostly in the form of movies,
but lots of other stuff too, including like records of
(28:05):
executives and actors and all this other stuff that got
leaked out. Uh, there were a couple of different arguments
about where that came from. One was the possibility of
it being from North Korean hackers, because it was in
response to a film that was coming out that was
The Interview. Yeah, it was the Interview. It was a
little a little bit of a spoof on North Korea's leader,
(28:27):
and North Korea had condemned it. So there was an
argument like, well, clearly you had already said that, you know,
you objected strongly, strongly to the movie. Apparently you objected
strongly enough to fund hackers to attack and this this company,
this global company.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Which the movie wasn't even very good.
Speaker 6 (28:44):
It's not that good. I've seen it.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
It was fine.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
We did an episode on this that you appeared on,
John that this, this idea of sophisticated coding and the
separation of the true actor from the appearance of an
actor leads us to another very strange question. So far,
(29:09):
when we've been talking about hidden hands behind cryptocurrency, sure,
we've been talking about humans.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
Well, why are we going to talk about raccoons?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yes, badgers.
Speaker 6 (29:22):
Sticking badgers? Oh roh wo badgers?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
What if? What if?
Speaker 6 (29:28):
Okay, hear me out? Yeah, hit me?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
What if a rogue artificial intelligence created bitcoin for the
express purpose of siphoning electricity to feed its nefarious dark engines?
Speaker 4 (29:49):
Wait wait, hold on, yeah it eats electricity.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Awesome.
Speaker 6 (29:55):
Well, I mean, if it's an artificial intelligence, it's presumably
on silicon based hardware and thus needs electricity to run.
So electricity would mean power. Power is what allows it
to process information.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
It needs a lot of it.
Speaker 6 (30:15):
I'm trying, I'm trying so hard to not just call
nonsense on this.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
But the reason, let's also use is an opportunity to
talk about how much bloody power and energy that mining
for bitcoin consumed. I think this is a good job.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
Right well, well, and I mentioned in the previous episodes,
So when you're when you're mining bitcoins, what you're really
doing is you're trying to solve very difficult mathematical problems
in order to validate past transactions, the ones that have
just happened to add the next block to the blockchain.
And if you managed to do that, you get rewarded
not just with whatever coins are mined at that time,
(30:54):
which is predetermined, and every few years the number has
per block I think's mind.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Currently bitcoin miners generate around seventy five bitcoins per hour.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
Every and when you look at that by per block,
it breaks down even further obviously because it's every ten
minutes is another block, right, right, So but every few
years that number is cut in half until you finally
get to the point where all bitcoins that'll ever exist
are in the system. And at that point it's just
transaction fees that keep things going.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
While energy spent on mining bitcoins is increasing well to
a point to a point.
Speaker 6 (31:33):
So if you get to a point where the number
of bitcoins you get per transaction completed is small enough,
then you have to reconcile that with how much money
you are spending on the electricity being used for the
processing power. And if you're spending more money on electricity,
then you're making money in the bitcoins you're mining as
(31:56):
a losing proposition, and people are going to start to
back off.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Here's a thing, though, to an article on Motherboard right now,
with the trajectory of bitcoin value being what it is,
they say it would be profitable for minors on the
whole to burn through more than twenty four tarawatt hours
of electricity in a year's time.
Speaker 6 (32:19):
Sure, yeah, and that's but these are making lots of assumptions.
Assumption number one is that the value of bitcoin is
going to continue to be high enough for that to
be true. And we don't necessarily know that, I suspect
it is going to be true. But over time, that is,
by the nature of what bitcoin is going to decrease.
It has to, because that's just how unless bitcoin's value
(32:41):
just continuously skyrockets and just keeps on building and never
takes enough of a backtrack to settle back down to whatever,
like ten thousand dollars per bitcoin, which is still a
huge amount, no doubt about it. Then you do eventually
get to a point where you're getting you're getting a
decimal like like ten thousandth of a bitcoin when you
(33:03):
successfully mine a block. It doesn't make sense for you
to continuously use that much power because you will be
spending more money than you get. That that's down the
road though, because it's when you've gone a few years
where this number keeps having until it gets down to
this tiny, tiny number. But eventually you get to a
point where it won't make sense to spend that much electricity.
(33:25):
In the short term, however, you're seeing massive amounts of
electricity being used to mine these coins.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
That number I said is apparently about the amount of
energy that Nigeria uses in a year, and that's the
country of one hundred and eighty six million people.
Speaker 6 (33:40):
Yeah, and it's it's not a surprise. But what will
happen is you'll eventually, at least the idea is that
you'll eventually reach a peak, you know, peak bitcoin, where
assuming again, assuming the value of the bitcoin doesn't skyrocket again,
that more and more people will start to back off,
and once they back off, the difficulty of that problem
(34:01):
will decrease, and people who are running more modest hardware
will be able to mind bitcoins and it won't be
as big of a yield per block mind. But at
the same time, they're also not the ones who would
otherwise be spending thousands of dollars just on electricity bills.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Until the machine consciousness is stated, at which point there
would be no reason to continue this charade, right.
Speaker 6 (34:26):
I find it very difficult to believe that an artificial
intelligence is in fact responsible for this, but I will
support that argument. After you take a break to thank
your sponsors.
Speaker 7 (34:41):
Who such cheek Jonathan, I am cheeky the sand Sorry, guys.
Speaker 6 (34:55):
I saw an opportunity and I went for it, so
I said that I was going to support my argument.
So the biggest argument I would make is just that
artificial intelligence is nowhere near the level of sophistication necessary
to create a system anywhere close to that complicated. I mean,
I follow the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, and there's
(35:20):
some amazing stuff in machine learning. There's amazing stuff in
various aspects of intelligence, but they're all very very narrow applications. So,
for example, image recognition we're getting really good at that
voice recognition, We're getting really good at it. But these
are all just tiny little slivers of intelligence. When it
(35:40):
comes to innovation, we're really lagging behind as far as
machine intelligence is concerned. And an example of this is
if you ever try and use the tool chef Watson.
Chef Watson uses the same platform as Watson that went
on Jeopardy and that Jeopardy right, and the way it
we're is that it was fed a whole bunch of
(36:02):
different recipe books and then it takes all that information
and it starts to really analyze it and try to
figure out which cooking techniques go with which ingredients, which
ingredients complement one another, based upon their appearance in various recipes.
And then what you do is you tell it what
kind of stuff you have at your disposal, and it
(36:25):
suggests recipes for you to cook and they're Bonker's crazy.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
What's an example.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
So, for example, there's cauliflower fricacy. One of the optional
ingredients in califlower frecacy is cauliflower. I'm serious, Like, I'm
going through the list of recipes and this is cauliflower optional.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Like, so burning question. Yeah, I've always wondered what constitutes
a frecacy.
Speaker 6 (36:50):
You know, an excellent question that I am not prepared
to answer, but I will tell you this that Chef
Watson is. It's dynamically creating these recipes. So if you
were to put the exact same recipes in or exact
same ingredients in as I did, you would get a
different recipe. If I did it twice in a row,
I would get two different recipes, and there would be
recipes that were created on the spot at that moment,
(37:13):
not like stored in some database and then retrieved. So
it's not like search results.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Just goes to show that Watson has moods.
Speaker 6 (37:19):
Man, Well, my point being that Watson hasn't quite nailed
it yet. Sure, this is about cooking a meal that
is edible to human beings. Creating an entire cryptocurrency system
in order to mask the consumption of energy is an
order of magnitude more complicated, and I just cannot conceive
(37:42):
of that being in the realm of possibility.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Well, of course not, man, you have a meat brain.
Speaker 6 (37:47):
Yeah, maybe that's the problem.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
What if said Tooshi Knakamoto, is working with the machines,
is aiding the machines in this endeavor because he wants
to be the number one meat bag and the takeover happens.
Speaker 6 (38:02):
He doesn't want to get caught in that sky net.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
It's made of lasers.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Yeah, we're doing references today, folks.
Speaker 6 (38:10):
Sorry you invited me on the show.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
I knew what happens, we knew what we were getting into,
and we welcome it.
Speaker 6 (38:16):
I think this is a fascinating idea, the idea that
there could like. To me, this is on the same
level as someone who suggested, and I mentioned this in
our previous episode two, someone who suggested that the reason
why the Large Hadron Collider suffered so many setbacks early
on when it was first going to come online was
(38:36):
that supposedly, uh, the someone from the future, some entity
from the future was traveling back in time to sabotage
the Large Hadron Collider because once it turned on, it
would cause some sort of calamitous event that would perhaps
extinguish the human race. And so there were Whether those
were theories that were that were expressed in jest or seriously,
(39:00):
I don't know. I mean, they seem tongue in cheek
to me, but I can never tell if someone's being
serious or not, which is why I am so awful
whenever I go to stand up. But the fact that
those were put forward, it seems very similar to this
kind of suggestion. And while it's fun to think about,
and I certainly think it's a great premise for like
(39:23):
a science fiction story, is just not quite within the
scope of what we're capable of doing.
Speaker 4 (39:28):
Right now, what do you think that I think it's
just hiding.
Speaker 6 (39:32):
You just think the artificial intelligence is hiding.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
Yeah, well, look at all this energy usage. I'm not
in here, I'm not inside to what ends. Well, it's
hiding till one day we get all of those slivers
that we're talking about of innovation into one unique piece
of just what it means to be a human.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
Then it will know, and then it will become.
Speaker 6 (39:53):
I think any artificial intelligence of that sophistication would be
able to essentially and would have already infected all networks
and distributed itself to a point where we are already superfluous.
And uh, why did the lights just flicker? Okay, well,
never mind. You know, I'm just gonna I'm gonna drop off.
I'm going to drop off on that line of line
(40:14):
of logic right now.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I'll tell you. The problem there though, is inherently artificial
intelligences don't have hands what with to build stuff, right,
so they need they need us for a time and
then you know, it's lights out.
Speaker 6 (40:27):
Until when they get better. Robus the robots.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
These days, I mean, they they're hard pressed to, like,
you know, walk across the room clunky.
Speaker 6 (40:36):
That's again why I sit there and say that there
our ability to create an artificial intelligence of sophistication that
would be able to do this is kind of laughable
because we're still at a point where a robot that
is designed to learn how to open doors will sit
and stare at a door for six hours and then
reach out and pull a door that's meant to be pushed.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
And I have a different hand.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I do that all the time.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yeah, I literally ran into a door yesterday.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
No.
Speaker 6 (41:04):
Well, I also don't expect you to create a cryptocurrency
to hide how much power you are consumer.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Hey, I make no secret about my yesh.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Don't sell it, don't sell. In short, so we are
we've looked at three of or at least three of
the really really big ideas right that somehow on this
on this idea of artificial intelligence or machine consciousness. Maybe there,
maybe there isn't some sort of proto sky net entity
(41:36):
out there, But would you be as quick to dismiss
the idea of, you know, the idea of some of
the same lessons learned from high frequency trading or algorithm studies,
like I know, sure is using algorithm I mean, sorry,
bitcoin mining is using algorithms.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean that certainly people are using are
the intelligence in order to work with bitcoin, But I
don't think bitcoin itself is a product or is the
is being manipulated that on that grand a scale by
artificial intelligence. But yes, as you mentioned high frequency trading,
that's where you've got computer algorithms that are making thousands
(42:19):
of trades per second, really far faster than what any
human can do, and you end up seeing little mini
crashes and bubbles in the stock market as a result.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
I can't believe we almost forgot in the first episode.
We left off at the very end with something we
need to get to, even if it's just at the
end of this episode. Wales.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
Oh so yeah, I'm happy to talk about whales because
we you know, you guys were talking about different questions
to ask and one of the questions you had was
could there possibly be any entity or organization that could
really work to leverage bitcoin in some way that could
be harmful to others. That leads us to the discussion
(43:04):
of wales. What are whales? Why do we call them whales? Wales?
That's a term within the bitcoin sphere for organizations or
people who own a large number of bitcoins. And it
is estimated Bloomberg did a piece on this in twenty
seventeen that one thousand people own forty percent of all
(43:26):
the bitcoins out there.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
There's already economic inequality.
Speaker 6 (43:30):
Yeah, so you think about that forty percent, nearly half
of all bitcoins belong to just one thousand people. So
keeping that in mind, and remember bitcoin, don't I argue
it's not really effective as a currency. It's more like
a commodity. In my mind. Let's say that you got
these one thousand people, and through their circles, they just
(43:53):
have learned, even if it's only a portion of them,
learn who the others are.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
OK.
Speaker 6 (43:59):
So it's a a loose confederation of bitcoin owners and
they all watch very carefully as the value of bitcoin climbs,
and they're thinking, all right, I feel like at let's
say seventeen thousand dollars. That's going to be the peak
before we hit the next plateau or maybe even a
drop off. What we're going to do collectively so that
(44:19):
we can really cash in is we're all agreeing at
x amount of time, we're all going to liquefy our
bitcoins so that we can maximize our profit and then
get out before the crash. Which means that they would
actually be causing a crash because they'd be dumping thousands, thousands,
hundreds of thousands of bitcoins on the market simultaneously, which
(44:43):
would devalue it suddenly. The demand would be far lower
than the supply, right, It's typically the other way around,
and you could see an entire market collapse. This is
the same sort of concept as someone who's dealing with
insider trading, right that they have the for knowledge that
something big is gonna happen, and they either buy up
(45:04):
a lot of stock or sell off a lot of
stock before the announcement hits so that they can maximize
their profit from it. That's the fear that this one
thousand people who own almost half of all the bitcoins.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Which is about seventy four billion dollars.
Speaker 6 (45:19):
Yeah, seventy four billion dollars worth could collectively make the
decision to get out of the game and maximize their
profits because I mean, you know, they could they could
just convert it to whatever currency they wanted to, because
I mean.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Surely they're in some kind of underground like torture club together.
Speaker 6 (45:36):
There's probably a fight club, probably a bitcoin fight club.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
I'm just saying, like you'd think players of that level,
as anonymous as it all is, are more likely to
be aware of each other than say some of the
smaller players.
Speaker 6 (45:49):
Well, there's certainly like they're online discussion groups about bitcoin
where where people who adopted it early certainly know each
other or at least know each other by handle, if
not by name.
Speaker 5 (45:58):
You kind of think there's some younger people, much younger
than you would imagine, sure, being old enough to have
that much money.
Speaker 6 (46:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's really it's especially for the
early days again before the computing demands got so high,
because the computational problems got so complicated, and obviously if
you got in on the ground floor and you were
constantly using at least some of your bitcoins to help
supply the need for more advanced computing equipment. You could
(46:28):
just continuously build out your your mining rig to mine more.
So as long as you're mining more coins than you're
spending on your mining rig, you're in the winning situation. Right. Well,
if this group of people all decided that they were
going to do that, it could be a total catastrophe
for the currency as a whole. And there have been
some folks who have said that bitcoin is in a
(46:50):
bubble and that bubble is going to burst, And one
of the things that could cause that is a tacit
agreement among the whales to get out of the game
rather than watch their investment balloon up in value and
then deflate and then balloon up and deflate. I mean,
(47:10):
I can't imagine what that would do to me. Like
if I were sitting there looking at my digital wallet
and thinking, all right, I've got twenty bitcoins. Wow, today
it's two hundred thousand dollars and then the next ac no,
it's down to twenty thousand dollars. I lost eighty grand overnight. Like,
it would drive me crazy. So that is a real fear.
Whether or not it would ever happen is a totally
(47:32):
I mean, it's still a hypothetical. It's not like it's
actually happened, but it's still a possibility.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Supposedly, there's a lot of work being done with neural
networks being used to predict the change in bitcoin price.
Speaker 6 (47:45):
Yeah, And honestly, now we're getting to a level of
technology that is I mean, it's fascinating to me. Neural
networks are amazing. I love neural networks. But you're getting
to a point where you're taking technology, which is something
I understand pretty well well, and you're applying it to
market theory, which is something that is like witchcraft to me.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Even to the experts, it's like witchcraft. Yeah, I mean
you have these like high level economists who just completely
contradict each other all the time.
Speaker 6 (48:13):
It makes me feel like string theory. Yeah, because you
talk to someone who's an expert in string theory and
you say, you keep asking questions, you will eventually get
to a question where they say like, yeah, I the
math tells me what it is, but I don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
That's the thing. When you're at the bleeding edge of something,
to use the phrase you had established earlier, When you're
at that edge, people are guessing and it becomes very
close to ideology. They're economists that have clearly been demonstrably
wrong over decades, and they're sticking to the model.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
And the nature of an edge is that it's not
that hard to fall off.
Speaker 4 (48:51):
That's true.
Speaker 6 (48:52):
That's true. It's really I like that. I want it
on a bubber sticker.
Speaker 5 (48:55):
So it just really fascinated something that I didn't understand
before we did this episode. Yeah, that exactly how many
cryptocurrencies exist, and you know, we keep saying that there
are a lot of them.
Speaker 4 (49:05):
Did you guys mention how many?
Speaker 6 (49:06):
I just all I did was okay.
Speaker 5 (49:10):
So according to coin marketcap dot com, which tracks all
of them, and it gives you it gives you their
market cap, it gives you the price of a single one,
the volume, the circulating supply. It's really interesting. It gives
you a change over time for a twenty four hour period.
You can get really deep into it if you want to,
the way you would a stock market. Just a currency exchange.
(49:30):
It has almost fifteen hundred different currencies that are out
there right now. That's that's insane to me. I was
I would only I've only ever been aware of for
I think right.
Speaker 6 (49:41):
Like ethereum and bitcoin.
Speaker 5 (49:43):
Yeah, that they're that many. And if you look through
this list on this website, it's so much money just
wrapped up in these ethereal things.
Speaker 6 (49:54):
It's so much wealth.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
Read those white read those white papers, Matt, sign up.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
That's my thing that what makes one more attractive than another?
Is it just that it has a cooler name, Like
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (50:03):
I mean it's it's honestly, when you when you really
boil it down, it's it's the ones that people feel
are valuable. Yeah, I mean it's the same thing as
really any again, any currency. Like if we go way
back in time where we get to bartering, then we
can have little philosophical discussions like like, Ben, really, do
(50:25):
you think that this laptop I have is worth only
two chickens? I don't care how close you are to
your chickens. I'm going to need more than two chickens
for this laptop.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
He's very close.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
You don't even know their names, man, No, how dare you?
Speaker 6 (50:39):
Yeah? Do you know my laptop's name?
Speaker 1 (50:41):
Yes, Dell, it's actually Lappy.
Speaker 6 (50:46):
I named him after Strong Bad's laptop. But no, it's yeah,
it's a good point, but but we could You know
that that gets to a point where you argue, all right,
well how much how much is the thing that you
make worth the thing that I make? Because I need
what you have and you need what I have. And
then the problem that came in is when let's say
that I need a table and the guy the carpenter, Nole,
(51:07):
you're the carpenter. I'm going to go to you, and
I'm like, I need a table. I am a goat farmer.
I can give you goat milk, and you're like, dude,
I do not like goat smoke. Well, now I have
to either find someone else who makes something you do need,
trade the goat smoke for the thing that you like, nol,
and then bring that to you and then get my table.
Or we have to invent a currency because this is
(51:28):
just too crazy. I need some other means of transaction.
Speaker 1 (51:32):
Let's just start a cult.
Speaker 5 (51:37):
Yes, and just last thing there right now, in all
these different cryptocurrencies, there is over half a trillion dollars
circulating in this just vapor somewhat vapor aware of money.
Speaker 6 (51:51):
Yeah, I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but seriously,
when you when you really look at all currencies, you
realize that there's there's only like a half step of
difference between the quote unquote real currencies of like dollars
and pounds in euros and things like that, and digital currencies.
It's it's it seems like there's more because you can
(52:13):
hold things, you know, most of them have physical versions
of them, like dollars you can buy you can get
a dollar bill, and since you hold in your hand,
it has permanence and you think of it as being
a real thing. But when you really really look beyond that,
you realize, wow, we're all just pretending. And as long
as everyone keeps pretending, everything's fine. But if we ever
(52:34):
come to a day where we decide to stop pretending,
we're bone.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
We're all we're all elmer FuG yeah, or Daffy Duck
walking off the cliff right before they look down.
Speaker 6 (52:46):
As long as you don't look down, you don't fall. Well.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
But if you think about it, though, too, if you
really want to go down that rabbit hole. It's like
the reality that we all accept comes with kind of
being part of a police state. Because as soon as
you step outside of your lane and say, I don't
accept this anymore. I want more, I should have this
much money, I'm gonna take it, you get shot or
you getting put in jail, Like, there are very real
(53:09):
boundaries that force us to be a part of this
system and accept it. So it's a lot easier to
accept it knowing that if you don't, you're boned too.
So it's kind of a boned if you do, boned
if you don't.
Speaker 6 (53:21):
What it comes down to is our confidence in the
method of transaction, and if our confidence is sound, it
doesn't really matter what we call it, or whether it's
digital or physical, if we're confident in it that the
thing that I have in my hand will be able
to purchase the goods or services that I want, and
then tomorrow it's just as good, and the next day
(53:42):
and the next we're fine. It's when you sit there
and say, this thing we've all been pretending has value,
I just realized it doesn't, and now everyone else has
realized that, and then suddenly the value just disappears because
we've gotten rid of our shared delusion.
Speaker 1 (53:58):
We did an episode asking whether money is a religion,
and it's still One of the things we always took
away from that and found interesting was that, you know,
there's a reason genres of some religions and versions of
some currencies are referred to as denominations. Yeah, it's not
(54:18):
for nothing does etymology exist.
Speaker 6 (54:20):
Also, remember it's not money that's the root of all evil.
It's the love of money that's the root of all evil.
Speaker 1 (54:26):
All right, Well, we have like three emotions a year,
so you don't need to worry about that.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Speak for yourself, Toddy.
Speaker 4 (54:31):
I found two currencies that are tracked on here.
Speaker 6 (54:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (54:33):
The first one is called snake eyes okay, and it
just goes by the handle snake. So you got I
got like twenty snake man. I think that's awesome. That
needs to catch on right now. It's like worthless, so
I just need to get that back up.
Speaker 6 (54:45):
I just see thousands of snakes wearing eye patches.
Speaker 5 (54:48):
And this one it's just it says it gay money,
that's what it says.
Speaker 4 (54:52):
So you know, maybe more power.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Well, if there's fifteen hundred of these, then I see
no reason why we can't get n bucks on the board.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
All right, and thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (55:03):
Let's end with that.
Speaker 6 (55:04):
How do you do it?
Speaker 2 (55:04):
How do we go from bend bucks the notion to
ben bucks the publicly traded tradeable available cryptocurrency we do have.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
We do have tangible bend bucks by the way, well
glad to make the switch.
Speaker 6 (55:18):
Yeah, you definitely don't need tangible ones. So what you
would need to do is you would have to set
up a network. You would have to create the software
that would allow you to create the blocks of transactions,
just as Bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies use. So
you would have this technology where it would be proprietary
to bend bucks. Where you know, the method we use
(55:39):
to create the math problem that the various computers on
the network have to solve in order to verify transactions
is unique and one that we could scale up or
scale down.
Speaker 2 (55:50):
We can't trade snake eyes for ben bucks.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
You could, actually, I mean certainly there can be. I
mean that's why exchanges exist, right The exchange exchange is
purpose is to determine what is the relative value of
all these different currencies so that you can make those exchanges.
Although all it really means is that you're handing the
units of bend bucks over to the exchange, The exchange
(56:15):
hands units of equivalent or snake guys to you, and
then the exchange has your bend bucks.
Speaker 1 (56:22):
So this is totally possible.
Speaker 6 (56:24):
Oh, it's possible, it would be. I mean, do we
have any computers in the office that aren't currently being
used for anything?
Speaker 1 (56:31):
I hope those words taste good when you eat them later.
Speaker 6 (56:34):
Because I'm just saying I mean, I mean, I got
a gaming rig, which means that I can be like
the number one minor of bit Bucks, which means I
can be.
Speaker 2 (56:43):
Getting in on the ground floor.
Speaker 1 (56:45):
We're taking all our We're taking all our old gaming consoles,
pulling a Pentagon and networking them together. Remember when the
when the Pentagon brought like or do o D excuse me,
got like two.
Speaker 6 (56:55):
S the OLDPS two.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
Contribute.
Speaker 1 (56:59):
I haven't too let's so well.
Speaker 6 (57:00):
You know, the thing was that Sony eventually made a
change in the firmware that removed the ability to boot
into Linux using PS twos. But they were actually being
used as supercomputers when they were networked together by the
US government and others. It's pretty cool we.
Speaker 4 (57:13):
Could flash firmware or something, right.
Speaker 6 (57:15):
Yeah, yeah, I think they might have finally lifted it. Honestly,
I haven't kept up because PS twos are so twenty
years ago.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
So let's put an air gap in this conversation for now,
thank you again so much for coming on the show
and walking us through crypto conspiracies.
Speaker 6 (57:37):
Jonathan, Now, thank you so much for having me. I
am now going to go home look at my paycheck
and wonder what is happening.
Speaker 4 (57:44):
I think we're all going to do that.
Speaker 6 (57:46):
You're all going to look at my paycheck. That's totally
again company.
Speaker 4 (57:49):
You get a check, weird? Yeah, I just get snake it.
Speaker 6 (57:52):
Actually, I just get a guy at my door saying
you're good, and then he walks away.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
It's called pain for protection.
Speaker 1 (57:59):
My man, Is that the guy who touches your face
when he talks to you?
Speaker 6 (58:03):
No, I.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
Kid say to you on both cheeks.
Speaker 6 (58:06):
I suspect that's Josh. He went from walking up behind
me and inhaling deeply where he would take in my scent. This,
by the way, totally not a joke. Josh Clark of
stuff you should know, used to come behind me and
sniff me. I think it might be him, but he
just disguises his features, so it's just a guess at
this point.
Speaker 1 (58:26):
Speaking of fantastic segues, you can find Jonathan Strickland on
tech Stuff. You can check out his excellent his excellent
work on YouTube where he introduces you to concepts of
everyday science and brain stuff, and where he gives you
a much more optimistic look at the future than we
do in his video series Forward Thinking.
Speaker 6 (58:48):
Thank you if you.
Speaker 5 (58:49):
Have any thoughts, and that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
st d WYTK. If you don't want to do that,
you can send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (59:10):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 5 (59:14):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.