FREEDOM & PRIVACY TECH vs THE FIAT PANOPTICON | Max Hillebrand - THE Bitcoin Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
This could definitely turn into massive chaos, you know, if the wrong people have such an enormous

(00:04):
amount of wealth. They can wreak havoc. Privacy is such a powerful tool towards freedom. We can
perfectly hide ourselves in such that no middleman can actually find us and pinpoint where we are.
With the genius of cryptography, we have it such that nobody can steal the money.
And it's incredible. Imagine on the battlefield there is one guy in a full metal plate armor,

(00:26):
and the other guys only have like wooden clubs.
They simply have no chance, right?
Given this asymmetric distribution of technology.
We need a decentralized system for timestamping and money, right?
That's where Bitcoin comes in.
It's just the beginning.
Like, that's a tiny, tiny, small protocol.
We can do so much more with it.
I hope funding for Freedom Tech will go up in the future rather than go down.

(00:48):
And if that is the case, then spicy times ahead.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker, and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
Bitcoin continues to make new blocks every 10 minutes,
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.

(01:09):
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(01:56):
And kind reminder that you can support this show by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain.
Or don't, Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk.
Max, good to see you, man.
It's good to see you too, Walker.

(02:17):
It's been a while since the last show.
And the last one was quite fun.
It was quite fun.
You know, we've had non-podcast conversations since then,
meaning conversations in the real meat space in multiple locations.
They probably should have been podcasts, really.
Everything should be a podcast.
But, you know, sometimes you just don't have that recording equipment on you.

(02:39):
Although I guess with our phones, is there an excuse?
I don't know.
They are listening.
We might as well, you know.
i really think that the long-term evolution of of bitcoin conferences is going to be the extremes
right either there is no phones no recording you don't even mention who's there to anyone ever

(03:00):
right unlike a harsh core a hardcore elimination of the community if you do right then the other
extreme is just big brother style microphones everywhere and we have this like two-day event
and out of this we get like three years worth of podcasts so honestly honestly i kind of like those
two extremes like the one what's the uh what's the style of guys is it chatham house rules where

(03:24):
it's like no no cameras no no video recording no audio recording there may be written transcripts
or not even written like written notes but not full transcripts shared afterwards i've been to
one conference like that attribute anything that was said to a specific person right right
these more private settings really foster a a more intimate way to to think and to express yourself

(03:47):
on on topics that you're not so sharp about yet if you're constantly worried about being recorded
and and that anything you say will be used against you that that means you will self-censor to a large
extent well it's it's true i mean it gets back to the like the core idea of privacy and how it is
intertwined with free speech in many ways, because it's like, you really like, there's the one thing

(04:11):
about speaking freely publicly, right? And being able to do that and having that speech be protected
by law. There's another thing to being able to speak completely privately as freely as you want,
without fear of being overheard, of being surveilled, of being recorded without your
knowledge and you kind of need that ability. Like you need both, you need both or you don't have

(04:36):
actual free speech. I think like if big brother is always watching, always listening, even if you
have free speech in the public, uh, you know, the public arena, if you don't have that in the private,
you know, the private side of your life, because someone's always listening, it's like, are you ever
truly speaking freely. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I started out as a freedom maximalist,

(05:01):
I think. And then slowly that morphed into becoming a privacy maximalist. And that is
because privacy is such a powerful tool towards freedom. And if we define freedom as the absence
of coercion, the absence of violence, and privacy as the ability to not reveal yourself to an
attacker and then then obviously privacy is something that cuts an attack at its earliest

(05:25):
possible point and therefore increases the cost of applying violence or in other words removing
your freedoms and and so mastering these tools of privacy will will eventually result in in a much
freer world for for those who dare to use those tools it it's so true and it's one of the things
they gave me uh you were in lugano obviously and i'm not sure if you you were up early enough to

(05:50):
catch my opening remarks in the second day, but it was just me up there and they gave me wisely or
unwisely, gave me the stage for like a full 10 minutes just to open up the conference. And usually
it's as people are trickling in and stuff, right? And you're trying to make sure you get butts in
seats before the big heavy hitters come on. And I decided I was just going to make the whole thing

(06:11):
about privacy and the basically the subversion of the state through the reclamation of our
freedoms, right? The idea that the state doesn't give you any freedoms. They can only take them
away. You have to take those freedoms for yourself. And we have the tools to do that.
That's what the cypherpunks were so passionate about, are still so passionate about, is creating

(06:33):
those tools that make it possible to take the liberties that you want, take the liberties that
you need, take your freedom for yourself versus needing to be reliant on a benevolent state,
which is rarely the case to somehow give you those rights. Like they,
ironically, I didn't realize this, but I,

(06:55):
because I didn't check the schedule at first,
but then I checked the schedule and I was like, Oh, right after me.
And basically I'm just saying like, you should resist the state. You know,
you don't necessarily need to not saying you should,
but you don't need to pay taxes on everything. If the state doesn't know,
like not saying you should, but you know, and then like right up next is like a,
you know, Bitcoin and politics panel. And, and it was just like, well,
that's a, that's a nice little juxtaposition. Uh, so, you know, but it is, it is such an important

(07:19):
thing. I think people, even those who are aware of the tools that are out there often think,
well, I don't really need to use those right now because like, I don't really have anything
to hide. Like we, it's so easy to fall into that trap of like, why do you need privacy?
If you have nothing to hide, but for yourself, like, Oh, I don't need to be that careful because

(07:41):
I'm not saying anything that bad or you know what I mean like it's so easy to fall into that trap
but I think we have to like really remain vigilant on that because it does matter and if we don't
use the tools now when they're not desperately needed we may not be able to use them when we
really do need to use them yeah exactly and and especially build them right like peace time is

(08:03):
for building so to say and it's not really that we're quite peaceful times nowadays right it would
be nice but so this just shows that it's it's really high time to to build these tools and then
to spread them widely and and to use them ultimately and to help people protect themselves
that's that's extremely critical because you know if if there is just mass tyranny everywhere

(08:25):
nothing gets produced anymore life turns to shit very very very quickly if we if we start to focus
on destroying stuff rather than building stuff it doesn't take long to completely devour what
we've built across decades before.
And then hopefully in such a situation,
there is an alternative gathering of individuals

(08:46):
to build a more sustainable and free parallel economy.
And that's critical, you know,
because otherwise we don't eat and that sucks.
And so we need to find ways now to already bootstrap
these communities of production in as many places as is possible,

(09:07):
companies and products that rely and are built on sound monetary principles
and good ethics and good protocol designs, etc.
And then we hopefully have a chance, right,
of when this fiat empire continues to collapse,
that there is some glimmer of hope somewhere to go to.

(09:31):
It's interesting. I think that people, maybe even a lot of Bitcoiners haven't internalized the fact that that parallel system is, that will eventually be the new system.
I don't really think that the parallel system that is being built right now that many of us are already participating in the future, being here already but not evenly distributed yet,

(09:54):
I do not think that that gets subsumed by the existing fiat system. Like the existing fiat
system is, is, is too broken. It doesn't, it does not align with this new parallel system,
right? The values, the incentives are not the same. And so really it's about like,
it's not about, I don't think those systems eventually merging. It's about the one system

(10:16):
just completely collapsing and the other being strong enough, resilient enough, widespread enough
where that just becomes the new system.
I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
Maybe I'm off base, but I just,
I don't see these systems ultimately merging
because I think the values,
the incentive structures are just too misaligned.
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It's really hard to go for complete destructions.
Thankfully, humans are hard to kill.
And we somehow always find a way to continue to survive and thrive.

(12:54):
And that's a good thing.
So it's more about what can we preserve and still elevate in some positions.
And the good thing is basically anywhere you go, you will find ways to still live freely despite a large extent of authoritarianism.
Even in extreme places like North Korea or even America, right?

(13:15):
There are still pockets of freedom where small free interactions take place, right?
And of course, there are far fewer in between compared to more free and liberal societies.
but still they are possible and they are there,
especially with new technologies applied,
those that are currently not evenly distributed yet.

(13:36):
These become more possible.
And nevertheless, we're currently in a much freer state than we could be.
It could be a lot worse.
And so that something to not take for granted and to leverage in the fact that we have more time to build and deploy at scale these technologies What do you think is the freest example of a nation state or of a territory that we have today

(14:04):
Maybe even classifying it by the nation state is not the right move there.
But like where would you say has the greatest potential for long-term freedom?
that would be most aligned with this parallel system that is actively being built?
Maybe the surprising answer might be the oceans.

(14:27):
On the high seas has been anarchy for centuries.
There is no single global ruler of the high seas.
And if you're a captain of a ship, you have a substantial amount of real autonomy.
and you know cruise ships for example are dictator ships on a boat ultimately.

(14:48):
A dictator ship, pun intended.
Literally, yeah.
By the way a lot of our legal concepts come from maritime law.
You know citizenship is another example.
So yeah the point at where a cruise ship loses its sovereignty is when it goes to port.

(15:09):
then it has to become accustomed in the national waters
and the port facility specifically
and has to sign a bunch of contracts to be allowed to get in there
but now imagine a cruise ship that never has to go back to a port
what if the cruise ship simply stays out in the high seas non-stop

(15:29):
and smaller vessels come and go and dock and bring supplies and people and whatnot
not. But all of a sudden, there you have an actual possibility of legal anarchy in the
currently defined existing set of rules. So the Seasteading Institute is really fascinating to
follow. And they've made phenomenal progress over the last couple of years. There's ultimately,

(15:53):
in order to make this long term sustainable on a holistic, like pragmatic front,
we ultimately need three things.
We need to have a flag to put on the vessel
because that means that you kind of have
like an anchoring to a certain nationality
and that gives you, in the current legal context,

(16:15):
a bunch of protections.
Second is that you need to have insurance
because if you cannot insure a boat,
the cost of it is way too high.
So insurance is incredibly useful
for cost-efficient risk reallocation.
But in order to get insurance, you need the third thing,
which is a classification of this type of vessel.

(16:38):
Because a fisher boat is different from a cruise ship,
it's different from an oil drilling rig in the high seas.
These are all different seagoing vessels
that have a different type of classification.
And we need now, in order to get such a classification,
you basically need to have a body of engineers
defining exactly what this type of vessel is.

(17:00):
In the realm of a seastead, it would be an ocean-going vessel
that does not have a motor.
It's not self-propelling.
It needs to be tugged, but it can float
and can be anchored for locational stability.
So with this then, yeah, we can basically get the insurances,
get the flagging agency.

(17:20):
The cool thing is the flagging agencies are private companies, ultimately.
And there's a huge competition.
Every Caribbean island, every country with an ocean, and even some that don't have oceans, have these flagging agencies, and they're very happy to compete for business.
So that problem is already solved.
And right now what the Seasteading Institute is solving is that panel of engineers defining the classification of the Seastead.

(17:46):
And once that is done, insurance shouldn't be that hard.
And yeah, there's multiple companies building these Seasteads already now.
You can buy them for not even that much.
I think it's like $150,000, $200,000 for the small edition.
You know, the luxurious editions go into the millions, of course, but they don't have to be.
Okay, this is a rabbit hole that I clearly need to go deeper down here.

(18:07):
Okay, so, I mean, how feasible is it to be able to do that on a long-term basis?
Like, I mean, I guess you need to have, obviously, either, you know, I guess some sort of contact with the shore in the sense that you need to provision yourselves.
Assuming it's not self-sustaining.
I don't know how many, like, uh, you can obviously grow things like, you know, you'll have plenty of
good sunshine out of the open sea. Right. Um, you know, uh, fresh water is a difficult one. So I

(18:32):
don't know if they have like desalination, uh, rigs on board and things like that, but like,
you know, how, how sustainable is that from like a long-term perspective of like, if you want to
completely stay out of any jurisdiction and like, can you, can you be, I mean, can these actually
be classified as their own states, like their own, their own nations eventually? I know there
were some what's the uh you'll know this the the one so a guy did this right like he built out his

(18:58):
own i think it was on an old oil rig and he built out like his own nation essentially like he was
the citizen of his own nation you do you remember you know what i'm talking about yeah uh there have
been a couple pioneer seastiders many of them killed or or hunted uh so unfortunately that well
that's always kind of in the early days you know the early big owners are also all tortured kidnapped

(19:20):
and in jail nowadays.
So we have that in common.
But yeah, this is absolutely possible.
In terms of self-sufficiency,
you need electricity to produce anything, right?
But for that, solar and battery, totally fine.
Weight is not that much of an issue, actually.
More weight is better for seagoing vessels.

(19:40):
They're kind of more stable.
So the weight of batteries is totally fine.
Then you can run a desalumination plant
and there are some prototypes that have them purely running off the solar
and they produce enough water for the family.
So that's fine.
Food, I mean, you can fish.

(20:01):
Actually, when you put these vessels into the ocean,
you can design them in such a way that it builds like this layer of mineral crust or something,
which basically turns your boat into a coral reef.
And if you have a boat that needs to go fast through the water,
you want to design to prevent that
because that creates more surface area, more drag, etc.

(20:21):
But if you're stationary, you don't care.
In fact, it actually benefits you
because it's a protection against corrosion.
So your steel in the vessel doesn't corrode away.
And then with this, you just get a coral reef
and there will be an insane amount of fish around your habitat.
So you just pick one up and there's food.
Not as good as a cow, yes.

(20:44):
But I don't know.
maybe you can get like a big shark or something that might be equivalent to our meat.
Or, you know, you could probably have a goat, depending on the size of this,
you could probably have a goat on board, you know,
if you wanted to at least produce some dairy products.
If you're into that, plenty of good cheese and goat's milk can come out of that.

(21:05):
Yeah, like the president of the Seasteading Institute, his wife,
is not yet convinced about living on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
and so her criteria for i will go if this happens is if i can walk my dog in grass out on the seastead
then yes i will go but we can absolutely put soil in a seastead and and you know grow grass on it

(21:28):
should totally be fine we can connect multiple of these parts together to form quite large structures
and and definitely you know have have larger areas um yeah should be fine it reminds me
of uh you know snow crash obviously uh the the giant you know floating uh floating city that they

(21:49):
they had there just kept you know tying on more and more and more vessels to it essentially uh
slightly you know less perhaps less cultish uh behavior and for anyone that hasn't read snow
crash you absolutely should because it's a uh a brilliant it's a yeah it's like that's where
metaverse came from you know like that's where so much so many things came from and the idea of like

(22:09):
the the future uh techno futuristic you know kind of uh corporate state i think is such a
fascinating one it's i think that's basically what bellagis took his network state from like
it's essentially uh a similar thing slightly more digitized but so okay so is this something that
you're actively actively looking into doing yourself as well i've no more like a curiosity

(22:32):
hobby it's a bit too early to to really connect to it yeah um unless you want to be an early
pioneer funder which i'm not in a position to do and so then but i'd like to in the long-term
future i always like the idea of sailing like getting a sailboat as one of the bases um i already
love living in a caravan like a camper van that's that's already incredibly rewarding

(22:55):
so doing it on the high seas would be fun i never really was a sailor or like boat person so it
would definitely be a new skill to learn.
But yeah, the
CSAT itself has interesting
aspects to it.
I definitely wouldn't mind doing it for
like a couple weeks of vacation.
The thing is,

(23:16):
for every dwelling place, you really don't
need to be there 24-7 for the entire
year. Most usually
we do travel a bit, and it can
be more or less for people, but
if you just want to stay in a cool
Airbnb for three weeks,
there you have
like ocean view 365 degrees and like zero zero steps till the waterfront you know that's not a

(23:41):
bad deal and you can probably get it for much cheaper than than actual beachfront property
yeah that's true you can you can create your own uh i guess waterfront property you know you may be
a little bit deep for the beach once you're in international waters i mean that's really what
kind of you're you're getting because obviously there are territorial waters uh on the you know
on coasts and like that are patrolled, that are kind of like managed, you know,

(24:04):
by whatever the country's version of the Coast Guard is.
But once you're in international waters, like for the most part, kind of all bets are off, right?
Like there are obviously various agreements in place that cover different international waters.
But like it is kind of as close as you can get to a true anarchic system these days.
Is that fair to say?
No, it 100% is.
I mean, there are, you know, some treaties.

(24:26):
But ultimately, if you're the captain of the boat, there is no higher authority over you that could legally prevent you from doing stuff.
It's quite actually an extreme setup, legally speaking, and it works.
It has worked.
It's the only possible way that it could work, right?
Like, how could you enforce a tyranny on the oceans?

(24:48):
Like, it simply doesn't work.
That's why the pirates in the 1700s were so incredibly successful.
because the technology and the reality of physics and the world
was strongly in the favor of their independence and protection and freedom.
And when the set-in setting is such, then the result is quite inevitable.
And I think we absolutely have a chance of re-sparking the same scenario in cyberspace

(25:12):
where the space is so vast.
Imagine 256 bits.
It's so mind-gobbingly fucking huge.
Like this is way bigger than the C's.
This is infinitely bigger than the C's.
And, you know, if we need more space, we just double the key size.
It's fine.

(25:33):
So, and now inside this vast space, we can perfectly hide ourselves
and such that no middleman can actually find us and pinpoint where we are,
which is incredible.
But we can still authenticate ourselves to our friends
and establish secure communication channels across this vast distance
to still coordinate and trade and collaborate with each other.

(25:57):
That favors the free market and prosperity to such an enormous extent
that I don't really see how in the long run that it could turn out any other way.
It goes back to like the, I'm forgetting if it was the,
I think it was in Timothy May's crypto anarchist manifesto
where he basically said, it could have also been the cyberpunk manifesto.

(26:19):
Now I'm getting the two of them confused.
But the idea that you should like with anonymous transaction systems, with anonymous communication systems or pseudonymous communication systems, you can engage in commerce without ever actually knowing that other person.
While you can also develop a web of trust in cyberspace, you can go even one step further, which is you can engage in commerce in a meaningful way without needing to know that person's real name, without needing to know where they are, without needing to know really who they are to any meaningful degree, providing you both anonymity or pseudonymity that is protecting you from things that may do you harm in the meat space, but still allowing you to engage in cooperative, productive commerce through cyberspace, through the beauty of encryption.

(27:03):
There's that other quote, I think many people have said something to this effect, but Assange is the one that comes to mind.
The idea that it's this amazing thing that the universe believes in encryption, right?
And that it's harder to decrypt something than it is to encrypt something.
And that is the asymmetric power that we have right now.
We have that, like the universe believes in encryption.

(27:26):
We're good.
We have that capability.
You can encrypt very, very trivially easily.
decrypting is order many many many unfathomably orders of magnitude
exponentially larger difficulty to do and like that the thing that gives us power right that the thing that allows us and that those rules apply to the state as well for encryption and decryption But typically the state may want to decrypt the things that we are doing you know rather than rather than encrypt them But I just think it such a fascinating thing that we at this time And whether it be physical you know kind of anarchic spaces or regions like the open seas or whether it be digital anarchic regions in cyberspace we do have ways of

(28:08):
of really grabbing onto freedom and holding onto it that we didn't have before.
Asymmetric.
We have an asymmetric defense mechanism,
put another way.
Like imagine building something like the lightning network with gold,
right?
So I have a piece of gold and I give it to Walker saying,
Hey,
can I pass it on to,

(28:30):
I don't know,
GG,
right?
And,
and GG is supposed to pass it on to,
to the next guy,
right?
And,
and,
and then finally to the person I want to pay,
like cool how long do you think it would take until the gold disappears in the middle
like very very fast so the the system simply doesn't work right you would need to know exactly

(28:51):
whom you're passing along the gold tool right and and where they are and you would want to have
checks and then probably that they do some deposit that in the case that they steal they lose some
type of money you know it's like crazy more complex and with bitcoin we can literally do that that's
exactly how the lightning network works we just send bitcoin along but with the genius of
cryptography we have it such that nobody can steal the money and it's it's incredible like that's a

(29:16):
system of human collaboration that that ensures reliability and delivery of good with with
basically 100 uptime and no way of the money ever getting lost or misaccounted for or stolen
like that's that's mind-bogglingly that we can actually do that nowadays and the lightning
network is just a it's just the beginning like that's that's a tiny tiny small protocol we can

(29:41):
do so much more with it it feels like there's been and i haven't been around bitcoin for that long
well i haven't been paying attention actively to bitcoin for that long i wish i would have paid
attention the first couple times i heard about it as does everyone right it is the rare breed of
human that, uh, that paid attention and went deep down the rabbit hole the very first time.
It was not me though. Um, and I'm sure it's not a lot of, of other people, but to those who did

(30:05):
kudos hats off to you. You are a, uh, you are a more awake person than I was, but it seems that
there's been just this kind of explosion in the last couple of years with, I mean, not only
different L2s, but then if maybe you want to classify them as like L3s, like, like cashew,
like Fetiment, these other, uh, you know, these other scaling layers on top of Bitcoin that yes,

(30:25):
they have their trade-offs. Callie will be the first to tell you that like, yes, this is, you
know, there are trade-offs here. You have to, you have to have some trust. You can spread that trust
out, but there, there is trust. It's not trustless base layer, but it is amazing to see this,
this explosion. And it feels like it's just, I mean, it's still just people hacking away, right?
It's, it's not, it's not, it's still unknown to the majority of the world. Most people,

(30:49):
most people don't own Bitcoin or use Bitcoin, the vast, vast 99 plus percent.
Out of those people that even do know about Bitcoin, use Bitcoin, the amount that use
these other layers on top of Bitcoin is even a smaller fraction of that.
Like it's even smaller.
So it just feels like we're so incredibly early.
And it makes me very hopeful about the future to think about what's it going to look like

(31:10):
when my son is, you know, when my son is my age, like what are, what is going to be available
then?
Like I can't even quite fathom it just because the rate of development, the rate of change
is so, so fast.
Yeah, yeah.
And it can be incredibly dangerous
when technologies are distributed unevenly.
Imagine on the battlefield

(31:30):
there is one guy in a full metal plate armor
and the other guys only have like wooden clubs
and stone sticks, you know.
They simply have no chance, right?
The one guy can slaughter thousands of them.
Maybe eventually he gets tired,
but like there's almost nothing
that can stop him given this asymmetric distribution of technology.

(31:53):
And I guess we see this obviously in the fiat system.
There's very, very few people who have direct access to the money printer,
and you're not one of them.
So that puts you in a very bad position, by the way.
You should do something about that.
And also likewise though with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was incredibly unequally distributed.

(32:15):
it. In the first four
years, where still nobody
knew about it, half of the money was issued
to the early adopters. That's
ridiculous. A couple thousand
people got half of the money supply
in the first four years.
And
that sucks, not just for the people who
didn't pay attention, but also for the people who
were simply not yet born.

(32:37):
And that puts
people who are early in Bitcoin
ultimately to a huge
responsibility to do something
meaningful with the capital that they acquired.
Ultimately, if they spend it on frivolous things,
eventually it will be gone and redistributed to the society.
So this is only an issue for a couple generations.

(32:57):
But considering that the early adopters of Bitcoiners
had a high likelihood of being very ethically motivated people,
very principled freedom lovers, ultimately,
that is a massive glitch in the matrix that we found
that these types of people enjoyed that massive early adopter benefit

(33:23):
rather than the continual layer class who did before.
So a quite unique opportunity.
And hopefully that means that we have at least a handful of people
who still hold these freedom principles very strongly
but now are sitting on thousands of Bitcoin.
and that's that's interesting so yeah let's see what what this yeah group of people or this cohort

(33:50):
of people does with this extremely asymmetric distribution of monetary technology and yeah
hopefully it it goes up good yeah i mean it is so fascinating because we've seen just on the topic
of the let's say the redistribution of this through uh through organic means right i'm not
saying through forced redistribution, but we had the OG whale with 80,000 Bitcoin earlier this

(34:16):
summer who sold them off, wanted to diversify into some fiat, I guess, probably mined those
Bitcoin or bought those Bitcoin for virtually nothing. Took a massive risk still nonetheless,
and holding it that long is truly incredible. That's, I think, the real amazing part is you
were able to not just be aware of it, acquire it at that time, but hold on to it. Because there are

(34:39):
plenty that were aware of it, acquired it, and then didn't manage to hold on to it or sold for
100x profit and said, this is amazing. I can't believe this. And little did they know there was
going to be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of X profit there. But you do see
that distribution happening. I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing Bitcoin being so

(35:00):
boring, you know, around 100,000, you know, infinitely printable U.S. fiat cuck bucks per coin.
This is the bear market now.
Yeah.
I mean, it is funny that like we're really doing the meme right now.
The, you know, Bitcoin crashes to 100K.
Like it's, human psychology is fascinating.
It really is.
But like we're seeing, and I think to your point, this distribution is a good thing.

(35:22):
It's a good thing for the ownership to spread out.
You want it to be broad and not so deep and centrally controlled.
And granted, them having all that Bitcoin doesn't mean they can change the rules of Bitcoin, right?
But it is a lot of economic energy that a small cohort of people were in control of.
But to your point, I am very interested to see, not even talking about the people that have, that guy had 80,000 or that gal, I don't know, had 80,000 Bitcoin.

(35:51):
Like that's a, wow, insane amount.
Maybe he's got a couple other wallets too.
I don't know.
But even the people who just have hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin, that's an incredible amount of economic energy.
And if they are as, say, aligned ideologically as it would be reasonable to think that they are, that's a very powerful economic force that has just kind of come out of nowhere.

(36:21):
And that is also very, you don't know who they are.
I think that's the really powerful thing.
It's like, you know, fiat billionaires, like, you know who they are.
Bitcoin billionaires could just be that guy sitting right in the bus next to you.
Like, you really don't, like, you don't know if they've done well enough to preserve their privacy.
And I think that's kind of an incredible wild card.
We don't really usually have that kind of hidden economic energy that Bitcoin has enabled for these really early adopters.

(36:48):
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, often they have a huge incentive to keep this hidden
and remain anonymous simply for personal security, obviously,
and protection of the assets.
So this will be really interesting on how this will develop.
I mean, this could definitely turn into massive chaos, you know,

(37:10):
if the wrong people have such an enormous amount of wealth.
They can wreak havoc.
I mean, look at the last 100 years, right?
That's exactly what happened.
It could be worse, yes, but I hope it's going to be much better.
I hope we will have some, yeah, I guess, like ethical philanthropists,
not the Bill Gates type.

(37:31):
Right.
I mean, I like to think that, and maybe this will happen, maybe it won't,
but the idea of patronage will come back.
Patronage for artists, patronage for inventors.
You know, everything Da Vinci was able to do was because he was,
you know, the, the Medici's were his, his patrons, right? He, he didn't have to worry about like,

(37:52):
am I going to be able to sell this invention? You know, am I going to be able to sell this sketch?
No, it was like, I'm just, I'm, I'm good. I'm covered. I'm just going to do what I think is,
is fascinating. And like clearly a very unique and singular mind in Da Vinci, but you know,
how many other Da Vinci's are out there that just were, were, were crushed by the public school

(38:13):
system and then the nine to five and whatever else because they were simply trying to make ends meet
i wonder how much a culture of of patronage of the arts and of technologists and inventors will
come back i'd be very interested to see yeah like i it would be amazing if if the next da vinci gets
you know his patronage and and can spend his time on building freedom tech and freedom tech as as

(38:37):
beautiful as those cathedrals were but that that would be breathtaking so i'm really bullish in
organizations like open science etc that just yeah give like really an army of freedom tech
builders the funds to just do their thing and the the results of that are extremely promising
so there's there's a lot more fun the thing is there's some like there's a lot of money slushing

(39:00):
around in in this kind of developer space if you consider all of the companies and organizations
that are paying people to work on bitcoin it's it's a decent amount of money it's not little
but even if it's like 10x more 100,000 more like I would know where to spend that money like I could
hire at least 100 times more devs and and build stuff like no no questions asked I'm not running

(39:25):
out of problems to solve or interesting tools to build and so if if we can really increase and
like considering the rather limited amount of funding that the space is having the the amount
of stuff that we build and the quality of it is really really good so i i hope uh funding for
freedom tech will go up in the future rather than go down and if that is the case then spicy times

(39:51):
ahead you know speaking of which what what are you working on right now what's uh what i know
you're always you always have your uh your toes dipped in a few different ponds but uh what's uh
what's what's taking a lot of your attention right now generally speaking i'm just helping
the Freedom Tech projects get built.
I'm not a dev, so I can do all the other stuff.

(40:12):
And that's not so much work, actually.
So I can do it for more projects than just one,
which I really enjoy.
Because it's so hard to choose which project to work on
because they're all so cool.
And so if I cannot make the choice
and just say yes to everything,
then I'll do that for a while until it gets too much.

(40:33):
but so ultimately i think the one of the big problems that really calls out to me that that
needs to be solved is to have a private experience of nostor and nostor works so beautifully well for
public announcements of stuff like our podcast right now right this live stream happening on
nostor like that's that's incredible right you can release software with with app store right you can

(40:57):
make short posts, blogs, you can sell stuff, really whatever you want to publicly announce,
you can do with Noster. And that's incredibly powerful. But the core architecture and the
spirit of Noster can absolutely be expressed in a private setting as well, with encrypted content
that even though that ciphertext is available to anyone on public relays, we just assume that this

(41:21):
is public. But despite that, there is no way that anyone can crack the decryption and read the actual
message and even further know who sent the message or who's
receiving this message or downloading it et cetera Once we have these types of security guarantees the canvas and the toolbox of what we have with Nostra just goes exponentially through the roof A lot of human interaction

(41:45):
requires privacy to work, at least to any reasonable extent. And if we have strong privacy
guarantees rather than weak ones, then we can actually trust the building blocks and see them
solid foundations to build more stuff on top.
Because if your entire secure system
depends that a server administrator in the back end

(42:07):
who's earning almost nothing,
who has to sweat and wake up in the midnight
just to make sure the servers are still running,
this grumpy guy has the power to rip everyone off.
And eventually he'll just take the money.
Or he'll take a big paycheck from someone else
and he will help him to take all the money
or the data or the honeypot, whatever it is.

(42:28):
But that is a really bad situation to be in.
So yeah, ultimately, we really have a cool opportunity
to build a private existence on Noster.
And there's a bunch of different ways that we could do it,
but one fascinating encryption scheme that we found

(42:49):
is the messaging layer security protocol.
And this is basically a protocol that a group of people
can come up with a shared secret
that they can encrypt messages to
and then later everyone can decrypt them.
But it's a smart algorithm where we rotate the keys.
So we don't encrypt everything to the same key all the time,
but we keep switching them out.
And we can add people to the group, we can remove them,

(43:12):
we can define who can write in a group,
we can only read it, etc.
And once we have this encryption envelope,
we can put all of the NOSTO events,
all the different kind numbers,
all the different use cases that already all of the clients support.
Now we can drop in these events in the encrypted envelope
and we just need to decrypt them on the client side

(43:34):
and any existing application can interpret them
and use them for whatever it needs to be used.
And so that's super, super bullish.
And that's the Marmot protocol.
Okay. Is that what White Noise is using or is that a different setup?
Yeah, exactly. That's White Noise.
And so we set out almost two years ago or something to solve this group messaging problem in Nostra

(43:59):
and went through a couple of different encryption schemes and thought through how they might work
and ultimately settled on this one, a quite modern variant of the signal protocol, so to say.
And the goal always was to fix this for existing Nostra applications.
And I want Primal to have world-class encryption for their messaging

(44:22):
and that primal users can write Damos users or Amethyst users
sharing the same encryption scheme, being interoperable
with all of this beauty that we have in Noster just on a private way.
And so it was much more than just creating an app like White Noise
that does this because that's just another app.
That's not really going to change the needle.

(44:43):
We need to fix all the apps.
And so for that, we need a protocol.
And so ultimately, we came up with this Marmot protocol
that encompasses three kind of sub-protocols
to enable this private realm.
There is the NOSTER protocol, obviously.
We create NOSTER identities, NSECs, NPUPs, etc.

(45:03):
And we use NOSTER relays to deliver the messages.
Then we have Blossom.
Blossom is very similar to NOSTER,
but NOSTER is for text,
and Blossom is for images or PDFs or any arbitrary data.
And then, so that's how we send encrypted pictures and so on.
And then we have the messaging layer security protocol, MLS.

(45:24):
And that's the whole encryption key derivation scheme.
And all of this together gives us a completely decentralized,
unstoppable, perfectly encrypted, fully private system
where we can switch out how we deliver the messages.
We can use NOSTA relays.
We can use multiple of them at the same time.

(45:44):
Or we just use Bluetooth or USB sticks or whatever.
It really doesn't matter that much.
because the server no longer defines the identity of the user.
The user defines the identity of the user.
You sit in your bathroom, you throw some dice,
you get a private key,
and you sign a message saying that this is my name,
hello world, and voila, that's it.

(46:05):
And with this mindset, together with the sovereign encryption,
we have an infrastructure-independent message delivery,
independent, strong encryption scheme that can be interoperable,
and for that we're building the code and the dev tooling and the libraries
to make it easy for others to implement this into their existing apps.

(46:25):
It's super cool and I mean the obvious one of the incredible benefits
is that if AWS happens to have a big outage,
this won't just unilaterally go down like Signal had issues recently.
I feel like that outage made a lot of people realize,
oh huh, Signal is a great tool.

(46:46):
I use Signal every day, but it obviously has some infrastructure vulnerabilities because of the centralization of that infrastructure.
And that's where the utilization of NOSTA relays, while some may in fact go down if they were hosted that way, you're not going to take all of them down unilaterally at once.
So you're still going to have a much better chance of getting a message delivered, an encrypted message delivered, even in the event of large scale outages across other centralized server clusters, which is pretty amazing and I think kind of like vital, actually.

(47:20):
Yeah, Signal reminds me so much of David Chom's early eCache projects.
They had a really difficult problem.
Signal is trying to make a group of people communicate privately super fucking hard.
charm had probably even a bit more difficult problem of let's make digital payments work
and they had tremendous issues of coordination in in charm's case it was especially about

(47:44):
time stamping right we need to prevent double spending ultimately um and the creation of new
tokens right so who can inflate the money supply these two things are super difficult to solve
and and with signal it's how how do we establish keys right like someone wants to just type in a
username and and get the public keys of someone how do we do that how do we uh you know um set

(48:06):
like deliver those group messages and send notifications to people and and all of these
get a lot easier when you have a centralized server in the middle like centralized solutions
to difficult problems are way easier than decentralized solutions and so okay we have to
use a centralized server but then at the very least let's reduce the amount of trust that we

(48:30):
have to put in that server let's reduce the amount of power that the server has over the users
let's make it so that at the very least messages are encrypted in signals case right so that the
server cannot read the messages of of the people in the group and in david chombs case it was let's
make the transaction private meaning that the server cannot say that this guy received a coin
here and he's spending it now right there.

(48:52):
And they utilize
beautiful cryptography, super
simple, elegant math formulas
to provide these security
guarantees very, very successfully.
And it's a monumental breakthrough.
This is fucking huge.
E-cash was massive in the 80s.
Way ahead of its time.
Incredible, visionary, genius
technology. Signal,

(49:13):
from 2016 or something when that paper
came out, also incredible,
amazing,
huge progress
but as you say
you plug out the computer and the system
dies and that
sucks for money, that sucks for speech
it sucks for both
if someone can just turn off your existence

(49:33):
and your tools and your experience
then sure
as long as he doesn't it's fine
but when he does
it's critical and just the fear
that it might happen in an
unopportune time is enough to
keep you anxious and keep you up at night
So we need a decentralized system for timestamping and money.

(49:54):
That's where Bitcoin comes in.
But equally, we need to have a decentralized system for public speech.
That's where Nostra comes in.
It really works.
But ultimately, we need to have a decentralized system
for private communication and coordination.
And I hope that Marmot is the protocol that can deliver it
because it is decentralized to the very core of it.

(50:17):
I think it's a really important point because it's easy to fall into the trap of like, well, we have Bitcoin, so we're good now, right?
You know, they can't stop us from sending transactions.
But what if you can't communicate in a secure and private way with the person you're trying to transact with?
Like that communication layer is necessary to enable the monetary layer.

(50:41):
If you're transacting through cyberspace, if you're not in the meat space.
Okay, if you're in the meat space, you can scan a QR code, whatever, no problem.
But once you are distributed, if you're trying to transact with somebody on the other side of the world,
and you don't have a secure communication channel to be able to exchange addresses with, you've got a big problem.
And if you've got, not only is it perhaps not secure, but if it's reliant on a third party just to keep it up and running,

(51:07):
you've got a really big problem.
Because then how can you have any sort of a guarantee that you will be able to exercise that freedom to transact
without the freedom to communicate and communicate privately.
In my mind, the two really go hand in hand.
Yeah, they really do.
And that's where we need to take all of the technologies

(51:27):
that we've built and put them together in novel ways.
And money, to some extent, is the least of our problems.
It's hard to stay alive.
We need to get food, we need to get clothing, shelter,
like physical protection and like joy you know beautiful things art nice walks in the park etc
like there's so many problems to solve in human existence and to a large extent i'm looking

(51:52):
forward to finally being done with the money and being able to finally start solving real problems
you know because most people don't work on the money most people work for the money sure but
they solve some other incredibly important projects right in real industry and real human
connections etc so i'm i'm really looking forward to be able to to fix or to work on these problems

(52:16):
now knowing that the money has been solved because a lot of these higher order production things and
and and services they they are so broken because the money is broken and that's why it was incredibly
good that we took the time to fix the money it took long enough you know but now that we have it
we can actually work on the other stuff with those solid foundations that we know won't won't break on

(52:41):
us and and that's that's incredible and and if if we continue doing this for public speech for
private speech for commerce for delivering physical goods etc for for all of these other
important parts of the human existence when we have freedom tech in every single one of them
Like that's, that's going to be cool.
Well, and, and it's, it's like actually quite urgent, I think, because you see this, this totalitarian temptation always just creep in, right?

(53:15):
it seems that even regardless of the political side that one may be on in any particular country,
very few people are actually advocating to dismantle and shrink to the extreme
the size of the bloated kleptocratic state.
Most people are more concerned with, is my side in charge of the state as it is?

(53:37):
And if it needs to grow a little bit for my people to maintain their power,
that's okay by me as long as it's not the other guy in power.
And both, you know, quote, sides tend to think this. But the reality is that like what we need to be doing is is massively shrinking the size of the state because you see this everywhere because of all of the incentives being broken, because of the fact that especially younger generations truly and rightly feel that they cannot get ahead.

(54:02):
They're not going to be able to afford the boomer's house that now costs $2 million that the boomer bought for a handful of raspberries in the 70s.
It's not going to happen.
So they're understandably frustrated.
They're frustrated because I think the main part of the frustration comes from just the fact that they don't actually understand what the true problem is.
They see the symptoms of the problem but not the problem itself.

(54:25):
And so you see this totalitarian creep everywhere.
You see people advocating for ludicrous policies like the recent mayor-elect in New York who is just talking about freezing rents, government-controlled grocery stores, just make everything free.
And it's like, boy, it seems like I've heard this before.

(54:46):
And it didn't work out, and it ended in hundreds of millions dead.
But hey, maybe it'll work out this time, right, buddy?
but those those types of controls always tend to lead to controls in other parts of the of society
right like the the totalitarianism starts out in in one part right before it becomes total it starts

(55:08):
out with control let's control the price of this you know just it's just the price of milk and eggs
we just need to do this right that ripples throughout and then once they realize they
don't actually have control of anything that's when they have to start exerting more forceful
and often violent control in other parts of people's lives
to ensure that they're able to maintain control
in these initial parts, the food, the shelter,

(55:29):
all of those.
things, transportation. But sadly, we're already at this stage where it feels like this,
the Fiat Panopticon, the surveillance state is so pervasive and has just been so accepted that
it doesn't take much for a totalitarian state to just take it one level higher,

(55:50):
which is absolute control, right? Like the tools are already there for them to do that.
it's now a question of do we have the necessary the requisite tools to be able to resist that
and i think we're at least getting closer but like there is a great deal of work still to do
yeah absolutely and mises wrote a really great book on the subject called the middle of the road

(56:11):
leads to socialism as exactly what you're describing right if you start with one intervention
economic consequences are that you will not get what you want and if you think that by more
intervention you will eventually get there, then that will ultimately lead to a hardcore tyranny
and the complete abolition of property and free markets. And that, you know, is collapse of society

(56:35):
every time for obvious reasons. So yes, we need to have tools available that makes resistance
profitable. Then it's again just economic law, right? If thievery becomes unprofitable and the
underground free market economy is very profitable then every thief will rather quickly turn around

(56:57):
and stop stealing and and start working and then because it's you know more money for him
ultimately so and i think we we can get to the state by massively increasing the the cost of
attack while substantially decreasing the cost of defense and that's exactly what encryption does
literally so by deploying this broadly and widely and you know together with a bunch of other

(57:24):
security culture technologies the the and if we ship these this tech via the internet to eight
billion people right then and everyone uses it like https is a perfect example right then
that surveillance on on this attack vector has simply stopped right like it's it just doesn't

(57:46):
exist anymore there's a bunch of other ways that that you can be and are being actively surveilled
by most modern applications but but https solved so much by by just basically google hitting the
on switch ultimately that that tipped over the the point right but but now we are at that point
where it's just supernatural and that will continue to happen once we build better application that

(58:11):
solve more important problems easier faster cheaper and yeah then then users will come
ultimately again we're not lacking problems like government is doing perfectly fine on the
the problem side of the marketing narrative uh we don't need any any more on on that they could
slow down if possible even but yeah telling people that the tools are available helping them to to

(58:39):
understand and utilize these tools and ultimately spread the word is hard work but worth it and
over a couple of havings it it absolutely makes a difference like if you look back for eight years
etc the the progress is stunning and and sure it seems like a grind when you're in it but when you

(58:59):
reach the peak and you look back down it you do realize that it's actually been quite a ride
there's something i think about a lot which is the idea of people running toward something versus
running away from something running toward freedom tech uh or a running toward a superior
user experience that happens to be built atop freedom tech or running towards any you know

(59:22):
you're running towards a positive right and a lot of people uh you know for instance use
nostril as an example a lot of people have come to nostril because of that because they saw the
potential in it. They weren't necessarily actively being censored or anything like that. In some
cases, obviously, yes. But in other cases, it was freedom minded individuals who said, wow,
this is a really cool thing. I'd like to be a part of this. I see where this can go. And boy,

(59:43):
I would really want to, you know, when a rainy day comes, I will be very glad to have this.
But until then, it's a lot of fun. The user experience is getting better. A lot of us ran
toward Noster. A lot of people only get smart. My father-in-law says to me, he says, you know,
the majority of people get smart by force, not by choice. Like you don't actually get smart

(01:00:04):
until you are forced. We don't get smart until you have a problem. So pressing something you
need to run away from that. You're forced to say, okay, I need to fix this. How do I fix this? I
need to figure out this, the solution. I'm curious what your thought on that is as it relates to
these technologies, because the other part of this is like the sad truth is that most people

(01:00:25):
just don't give a shit about a lot of this.
And it's sad, but it's true.
But to your point about HTTPS,
which is a really good one,
people don't necessarily give a shit about it,
but they still use it.
So it's like, how do you bridge that gap
where something becomes ubiquitous?
A privacy-preserving freedom tech tool
becomes ubiquitous
where it's just the water people are swimming in.

(01:00:47):
They don't even know what HTTPS stands for,
but they see it at the front of all their URLs
and they're using it.
How do you get to that point?
Does it involve people running away from something, from the totalitarian overreach because they finally just have had enough?
Or is there a way to draw people in and have them run towards something because they're curious about it?
They have a desire to check it out.
They think that it might just be better.

(01:01:08):
How do you balance that?
Those two things are extremely important.
But I think more important is that we control the creation of the tools.
There's a phenomenal research paper by the Tor people from like 20 years ago called Anonymity Loves Company on network effects and privacy, something like this.

(01:01:32):
And the gist of it is in order to achieve a high level of privacy, we need to increase the size of the crowd.
in order to increase the size of the crowd
a large amount of people need to behave the same
look the same, be indistinguishable from another
if we leave

(01:01:53):
important decisions of how to behave
to the end user
he doesn't have the expertise to understand the problem
or even know that there is a problem let alone how to solve it
and there is no consensus
among users and everyone will behave slightly different
therefore we have no crowd
Therefore, we're easy to spy upon.

(01:02:13):
So if we do want to have a secure system,
we need to have a system that by default enables privacy for the end user.
Like if the user has to solve the problem, that's the wrong level.
If the developer of the app is the guy who has to solve the problem,

(01:02:35):
it's still not the right level because he's an app developer.
He doesn't know about the details of cryptography and protocol design.
So the layer up is like if the library developer,
the tooling of the app developer,
if this guy could fix it, that's better.
But ultimately, if the person who implement the protocol itself
or the cryptography,

(01:02:56):
if they can nail down a system that is perfectly private by default
or simply by using the tool,
you become indistinguishable from anyone else.
You don't need to do anything special.
just use the tool and you're good,
then we increase the size of the crowd substantially
from just this one user who has no idea
to ultimately a couple protocol designers

(01:03:18):
who really thought about this,
who've implemented the protocol,
which later got faithfully implemented in libraries
and then used in apps,
and ultimately there's the end user using it.
But because we established proper ethics
at a higher point of this production cycle,
that means that a much wider net of protection is cast over users And that is ultimately I think the way to go Like only the defaults matter

(01:03:45):
Because most people just use the default.
And if that is not secure,
if the default is one of systematic theft and slavery,
which is absolutely what we have right now,
the default path of the human is go to school
until you're properly indoctrinated for 25 years
and then sit in a desk for the next 40

(01:04:07):
and then maybe we'll let you go.
It's so sad.
It's horrible.
And many people do this simply because, well, that's what we do, right?
And that is because the people who designed the protocols

(01:04:28):
of the civilization we're in
did not have freedom as their guiding star.
They had power and control,
especially control,
in what they optimized the system for.
And the system is behaving as designed.
It is very much according to specification.
It's just the initial goal
of the people working on this

(01:04:48):
was truly flawed.
And so by first of all re-examining
what should be the founding principles,
the guidelines,
the solid foundations that a big project should rest upon,
in my opinion that's individual sovereignty, freedom, property rights, privacy, etc.,
that is extremely important to shape the real human life of a large amount of people.

(01:05:16):
And so by stepping up and building the tools,
we have a chance of putting this better ethos
at the heart of these systems.
And ultimately that will affect a large amount of people.
It's just hard.
It's really, really hard.

(01:05:36):
And it takes a lot of time and effort
and a lot of people
and much more than just programmers.
So if you're listening to this
and you want to fix the status quo
and you want to fix the default,
then step up and build Freedom Tech.
That's actually good.
I say amen to that.
It gets back to that idea that the purpose of a system is what it does, right?

(01:05:58):
Like you want to know what the purpose, you know, yes, it's a little tongue in cheek almost in many ways,
but it's broadly, I think, very applicable because what it gets down to is like,
it gets down to what you said at a protocol level, right?
And if the incentives and the values of whoever designed that protocol warp it in some way,

(01:06:19):
Like, like fiat is ultimately, you can think of it as its own sort of protocol, right? Like all of the, you can, you can use protocol in a fairly liberal, uh, liberal way here. Like you want to know what the purpose of fiat is. Just, just look around you that like, that's the purpose. Like it's what's happening. It's what it does. It's what, what is the result?
And to the point about just in indoctrination, this is something I have a very vested interest in now, just having a young son.

(01:06:48):
And also as somebody who was, I was homeschooled myself and I'm forever grateful, ever more grateful to my, uh, my mother and father for doing that.
A little more work on my mom's side, but a grateful to both of them very much, uh, just for being great parents and for, for homeschooling, because it's not easy, especially at that time when you don't just have, uh, you don't have the internet was not, uh, then what it is now.
The tools that exist then were not at all what they are now.

(01:07:13):
But the modern public school system is truly a system of indoctrination.
And it's based on this Neo-Prussian model that was then adopted by Adolf Hitler, famously with compulsory public schools,
which for some reason are – it's like the one vestige of Hitler that Germany has decided to keep is compulsory public schooling.

(01:07:35):
Homeschooling is illegal.
can't imagine why they decided to keep that one bit you know but hey apparently they liked that
bit about it but but it's insane it's like you you know you want to know why things don't change
uh like in any meaningful level from within the system it's because like the system is doing
exactly what it's designed to do what it's designed to do is continue to perpetuate itself

(01:07:58):
and it can only perpetuate itself if it can maintain the status quo if it can ensure that
each new generation of, you know, a bright and sparkling young minds are systematically,
you know, beaten into mental submission, robbed of any and all creativity, robbed of
any fire that they might have to say, you know what, fuck this.

(01:08:19):
I'm done.
This doesn't make any sense.
I don't like this anymore.
Like, I don't want to be a part of this.
They, it, that needs to happen because otherwise if you had a, I mean, too many kids start
getting homeschooled and there's going to be far too many free thinkers. It's going to be,
it's going to be a huge problem for the state. So if you're able homeschool your kids, um,
but, uh, I digress, but there are so many tools available now. It's amazing. Like you can like

(01:08:43):
technology, the internet is a magical, magical thing that enables so many people to do so much
more with so much less. But I think you're spot on with the kind of call to action there about
like, you can just build things like, and if you can't build, I think you are such a great example
of this, Max, because you said it yourself, you're not a developer. You're not a coder,

(01:09:03):
but you've been able to, you've contributed to so many different Freedom Tech projects over the
years, like so many. I don't even know if you have count, but you've been able to do that without,
you know, without writing code because there are other ways you can contribute. There's so many
other things that need to be done. Like, and you don't just have to start a podcast either. You
can do so many other things. You should also start a podcast. Absolutely. 100%. Everyone should,

(01:09:28):
start a podcast. If you're listening to this right now, why aren't you starting a podcast?
But it's a beautiful thing that we have these ways to contribute. Wait, sorry, what'd you say?
That's every podcast horse tells himself that. It's like, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm doing my part.
I'm doing my part. But, but really like what we're dealing with at a certain point comes down to just

(01:09:48):
a, uh, a messaging game, a communication game, an information game. And the information sphere
is so saturated with garbage. There's so much noise that we need more signal. We need more
people who have that signal within them and are capable of amplifying it to do so. Because like
that, you know, it's like, it's not the whole field of dreams thing. If you build it, they will

(01:10:10):
come. Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter if you build freedom tech that nobody knows about and
nobody uses. Like people have to know about it. People have to use it. You have to go out there
and do the work. And a lot of that work, you know, the developers are, you know, who build it are
oftentimes not always the greatest at promoting it themselves and that's where there's so much
room for other people to step in who may not be non-technical to come in and do uh do that other

(01:10:33):
work that you know you can't code the developer maybe isn't doesn't want to do the promotion
that's a match made in heaven right there you know that that's your uh that's your
Wozniak in jobs essentially yeah yeah yeah like your goal as a non-developer is basically that you
can keep the other devs in the development cave.
Like, your task is to keep them in

(01:10:56):
to make sure they don't escape for, like, reasons,
like, you know, getting water or something.
Just bring it to them.
And then they can do their deving thing.
And you just do the other stuff that needs to be done.
And, you know, it's not that hard.
It's actually quite chill.
And, like, ultimately, I just talk to people.
That's basically my job.

(01:11:17):
and that's a pretty good job
it helps that you're good at it too
you know
but that's the thing
you get good at it with practice
right I mean if you
if you look at my early videos
they were shit obviously
and you know
they get hopefully a bit better
but it would be astonishing if not

(01:11:38):
right if you really do something
for a thousand hours or more
you'll
you'll no longer be shit
yeah I mean yeah If you do something for a thousand hours for more and you are still shit at it like maybe there something wrong with how you been doing it Like you may you may want to you may want to reevaluate that a little bit but I think by and large
it's like, it's, it's almost impossible to do something over and over and over and over again

(01:12:01):
and not improve at it. Like, unless you are just truly like perhaps so convinced of your own
aptitude that you don't see the areas where there are needs for improvement perhaps,
but otherwise like you should be able to meaningfully improve in just about anything
that you are doing over and over and over and over again i hope and the cool thing with division
of labor is that you don't have to be the best compared to others you just have to focus on that

(01:12:26):
that you want to work on most ultimately like and that's pretty cool like you know devs are
crazy nerds that literally prefer staring on their computer screen for like 20 hours
more than i don't know walking out in the park or weird people they exist but like let them be in
the cave you know if if you need to do some calls coordinating stuff and you can take a walk in the

(01:12:50):
park while doing it you know like you prefer that the other guy prefers that like just trade and
conquer yeah well it's a again like you without the the devs who are willing to go in that hole
and who like to go in that hole and solve problems
and write the code that actually will be the underpinnings

(01:13:12):
of the world that is to come, none of it exists, right?
You necessarily need that first.
And then once you have that, though,
it's about how do we get that in front of as many people as possible?
And you've got the rare breeds like Callie,
who are capable of both writing the code
and going out and promoting it very well.
But Callie is, I think, a very special breed in that case.

(01:13:35):
yeah yeah definitely and that's the other thing like you can you can find a couple areas that if
you specialize yourself in in a small niche you could actually become one of the greatest
on on this planet in in this niche right if you pick it well and maybe you can do this in two or
even three areas or probably not 50 but if if you find a collection of really important skills that

(01:14:03):
you get really really good at and that in combination they become very impressive right
then then that's a that's crazy powerful right there there's a few other people like for example
austrian economics and like computer science or computer engineering right those are two
niches right they're incredibly broad rabbit holes after all but there's you know there's few that

(01:14:28):
have mastered any one of these but very much fewer that have mastered both like i i count
maybe two or three people that have actually mastered computer science and uh austrian economics
by the way one of them is eric voscue he wrote crypto economics the best book on bitcoin
the other is lucas antivero like warrior at wasabi wallet um since since the early days

(01:14:52):
like and that's about it like they are like so sharp in in both of these areas and that's
incredibly rare to find and now imagine you have you have this genius right but i don't know he has
to waste time booking his flights and getting a hotel to come to a conference or something right

(01:15:14):
like he's the genius he should be painting the the like the portrait on on the ceiling
let him do that and and get him an assistant you know someone who was definitely not a master coder
to do the administrative stuff you know to clean the toilets in the spaceship
so that he can you know continue building the spaceship

(01:15:34):
it's true and it's like we again this is where like i'm i'm so happy to see all of these different
grant foundations pop up and i know people have like different thoughts on this and right now
it's particularly contentious about which dev should be getting funded and which shouldn't but
it's like i think these organizations like open sets as a prime example like uh hrf gives out a

(01:15:59):
lot of grants as well too right this is like this is fantastic like because that genuinely just
frees people up to do what they do best which is build and there and there is so much time that is
lost in the minutia of just figuring out inconsequential shit but that shit that needs
to be done. Right. But it's like, it's not what those types of people should need to focus their

(01:16:20):
time on. Like we, and the fact that there are patrons out there already, like we actually,
we were talking about patronage earlier. Like, will this come back? It's like,
in many ways that actually is what organizations like open sets are like, that is a form of,
you know, of a very kind of decentralized patronage where you're, you know, bringing
in patrons from a lot of different areas, obviously, and then having a, a group decide
how to allocate that. But that, I mean, that is patronage basically. And like, so I guess we're,

(01:16:44):
Again, the future is here.
It's just not evenly distributed yet once again.
Yeah, and as you say, these funding organizations are amazing,
but they do come with a risk that they can rug pull the funding
for whatever reason and potentially even threaten people with that.
It's actually quite common in philanthropy and so on.
So one of the other things a non-developer can do

(01:17:07):
is actually find and develop and integrate a business model.
right like developers should be sorry the users should be funding the developers in the best case
right users are the ones that get massive benefits of using the app otherwise they wouldn't use it
so they have an incentive to chip in a little bit you know not too much per user but it will sum up
to a decent amount and and then that means more devs can focus more time on making the app better

(01:17:32):
so it's a it's a nice beautiful feedback loop now that we have magic internet money finding a
business model in cyberspace has become ridiculously easy like you we can literally
write the code that takes the money from the user and puts it to to the devs right like it's
that's like two lines of code you can vibe it by now and and so designing this business model we

(01:17:57):
have so much more opportunities now and there are so many bitcoin projects or freedom tech projects
that have amazing developers, really passionate UX designers and so on.
And they just need a little bit of help of actually convincing users
that this is worth paying for.
And then managing this whole enterprise to make sure it scales to more developers and so on.

(01:18:22):
These are incredibly important tasks where you don't need to be a specialist engineer or anything.
like sure help sense it helps if you have some entrepreneurial experience etc but you can learn
those easily like this is just a learning by doing thing and if you really want to help just
do stuff like that for a cool project that you're already using scratch your own itch right if you

(01:18:44):
have if you have an app you know it's valuable because you you're using it and you see how it
could be way better than it currently is there's like 10 bugs that you know and 50 feature requests
you would have that's perfect just be annoying and start writing the developers all the time and
join their public calls and their chat rooms etc and hang out and be helpful and ask what you can do

(01:19:06):
that they don't want to do and you know eventually you're part of the team and
now cleaning the toilets on the spaceship you know it's a kind of shitty job but at least you're on
the spaceship like that's that's a big deal it's true and the other beautiful thing is just
the barriers to funding developers whose work you like or find valuable,

(01:19:31):
those barriers have actually never been lower.
I think Nostra is such a great example of this.
Obviously, Bitcoin already made it so much easier,
especially if you're trying to fund a developer who's in Africa,
who's in Asia, and you're sitting here in the US.
That can be hard to do in the fiat system or impossible,
depending on what specific jurisdiction.
Are there sanctions to it?
Like, I know, so Bitcoin fixed basically all of that.

(01:19:55):
But Noster fixes that discovery layer of it as well which I think is so beautiful Like if you listening to this right now like go just find a dev you like and just go give them a zap Like you can just do that
You can just go zap a dev right now.
It's a beautiful thing.
You can, there's also, you know, through multiple of the different Noster clients, you can, you know, actively, I think at least I use Domus because I'm an iPhone user and I use Primal.

(01:20:18):
And on Domus, you can allocate a certain percentage.
whatever zap you send, you can like add an additional percentage on top that you say,
I want, I want for each zap I send, I want to add, you know, whatever, 10%, 20% additionally
that I want to go to the dev team.
Or, you know, you can pay, you can call it crazy.
You know, you can, you can pay for like a premium subscription to one of these things.

(01:20:40):
And maybe, maybe you don't think that that's worth it, but like, I don't know, for me,
it's, it's worth it to at least do a small thing to be able to, to give value for value.
Like people talk a lot about value for value, but it only works if people do it and people do it at scale.
And I'm not even talking about the scale of individual contributions, but the scale of the total number of people who are engaging in that value for value model.

(01:21:03):
Because I think that it can work.
Right now it's, you know, perhaps the pool is too small to draw from.
But like, you know, with each zap, you make that pool a little bit bigger.
That's a beautiful thing.
Exactly.
One other cool trick is you can make it that the post that you write, the zaps actually go to someone else.
So one cool thing is, like, if you want to help out a project, make a cool post about, you know, why the app is great and how to use it.

(01:21:32):
And add the lightning address of the developer into the note, send it, and maybe a couple thousand zaps get put together.
and it's like the developer gets not just marketing,
but he gets paid for someone else's marketing.
So like that's a good deal, right?
And that's something you can do.
It is really cool.

(01:21:53):
Like the friction has decreased exponentially
and there's just so many cool things being built right now.
I love to see it.
I want to be conscious of your time here
because I know we're running up against it
a little bit of our 90 minutes.
It flies by every time we get to chatting, Max.
It's been a treat to have you here.
Is there anything you want to leave folks with or anything we didn't cover

(01:22:15):
or any projects that you want to give a shout-out to
that people should go check out that you're particularly interested in?
There's so many cool projects.
And I'm trying to always shill different projects each time.
So far, I have not run out of ones, which is good.
But one that was on my mind today is an incredible steel engraver

(01:22:38):
for your private keys called the seed hammer.
It's an open source hardware and firmware
with 3D printed, do-it-yourself standardized parts.
And you can engrave on like a small steel plate,
whatever you want.
It can be your 12 words.
It can be your password to your password manager.

(01:23:00):
It can be a QR code to your output descriptor
of your multi-signature, right?
Steel engraved QR codes.
That sounds really interesting all of a sudden.
It could actually be a Shamir secret share QR code of any arbitrary text that you want.
So you need to have like three out of five steel plates in order to get to your secrets.
So once the robots do our steel backups for us, we can do all types of cool things in steel.

(01:23:26):
So I'm really bullish on that one.
I have not heard of that one.
That is really neat.
I'm going to have to check that out.
You said it's totally like they open sourced it as well?
Exactly.
So this all kind of started out with the seed signer where you needed a QR code of the private key.
And so we were drawing them on a piece of paper by hand.

(01:23:47):
And I was starting to think, hey, is it actually possible to do this on steel?
Like would a camera read a QR code that's in steel?
And like some guys in Switzerland went and just did it.
They kind of created a manual hole punch for checking if it's actually possible.
And it turns out, yes, you can absolutely scan a steel QR code.

(01:24:07):
And so people started selling those hand stamps and so on to punch into steel.
But it takes a lot of time.
It's super easy to make a mistake, especially with a QR code.
That's just not a thing humans create.
That's a computer thing to do, both to write and to read a QR code.
So humans are really bad at doing this consistently correct,

(01:24:28):
and it just takes too much time.
and if we want to make really complex things
like an output descriptor that's like next level
even more difficult than just words
so let's the robot do it for us
and they found this on Alibaba
this like Chinese steel engraver
that they could plug in the Seed Signer

(01:24:49):
as a kind of management computer
but it's just kind of weird
to buy this Alibaba machine overpriced
to back up your multi-generational wealth.
So ultimately they're like,
yeah, we can do it from scratch.
Let's just design the entire hardware,
the PCB board, the mechanics, everything.

(01:25:11):
And two years later, they're basically done.
So really cool to see that project develop
and really happy that they're actually selling
and shipping it now.
I'm stoked to go check this out.
That sounds awesome.
I'll link your towards
towards Liberty.com
as your general site right for
a lot of your stuff and then I'll link your

(01:25:32):
end pub as well of course
but Max it's been a treat to have you on here
man it was good to catch up
any final words
yeah thanks Walker for the
continued advice I'm happy to be back on the show
it was good hanging
in person with you and Carla that's always nice
and the final
words is just go out there and build stuff

(01:25:52):
if you're listening to this pod
I mean, that's the thing with these Bitcoin podcasts.
It feels like we're preaching to the choir.
Like, you know you should be working on Freedom Tech.
We know that you know that you should be working on Freedom Tech.
And you know that we know that you know.
So, like, all things, you should basically just be working on Freedom Tech.
Like, that's the gist of the story.

(01:26:14):
You have approval.
Like, the official Bitcoin podcast told you to work on Freedom Tech.
Full endorsement.
You can tell your mom it's fine.
some guys on the internet said so and and therefore just you're going to do that now
and it's going to be glorious that's a that is a perfect note to end on uh yeah you can just do

(01:26:40):
things especially when a podcast tells you to that's the best time and you should start a podcast
on that note max great chatting you man thanks to everybody who joined in on the
Noster livestream as well.
Appreciate you guys. Thank you for the zaps.
You know I will be paying them forward in
696 sat increments.
So thank you guys. Thank you, Max.
It was great hanging. See you on the next one,

(01:27:01):
Walker.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode
of The Bitcoin Podcast.
Remember to subscribe to this
podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family, and

(01:27:22):
strangers on the internet. Find me on Noster at primal.net slash Walker and this podcast at
primal.net slash titcoin on X YouTube and rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this
podcast on X and Instagram at titcoin podcast. Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links,
head to substack.com slash at Walker America to get episodes emailed to you and head to

(01:27:47):
Bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you
for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.

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FREEDOM & PRIVACY TECH vs THE FIAT PANOPTICON | Max Hillebrand

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}FREEDOM & PRIVACY TECH vs THE FIAT PANOPTICON | Max Hillebrand