INFLATION, ANARCHY, MORALITY & THE STATE: Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This theft on a large scale has been going on for thousands of years.

(00:05):
No, it's not like this is the new thing that the bureaucrats recently pulled out of their ass.
No, they've been messing with the money supply since fucking forever.
And it is it is absolute horrific that it leads to numerous people, you know, just living their life, not even knowing they are in fact a parasite.
And and that is that is really that's really sad.

(00:26):
It's really dangerous. And that's why I think having a good money, a sound money with honest principles and the hard money supply that cannot be increased.
That's why Bitcoiners feel so weird.
Like what's happening?
Like what's going on?
And what's happening is that you start stealing from lots of people and that feels a lot better.
Even if you might not consciously be aware of how you're hurting yourself in the act of using fiat.

(00:51):
Once you stop doing it, you realize quite quite quickly of how devastating this actually was.

(01:21):
Today, that guest is Max Hillibrand.
Max is an open source entrepreneur supporting several Bitcoin projects that build tools for sovereign individuals to defend their property rights, liberties and privacy.
Max and I get into a lot of topics in this chat, ranging from how non developers can contribute to Bitcoin, to Austrian economics, misconceptions about anarchy, the devastation wrought by fiat and the importance of sound money.

(01:49):
The appropriate role of the state, the law and a bunch of other stuff.
I know you're going to love this conversation.
Before we dive in, just a heads up that you can find links in the show notes to get discounts on the Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet from Bitbox Swiss.

(02:09):
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(02:59):
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Max Hillbrennd.
Welcome to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Yeah, thanks very much, Walker, for the invite. I'm really looking forward to it because clearly we don't have enough Bitcoin podcasts.
Another one was all we needed.
We need Bitcoin podcast number go up. That's the key. It's a number of people go up.

(03:23):
And I think it's a good thing that we have a lot of people who are interested in Bitcoin podcast.
Bitcoin podcast number go up. That's the key. It's a number of people go up. Number of podcasts go up. That's the key here.
But it's an interesting thing because I was looking, I was on your website, towards liberty.com, right?

(03:46):
I'll link this in the show notes as well. It's a great resource. Also, I started digging into your archive a little bit.
But I was looking and you've contributed to Bitcoin, Wasabi Wallet, Join Market, BDC Pay Server, Cold Card, LND, Crypto Anarchy, Debian Repository.
That's a really impressive list of contributions to things.

(04:08):
But I also understand that you are not actually writing code, right? You are contributing in other ways.
And I think there's a lot of people in Bitcoin generally who think, well, I want to do something for Bitcoin or for the Bitcoin community, for the Bitcoin industry.
But I don't write code. So how can I, I guess there's nothing I can do. I guess I can't help.

(04:28):
And I'd love it if you could talk about that a little bit and kind of how your involvement in those projects has been.
And what advice you'd give to people who say, I want to do something for Bitcoin, but I can't code. So what do I do?
Yeah, that's one of the very common ideas that people have that you need to be a developer really technical in order to be useful for software projects.
And that's just really not the case.

(04:51):
As with any business, doing the actual real physical task is very small part of the business.
There are all types of customer service, explanations, documentation, project management, HR, hiring people, teaching them, etc.
There's just so much to do for any project.

(05:12):
And so, and we all benefit from division of labor.
And that goes across any scale.
As soon as two or more people collaborate, this economic law applies.
And so this means that you can be extremely useful to basically any project out there simply by doing what you're marginally best at.
The thing that you're really, really good at much better than anything else that you do.

(05:35):
Just keep on doing that for whatever project you're interested in and you're probably going to make a quite valuable and meaningful impact.
I think that's such an inspiring point because, again, a lot of people think that the only way that you can contribute to Bitcoin,
because they, you know, it's like, okay, Bitcoin is code, right?

(05:55):
I can't write code.
Well, what am I to do then?
I guess I'll just be on the sidelines and kind of instead of making things happen, I'll watch things happen.
But you actually do and for anyone that's worked not necessarily on but around software with software teams,
you know very well that developers are very good at developing.
That's what they do.

(06:16):
That doesn't mean they are savants in every aspect of business and of, you know, interpersonal work and everything else.
So I think that's such an inspiring thing for people to hear that, look, you can contribute in a non-writing code way and that doesn't make it any less valuable.
It's still a job that needs to be done.
It's still a skill that can be accessed.

(06:38):
So I love that and I hope more people take that.
For me, it's, you know, I'm just here making another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
But, you know, we all play the hands we're dealt and try to find, again, what we're marginally better at.
I still, the jury's still out if I'm marginally better at podcasting, but we'll see.
I don't think I'm in 10X.
I voice certain things, you know.

(06:58):
Again, that's the hand I was dealt.
So it's like, well, this is what I'll use.
And, you know, speaking of kind of being marginally better at things and economic calculus,
I want to, I think a good starting point for this discussion is actually around some definitions.
Because I've seen a lot of discussion lately that seems to misinterpret or misunderstand

(07:23):
what words like anarchy mean or what words like law or natural law mean.
And you have some really good writings on your website about this that express them
really simply.
And again, I'll link this for people because I highly recommend they check these out.
But I'd love it if you could kind of start off this with just a little bit of
how you look at words like anarchy and how you define that.

(07:47):
Is it the Mad Max, barbarian, fire explosions, bloodletting and violence everywhere?
Or is it something different?
And how that relates to the concepts of kind of property rights and then
verges into the Austrian economics discipline.
Yeah, fascinating topics.
And so anarchy is an old Greek word constituting of two parts.

(08:10):
And a prefix meaning without or the absence of and the suffix arcon,
which means rulers, kings, masters.
Anarchy is not as you said this Mad Max world of anything goes, no rules to whatever you want.
Quite on the contrary, I would argue that anarchy follows a society that lives in anarchy,

(08:31):
follows certain principles extremely strongly.
And that is that there are no kings, no masters and no slaves.
So meaning that there is an equal law for any individual part of this society.
And of course the question is how would we ever find a single law that applies to all of us?

(08:51):
You know, in terms of how we should act and what we should not do.
But I think we can clearly deduct and reason through that simply you shall not steal.
That is kind of the one main rule that we can very consistently apply throughout human life.
And very likely you're going to be better off with not stealing than with stealing.

(09:13):
And not just you, but everyone around you.
So for me, anarchy is very strongly defined on private property basically.
That is saying that being in a private property society means that we do live in anarchy.
There are no rulers over each other.
We're peers on a network on equal footing and we choose to collaborate and team up

(09:37):
and build awesome things together.
But that doesn't mean that one person owns the other or can command him to do certain things that he does not want.
So I would say that as soon as we have two parties or more consensually collaborating together
and doing something, anything really, that that is a true state of anarchy.
And it's a beautiful thing and we see it in life all the way all around us.

(09:59):
I really appreciate that definition.
And I'm curious of your opinion of how the term of the word anarchy was perverted in its definition.
Was this some Hollywood concoction that took the word?
Was it the anarchist movement as it kind of originated in a more,
well, as formal as an anarchist movement can be?

(10:21):
How did we get to this perversion where people hear anarchy?
And instead of thinking of what you just said with voluntary cooperation, non-violence,
you know, don't steal from people, respect private property.
How did we get from that to people associating anarchy with burning down buildings and looting and violence and mad max?
And how did we get there?

(10:41):
That is a really good question.
You know, this should be common sense because it obviously makes sense and sense should be common, meaning everyone gets it.
But seemingly not.
So, yeah, the question is, how could people forget such a fact? Because, I mean, it is so obvious and it is all around us.

(11:01):
So, you know, it's like the fish asking, what is water?
And I guess, you know, that's part of the human experience.
You know, we have very selective focus, very selective zones of interest on where we apply our attention to.
And that means that sometimes lots of important things just get ignored.
And, you know, that ignorance is quite a dangerous thing.

(11:24):
It's actually another funny, interesting word.
The difference between ignorance and nashens.
So, ignorance is when you have information available to you, but you choose not to do anything with it.
You know, but you ignore it.
Versus nashens is simply you have never encountered information that would lead you to this conclusion.

(11:45):
You're simply absent of the facts.
That is what nashens means.
And I think a bit of both applies here.
You know, most people simply have never thought about morality or, you know, human life and society, let's say.
Because, you know, why would you much philosophize about that?
But then on the other hand, nobody taught them about it either.

(12:07):
Yeah. And after years of schooling and professional education,
I guess we could expect that important topics like this come up.
But apparently they do not.
So, quite interesting on where today's educational systems, you know, carry its roots.
And, you know, mainly in Georgia, was an outcome-based education system.

(12:29):
First introduced there to build a quite heavy army, you know, of obedient soldiers and such.
So, this is unfortunate, you know.
And I think with Bitcoin and the internet and other things,
we hopefully have some renaissance of common sense and that you could actually thinking about certain difficult issues through for themselves.

(12:50):
And, you know, based on the support of others by reading books and browsing stuff online.
The internet is a really magical place that allows us to collaborate together and share a bunch of amazing knowledge.
So, I think over the last, you know, 20, 30 years or something with the internet.
Just the amount of information that is available that you could get to you at the tip of your finger.

(13:15):
Which is absolutely incredible.
But this basically means that we're all very ignorant nowadays.
Because we have all of the information available.
And you can read whatever you want.
The question is what do you put your attention to?
What do you choose not to ignore, but actually pick up and read?
And I guess that's a question that many people don't frequently ask themselves.
And this might be, you know, part of the orange pill experience of suddenly waking up and starting to put your attention much more carefully.

(13:44):
And I think that's a very powerful aspect.
I think that that is such an important point.
Because, yes, we do have, I mean, in the palm of our hands, or in our pockets, we have basically the, or a version of, many versions of the collective history and knowledge of the world.
That's insane that we have that capability.

(14:07):
Literally in this little box.
That's just incredible.
And that we can instantaneously share that and discuss it with people we've never met all across the world with zero latency.
That is amazing.
What the fuck, right?
It seems like a collision limit right now.
Like, how could that even work?
How does that even exist?

(14:29):
But then to your point, it's like, okay, we are all ignorant.
There is, you know, and with different levels of that ignorance, relatively speaking.
But the problem, I think, becomes what you touched on is that because there is so much information available, basically all, or, you know, as much as we can, we can possibly think of more than we could digest in a million lifetimes.

(14:53):
What do we focus our time and attention on?
Because that is scarce.
We're doing more rapidly than our lifespans and our ability to cognitively process the information as it grows.
We can't do it.
So what do we focus on?
What do we take our scarce resources of time and energy and attention and focus on?

(15:15):
I think to your point of the Bitcoin rabbit hole is kind of a way to focus that.
It gives you a way to say, well, now I know where to look.
I'm not just, I'm not overwhelmed by options as much anymore.
I know that this is an area that I can look deep into and with some of its tangential paths that come off of it.

(15:39):
And that will lead me to a great deal of knowledge, but an amount of knowledge that is actually digestible in a human lifetime versus the totality of everything that's out there, which no human will ever be able to digest.
It's impossible.
And I think that's, it's a really interesting point and maybe, maybe we could take a step back here because I had heard that, I think this was in your interview with Preston, that you started reading Austrian economics at a very young age, like in your teens.

(16:09):
Can you talk a little bit about just, I'll ask this question, who are you and how did you get here to be who you are today?
Yeah, many ways to answer this, of course, you know, humans are endlessly complex, but one important aspect, I think for me was always child labour.
You know, my mom pushed me to work really early and that's really great.

(16:33):
I would highly encourage parents to get their kids to be productive early on.
It's probably the best thing you can teach them because it's a cross aspect skill.
If you're productive in general, you can do so many things in all different aspects.
And so, you know, as a young kid, you might not really understand why you should be productive, like why should you go work and help others.

(16:56):
And, you know, that always bothered me a bit, like not really getting for why do we do these things, you know, go to get a job and work.
So I wanted to learn more about that theory and, you know, started looking up online, different economic explanations and stuff, different schools of thought.
Most of them didn't really make much sense, though, especially the Keynesian school and historicism and Chicago schools, etc.

(17:23):
Not really that useful, you know, it might, you know, all the words itself, like they're there and it kind of makes sense,
but it doesn't seem to be helpful for everyday life and that's something I was looking for.
And then eventually I stumbled upon the Austrian School of Economics and it's just so practical, so real, so no bullshit, you know.

(17:44):
It's just proper logic that all makes sense and that all is incredibly useful.
Like just by the fact of learning more about economics, I can apply this in so many different areas of my life, much more than just work related, you know.
I think also the theory of family, for example, or of leisure and enjoy and sports, etc.

(18:06):
It's all very interesting if you analyze it from an economic point of view as well.
And especially with the Austrians, that just all makes very sense.
And I think it gives you quite a beautiful outlook on life.
You know, lots of people think, you know, humanity is a cancer on the face of this planet and we should just be eradicated and get rid of it.

(18:29):
And that seems very depressive to me, like very nihilistic.
And I guess it's just a result of weirdly thinking about something and maybe some other way of thought would provide a much more positive outlook.
And I think the Austrians do exactly that.
They have very basic, you know, tenets and very obvious rules, but it's, you know, a good foundation of not being an asshole.

(18:53):
Again, the one rule, don't steal.
Like a very interesting practical experience, if anarchy is a good or bad idea, is to consciously break the one rule as much as you can.
Go throughout your day and steal as much as possible.
Whenever, you know, whenever there's an opportunity, do it and then see how your life goes in just a short amount of time.

(19:15):
Like it won't take you many hours until you probably get kicked out of the village.
So this is just by experience and this is very useful.
You know, I'm curious your take, as I've seen, again, just a lot of chatter about this lately, about kind of misconceptions about anarchy and what that means.

(19:40):
And I saw one comparison.
It was by Bitpain, who I very much enjoy and I appreciate that he's trying to think through things logically and I think that his approach is in good faith.
And naturally, I'm going to disagree with much of what he says and agree with much of what he says.
And that's the beauty of us being humans, right?
Is that we can still, you know, like a person, an individual, but disagree with much of what they say.

(20:06):
But one of the things that I saw him point out was that the anarcho-libertarian mentality of many Bitcoiners is really similar to that of the communists in the sense that not in terms of the theory itself,
but in terms of how they talk about the theory, which is that, well, you know, the communists, the classic trope is, well, real communism's never been tried.

(20:29):
And it's like, well, because every time we try to do real communism, millions of people die.
But, you know, different side. But then his point, which is a somewhat valid point, I think, or at least it's a valid argumentative tactic, is that, well, you know, Bitcoiners who are very, you know, focusing on anarcho-capitalist principles, libertarian principles,

(20:52):
they will say the same thing, that real anarchy, real capitalism, real libertarianism has never been tried.
And so you're just, you know, you're using the same logical fallacies as the communists. I'm curious of your take on that.
And if you see examples in history of a real anarchic system being tried or something close to it, and how you think that relates to our current system today, in terms of where we fall on that spectrum from, let's say, communism to,

(21:23):
I don't know what the other end of the spectrum is. If the other end of the spectrum is anarchy, in the definition that you've given, or if there's another end to that spectrum as well?
Yeah, again, I think anarchy is the status quo. It's the real thing that is all around us. And we see it on micro and micro levels.
I don't like in your family, for example, I would say that's most likely to be pure anarchy, like, you know, unless you have some weird kink, you're not going to have chains and a plunge equipment lying around for your wife and your kids.

(21:54):
So that seems to be a very consensual relationship here. And, you know, of course, children are, you know, to be raised and still brought up in the realms of ethics and how to behave among polite society, let's say.
So certainly there's some always friction between, you know, what the child would like to do and what is proper to do, but that doesn't necessarily violate anarchy.

(22:22):
There are rules of the house, so to say, if you're the property owner in the house and you set the rules that are inside, then that is still in part with anarchy itself. Or with your friends, you know, to play sports, for example.
There is no king in a sport that gets to, you know, arbitrarily decide the rules and change them. All the rules of basketball are clearly defined and everyone agrees to them and everyone plays by.

(22:52):
So that's pure anarchy. And, you know, likewise, on the global scale, like, there's no one government that sets the clear rules on how everything is.
There are pockets of, let's say, local dictators defining the rules for themselves, we're sure within that one country, there is a clear ruler and a clear subject.

(23:13):
But on the macro scale, that doesn't really exist. I'm sure some people would love to be a final human-made highest authority for the entire planet.
But thankfully, that's very difficult to build and probably the outcomes thereof would be quite tragic as well.
So it seems to me that the, again, this argument about, oh, you know, how should, what is the role of the state?

(23:40):
What is the proper way to collectively organize? What is the proper treatment of private property? Is anarchy, quote, anarchy a desirable goal?
It seems to me that most of the confusion comes down to just differences in definition. Because what you have just proposed there is that this, we already live in an anarchic state of cooperation, for the most part, right?

(24:07):
And with different pockets having different degrees of that, it's a spectrum, if you will. But if there is private property to some degree, if there is voluntary nonviolent cooperation, non-coercive cooperation, then at least anarchy exists in some state.
And for you, you are literally taking the quite literal definition and etymology of the word anarchy back to just meaning that it's essentially there's the same set of rules for everyone.

(24:37):
And we're talking about no masters, no slaves, and peaceful, nonviolent cooperation and respect for private property.
Amongst, no matter where you fall, there is no hierarchy of society. There is just peaceful cooperation among equal participants in that society.
A fair summary?
Bitcoin is private property perfected. And if you want to keep it safe from an overreaching state, you need to actually take custody of it yourself.

(25:05):
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(25:31):
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Yeah, basically. It sounds very simple and maybe it's too simple to be true, but I think some quite profound realization turned out to be rather simple if you look at it.

(26:01):
You know, equals mc2 tenons. It's, of course, an example of physics. That's a very beautiful and simple equation.
And physics and economics are extremely different areas of thought, of course.
But still, you know, the beautiful ideas are usually a very simple core.
And I think just don't steal is a simple of a baseline rule that we get.

(26:23):
I don't think it gets us all the way.
You know, like you cannot steal and still be an idiot and not really helpful and people won't like you.
So it's not the one thing that you have to do to have the perfect life.
But it's certainly the one thing that if you violate this rule, you're going to have a bad life.

(26:44):
And so it's maybe more seen like this. But I do think we need more like ethics or more morals on top of this foundational rule to ensure that we have a life that is as good as it could possibly be.
I would agree with you there.
And you know, just speaking of, let's say speaking of theft, and I think we can all agree that to steal is bad to take the fruits of someone else's labor is that is we know we all know that to be wrong.

(27:18):
Right.
We you don't need to have this written out for you in a law to know that that feels wrong that there there is something that is immoral about that.
And I think that one of the one of the reasons that so many people today feel something is wrong with society is because there is so much widespread theft at an institutionalized level.

(27:41):
And that comes in the form of inflation, which is really this sort of silent mode of theft at an again, a systemic institutionalized level.
And that is so again, is made so needlessly complex from a definition standpoint that that it always gets away from, let's say, back to the Austrians, the simple definition of inflation is increasing the supply of money, you're inflating the supply of money.

(28:12):
And prices rise, you can, but we so typically talk about well see, you know, in the US CPI, and, and prices rising and inflation is just kind of mashed all together.
And nobody thinks, no, not that many people think about the actual, the root causes of that which is just you're increasing the money supply this is a necessary byproduct of that.

(28:35):
But you said something I was, I was watching your talk with with Preston and Alan and Lynn at cheat code and I thought it was a really great discussion.
And one thing you said was that you were asked about, you know, how is Bitcoin a cheat code basically and you said, Bitcoin is how life should have always been the cheat code is fiat money printing.

(28:57):
And I loved that quote. And I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit just in simple terms about how exactly that fiat money printing is a cheat code and and why people should actually care about that from a just a base level.
Yeah, man.
You know, I think many people are wondering why does it feel like we're losing our freedoms. Why is it that the world is not as free as it would be nice to be. And I think there's another quite simple rule in the universe and that is, as morality increases,

(29:31):
as freedom increases, and as morality decreases, freedom decreases. And I think that that seems to hold true. So and again, what is morality, violating the or it's about the rule of do not steal.
So, when we steal a lot, that means that the morality of society decreases. And the end result obviously is that there's less freedoms because people get stolen from all the time.

(29:55):
Now, how does this tie all into inflation. And that goes to your earlier point of you know what why do people misunderstand anarchy. Why do people misunderstand inflation.
That's, it's a full inversion, you know, of what it actually means.
And inflation has nothing to do with purchasing power. If, if only you know inflation would be about purchasing power, it wouldn't be a bad thing at all. But it is much, much more fundamental than this, because, as you said, inflation is about increasing the money supply.

(30:25):
And that is important because it kicks off the canteen effects, which has numerous tragic, tragic results. And one is quite obvious. The person who receives the newly printed money first gains at the expense of those who received the newly created money afterwards, obviously, right, the guy with the money
printer is all of a sudden rich, because he can print the money and buy all the stuff that other people don't. So obviously, all of the resources naturally flow to, to the guy with the money printer. And now you could be like, oh, look at that bad guy with the money printer, you know, he's taking all of our stuff away

(31:00):
indirectly via inflation, and, and your, your true, but you know, that, that rule is not just the one off with the person who actually has the money printer. That as soon as we start printing money, it, it starts a chain reaction of events.
Right. We're always, we move capital to the person who receives the newly created money earlier, and away from that person who receives that newly created money later.

(31:25):
And, and so the thing is, even, let me know, average Joe, like, like you and me earn our money in exchange for something, that money got created somewhere, you know, by some bureaucrat in some central bank.
And since all those people who have helped that physical bill before you are literally stealing from you, and you, your capital, your wealth, your, your, your passion is being drained away from that monetary transfer that you're doing right now, and into those hands from from the people who who touched that money

(31:54):
before you. Now, outrageous, there's this huge line of people who just grabbed into your pocket because you bought a sandwich, right? It's ridiculous. But what people forget is that it's even worse, because sure, there might be a couple hundred people in front of you.
But look behind you. There's billions of people who will receive this newly created money after you, not just the people who are alive today, working right now, but the people in the longest in future, people who are not even born yet.

(32:22):
Whenever you use a fiat money that has that has been created at infant item, and then this means that you are stealing from billions of people in that are yet to come.
And so the most devilish trick that inflation has pulled on us is that it turns everyone into a thief. If you use the money, if you get paid, if you pay others, you're actively stealing from parts of the population.

(32:46):
And you don't even know about it. And nobody tells you. And you don't really have time to stop and think of what you're actually doing when you're using these pretty painted pieces of paper.
But it is in fact a tragedy, a human diversity that this theft on a large scale has been going on for thousands of years.
No, it's not like this is the new thing that the bureaucrats recently pulled out of their ass. No, they've been messing with the money supply since fucking forever.

(33:14):
And it is it is absolute horrific that it leads to numerous people, you know, just living their life, not even knowing they are in fact a parasite.
And that is that is really, that's really sad. It's really dangerous. And that's why I think having a good money, a sound money with honest principles and the hard money supply that cannot be increased.

(33:36):
That's why Bitcoiners feel so weird, like what's happening, like what's going on? What's happening is that you stop stealing from lots of people and that feels a lot better.
Even if you might not consciously be aware of how you're hurting yourself in the act of using fiat, once you stop doing it, you realize quite, quite quickly of how devastating this actually was.

(33:58):
And it's such an interesting point that I like your perspective that look, it's not just, it's not just you that are the victim here.
It's not, you know, the buck doesn't stop with you, as they say, you aren't the last person in this chain of fiat debasement.

(34:19):
You're just part of the chain. Yes, you are lower, lower down in the from the spigot than the people holding their buckets right up next to it.
But there are, as you said, billions of people still in the world who, for instance, as a as an American, I am privileged to have the world's reserve currency as my national fiat currency.

(34:42):
Like that is that is a that is a privilege. And the more you learn about, I think I remember the first time I started digging into some of Alex Gladstein's work and realizing all of the bullshit that the IMF and the World Bank get up to.
I mean, it's honestly sickening. Like it makes you sick to your stomach and you realize, I like I had no idea.

(35:06):
I had no idea and I feel somehow complicit because this is ultimately my country and some others, you know, the French are certainly don't have their hands clean here.
You know, Japan also does not. There's there's a lot of blood and a lot of people's hands and quite literally.
But you just feel sick to your stomach and you say, like, this is just so fundamentally wrong and I want to opt out of this.

(35:27):
Because clearly little old me can't snap my fingers and change things. But I can change things that are within my control. I can change my habits.
I can change how I decide to store the value of my time and energy and to try and opt out of that system.
And I think you're right that that feeling that you get the deeper you you get into Bitcoin where you start to feel better about things.

(35:50):
There's there's kind of a sense of relief and calm almost that you don't exactly know where it comes from originally.
And so much of it comes from just not being as complicit in this systemic hierarchy of theft that exists the world over.
And that to your point has existed for thousands of years in various forms.

(36:12):
And you know, and I'm curious because I like to think a lot about just like the idea of human flourishing in general and what enables humans to flourish.
What enables them to be able to reach their full capacity to find a purpose that is also productive and brings value to themselves and to others.

(36:34):
And I'm curious just as a very simplistic question, but how do we increase human flourishing and the capacity for humans to flourish in this day and age operating in in this fiat world that we're in?
How do people make that transition? How do we increase overall human flourishing?
And that's a really great question. And I hate to be boring, but it comes back to the one rule, right? Don't steal.

(37:00):
But that made it to put a different spin on it. And I like to think cyberpunk stuff.
This is the way of thinking of asymmetric cost of attack and defense.
And so we want the attack to be extremely expensive and we want to be defense to be extremely cheap.
Because if that is the case, then theft has become extremely expensive pricey to expensive. So basically impossible.

(37:28):
When there is a mismatch between the cost of attack and defense, then interesting things happen.
Back in the Middle Ages, there are a couple hundreds of peasants on a field with a stick and a shovel.
But then a knight on a war horse in full solid metal plate armor comes along.
He can kill them all because his level of defense is so substantial that it simply is impossible for any of the peasants to do harm to him.

(37:59):
And so the cost of attack is pretty high. And so peasants don't even have a proper sword.
And then on the other hand, the cost of defense is so high that only the VIPs can use it.
There were only a handful of well armored knights back then because it was crazy expensive.
But then those few people with that level of defense, big castle walls and such, all of a sudden could exert control over vast amounts of resources

(38:28):
and even compel people to do things that they might not otherwise have liked.
But then all of a sudden comes the crossbow.
It's a pretty simple mechanical device using some genius concepts of physics to apply a lot of force on a short stick.
And all of a sudden you can punch through a fully armored knight.

(38:50):
And peasants can do that by pulling a little trigger.
And all of a sudden, 50 meters up heads, the knight falls off the horse.
So now we have decreased the cost of attack.
And now the crossbow, which is not that difficult to build.
And that can take down something that even had substantial costs of defense, but the defense was still not good enough to stop the crossbow or later gunpowder, etc.

(39:18):
So whenever we have changes to the asymmetry of power in regards to cost of attack and cost of defense, interesting things happen.
And then in the 1970s, it's not even that long ago,
weirdo mathematicians discovered this weirdness of mass in the coin private public t cryptography.

(39:39):
And we can flip a coin, generate a random number.
If we do that large enough or often enough, then it's just such an unfathomably large possible number space where you randomly picked one out of,
literally finding the needle in the haystack.
And it's easy to flip the coins and get the random number, but then to actually discover that random number by yourself out of all the possible available numbers is just simply impossible.

(40:03):
Nobody could count that much, not even a supercomputer could, because it would consume so much electricity that it would just collapse into a black hole.
And then likewise, if you have that secret private key, you can easily derive a public key.
And to derive a public key from private keys is trivial computation and costs a couple nano jewels of electricity likely.

(40:25):
And then on and then further on the other hand, if you want to, if you have a public key, but you want to get the private key again, near impossible, right?
Just not feasible to compute this math function and same with signatures.
And if you have the private key to create a signature super easy to forge a signature nearly impossible.

(40:47):
So cryptography is so magic, precisely because it changes that power of cost of attack and cost of defense.
It decreases the cost of defense to almost nothing.
And it increases the cost of attack to literally destroying the universe into a black hole.
So like, that's a pretty cool trade off balance.
And with cryptography, we can do all types of marvelous things.

(41:12):
I mean, like, look at the internet, look at email, all of the stuff simply would not be possible without these cryptographic primitives.
And humanity enjoys and uses these concepts all the time.
Everyone does because it's a beautiful concept that will help us literally flourish because it helps us to build systems of human collaboration where theft is more and more discouraged.

(41:36):
So in your mind, basically the key to human flourishing is having that a high level of asymmetry when it comes to defense versus attack.
It's arming the peasant with the crossbow so that they can now like that is a, you know, it's a defensive weapon if they're using it to keep away the...

(42:00):
Maybe more like arming everyone in, you know, full metal suit, you know.
And all the attacks are, you know, little, you know, swimming, like, little rubbery things.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, I like that because when everyone has a tool, that tool can no longer be a lever of power for just a select few.

(42:28):
When everyone has that capability, and I think that that is one of the beautiful things about cryptography generally and also about Bitcoin is that because Bitcoin is for anyone, anyone can freely opt in to this network and utilize this technology,

(42:49):
it lowers the bar really to protecting, in this case, protecting your savings, to protecting your time, because I think that it's such a...
It's so easy to get caught in the trap of just thinking in the monetary sense of dollars and cents, you know, euros, pounds, yen, whatever it may be.

(43:12):
But ultimately, I think the most pernicious thing about inflation is that it's not just stealing the value of your money, it's not just devaluing your money.
It is ultimately stealing your time.
It is stealing a piece of your life and that you can't get back and you had no say in this.

(43:33):
It's time theft ultimately, it's theft of your time and energy that you applied to try and create something of greater order value than whatever inputs you had.
And I think that's such a disgusting and sad thing.
And again, it gets back to why so many people are so frustrated right now and you see this, like you see this across the world right now, different flavors in different countries.

(43:59):
But people are fed up, but they don't know what exactly they are...
They don't know exactly where to direct their focus back to your original point.
They don't know exactly what the problem is.
They just know something is wrong.
And, you know, to take America as the example, we're very fond of blaming the other colored party when something is bad.

(44:23):
You know, if you're on the red side, well, something's bad, you got to blame the blue side and on the blue side, you blame the red side.
And on and on we go just spiraling, you know, kicking the can down the road until our children and grandchildren are just left with a mess.
And I think that's the same the world over.
And, you know, maybe this gets to the question a little bit of what is actually the proper role of the state in its modern form?

(44:54):
Because I think that a lot of people tend to look for political solutions to things because we've been we've been taught and the systemic education has taught people that there are always political solutions, these problems.
They're very top down heuristic, right?
It's looking at things and saying, well, if something's wrong, we must need to change a law way up here in Washington, DC, in whatever capital city of your country is.

(45:24):
And that that will be what what fixes these things that are broken.
And people are slowly, I think, realizing that maybe that's not the case, maybe these political solutions don't exist.
But I'm curious of what your opinion is of what is the proper role of the state?
What is the state's function?
Its best function, if any, in the modern world?

(45:48):
You know, then we have to get back to definitions and see what what is the state?
You know, it's the state like the fireman department.
Not really.
Those are like service providers who keep your house safe.
You know, the state is not the post office because those is just a guy putting a thing on top of another thing.
And it's not the guys building the road because it was just construction construction workers.
So what exactly is the state?

(46:11):
And again, I think Austin economics and especially Murray Rothbard has a beautiful answer to this.
The state is the monopoly on violence.
And it is the highest authority who gets to say when violence can be applied in order to settle disputes over conflicts.
And basically the ultimate judge, so to say, when two people have a conflict.

(46:32):
The state gets to decide on which of those persons are right.
And then those fundamentally again, if we have here a monopoly of violence, there is in a symmetry.
There are some people for whom it's okay to use violence and there's others for whom it's not.
And we're back to our non-anarchy situation.

(46:56):
And all of a sudden we are in an archonist world.
We have kings who have a special set of rules and then we have the slaves who have a very different set of rules.
And so what is the role in the state?
I don't think there is the role of a state in the civilized society.
I think we need a system where there is no mismatch between people in the sense of what their rights and empowers are.

(47:22):
So no, I don't think that we need to introduce theft or violence to solve any meaningful problem.
In fact, as soon as we introduce theft, solving the actual problem becomes way worse.
So like the fire department, the roads construction, the postal service, lots of these systems suck.
Because the service provider enjoys the monopoly benefit on force and he can hit anyone else who tries to provide a competing service.

(47:49):
Not that easy to start building roads where you would like simply because you won't get the permission of the state.
And so here we have a lot of interventions into the market economy.
Rothbard would categorize that there are three different types of intervention.
There is autistic intervention.
And so I'm the state and I say, Walker, you're not allowed to drink that beer, alcohol strictly prohibited.

(48:14):
So I know you brood yourself, it's your homemade moonshine, but nevertheless, this is just not something that you're allowed to put into your body.
And so I dictate what you can do with yourself and your own stuff.
Clearly against your consent, you like to get fucked up.
And then the second type of intervention is a binary intervention.

(48:35):
And so, okay, like Walker has this awesome bottle of moonshine.
I don't like him getting drunk.
I prefer getting drunk myself way more.
So I go and take it and move his capital into my control and possession.
Classical theft, that is binary intervention.
And finally, there's triangular intervention.
We know Walker and I don't know who else.

(48:57):
Gigi, let's say, are having some great conversation over there and exchanging moonshine for dry aged beef.
And I'm like, oh, no, both of those are really carbon intensive, better not to use such technologies.
So I take both of them.
Or for example, I say, no, it has to be two moonshines for one steak.

(49:19):
So the moonshine is clearly not as good a steak so that there must be two.
These type of price interventions are part of triangular intervention.
And all of these three types of intervention leads to a net loss for society.
One person is always going to be not happy.
Well, another one is really happy.

(49:40):
If I take his moonshine, I'm happy he's not.
That's not great.
We have a system that creates win-win situations all the time.
Why are we not winning all the time?
And that's again, because we broke the first rule and started stealing from each other.
And we always will have a victim and a winner.
And that sucks.

(50:02):
Then there will always be envy and hate and distractions in society.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
Division of labor, mutual beneficial exchange.
All of these economic principles teach us that we just have to work together consensually
and we literally create value.
We make it up out of nothing.
Humans can create such valuable things simply by working together

(50:25):
and improving each other's situation.
It's like we're like this miracle machine to make things better.
We should just not be in each other's way and hinder each other for improving the situation.
Two things on that.
First thing, I hope that someday I can exchange moonshine for beef with Gigi.
That would be, what a dream that would be.

(50:46):
It's going to go on my bucket list now.
Whichever way the transaction flows is fine with me.
But that's added to my bucket list.
The second thing, I appreciate the explanation.
And I want to play devil's advocate a little bit just to tease this out a bit.
So if you look at the definition of the law itself from someone like Bastiat,

(51:09):
basically he's saying that, and to paraphrase here,
the purpose of the law is to protect individual private property.
That's the only purpose of the law.
And the only reason that the state exists is to enforce the law.
Thus the only function of the state is to organize for the collective defense of private property

(51:30):
to protect that private property from the plunders.
Now Bastiat also goes on to say that,
but the law has been perverted.
The law has been perverted to where those that are supposed to be in charge of enforcing the law,
the state, have become the plunders themselves.
They are now the ones writing the laws and enforcing the laws

(51:53):
and thus able to legalize the act of the plunder of private property.
Which is obviously a massive perversion from what he envisions as the ideal state of the law.
So I know natural law is something that you think about a lot.
And maybe that's a good way to approach this.
So when it comes to, do you think there is a role for the state or for something, some organization,

(52:20):
when it comes to the organization of the enforcement of the law?
And I think we would both probably agree that, again, the law as it exists comes back to defending that very first fundamental point,
which is don't steal.
So if somebody breaks that law of don't steal, we don't want that to happen.
We want to be able to defend that private property.
But not every person is capable of defending that property.

(52:44):
That's why there's the organization for collective defense.
How do you see that interplay and what do you see again, I guess, as the role of how should the defense of private property be provided, if at all?
So law is an extremely important aspect of human society because time is scarce, resources are scarce, as you well know.

(53:11):
And that means that there's a potential conflict where do we allocate those scarce resources?
And either I'm on another fucking Bitcoin podcast or I'm on Joe Rogan.
I cannot be at both.
So there's a conflict of where do I go?
And obviously I made the correct choice.
So then that means people though, this conflict of potential ownership and control applies not just to yourself.

(53:37):
Like do I eat steak or drink moonshine?
I'm not both.
But it also applies, of course, to when working together with others.
And so this means that we might disagree on who gets to use one resource or another.
And disagreements are not nice.
They hinder us, they block us, they prevent us from moving forward.
So somehow we need to deal with these conflicts.

(54:00):
And there are, and Rothbard lays it out beautifully, but there's only a handful of different approaches that we could do this.
First of all, nobody owns anything, pure communism.
And then, well, that kind of sucks because, you know, we're cold and hungry and starving and stuff.
So if we cannot use any external resources, then we literally die.

(54:21):
So obviously that isn't that great of a system.
Clearly someone needs to be able to use these resources.
Another option is everyone owns everything.
But then clearly, of course, the question is, so are you allowed to eat the steak or is Walker?
You know, like one of the two has to do.
So what are we going to take a vote from everyone on this entire planet to see who gets to eat what?

(54:46):
Or does it have to be 100% consensus?
Like if one person disagrees, nobody eats the steak.
How's it going to go? Obviously, I think of impossibility again.
Another option is that some people decide where the resources go and others just have to follow those rules.
And so this is yet another possibility.

(55:08):
But obviously, you know, that just sounds like slavery.
Like one person gets to rule, the others have to follow and obey.
It's not really that great of a system.
And obviously there's a mismatch on and different sets of rules for different people.
So now who gets to choose who's in which class?
Like I'd like to be a king, please.
But I guess everyone wants to.
So that's not really happening either.

(55:30):
And then I guess the only thing left is a private property society.
The person who created the thing gets to decide what to do with it.
And if you were the one who found it, who built it, who worked on it, you get to give it away as a gift.
You get to abandon it.
You get to exchange it for something else, trade it, you know, for money or for other goods and services.

(55:51):
And that's a private property society.
You know, either you homesteaded it, you created it out of, you know, from a raw state of materials,
or you contractually acquired it.
And I think that makes a lot more sense than all the other options, obviously, right?
Because we have local agency, the people who actually are involved in the problems get to discover those solutions for themselves.

(56:14):
We don't need to walk a thousand miles to some king and ask for permission on who actually gets to do this.
It's just a very practical, common sense thing that we could probably all agree upon.
But so nevertheless, right?
If there's a conflict, there's a conflict. So what do we do?
And then how do we provide justice, so to say, right?

(56:36):
How do we ensure that the just person gets to allocate the good in a way that he sees fit?
And again, extremely important that this gets solved.
Because if it doesn't get solved, then humanity dies.
So such a problem of such a crucial scale.
Why would you ever entrusted to a person who's not accountable and who can just do whatever he wants?

(56:59):
It's such an important thing as the law cannot be given to the monopolist on violence.
Because if he is the guy with all the guns, he's just going to say,
well, whenever I take something, it's totally fine.
Trust me, obviously, right?
So something as crucial as, you know, even as simple as roads is not easily being built by a central planner

(57:22):
who gets just to dictate where to build roads and how much there's a planning issue.
Because there's no prices.
You don't even know how much the resources are worth if you're the central planner trying to do all of this.
And the same applies, of course, to law as a franchise tool.
So it is absolutely essential that the state stays out of the business of law.

(57:43):
Because otherwise, the quality of the service provided in terms of dispute resolution will get worse and worse and worse.
And I think we see that now where court cases, you know, get dragged for decades before there's any final resolution.
Just, you know, not being productive for anything other than drumming up a huge lawyer bill.
I think we would have much more productive uses of our time if we had a more efficient way of resolving our disputes.

(58:09):
And I would argue it is not efficient because the state has intervened in its substantial.
I think that that's a fair response to it. And I think something a lot of people get hung up on,
and myself included as I try to think through these things, is that you think of, OK, yes, all of that sounds very nice and all,
but there are just so many of us. Like we're far past Dunbar's number, right?

(58:34):
We're not at what is, 140 people. I think that's the number, right?
We're so far past, I mean, we're talking, you know, thousands, millions, hundreds of millions, billions of people.
How do we possibly coordinate and organize at that level when it comes to, I think maybe the mistake is sometimes separating,

(58:57):
OK, we say, yes, you could organize a free market that way, you know, because let people trade, let them do whatever they may.
But then I think there's a tendency when it comes to things like the law and the enforcement of the law and the dispute resolution,
that people say, well, we need some sort of centralized body to be able to arbitrate this, to control it, to enforce it.

(59:21):
And that's where the state comes in. But I think that you and I would both agree that the state necessarily makes things less efficient.
So perhaps that one of the issues that we deal with here is simply a matter of scale.
Like one could make the argument that democracy works very poorly at scale, that it works pretty well in small localized areas where people are actually accountable to each other.

(59:42):
But as soon as you get to any sort of large scale, it stops working quite as nicely.
And representative democracy sure seems like a fix for that.
But we have many examples of that working not very well as well.
So, you know, I don't exactly have a question here. I'm just more so thinking through it and thinking from the perspective of maybe one of the big problems when it comes to this discussion is just that we're thinking in different scales.

(01:00:10):
And those who would be in favor of state influence, of state, the state having the quote, right to enforce the law are thinking at a very large scale,
because that's what we're used to thinking at versus somebody who is making an assertion like you are, which is that the state has no business in that because they're not effective at anything they do because they have no stake in anything they do.

(01:00:38):
They are not stakeholders in anything that they're doing. They are purely extractive.
And that you're thinking at, I think, a scale that is going back to decentralization and localism, which in my mind is a very good thing. But then perhaps the critics would say, well, but that you're just these starry eyed, you know, you know, anarchic dreamers and it is what it is and there's

(01:01:03):
no way to get back to any sort of localism and sorry, but you're just going to have to take it for what it is.
And what's your take on that? And do you think that I'm drawing the lines fairly there in terms of how we think about this problem? Because I think it is a problem and it's one like it's a fundamental problem that we should be discussing in open forums constantly.

(01:01:25):
But it's one that I think very few people actually think about at a deep level.
I think Leonard Reid has a really great insight in his little essay called I pencil, you know, thinking about it should be super easy to make a pencil.
You know, anyone should be able to do that. It's not that hard. It's some wood, some rubber, some metal, some graphite. That's it. You know, it's like it's just stick basically that draws, you know, it's not that hard.

(01:01:51):
But then you actually start to think about each of the steps that are involved with creating a pencil. First, obviously you need wood. You know, what does it just grow on trees?
Okay, it kind of does, but you need to do something to the tree in order to get the wood. And that's something you know, means probably have to hit it down. So you need an axe and or saw or something like this.
But for that you need metal. And also, how do you get metal or we need to dig it out of the ground and you're going to do that with your hands.

(01:02:18):
You need a shovel as well. So, are you going to get your shovel? No, but, you know, maybe like a chainsaw would be much better but now you need fuel as well. So first you need to drill in the ground, extract the raw material, the raw oil, you know, you need to put it into the refineries, etc.
So now you need to learn all types of, you know, different heating levels of oils and nonsense like this. And you still don't have the wood to start the pencil with, you know, but but then you need rubber for the backside.

(01:02:46):
And then you need to drill in the other side to the planet, which means you kind of need to build a boat and it needs to be a big one, you know, that they can actually cross the Atlantic so you need to learn about the sting of buoyancy and all types of weirdness.
And we can just keep going. And at the worker who are doing this, you know, they want coffee. So yeah, you got to go to the other side of the planet again to get some beans and roast them and bring them back so that they're happy and keep working right so just to create something as simple as a pencil requires the complex

(01:03:15):
of thousands, millions of people across space and across time. And yeah, how the fuck do we coordinate it seems impossible to create something as simple or stupid as a pencil.
Yet, and you know, then even worse, like, not thinking that you're a central planner actually who needs to do the pencil like, which type of wood do you use like cedar or pine, you know, from from which continent more of a younger tree or an older one.

(01:03:43):
Would you like to have some brass for for the end of it or more copper, you know, maybe some gold would be nice. There's like probably a gazillion different ways that you can create the rubber to erase the all of this again.
So, you know, there's, there's so many micro decisions that have to be made. And now how are you going to make something that's, that's, that's cheap, you know, that that still works and that makes you a profit.

(01:04:08):
It's near impossible calculation on how valuable are each of these items and how much does it cost to transport it from from a to B. The amount of economic calculations and decision making that has to be made there is is absolutely huge.
And of course, if you would make, you know, some miscalculations, some not so optimal decision, ultimately you would be wasting resources because there's another way to do it better.

(01:04:32):
So yeah, how could one mind possibly decide what are the prices of wood and the different types there often how much should we charge for shipping them across the planet, etc.
It is simply a computational impossibility for one brain to calculate this locally, because by definition the brain is only in one place at one time.

(01:04:53):
So how could you get the information from the other side of the planet that that is needed to actually calculate those prices.
A price is an emergent phenomena. It's not something that you can just observe and there it is you need to create the price.
And we can only create a price if we have consent. If two people can choose whether or not to take that deal or walk away, that choice needs to be there in order to create what's known as a true price.

(01:05:20):
If you say no, no, you have to use $5 to trade the stake. It cannot be more cannot be less. That's not a real price.
You're just saying a number and forcing people to hand that number of stones over so that he gets the stake.
But that's not what a price means. You know, a price is the meeting point of the subjective marginal preferences of two or more individuals.

(01:05:42):
You know, how much do you like stake versus moonshine and how much do I that discrepancy here? That is what eventually where the two of us meet.
That is the price, but you cannot force such a thing. Such a thing needs to be revealed voluntarily by the people who control these resources.
Otherwise, the price simply does not exist. And so no, one person can clearly not design an economy or settle prices or anything because they have to be discovered by the people who are willing to take the risk.

(01:06:11):
They have to be discovered by the people who act upon their individual preferences.
That is beautifully well said. And I think it price controls are such an illustrative example of where the state fails.
And we have these examples of price controls all across history.

(01:06:32):
And you have to to cherry pick to find good data there. It's it's really widely available. And Mises does in his third lecture of the six that he gave in Argentina in 1959 that then became economic policy thoughts for today and tomorrow, which if you're listening, I'm also reading out loud on another fucking

(01:06:54):
broadcast so you can get an Austrian primer. But anyway, he gives just a great breakdown and he talks about how basically price controls come whenever you reach a point of too much inflation, the government has debased the coinage or printed too much paper.
And the inflation is so prevalent they realize, okay, these prices for everything for milk are going wild. We need to do something because people are unhappy with the price of milk.

(01:07:25):
So what does the state do they say, well, I'll just fix the price of milk at one unit of whatever currency they're using.
Great. Wash my hands problem solved right. And then what is the problem there well some people who is marginal cost to produce that milk is greater than the price that they are forced to sell it at stop producing it because why would they they're going to lose money by doing it that would be that would be incredibly

(01:07:52):
stupid. So unless somebody has literally has a gun to their head, or a sword to their throat.
They're just going to stop producing it doesn't make any sense for them to do it. And then okay what what ultimately happens as well is that more people who would not have been able to buy the milk at the prior price can now buy it at the artificially set price.
So what naturally happens when you have more people who are able to buy but less people who are producing it because it no longer makes economic sense. Well you have shortages.

(01:08:19):
And so then, you know, all of the government steps in again and says well the problem must be that the cost of livestock feed for the feed for the cows is is too great. That's why the producers can't make milk anymore so we'll just fix the price of the food of the fodder.
Great. Okay, wash our hands again problem solved by the state genius were geniuses guys, but then the problem just repeats and cascades and goes and ultimately up that chain.

(01:08:47):
Until it arrives at the price of labor itself. And then they fix the price of labor while you you need you can only be paid this much or you must be paid at least this much.
But then it's just the same over and over again, and this has repeated throughout history.
And it's an example of to your point, one person or one committee, one, one central party. They can never have all the information. They, and to your earliest point about all of the information available to us in our fingertips and our, you know, in our devices.

(01:09:26):
It is impossible to look at all, you know, all of the data. No human can do it. No committee can do it. No group of humans can do it. You, it's just not possible.
And trying to force that to assume that you're able to, you're just smart enough, and you've got the right guys in the room that you can figure this out is pure hubris. And it is a complete rejection of reality as it exists.

(01:09:57):
And the belief that you can somehow be smarter than the other billions of people around the world, making decisions independently of their own self interests, making subjective value judgments in a dynamic way constantly.
You will never be smarter than that collective hive mind when it comes to making decisions. And I think to the point there, that is why state intervention necessarily always fails.

(01:10:28):
That's why subsidies are a terrible, terrible idea. Anytime I see an industry subsidy and I'm like, well, that's a pretty shitty industry right now, then they, if, if it was valued by the market, they would not need the subsidy.
And people will make all sorts of, of, of excuses saying, well, you know, something like the solar panels or electric vehicles, well, we need to subsidize them so that we can force this sort of behavior that we want.

(01:10:54):
And that's what it ultimately comes down to, right, is trying to force behavior, trying to play God in the market. And it just doesn't work. But we keep trying it for some reason.
Again, this is pure ignorance, right? We have all of the historical examples, but we, and they exist. We know that they're there. But we choose to remain ignorant of them.

(01:11:18):
And in the collective sense here, we as the state, it's so sad and frustrating, ultimately, because you know, it's like, you know, I've seen this, I've seen this movie before, I've seen this play out, it's always the same.
But we keep trying it again, pretending as though we're doing it for the first time. And again, there's not a question there, there's more of a frustration that I'm sure you feel as well.

(01:11:40):
But I don't know if that ever stops. Does Bitcoin fix this? I guess would be the question there. Does Bitcoin fix this? Fix the money, fix the world, fix the incentives, fix the world?
How do you question this? Of course it has to fix it. Rhetoric, I'm speaking.
I think that there's definitely something there. I think that technology can have an ethic imbued into it. Not all the time, but I think it is possible.

(01:12:10):
And Bitcoin seems to be one of such technologies. Every 10 minutes, technologies that know you shall not steal, and quite consistently so.
And I think that that definitely changes how people act. And I think we've all experienced this.
Maybe monetary technology is even more so the case than others, because it is the accumulator of human actions, so to say.

(01:12:33):
And of course, your savings. So if you use a different money technology, it changes your time preference, your capital structure changes so much.
So yeah, I would speculate that for most Bitcoiners, that change has been for the better. And I'm still quite unsure about why this is the case.

(01:12:54):
People like John Wallace, for example, has an insanely great podcast of talking to a bunch of Bitcoiners, sharing their weird stories of character transformation that seem to have been sparked by Bitcoin.
And that is, I think, something very encouraging. And the more people will get curious about Bitcoin and start to think about it, the more they will get sucked in to that rabbit hole of weirdness that Bitcoin ultimately is.

(01:13:20):
But hopefully at the end of it, they come with a worldview that's a bit more productive and happy and not as nihilistic as the most common sense yous are nowadays.
How has Bitcoin changed you?
How has it not?
I guess definitely made me more humble. I thought I knew a thing or two about economics before I discovered Bitcoin.

(01:13:48):
Now in hindsight, it's an absolute joke. And just the appreciation of the phenomenon that is money.
Sure, everyone thinks a bit about money all the time, but really contemplating the deep ethics of this technology and what it compels humans to do and what it enables humans to do.

(01:14:16):
I think just that appreciation has really been increased.
There's some, I guess, it's easy to be nihilistic nowadays, especially when you start to glimpse behind the curtain and see how weird things are.
Very easy to call everyone stupid people and stuff like this. But on the other hand, I don't even necessarily think so.

(01:14:40):
This is one of the great things that Austrian economics has taught me that there's infinite value in every human being.
Regardless of IQ or skin color or location, etc.
The fact that we are productive creatures is something utmost beautiful and we should thank God every day that we are such marvelous creatures and that we can help each other and manifest value.

(01:15:06):
Again, we literally create value. It's insane. It's like this perpetual mobile of forever motion, just when we tune it right and let it go.
So I guess that appreciation of humanity is something that I feel now much stronger than before.

(01:15:28):
It's well said and it's that old quote, you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you and it's a meme, but it's as many memes as it's really quite true.
I'm curious, just this is a bit of a shift, but what do you think is, can Bitcoin be stopped?

(01:15:50):
And maybe a different way to put it is, what do you view as the biggest risk to Bitcoin? To Bitcoin quote succeeding, to evolving to a Bitcoin standard. How do you view that?
Yeah, I think Bitcoin can definitely stop it, at least for you when you stop using it.
And I guess that's one of the great things of Eric Moskiew, this idea of the axiom of resistance, that any security technology can only protect you if you actively use it.

(01:16:21):
And if you deny the attacker the privilege of just taking the stuff from you.
So, yeah, definitely if people lose interest in protecting themselves and if people lose the interest in researching technologies and applying these technologies in order to defend themselves, then yeah, Bitcoin dies and fizzles away.

(01:16:44):
Now sure, there will always be those two weirdos running full nodes in their basement, but that might not be as much as we would have of course liked. Nevertheless, there's of course the incentives and in theory if Bitcoin seemed to be quite a compelling thing that seems to be around and capturing the hearts and minds of more and more people as it continues to live.

(01:17:07):
Nevertheless, that's of course not a given. And there's numerous ways that people can be tricked or compelled or coerced to abandon Bitcoin, obviously.
And it's an unfortunate reality, but thankfully it seems that the information of Bitcoin is going to be hard to be destroyed and just completely removed from existence entirely, simply because it's too compelling of an idea.

(01:17:39):
Now it's something very beautiful and I guess humans are pretty drawn to beautiful things. I think I'll start talking about them. That's why we have yet another fucking Bitcoin podcast of course.
Okay, there and now we've come full circle. I'm curious. What do you think is the biggest misconception held about Bitcoin by Bitcoiners? So I'm not talking about external, I'm talking about internally within people who quote identify as Bitcoiners.

(01:18:10):
What do you think the biggest misconception is or blind spot, maybe would be a different way to put that?
That's a really good one. There's so many, of course, you know, nobody understands Bitcoin, just like nobody understands how to make a pencil. Bitcoin is way more complicated than a pencil.
So yeah, don't hate you on yourself too much for not getting Bitcoin because nobody does.

(01:18:35):
Maybe one interesting aspect is that miners don't create new currency, I would say. I think that the amount of currencies is clearly defined and therefore created in the full node software.
So I would say that you as a full node operator are literally defining and creating all of the Bitcoin in existence whenever you boot up your full node.

(01:18:59):
And that I think is quite crazy. And so what Bitcoin miners are not really like applying energy to create more Bitcoin.
They're applying energy to prove to the world that enough time has passed and they unlock from time those new units of Bitcoin.

(01:19:20):
My full node defines 21 billion Bitcoin since Genesis, right, all the way from 2009.
But the unlocking rate thereof is set in time. And of course, not just in the past, but also in the future, which is fucking crazy.
Like how could we ever clearly define the creation of a good in the future? But we're already defining it right now.

(01:19:47):
And why come that nobody just cheats time and goes ahead and digs out all of those Bitcoin yet to come?
And of course it is because of the genius of proof of work and on top of a distributed database that enables all of this.
But yeah, Bitcoin is not energy backed money or anything like that. Quite on the contrary, it's backed by nothing.

(01:20:10):
But maybe by the electricity of your computer flipping the bits to manifest the creation. But no, you come up with Bitcoin and you can choose whatever rules you want.
That's maybe one of the greatest things that Satoshi taught us. Like you can make up your own money.
Like you actually can again, like humans create value. We make money as Americans like to say literally.

(01:20:34):
And we do that every time we get paid for something in that act where I get money and I release the pizza to the person who wants it.
Me taking something and releasing the other, that definition of when do I let go of the pizza and hand it out.
That is the moment where you have the opportunity to manifest the money of your choice.

(01:20:55):
And sure, lots of people get tricked into manifesting fiat at that point, which as we spoke earlier is just initiating or keeping going to this chain of theft all the time.
But you don't have to hurt yourself with the manifestation of fiat every time you buy a coffee. You really don't.
Not since Satoshi taught us this beautiful spell where we can instead manifest this goodness that is Bitcoin.

(01:21:20):
That's beautifully said.
I'm curious.
You are clearly somebody who has read quite a great deal as evidenced by the fact that you can genuinely respond to questions without just saying some, you know, wrote memorized thing.

(01:21:43):
I'm curious what books you would recommend.
Maybe a couple in the Austrian vein that you found particularly foundational but approachable because there are also a lot that are, I think, quite dense and difficult for a lot of folks, maybe as a starting point.
And then maybe some that are outside of that Austrian specific vein that that perhaps you've also just found instructive in in helping to helping to think through the world as it works today.

(01:22:16):
Yeah, I like to give always some new books when people ask me these types of questions. Let's see which ones I can find like one really approachable one is economics in one lesson by Henry Haslitt was not an economist.
He's actually a journalist, but he really understands economics quite well.
And you know, when first that UFC fighter came along, who talked about the six lessons by Mises, I was like, Mises never brought any like six lessons. You know, there was like economics in one lesson by Haslitt.

(01:22:47):
So it actually happens very rarely that someone tells me about writings of Mises that I haven't heard of before, but actually that like six lecture series.
I haven't read them before, so I'm enjoying them on your part as well.
Oh, wow.
So I'm honored.
I guess that's a good recommendation. But yeah, economics in one lesson, super super approachable.

(01:23:08):
And, and quite quite a great read.
There is a little pamphlet by Murray Ross Bard called for a new liberty. It is like the black pill of anarcho capitalism, so to say, a tiny pamphlet.
And it will teach you very quickly that the state is not that beautiful creature that you thought it was.
Yeah, really worth to read.

(01:23:32):
One fun one.
It's not really the masterpiece in economics or anything, but it's very interesting to think about the skyscraper curse by David Thornton.
This is a book where he correlates the Austrian business cycle theory together with with history. And it finds out that basically whenever humans started the construction of a record breaking skyscraper, that was the time when we went from the boom to a bus period.

(01:24:03):
And it's very phenomenal reason because he says that skyscrapers aren't handily extremely cutting edge technology, right, like already moving from like a single story single floor building to a second one.
That's so much more difficult to build, you know, all of a sudden you need to pump water and then stairs and all types of other things to to build higher.

(01:24:24):
And so humans for a long time was basically on the ground until we advanced our capital structures and build technologies to to build higher and higher.
But the higher we go, the more marginally difficult it is.
Right again, diminishing marginal returns, the higher we go, the more and more capital we have to expend to go just another meter higher.
And that that means that we need a bunch of capital to build these record breaking skyscrapers.

(01:24:50):
So where are we going to get them money printing, of course.
And of course, like, if in times of money printing, the people who received the newly created money first, of course, they feel richer because they are they just stole a bunch of money.
And what you do when you're rich, you start spending it on a lot of fancy stuff that you might not necessarily need.
I'd like making a massive villa or even better a huge skyscraper.

(01:25:14):
So he found that like since the 1700s or something like this, he went really back into the historical records of, you know, architecture and such to find that again, whenever there was a boom period and huge increase in money supply,
we now invested our resources into thinking that we can finalize the construction of this massive building.

(01:25:37):
But then we realized that, oh, actually, there's a bust, you know, we've over consumed with now invested our resources.
We thought that we were rich and that we have enough stuff to finish building the house.
But in fact, we do not have we already consumed everything and it's gone.
And now we have big issues.
And so this happened almost like clockwork, you know, whenever we're in a massive boom by the Fiat inflation was also the time when when we created a new skyscraper.

(01:26:05):
So most recently 2008 that was the first codify thing.
So it really is pretty much like clockwork.
And by the way, a new record breaking skyscraper is in construction right now.
So yeah, get ready for some roller coaster.
That that's actually a really fascinating kind of lens to look at things.

(01:26:27):
I'm going to have to read that one.
I'm very curious about that.
And now I'm very worried about this new skyscraper that's going up as well.
Those are those are fantastic recommendations and I very much appreciate the you're listening to the lectures of of Mises on on this show.
I've tried to find I know those lectures were actually recorded because they were transcribed in real time.

(01:26:53):
I have not found it yet.
So if anyone's listening and is able to find those, I think they were given an English and then translated to Spanish for the audience who is mostly Spanish speaking in Buenos Aires.
So I would love to find those.
I'd love to hear it read in in Mises own voice.

(01:27:14):
But for now, my own will have to do as a substitute.
Any I want I want to be conscious of your scarce time here is I'll link to your website towards liberty.com and your your account on noster and Twitter.
Is there anywhere else that you'd recommend to send people or anything else to to impart any other tidbits of wisdom that you felt went on said.

(01:27:39):
Yeah, definitely follow me on master.
That's that's for all the cool parties happening nowadays.
And I'm going to max out towards liberty.com as my Nepal five.
So you'll find me there.
And actually keep building, you know, I think we've really stumbled upon some beautiful glitch in the matrix that is cryptography and crypto economics and now with with the spell we can cast Bitcoin, which is extremely powerful.

(01:28:07):
And more and more people are participating in our conjuring here every day, which is great.
And yeah, also, though, there's there's been so many great books on on on cypher punk philosophy and strategy that I probably should should recommend a couple here as well.
So there's the second realm by Smarkler and XYZ a book on strategy, which I think is mandatory mandatory reading for every bit corner.

(01:28:38):
It clearly articulates the power dynamics and the enemies that that graph basically and the strategies that most are most common to work against that also very much recommended.
There is a lodging of wayfaring men fascinating book by Paul Rosenberg very beautifully written about a bunch of freedom fighters basically living in this weird hyperinflationary fictional world where where cryptography and strong privacy is outlawed.

(01:29:07):
Etc. and sound money, of course, is quite quite fascinating.
There's hashtag true Agora, which is about an early IRC channel and like a crew of Berlin hackers and just follow stem, you know, doing the stuff that early cyberpunk hackers did based on true stories.
So there's some pretty cool stuff in there as well.
Great on on strategy.

(01:29:29):
There is the true names by Vernon.
Or not something I forgot the last name, but a fascinating fascinating interesting short novel from I think the 70s or something where he just goes mind blowing the trippy on on you know what cyberspace is and and what we can do with code and computation.

(01:29:52):
A fascinating fascinating book so very much recommend super short you browse through it on the toilet basically but it will keep you thinking for for quite some time.
And I guess in general read anything that's on an our plex dot Syrian dot IO on our plex was an og privacy preserving service provider of the early internet, you know they had anonymous retailers anonymous IRC servers VPNs, all of this stuff.

(01:30:18):
And they also did file hosting specifically for a lot of anarchist and freedom minded content.
The website is down, unfortunately, because they shot down their service after many years of operation. But there's so mirrors hosted, for example, on on Syrian that I owe.
So there's a bunch of files and text documents and PDFs about fascinating ideas that cyberpunk have been dreaming up now for a long time.

(01:30:46):
So Bitcoin does not come out of nothing Bitcoin has an ethic include into it and Bitcoin is built by the people who have been thinking about this for a very long time.
So read the stuff that the forefathers of Satoshi have written, because there were a couple quite beautiful things in there.
And I guess with that, I'll say thank you very much Walker for inviting me to the show. I really enjoyed it.

(01:31:11):
And this this was yet another great fucking Bitcoin podcast.
I'm so great. So glad to hear that. And thank you for coming on. The last thing I'll say is I noticed today, as I was looking at your website again and you had that it was published under the open anarchist license and I said,
That's weird. I've never I've never heard. I've never heard that before this open anarchist license like, okay. And so I had to I had to look it up. And and maybe I'll just just to cap us off. I'll just read that if I if I may, because I thought it was really beautiful.

(01:31:47):
It's the open anarchist license, a Libre open source license for any peaceful individual. The knowledge shared under this license is freely available to anyone who does not initiate aggressive violence against another peaceful individual.
Those that do not harm others have the explicit permission to do with this knowledge as they please including use copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sub license and or sell copies of the software.

(01:32:13):
The license explicitly encourages productive entrepreneurs to build products and services based on the presented ideas and code. However, this license explicitly prohibits any individual or entity who is engaging in or encouraging murder, assault, coercion, theft, rape, trespassing, lying.
This includes but is not limited to any state government, police agency, monopolist, mafia or gang of thieves, any act that is taking a scarce good from another individual without the explicit consent and voluntary interaction is considered wrong and constitutes a break of the license agreements.

(01:32:54):
And I just thought that was beautiful. And it's a form of the MIT license. And so I just, I just wanted to end on that because it was really I read that today. I was like, that is that is beautiful.
Yeah, I almost forgot that I wrote this. This is quite some time ago. But yeah, I am somewhat conflicted in here because I don't own the information.

(01:33:15):
So I never feel I have the right to tell even thieves that they are not allowed to speak those words because they're not mine. But well, copyright is anyway a creature of the state. So might as well use it against them.
Did you wait, did you write the open anarchist license yourself? Or did you pull or did you pull that from I wasn't I thought I assumed somebody else had written this. But did you write this too?

(01:33:39):
I this is years ago, right. But I think so. I did. There was the license, which is like an explicit anti government license. But I think there was none that that really fit my definition of what whom I actually would like to prevent from using this information here.
So yeah, I think this this was me and a friend like 10 years ago.

(01:34:01):
That's that's even more beautiful. Now that I know that you wrote this, I thought that, you know, you found and it would have been fine if you'd found it and decided, wow, this is nice. This aligns with my how I view the world, but even better that you wrote it.
Well, that is a wonderful note to end on. If go go build it if it doesn't exist, go write it if it doesn't exist. Go write code if it doesn't exist, build the future that you want to see.

(01:34:26):
Thank you so much. Bitcoin is scarce, you know, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for sharing your scarce time on another fucking Bitcoin podcast. This was really a pleasure.
Yeah, likewise, Walker really appreciate it. Thanks a bunch and keep up to good work. See ya.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you're a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to Bitcoin podcast dot net slash sponsor.

(01:35:00):
If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast, consider giving a five star review wherever you listen or sharing this show with your network or don't Bitcoin doesn't care.
You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker. And if you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter, go to at TIT coin podcast and at Walker America.

(01:35:21):
You can also find the video version of this podcast at YouTube.com slash at Walker America and at Walker America on rumble. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million.
But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.

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