The Bitcoin Research Institute, Metaphysics, & Money: Bradley Rettler (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I think the main reason is that Bitcoin is neutral and these other cryptocurrencies are

(00:06):
not.
They have insiders, whether it's founders, whether it's boards, whether it's companies.
They have methods of beginning and distributing tokens that Bitcoin doesn't have.
From the very beginning, Bitcoin was awarded via proof of work, via miners winning competitions,

(00:28):
and even Satoshi was participating, made that competition open to anyone from the very beginning.
I think Bitcoin is a neutral internet money and that these other projects aren't.
You could have centers for neutral computing and argue that that's what Ethereum is.

(00:49):
It's a neutral computer.
I think Bitcoin is unique and that's why it's worth studying and having its own research
institute.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.

(01:09):
The Bitcoin time chain is 857680 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else
comes up.
And today that guest is Bradley Rettler.
Bradley is the director of the just opened University of Wyoming Bitcoin Research Institute

(01:31):
and co-author of Resistance Money.
We get into a bunch of topics today, including the launch of the Wyoming Bitcoin Research
Institute, what Bitcoin critics fail to understand politics and Bitcoin metaphysics and money
and a whole lot more.
Bradley is a professor of philosophy and I find that I really enjoy talking to philosophy

(01:52):
professors and if you enjoy hearing them talk, you can also check out my conversation with
Andrew Bailey, one of the other co-authors of Resistance Money and check out resistance.money
if you have not yet picked up a copy of their excellent book.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're listening
or watching and check out my sponsor, Bitbox in the show notes or just go directly to bitbox.swiss

(02:18):
slash Walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only
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running and I truly appreciate it.

(02:39):
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(03:01):
Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin
podcast, hit me up on social media through the website which is Bitcoin podcast.net or
shoot me an email it's hello at Bitcoin podcast.net without further ado, let's get into this
Bitcoin talk with Bradley Rattler.

(03:26):
All right, live and in color Bradley.
Welcome.
Do you prefer Bradley or Brad by the way?
I wasn't I wasn't sure.
I do not have a preference.
So either one.
Oh boy.
Just leaving it up to me to ponder.
I may switch back and forth.
I put Brad down here in the corner.
So I guess that's what I default to that.
That's a fair default there.

(03:47):
Well, welcome.
Thanks for coming on another another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
You've been you've been making the rounds of late with with resistance.
The resistance money crew.
I was just recently watching you guys on Peter McCormick show.
You're gonna be one of the last ones, I guess, while that's still what Bitcoin did, which
is a nice honor.

(04:07):
Yeah.
I'm just gonna go up and Peter shut it down in the right way.
Yeah.
I'm interested to see which way he which way he goes next with that because I know it's
a hugely foundational podcast.
Like first one I ever listened to there was a Bitcoin podcast still the one I listened
to the most.
So I'm sure he's gonna land on his feet with his new the new endeavor.

(04:30):
But yeah.
Well, so you know on that on that show, I think you guys recorded it before you made the announcement,
you had just you were just about to announce the University of Wyoming Bitcoin Research
Center, which is pretty awesome.
And I want to get into that.
But maybe we can just start for folks who don't know you.

(04:50):
Can you just tell me who are you?
How did you get here today to be, you know, a professor of philosophy who is writing books
about Bitcoin now starting a Bitcoin Research Institute?
How did all this come to be?
Yeah.
It all culminates in an appearance on the Bitcoin podcast.
Yeah.
So I got into philosophy through questions about free will as like an undergrad who's

(05:16):
just about to graduate.
And I was gonna like do youth work and I got to spend some extra time in the library and
I was reading these books on free will and I was like, oh man, I got to figure this stuff
out.
So I went back to school, did more school, still thinking about those kind of perennial
questions and philosophy.

(05:38):
And I did my PhD and there's a very well trodden path through the PhD program.
You do a little bit of teaching, do some grading, then you go out on the job market and you
hopefully get a job.
You try to publish parts of your dissertation as articles and so on.
So I did all that stuff.
And then there's this really cool thing in academia called tenure where you can no longer

(06:03):
get fired just for not publishing enough.
And some people abuse this privilege, obviously, and they just don't publish anything.
And other people use it to do wild and crazy things that seem like they're not gonna have
any concrete positive outputs, but every once in a while change the world.

(06:26):
And so this is seen as like a good cost benefit analysis.
It's worth giving tenure because that freeze researchers up to do the kind of research
they want.
And so for me, coming up to giving tenure, I was like, okay, now I no longer have to
do the same kind of stuff that I was doing.
Do I like it enough to keep doing it or do I want to do something else?

(06:47):
And right around that time, Andrew and Craig and I, my two co-authors on the book, were
starting to talk about Bitcoin and whether we might be able to do something philosophically
related to it.
And so I was like, this is just the kind of research left turned that tenure is made for.
And so we'll spend a couple of years doing this Bitcoin thing, see how it goes.

(07:07):
But it's gonna be a lot more fun for me.
And I feel like that's an important part of your job is that it's fun, that you want
to keep doing it every day.
And so the idea of working on Bitcoin made the job seem fun again in a way that it had
kind of gotten a little bogged down and boring.

(07:28):
That's awesome.
I've got to say, the more I listen to you and Andrew and Craig talk, the more I'm like,
wow, boy, I should have maybe skipped the whole engineering track and gone into philosophy.
It certainly sounds much more interesting, but I suppose it's never too late to start.
Perhaps not the more classic academic route for many of us who are still in their regular

(07:54):
fiat jobs.
But I think Bitcoin has given a lot of people kind of the inspiration to go down some of
these philosophical rabbit holes, which are seemingly limitless.
And so that's a good thing.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I think that people who get into Bitcoin tend to be the kind of people who like going down
rabbit holes.
And it turns out that at the bottom of a lot of rabbit holes is philosophy.

(08:16):
I think at one point I heard something like if you open up any Wikipedia article on anything
and just click on the first link, within 10 clicks you'll get to philosophy and everything.
So I've tried it a few times and it at least has proven true in my experience.

(08:37):
It's like seven degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, but with philosophical concepts.
I love it.
Now I'm going to, I've got a new Wikipedia rabbit hole to go down there.
So, you know, you guys yourself and your co-authors, you recently released this awesome book, which
I must admit I have not fully finished yet, but I have worked through the majority of

(09:01):
it because I had Andrew on this show previously.
I guess I need to have Craig on now after this just to complete the trifecta.
But I think that first of all, the reception to this book seemed from what I saw perhaps
it just within my own echo chambers online, but was super positive.
I know you guys were up at the top of like the top of Amazon's philosophy list for, I

(09:25):
don't know how long, maybe you're still there.
I mean, that alone is like a pretty incredible achievement.
You're up there with some pretty household names in philosophy.
But did you guys expect that kind of like very rapid outpouring of support for it?
Or was it kind of like you were waiting a little bit like, how's this going to go over?

(09:45):
How was that for you guys?
Yeah, you never know.
So we hoped that people would like it.
We thought that it was different and that that was important.
We also think that, as I mentioned before, bit coiners are curious.
They're readers.
They want to know more.
They got into Bitcoin because of doing a whole lot of research about things.

(10:07):
And so more than on any other topic, we thought a book on Bitcoin might actually sell to non-specialists,
to non-philosophers.
And yeah, that's what happened.
People are interested.
They wanted to hear a new take on Bitcoin that they hadn't heard before.
Of course, there's a lot of stuff in the book that isn't going to come as any surprise

(10:29):
to people who've been thinking about Bitcoin for a while.
But we hope that for everyone, there'd be at least something new in there.
And yeah, so it was really nice to see this unprompted outpouring of people posting pictures
of themselves with their copies of the book.
And you put that much time into it.
And I think we make like a dollar for every copy of the book that we sell.

(10:52):
So it's not a huge money-making thing.
So that just helps us feel like it was worth it, that people are getting something out of it.
Oh, no, for sure.
And I mean, I'm curious, you mentioned that, yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there that
perhaps for a Bitcoin or somebody who's deep down that rabbit hole isn't going to come as
a surprise.
It may be somewhat repeated information.
But for somebody who's getting into Bitcoin or learning about Bitcoin for the first time,

(11:17):
a lot of this stuff is completely new.
And you guys presented in a very digestible way.
Who was kind of your, I guess, your target market for the book?
Was it philosophers?
Was it folks in academia?
Was it meant to be more generally approachable?
What was or did you, how did you go about that, I guess?

(11:37):
Yeah, that was a decision early on, were we going to try to target philosophers?
Were we going to try to target Bitcoiners?
In the end, we decided we wanted it to be the book that a Bitcoiner could give to their
friends and family members that wanted to learn about Bitcoin.
And they could say, you know, this is, there's some social proof.

(11:59):
These people are philosophy professors at real universities.
And they wrote this book on Bitcoin, arguing that Bitcoin is good for the world.
So you should pay attention to them because of their, you know, academic credentials.
And it's not going to have stuff in there that is ideologically coded.

(12:21):
So we tried to start from in each chapter talking about privacy, censorship, et cetera,
try to appeal to principles that everyone believes, regardless of, you know, philosophical
or political or religious or whatever beliefs.
These are kind of fundamental principles that we think most people adhere to principles

(12:42):
like you should have the ability to selectively disclose parts of yourself to the world.
And then just kind of see what follows from that when it comes to money and when it comes
to digital money.
I also think we, we even for the Bitcoiners out there, we make some distinctions that
I don't think are, have been at least made explicit before.

(13:06):
And so when we talk about Bitcoin being resistance money, we talk about it being a way of resisting
monetary makers.
And this is, I think a thing that you hear a lot about Bitcoin, right?
You, nobody can print it at will.
The money printer can't be turned on and off just at some person's whim.
And this is a really important feature of Bitcoin, but it's not just resisting money

(13:29):
makers, it's also resisting money managers, money mediators.
And most books focus on one of these things, not all three of them.
And so as we were figuring out what this book should be about, we came to believe that it
was really important to highlight all of these different kinds of resistance because they're
going to apply to different people in different situations.

(13:51):
You might be in a country that has no inflation at all, but you have still corrupt authorities
who want to target you for your religious beliefs or something like that.
You might be in a country that has, doesn't have the capacity to censor your transactions
because they're just not strong enough, but that your local currency is inflating away.

(14:15):
So it's really important for all these kinds of people to have access to a money.
And it turns out, you know, interestingly enough that Bitcoin can do all these things.
It didn't have to.
So Satoshi could have made it resistant to censorship and privacy concerns, but it not
been a way of resisting monetary creation.

(14:37):
It could have had a supply that was dictated by some external feature.
So it's kind of, I almost said miraculous.
It's kind of miraculous that we have one currency that can resist all these three kinds
of things because they're quite different.
And the mechanisms for resisting them are very different, right?

(14:59):
The supply cap is very different from, you know, the addresses and the mining, the proof
of work mining that doesn't enable censorship.
So yeah, it kind of comes together in a really cool way.
I always kind of ask myself the question.
I'm curious your thoughts on it.
It seems like seeing Bitcoin where it is today versus when Satoshi created it and those,

(15:25):
you know, initial before he, you know, left the project to move on to other things.
It's insane how much apparent foresight he had.
Like it seems like, like how could one person, and there were other people contributing as
well, but even from that Genesis, there was so much foresight.
And I always wonder, was all of that on purpose or did some of it just kind of, perhaps it

(15:50):
worked even better than he thought it ever, he or she or they thought it ever would?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Is it something you think about at all?
Like, did he actually plan all of this?
Or did some of it just kind of happen in a really beautiful way?
I think about that all the time.
Yeah.
Every time that it seems like a contemporary problem or a thing that could have been a

(16:13):
contemporary problem was handled in the code back in 2009, 2010.
And then, but then there are some like, you know, small things that you think Satoshi
should have easily been able to anticipate.
Like there's going to have to be a hard fork at some point to handle the fact that dates
are used in the hexadecimal and we're going to run out of a bit.

(16:36):
So we have like 40 years, but if Satoshi is really looking so, so long term, this, this
should have been something that was easily seen.
Yeah.
It kind of amazes me how many times it turns out that a problem has been solved or it seems
to just work itself out in a way that it didn't necessarily have to work itself out.

(16:56):
Think with block sizes.
And you know, Satoshi talked a lot about the kinds of hardware that you would need and
appeal to a lot of hardware principles for making sure that people would be able to on
a computer download the entire blockchain, run a full node.

(17:17):
That was very important to Satoshi and clearly had some ideas about how big blocks should
be in order to make sure that people could keep entire copies of the blockchain on their
computers.
But yeah, then there are other ways where you think how, how the world did Satoshi think
of that so many years before, especially things about mining as we see how mining is working

(17:39):
out and not only Satoshi, but right.
How Fini like three, four months into the protocol, maybe earlier.
So I'm thinking about how to fight climate change using Bitcoin mining.
And you know, the, the pendulum has come around how started there.
Then it was like Bitcoin mining is going to be the one unique destroyer of the environment.
And now we're sort of swinging back to.

(18:02):
Hmm, maybe we can use Bitcoin mining to combat climate change.
It's wild.
It's insane.
And it's even to the point now where, you know, you can ask one of these LLMs, which
maybe like when they first came out would have a lot of outdated information about Bitcoin
mining and, you know, they're pulling from the more at all's and New York times pieces

(18:24):
on it and saying how it's, you know, that's a big concern.
And now like I just today, actually before this, sometimes I'll just do like a little
back and forth with chat GBT just to see like, you know, well, not what it's thinking, but
what it gives me.
And today it was like, Oh, you know, this has previously been in concern with Bitcoins
environmental impact, but now actually the majority of miners are transitioning to renewable

(18:45):
sources and stranded energy.
And I was like, wow, that's, that's great.
Even the LLMs are catching on now at this point.
They're probably catching on before the New York times, but we'll give them, you know,
they're, they move a little bit slower perhaps.
But yeah, it's, it's mind blowing to think that, and again, your point about how Finney
so many of these early, the early discussions on the Bitcoin talk forum or on the mailing

(19:09):
list, people think that like these, you know, nowadays they've, they've come up with some
like, oh, really cool new novel idea.
Like odds are it was probably discussed back then in the, which is just wild that so many
people, I mean, not that many, but a decent number were thinking about this and really
like worked through the game theory far, far in advance.
It's kind of incredible.

(19:30):
And now here we sit 15 years later and still blocks taking along and, and so many of these
kind of predictions or ideas are actually reality now in a very meaningful way.
It's beautiful to see.
Yeah.
No successful double spends, very few reorganizations.
It's, yeah, you wouldn't have expected that, I don't think.

(19:54):
No, no.
And, you know, because I mentioned, you know, Mora et al. a classic piece of Bitcoin misinformation
that was put out there and has, I'm sure been as folks who are in the academic space been
thorns in your side for quite some time.
Maybe it's a good time to talk a little bit about the, you have just started the University

(20:18):
of Wyoming Bitcoin Research Institute.
You announced it at Bitcoin, the Bitcoin conference in Nashville.
This is now you're moving forward with this.
Can you talk a little bit about why you started it?
Is it some of it a response to just kind of some of the garbage that was out there in

(20:38):
in academic texts as far as, or I don't even know if you can call them academic texts, like
the Mora et al.
And why, why did you decide to start this?
Why was this necessary?
What was the fire that you decided, you know, this needed to be done?
That is roughly one third of the problem is the Mora et al. of the world.

(21:00):
And there are, there aren't a ton of them, but the ones that there are, a lot of them
have been picked up and repeated and cited.
So for those of your listeners who might not know in 2018, Camilo Mora published a paper
written by his undergraduate students in the journal Nature Climate Change, which is a nature

(21:27):
journal, which is the pinnacle of nature and science are like the two top scientific journals.
So this is a nature journal, nature climate change entitled Bitcoin emissions alone could
push global warming above two degrees.
So most people think 1.2 degrees of warming would be disastrous.

(21:49):
If Bitcoin's doing two degrees all by itself, then, you know, we're screwed.
And as you start reading the paper, which you do when you're an academic researcher
like we're trying to read all the papers, this has been cited over 500 times in other
scientific papers.
And you get things like if its rate of adoption follows broadly used technologies, it could

(22:14):
create an electricity demand capable of producing enough emissions to exceed two degrees of
warming.
So if it's adopted at a certain rate, then the energy use is going to go up at a comparable
rate.
Well, so problem number one, blocks are already filled.
And adoption going up isn't going to make blocks more full than they already are.

(22:39):
So you learn more at all doesn't understand there's a block size cap.
More at all thinks that miners will spin up more and more energy use to chase the block
rewards because they don't realize that the block rewards only come every 10 minutes.

(22:59):
They also don't realize that there's a difficulty adjustment.
So it's not like they can come faster and faster and more and more Bitcoin can be issued.
And so these assumptions are all leading to this conclusion that Bitcoin could exacerbate
global climate change.
And it's just because these people don't understand the Bitcoin protocol.
They wrote up this paper as undergrads.

(23:20):
They were worried about Bitcoin mining.
They also didn't look very carefully at what kind of energy Bitcoin is using.
And they didn't extrapolate out what kind of energy it might be using.
So Troy Cross makes this argument all the time that and I think he and Margo Piazza's
new paper is called I think in the title Bitcoin is a dung beetle.

(23:44):
And the idea is basically that Bitcoin miners are always going to be chasing the cheapest
electricity because it's location agnostic.
All you need is a pretty weak satellite internet connection.
And so as it gets more and more competitive to mine, miners are going to be pushed more

(24:05):
and more to these other sources of energy.
So there's at least four assumptions in more at all that most Bitcoiners know are fallacious
and three that that basically we all I mean we all know about the block size cap.
We all know about the difficulty adjustment.
We all know about the target block types.
So we're reading more and more papers like this.

(24:28):
We're reading papers that don't make mention of the lightning network when they talk about
how many Bitcoin transactions can happen or they don't talk about layer twos at all.
They're comparing Bitcoin to Visa rather than comparing Bitcoin to Swift or Fedwire
or something.
So over and over again, we just saw pretty elementary errors by researchers who to take

(24:52):
a charitable interpretation are making mistakes.
We're pretty convinced that some researchers are not just making mistakes.
They're invested in misinformation about Bitcoin becoming well known and widely distributed.
And I don't think we can necessarily do anything about that other than make the case so overwhelmingly
to everyone else that these people are just one of the many voices.

(25:18):
And right now they're they're too loud of voices.
So the Bitcoin Research Institute came about one as a way of helping the mora at all of
the world to vet their research beforehand so as to make sure that they're not making
these really basic mistakes.
That paper has three responses that are published alongside it pointing out some of these problems

(25:42):
and other problems.
And then two to solve a different problem.
The other problem is that there are a lot of people who want to work on Bitcoin.
We theorize who are in grad school or even untenured academics.
And there's just no incentive for them to do that.

(26:04):
They can't find advisors to work with who understand Bitcoin.
They won't approve Bitcoin projects.
And it makes sense for advisors to try to keep their advisies working on things that
they can actually advise about.
So it's intellectually responsible for an advisor to say, I just don't know enough about

(26:24):
this thing for you to work on it.
And so we want to help those people to be able to do Bitcoin projects.
And if they can't do it and be incentivized where they are, we want them to we want to
provide them another incentive.
And that incentive is money and time with Bitcoiners.
So come to Laramie, hang out in the summer at our workshop and talk to other Bitcoiners,

(26:49):
help some collaborations and have a community and do it for free.
So we think that we'll be able to help quite a lot of Bitcoin research by bringing these
Bitcoiners out of the closet and also by helping the people who aren't Bitcoiners but do want
to work on Bitcoin topics, make sure that they don't make mistakes.

(27:09):
So first of all, I love the idea.
And now I do.
I have a couple of excellent questions posed by your colleague, Andrew Bailey.
I saw this that I would be remiss if I did not ask, because of course they are very well
thought out as only a professor of philosophy could do.
But how do you answer the charge that the Bitcoin Research Institute merely exists to

(27:33):
promote and indeed to academically whitewash Bitcoin?
What are people who say things like this missing?
A few things.
One is this is still governed by the same standards of academic integrity that we do
anything else in, which is you give arguments and you follow the conclusions of those arguments

(27:55):
where they go.
So the book, we started without a conclusion.
We don't know where this is going to go.
In fact, we ended up being much harsher in the privacy chapter than we expected to be
on Bitcoin, because it turns out that while Bitcoin is has a similar degree of privacy

(28:16):
to physical cash, it could be and should be better.
So we were prepared to argue for any number of theses, depending on what the research
and what the argument showed.
And in the end, we thought the argument showed that Bitcoin was good for the world.
And so it's the same thing with academic research.
We're not only going to sponsor academic research that has the conclusion that Bitcoin

(28:38):
is good, we're going to sponsor academic research about Bitcoin that tells the truth.
And in some cases, the truth might not be something that Bitcoiners want to hear.
We think that in general, it will be and that as more research has been done, that that's
been borne out.
But it's also the case that people should be allowed to work on what they're interested

(29:02):
in.
So imagine like a Center for American Democracy, where you're researching democracy, you have
a stake in being right about that.
And it would be ridiculous to say, well, you shouldn't work on American democracy if you're
living in America, or if you're pro-democracy, you have to be more neutral about that.

(29:24):
Or you know, Iber Max Kendi has a Center for Anti-Racist Studies.
Should you say that that you can't be anti-racist if you're participating in that?
Or you can't be black?
That would seem ridiculous.
It makes sense for people who understand this to have a view about it, and then it makes
sense for people who have a view about it to participate in these kinds of activities.

(29:46):
So I think it's always open to us to change our minds about Bitcoin, and research might
do that.
But if it doesn't, I don't think that shows that the research is illegitimate.
I would agree with that, and thank Andrew for the question as well.
And again, I feel like I need to ask another Andrew question, because I think this one,

(30:10):
again, he's doing all of my hard work for me.
So thank you, Andrew.
But why not a cryptocurrency research institute, or a Dogecoin research institute?
Isn't it unfair and sort of weird to select Bitcoin for a special focus out of so many
cryptocurrencies?
Well, you could have, however, many tens of thousands of research institutes if you wanted

(30:33):
to do one for each cryptocurrency.
So we're not an anti-Dogecoin research institute.
We don't have the bandwidth to be anti all the other cryptocurrencies.
So I guess it's open to someone else who believes in the power of Dogecoin to do something
like that.
We work on Bitcoin because we believe in Bitcoin, and we wrote this book.

(30:54):
So that's why we started a Bitcoin research institute.
We didn't start a cryptocurrency research institute, I think because a couple of reasons.
One, the University of Wyoming already has a Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation
that was partly funded by Charles Hoskinson of Cardano, ADA.
And they do research in a lot of other cryptocurrencies and a lot of other blockchain applications.

(31:20):
And it's primarily, so we're an institute.
They're a center.
They're primarily practical, project focused, student teaching focused.
And we think that there's not that much that unifies cryptocurrencies.

(31:40):
There is a lot of different consensus mechanisms.
There's a lot of different methods of dispersal of the mintage tokens.
And we think Bitcoin is unique among those, our last two presentations at the Bitcoin
Policy Summit in Washington, DC, were about what makes Bitcoin unique among cryptocurrencies.

(32:03):
So it's put on by the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
And the first question is, why did we need this?
In addition to the Blockchain Association and Coin Center.
And one of the reasons, I think the main reason is that Bitcoin is neutral.
And these other cryptocurrencies are not.
They have insiders, whether it's founders, whether it's boards, whether it's companies.

(32:27):
They have methods of beginning and distributing tokens that Bitcoin doesn't have.
From the very beginning, Bitcoin was awarded via proof of work, via miners winning competitions.
And even Satoshi was participating, made that competition open to anyone from the very beginning.

(32:51):
So I think Bitcoin is a neutral internet money and that these other projects aren't.
And so you could have centers for neutral computing and argue that that's what Ethereum
is.
It's a sort of neutral computer.

(33:12):
But I think Bitcoin is unique and that's why it's worth studying and having its own research
institute.
Philosophers love to ask questions.
And one question you should ask yourself is why you have not gone to bitbox.swiss.com
slash Walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only

(33:34):
bitboxo2 hardware wallet.
Furthermore, why you have not yet done that and then gotten your Bitcoin off the exchange
and into your own self custody.
The bitboxo2 is super easy to use whether you are brand new to Bitcoin and it's your
very first time setting up a hardware wallet or you are a well-seasoned psychopath and
you have a nice little collection of them sitting on your shelf.

(33:56):
It is Bitcoin only and again, it is fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and you can verify for yourself.
There is no need to trust me or to trust bitbox.
And when you go to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do
you get 5% off a great piece of open source Bitcoin only hardware, but you also help support

(34:19):
this fucking podcast.
So thank you.
I think it's such an important point to drive home for folks that, you know, I've seen a
lot of pushback.
Anytime a Bitcoiner says, you know, Bitcoin is not in quotations crypto.
You invariably get the responses that are, well, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and uses

(34:40):
cryptography.
So, and it's like, well, guys, the quotations are important here.
We're saying crypto because this is a huge stumbling point, I think for a lot of people
as they try to approach Bitcoin is that it does either intentionally or unintentionally
get lumped in with all the tens of thousands of other cryptos out there.

(35:02):
And it's important to make that distinction, I think, because not to have a like a protectionist
viewpoint, but more so that it's, it's important to make the ideological distinction between,
as you said, a neutral money and everything else.
So many of these other cryptocurrencies are just perpetuating the same sort of, let's

(35:27):
call them fiat ideals that are the reason that Bitcoin was created in the first place,
the presence of insiders, the idea of the cantaloupe effect.
All of these things are present in these other cryptocurrencies that had pre minds or that
had ICOs or whatever it may have been, or that have a governing board that can decide
to stop the blockchain at any point and then restart it and do a reorg.

(35:51):
Like that, that's a fundamental difference.
And I'm glad that there is dedicated research being done to this.
And I'm curious, you know, what kind of projects do you envision that the Institute will take
on?
I mean, do you have some guidelines in terms of, I guess, as somebody who only did an undergrad

(36:11):
in engineering and does not understand the higher highs of academia, how does this work
for a research Institute?
Like how does that play out?
Do you accept applicants to it and then you have them pick a certain tract?
Is it kind of open?
Can you walk me through a little bit like how that works?
Yeah, it works different ways depending on how much money you have.

(36:32):
And we have some money, but not that much.
So what we can't do is go out and hire for each area of academia, a person who works on
Bitcoin in that area.
That's what I would love to do.
I'd love to have a research Institute here that has a climate scientist, that has a computer
scientist that has a economist that has a law professor or legal scholar, political

(36:59):
scientist, etc.
That'd be awesome.
All of you are working on Bitcoin.
That's a lot of salaries to pay.
And we don't have that much.
So what we'll largely do at least at first is have these open summer workshops where
we invite people to apply.

(37:20):
We have them give either an entire paper or an abstract.
We have to decide like a summary of what academic paper they're working on and then pick the
best ones to bring here along with some academics who've been working on Bitcoin for a long
time.
So there's Andrew and Craig and I, but there's also Will Luther at Florida Atlantic University

(37:40):
and Josh Hendrickson, who are both BPI fellows and economists.
Troy Cross, obviously at Reed College.
Margo, who's, I can't, is she a Georgia student?
I can't remember.
A PhD student.
So people who've been doing academic work on Bitcoin for a long time to sort of serve
as mentors and guides and hopefully be collaborators on future projects.

(38:05):
The Institute's not going to be teaching focused right now.
Andrew will teach a Bitcoin course in fall of 2025 when he arrives here.
And then depending on student interest in that and in some internal reading groups that
we'll do, we'll see if we can afford to offer more Bitcoin courses.
I've gotten so many emails from people that want to sign up like, I've been thinking about

(38:30):
doing a PhD.
Can I come do it at your Institute?
Or hey, can I take your classes from a distance?
Enough, enough interest.
I think that we may actually be able to do something like that.
So I was telling the first people, no, but you know, we announced it less than a month
ago and I could already fill up a class with the emails that I've gotten from people from

(38:51):
Australia to Thailand to Vietnam to Europe to South America.
So maybe that's more in the future than I expected it to be.
The primary goal, because of the reasons for starting it, the reasons for starting it was
the research papers are bad, the papers you can find on Google Scholar are bad.

(39:13):
And so we need to help with that aspect.
So that's not teaching focused.
But it seems like there are a whole lot of people who are eager for academic teaching
on Bitcoin as well.
So we got to think about how to do that.
Well, I mean, it's a good problem to have to have a lot of folks reaching out about

(39:34):
it.
And this does bring me back.
I'll paraphrase another one of Andrew's questions who generously supplied so many.
But in terms of the main barriers to getting serious academic work on Bitcoin out there,
he asked, you know, supply problem or demand problem.
And do you envision, I guess, this is just from my perspective, do you envision the Bitcoin

(39:55):
Research Institute kind of addressing this problem?
I guess, firstly, where do you see the problem?
Clearly, there is a demand for people who want to do the research.
But like, how does the Bitcoin Research Institute start to kind of alleviate that gap there?
That clearly there is a gap.
People want to do the research.

(40:16):
Is this now going to be the hub for where Bitcoin research is done at an academic level?
That would be fine with me.
But if that's something that's needed, and I think that will become clear in the next
in the next few months is whether that kind of thing is needed.

(40:38):
And so we will be ready to take that mantle on.
I think it's a supply problem and a demand problem.
So the supply problem is that this kind of research is an incentivized by institutions.
It's not incentivized by advisors for grad students to work on, and it's not incentivized
by the sort of broader community.

(40:59):
There's not that many papers written.
You don't get that many citations.
You can't get famous right now in the short term working on it.
And then there's also a maybe a gatekeeping problem.
So Craig wrote this paper, What is Bitcoin?
Which is a fantastic paper doing some metaphysics of what the nature of Bitcoin, the asset.

(41:25):
Is and what Bitcoin, the network is.
And he gives a scientific model for it.
And he has a substantive conclusion that Bitcoin is a fictional substance, much like butter
beer and Harry Potter, which is kind of surprising given that the this thing is worth like a
trillion dollars.

(41:46):
But it's all because of the rules about how you can move butter beer in this case around.
And so he had a hell of a time getting this paper published, even though it's really good.
For a couple reasons.
One, a lot of people aren't qualified to referee the paper.
They don't know enough about Bitcoin.

(42:06):
And then a lot of the people who or at least some of the people who weren't qualified
refereed it anyway, because they hate Bitcoin.
And they just found some nitpicky problems.
And philosophy journal acceptance rates are between two and 5%.
So it's really easy to reject something.
Just find a couple small reasons, whether they're right or not.

(42:27):
And the editor will thank you that they don't have to publish it because they have too many
papers already.
So there is a problem of getting these kinds of papers in the pipeline.
I think it's more of a problem in some disciplines than others.
It doesn't seem to be as big of a problem in economics.
Although we, Andrew Craig and I, along with Will and Josh and I think Troy, have a paper

(42:51):
that's an economics paper responding to a paper that says that Bitcoin can't work because
it can't handle enough transactions.
And our paper is called Bitcoin Works in Practice, but does it work in theory?
And the idea is the existence of Bitcoin doing what it is in fact doing is already disproving

(43:14):
this paper.
But how do we make it make sense?
The answer is of course, layer twos.
And we've had a hard time getting that paper published as well.
So maybe there's even more gatekeeping in economics than I thought, but certainly in
areas like climate science, it's going to be hard to publish.
Your data is going to have to be pristine, your methodology, your arguments, and it might

(43:38):
take a while.
But I think it's a mistake to cede academic research to the anti-Bitcoin crowd because
at least so far, the anti-Bitcoin academic research that I see has all been false.
So the arguments are out there and at some point, you're seeing it with chat GPT already,

(44:05):
the prevailing wisdom will change.
You know, I'm curious because there is obviously folks who are pro-Bitcoin who have gone down
the rabbit hole, who have spent innumerable hours reading, listening, discussing, thinking
about this, folks such as yourself and your colleagues as well, your co-authors.

(44:30):
It seems to be very, Bitcoin becomes very self-evident at a point.
Perhaps from a philosophical perspective, I don't know if you would say that anything
is ever self-evident.
I'm no expert there, but we can get into that later.
But it's incredible to me that you see a seemingly similar amount of passion on the anti-Bitcoin

(44:51):
side from some people.
And I'm wondering at a, zooming out a little bit, why do you think that is?
Why is Bitcoin so difficult to understand, but maybe not even just understanding?
Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge the reality of Bitcoin as it exists and is

(45:12):
functioning today versus what their preconceived notion of it is?
Is it just this bias that they're carrying from the first time they heard about it?
Is it something else?
Why are some people just so stuck in the idea that Bitcoin bad and there's nothing you
can say that will change my mind?
Or nothing that you can show me that already exists in the real world that will change

(45:34):
my mind?
I think there are a variety of reasons for different people, and I'm not sure which
camp each person falls into.
But so one, here's the most respectable one.
I have a book on my shelf called Bitcoin, a game theoretic analysis by Michael Warren.

(45:57):
He's a math professor at the University of Oregon and was really involved in the Occupy
Wall Street protests early on and saw Bitcoin as a way of removing oligarchic control over
money.
Very pro-Bitcoin.
Then he started seeing who was using Bitcoin and how they were talking about it, and those

(46:21):
principles didn't align with his own principles, except on this one narrow thing.
And so he became more anti-Bitcoin.
So he moved that way.
Then he started talking with Andrew and Craig and I.
He taught a course on the game theory Bitcoin.

(46:45):
He wrote this book.
I think he thinks there are serious concerns with the game theory of mining and it might
not take 51%, it might be more like the 30s.
So there are some technical concerns that I'm not smart enough to understand or not
trained enough to understand.
But a large part of it was cultural that moved him away and then moved him back.

(47:10):
And I don't know where he would put himself at present.
I think maybe sort of skeptically hopeful or something.
I think that's the case for a lot of people, that the Bitcoin community that they're exposed
to turns them off and that their ideals in fact align really closely with Bitcoin.

(47:34):
But they either don't realize it because they haven't been exposed to people talking about
their ideals in connection with Bitcoin or they've been exposed to it, but they've also
been exposed to so much that they don't like that their view is overall negative.
I think some people, it's a failure of understanding.
They just don't get it and they don't have to because they're relatively wealthy Americans

(47:58):
and they don't need Bitcoin.
They're just fine with their Schwab accounts and whatever.
So that's the position I think most of the philosophical world is with respect to our
work.
If they're against it, it's because they don't really know that much about Bitcoin.

(48:19):
And some of them, it's because they've been exposed to a side of Bitcoin Twitter that's
toxic to them.
And then others I think have cast their lot with the anti-Bitcoin crowd early on and it
would come at some reputational cost to be wrong.
And so even as Bitcoin succeeds, grows in adoption, grows in market value, they have

(48:46):
to keep saying,
I'm going to be proven right eventually because to not say that is to lose your audience,
to lose your livelihood in some cases, to lose your reputation, and to have to reckon
with the fact that you were wrong.
So if you can say, I've been saying since 2015 that Bitcoin's going to fail and it still

(49:10):
is.
It's taking longer than anyone expected because there's all these fools out there, but at
some point it's going to fail.
It's more palatable than to say, all the evidence in 2015 that I had made me think that Bitcoin
was going to fail, but I've got nine more years of evidence now and it hasn't failed.
So I got to reckon with what's happened.

(49:32):
And I think that's the case with some of the most prominent anti-Bitcoin journalists
and influencers and things like that.
But they said it early on and now it's just too costly to be wrong.
Like a Peter Schiff syndrome, we can call it something to that effect.

(49:53):
Like it's, your heels are dug in so deep that there's no going back.
It gets your brand now.
It's part of your identity.
Yeah.
I mean, it might be the case that the fork, there's another kind.
And this is where I put Peter Schiff, which is that Peter Schiff knows that Bitcoin's
good, but he gets a whole lot of attention for being anti-Bitcoin.

(50:16):
And so he would lose his audience, not because he's changing his mind.
I think his mind has always been that Bitcoin is good and he's just engagement farming.
So I would put him, from my own perspective, just based on the things he says in the, he
doesn't really mean what he's saying.
He doesn't really believe that.
That's a persona that he's playing online for views and attention.

(50:37):
I'm inclined to agree with that.
And I will say, I think he is masterful at his craft.
I mean, he is an exquisite troll.
And I mean that as truly a compliment, Peter, if you're somehow ever freakishly listening
to this because you're a closet Bitcoiner, like really it's his, he has perfected his

(51:00):
craft.
He knows how to trigger Bitcoiners.
He knows what to say.
And he is also one of those people who, if you take out his Bitcoin rhetoric, a lot of
folks who are pro Bitcoin would agree with a lot of the other things he has to say about
government, whether it be about government, about inflation, central bank, money manipulation,
whatever it is, a lot of people agree with that.

(51:22):
He just has this Bitcoin goldmine, if you will, of engagement that he can continually
tap into.
And so I guess we feed that fire.
I myself am guilty of feeding that fire as well.
But it's almost in a friendly way when I do it because I agree with you.
I think he knows exactly what he's doing and he does it very well.
And it works.

(51:42):
People pay attention, right?
There's another camp of Bitcoin critics that I don't quite know what to do with because
I don't think they fall into any of the previous ones.
And I'm thinking here of Molly White and Cass Pianzi and Bennett Tomlin of the Crypto
Critics podcast.
And they, I think, are open to new evidence.

(52:04):
They're open to changing their minds.
They're largely fair and balanced.
And I think it's notable that they are less harsh about Bitcoin than they are about other
cryptocurrencies.
And so it may be that for them, Bitcoin is caught up in this thing that they genuinely

(52:24):
dislike and disapprove of.
But they're also smart enough to notice the difference that we talked about earlier, that
they may hate Bitcoin culture, but they know that Bitcoin is not pre-mined.
It wasn't an ICO.
It's not rugged.
People who have used it dishonestly, like Sam Bankman-Fried and others, could have used

(52:47):
anything.
So they're, I think, really good at noticing these differences and saying mostly true things
about the negatives of the crypto space and Bitcoin in general.
And so I think there's hope that they might, I don't know, not be brought around necessarily,

(53:08):
but they might believe the truth about Bitcoin.
And they're the kinds of people, when you point out how Bitcoin is being used in countries
with high inflation or how it's being used to evade authoritarian governments.
They don't just dismiss you.
They don't block you.
But they take it on board and they engage with it.

(53:29):
I see Molly do this with Lyn Alden.
I see Cass and Bennett do it with Andrew and others.
And so I think these are the critics that we can have a good faith conversation with.
And we can learn some things.
And they can learn some things.
And we can understand Bitcoin a little bit better and understand how to talk to non-Bitcoiners

(53:51):
about Bitcoin better.
I think that's spot on.
And just I listened to the conversation, the recent one with Molly White and Lyn Alden.
And I thought it was a very nice conversation.
And Lyn, as usual, bringing her incredibly measured and fact-based approach.
But Molly seemed to me actually open and receptive to it, to Lyn's actual experience within the

(54:15):
Bitcoin ecosystem.
And I think that, again, this is a case tangential to Peter Schiff, where the crypto skeptics,
folks, they share a lot of beliefs or opinions with Bitcoiners, with hardcore toxic maximalists
about what a absolute just scourge crypto is generally.

(54:40):
And because of that, they actually have done their homework.
They do understand all of these scams, probably in many cases better than Bitcoiners do, because
they've spent more time looking into these scams, whereas Bitcoiners have been focused
on Bitcoin.
And so I think they're the good kind of critics you want to have.
And I do think that they're, yeah, as long as somebody is open to new information and

(55:01):
open to saying, oh, I wasn't aware of that.
And yes, these things are true about Bitcoin, which are not true about any of the other
crypto tokens out there.
And that's the kind of critic that you want, somebody who is actually willing to engage
in a good faith discussion and potentially change their opinion on something when presented
with new information.
And those are the kinds that are also welcomed, I think, with open arms ultimately, because

(55:24):
everybody loves the, you know, I was wrong, and now I was blind, but now I can see story.
People love that.
It shows that somebody's human and willing to be humble enough to admit when they're
wrong because, you know, we were all wrong about Bitcoin until we understood it, right?
And nobody really understands it at all.
So from a philosophical perspective, can one ever fully understand Bitcoin?

(55:51):
I mean, from a philosophical perspective, I'm not sure one can fully understand anything.
You got me there.
And I think because Bitcoin is money and has all these weird properties, no, certainly
not.
Nobody could fully understand it.
And nobody, even if you fully understood the code and how it worked and stuff, you can't

(56:16):
fully understand how it integrates into society because that involves a whole lot of psychology
and sociology and guessing.
So no.
Yeah.
And I actually, this just reminded me something that I wanted to bring up with you because
I mentioned just like sometimes the outside looking in view of toxic Bitcoin culture or

(56:41):
let's say more so it's toxic online Bitcoin culture because there is a very big difference
between how people act online, how they act in person.
But this idea, I think a lot of times people struggle with Bitcoin because it does not fit
neatly into the boxes that they have been told exist.
It doesn't fit into their left, right dichotomy.

(57:04):
It doesn't fit into their Republican Democrat here in the United States.
False two-party system dichotomy that we're told is the only way that we can do things.
It pulls from both of these.
There is a progressive case for Bitcoin.
There's a conservative case for Bitcoin.
There is just a case for Bitcoin period.
And I think people, that's difficult because people want there to be something that's cut

(57:26):
and dry.
They can say Bitcoin is this or Bitcoin is that or Bitcoin shares these ideals or it
shares those, but it just doesn't.
And there's a little rhyme that I repeat ad nauseam much to the chagrin of my lovely wife,
but there is no red, there is no blue, there is the state and there is you.
And I say this from the perspective of when I look at Bitcoin, I don't see something that

(57:53):
is a, it's not a Republican talking point.
It's not a Democratic talking point.
It's not a leftist, a left-wing or a right-wing talking point.
It's not a conservative or a progressive talking point.
I think it has elements of all of these because ultimately, as you said, it is neutral.
How do you approach that?
And do you think we're right now seeing a lot of the politicization of this?

(58:15):
We're seeing, you know, Donald Trump was at the Bitcoin conference.
It was quite a spectacle.
We also had RFK Jr. there as an independent, I guess as close to politically neutral as
you can get in America at least.
And there's been a lot of anti-crypto folks like Elizabeth Warren who have been very
loud on the left, but we also had Democratic members of Congress at the Bitcoin conference

(58:40):
speaking incredibly positively about Bitcoin.
Do you view this as an issue that is in any way partisan, or do you think that that is
sort of a mistake to try and travel down that road and make it partisan?
Or does Bitcoin just not care and the chips will fall as they may?
TikTok next block, we shouldn't even worry about it.

(59:02):
I do think we should worry about it, and we should endeavor to make the politically neutral
case for Bitcoin or the progressive case to progressives and the conservative case to
conservatives.
I agree that there are aspects of Bitcoin that are conservative and aspects of Bitcoin
that are progressive.

(59:22):
And I think it's important that people not think that Bitcoin is inevitable.
Whether Bitcoin succeeds depends on how people use it and how many people use it and what
they do with it.
If everyone stopped using it, then it wouldn't succeed.

(59:44):
So you might think, well, I'll never stop using it, and my friends won't.
So that's all that Bitcoin needs.
But then Bitcoin wouldn't be able to fulfill any of the things that we think it's actually
good for.
So I even slightly disagree with, or maybe more than slightly, with the dichotomy between

(01:00:06):
me and the state.
So red and blue, the state and you.
I'm probably far more pro the state than certainly than you and than others are.
But I think the state has done a lot of good things.
I think that the creation of roads and hospitals and things like that are overall good.

(01:00:32):
I think whether that's right or wrong, you can think that and still think that one of
the things the state has done really badly is create money and distribute the money that
they've created and manage the money for people.
And that the state might do a lot better if it were disciplined by having its money that

(01:00:54):
it can create devalued in favor of a money that it can create.
And whether that means putting the state on a Bitcoin standard or whether it just means
having Bitcoin there for the people as an option when they feel like the state is being
irresponsible with the US dollar, they can move to Bitcoin.
And when they feel like the state is more responsible, they can move back to dollars.

(01:01:15):
I think this is a good barometer for measuring the success of the Fed is how many people
are exchanging their dollars for Bitcoin.
Right now we're seeing fewer people do it than I expect will do it because they don't
understand as much about Bitcoin.
But as knowledge gets out there and it becomes more available for people, the way that Bitcoin

(01:01:41):
ownership will go up and down, I think will be directly proportional to the responsibility
of central banks and governments in general.
So yeah, I think it's good that the state exists to solve certain kinds of collective
action problems that it's not maybe beneficial for any individuals to do, but it is beneficial

(01:02:03):
for society as a whole.
And just not convinced that money is one of those things.
And so I think you can make that case as a conservative.
I think you can make it as a progressive too.
I was talking at Pubkey the other day with someone who was worried about the origin story
of Bitcoin and these libertarian circles.

(01:02:25):
And I was like, you know, I'm not the person who should tell the following story, but I
think it's a story that could easily be told of the black community in America after the
burning of Black Wall Street saying, you know what, this entire system is set up against
us.
It's completely messed up.

(01:02:46):
We should work hard to reform it, but at the same time we should build something that
runs alongside it that doesn't depend on it.
And you could imagine them coming up with something very much like Bitcoin.
And that would be an origin story of Bitcoin that progressives would love.
So it can't be that the current features of Bitcoin are libertarian just because the in

(01:03:11):
fact origin of Bitcoin is libertarian.
And I do think that that's one of the things that turns a lot of people off when they first
start hearing about Bitcoin, they go on Bitcoin Twitter and it seems to be dominated not only
by libertarians, but also people telling you that if you're not a libertarian, you can't
be pro Bitcoin.
Or if you are not a libertarian and you are pro Bitcoin, then you just don't understand

(01:03:33):
Bitcoin.
And I think that's ridiculous.
That's people not understanding all of the different ways in which Bitcoin is good and
just focusing on their own little sliver of understanding about Bitcoin.
It's a very not very libertarian thing to do to tell somebody else what they should think.
I mean, that alone is... And I appreciate the distinction or just the commentary on the

(01:03:58):
state in general because I also sometimes replace the state with the Fed when writing
this little rhyme because I think that is ultimately the most important thing that you
identified there is that this is about the separation of money from state.
And Bitcoin ultimately is... Many people have made this analogy before, but it's a

(01:04:21):
mirror, right?
It's going to reflect back at you the values that you have.
You're going to find some subset of your values within Bitcoin.
You're going to somehow attribute those values that you hold already to Bitcoin.
This is going to be true for folks that are coming at it from a religious angle, whether
that be Christianity or Islam.

(01:04:42):
That's going to be true of people that are coming at it from a political angle, whether
that's left wing, right wing, whatever wing you happen to be flying on.
And I think that's ultimately kind of a superpower of Bitcoin is that if you look at it objectively
because as you've stated, it is neutral money, you can project onto it whatever ideas that
you have and you'll find a way for them to stick.

(01:05:03):
And that's ultimately so powerful though because that means that really anyone can become a
Bitcoin or no matter what angle you're coming at it from and Bitcoin doesn't care.
Bitcoin doesn't care who you are or where you're from or what you believe.
That's the beauty of it.
And I think that that's such a powerful thing.
It's one of those things that gives me so much hope because you can have people.

(01:05:23):
That's the best part about meeting a bunch of different Bitcoiners is you realize there's
no mold.
There's no checklist that you need to go down to say, yep, this is what a hardcore Bitcoiner
is.
No, hardcore Bitcoiner is somebody who appreciates Bitcoin, uses Bitcoin in whatever way they
personally believe it should be used for them at this point in their life and believes

(01:05:46):
that others should do the same.
There's really no other big overarching set of characteristics than that, at least in
my opinion.
And perhaps some pseudo libertarians would disagree with me on that.
I just dislike political labels in general though.
And I think they're very ineffective when it comes to talking about Bitcoin because
you will find many exceptions whenever you try to make any rule.

(01:06:09):
But again, I think that's a superpower of Bitcoin.
That's really well said.
And yeah, I completely agree.
There are all kinds of reasons to like Bitcoin and all kinds of people should like Bitcoin.
And the more you understand about Bitcoin, the more you see how it fits in.
And the more you see how it, how we maybe should re-envision our dividing people into

(01:06:39):
these various camps because Bitcoin muddles a lot of distinctions that we like to make
between people like left and right, Republican and Democrat, etc.
It's the thing I think Bitcoin has the power to be a great unifier.
It's something...

(01:07:00):
Do you think that there we start to see the emergence of sort of a new, I'll say political
identity because I can't think of a better word for it right now, but the emergence of
a new sort of political identity.
It's not left, right?
It's not red, blue.
It's not even libertarian or whatever it might be.

(01:07:20):
But is there something that we haven't conceived of yet?
Do we already...
Is it already manifesting itself right now?
Do we already see this new identity emerging that is somewhat undefinable but united with
Bitcoin?
I'm not sure because there are also a lot of practical problems that this new political

(01:07:46):
identity I think should be silent on, but that are really important to people like
healthcare or the permissibility, a legality of abortion and things like that.
For a lot of people, this is a more important issue than Bitcoin.
So you could be very firmly pro-Bitcoin, but also very firmly pro-choice or very firmly

(01:08:11):
pro-life.
And are you going to put your Bitcoin voting ahead of those things?
If you're anti-immigration or pro-immigration, are you going to put Bitcoin ahead of those?
So I think it would be a mistake to say, we're the Bitcoin party and here are the rest of
our policies because you're going to turn off a whole lot of people doing that.

(01:08:34):
But if you don't have a stand on those things, then people aren't going to be sure what happens
if you get in power.
So I don't think we're at a point where Bitcoin is most even Bitcoiners primary voting

(01:08:54):
decision-making, a politician stands on Bitcoin.
I certainly see it.
Some people say that it is.
Sometimes I think that's just, they're using Bitcoin as an excuse to vote for the person
that they already wanted to vote for in the first place for other reasons.
So it would be interesting to see if things changed, whether they would really follow

(01:09:21):
that or not.
But I think we need, to know that, we need more polling data.
So Troy and the Nakamoto Project have started to do this kind of research to find out, first
of all, political identities of Bitcoin owners.
The highest group in that case was very liberal and only 3% of the Bitcoin owners that they

(01:09:44):
interviewed classified themselves as libertarian.
Now these aren't Bitcoin first people or people who are on Bitcoin Twitter.
These are just people who report that they own Bitcoin.
And so maybe what that tells us is a lot of people on Bitcoin who don't see it as a primary
driver of their identity.
And so they don't have a Twitter bio centered around Bitcoin like we do.

(01:10:08):
But we got to use that data to figure out what role Bitcoin is playing in people's
public lives.
How are they making decisions based on the fact that they own Bitcoin?
And how much are they considering Bitcoin in those decisions?
Yeah, I thought that research was really interesting.

(01:10:28):
Like it's incredible.
And it again, kind of forces you to reject your preconceived notions about what you think
the typical Bitcoiner looks like.
Like I know what I look like.
I know what some of the people in my circle look like.
But I cannot possibly know what all the myriad other people out there.

(01:10:50):
I don't know what their hopes and dreams and aspirations and beliefs are.
But studies like this are really cool because they do give you an idea that, oh, it actually
turns out that the typical Bitcoiner or the typical swath of Bitcoiners looks just a lot
like the typical population.
Like it's just a fairly normal distribution of people.

(01:11:11):
And I think that's, again, ultimately a very good thing.
It is the reality, at least based on their data.
And it seems that there are methods.
Again, I'm not an academic.
I'm not, you know, at Liberty to go into their statistical methods.
But it seems just as robust as any other sort of large scale polling data out there.

(01:11:32):
And I think it's really fascinating to look at.
And it kind of forces you to, again, which is something I think a lot of Bitcoiners think
that they do, but fall into this trap.
We should reject these manufactured divisions that are out there.
We should reject because that's, when I throw out the red, blue state, you think it's more

(01:11:53):
so a commentary on the fact that there is a lot of impetus to divide us, to force us
into these tribal groups, because then we spend time fighting each other, blaming each
other, being angry at each other, instead of looking for real solutions and calling
on the people who are actually capable of making change at a legislative level to do

(01:12:16):
so.
Like that's where I get frustrated because so many times it just, we spend so much time
back and forth with each other.
And this election season is no different.
Of course, every election is the most important election of our lifetime.
And the social media gets really tiresome for a while with the same stuff thrown back
and forth.
And so little of it is based in fact.

(01:12:37):
And I think one of the things that is always frustrating to me is that I don't have numbers
on this, but it feels like high 90s percent of political talking points are based on why
other person bad, not why our person is good.
It's so much focus on the problem or the perceived problem versus what is positive, what is good,

(01:13:00):
what is the solution.
And I think, I mean, you have now, and your co-authors have now started dedicating your
academic careers to looking at Bitcoin as this resistance money, as this neutral money.
Do you have a, maybe a message for other academics out there who are perhaps similarly, maybe

(01:13:24):
a little bit feeling disenfranchised by the fact that they are forced to pick a franchise
and then go with talking points from said franchise instead of being able to provide
kind of neutral commentary that's ultimately solution based commentary versus problem based
commentary.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think probably the biggest piece of advice I could give is to take some time to take

(01:13:53):
a step back and figure out what you actually care about.
And for some people, that is going to be the thing that got you into whatever field you're
working in, the project that you worked on for your dissertation.
And so you're going to want to keep doing that.
But I think for a lot of people, your views change from the time you're 18 to 22 to 27

(01:14:17):
slash 30 whenever you finish your PhD to 35 to 37 when you get tenure.
Your life circumstances have changed.
You've experienced new and different things and the world around you has changed.
But academia is not geared towards helping you make that shift.

(01:14:38):
It is geared towards directing you down the same path that you've been going down since
you started.
And you have to actively imagine what it would be like to do something else in order
to start to entertain it.
So you're fighting against inertia to do just like imaginative resistance when you think

(01:15:01):
about, OK, suppose I stopped going to the conferences that I've been going to.
Suppose I stopped writing on the things that I've been writing on.
And suppose I started thinking about something else.
What would it be?
Step one, and how would I do it?
Maybe I need a sabbatical to take some time to read.
Maybe I need to go back to school to get a credential and something else.

(01:15:27):
For some people, it's going to be AI or various political things.
For some people, it's going to be something to do with being a parent, which they could
never have imagined when they started grad school at age 22 or 23.
And now for some people, it's going to be their children's schooling situation.

(01:15:47):
So I have a colleague in philosophy who is writing on the metaphysics of free will.
He had a child.
The child has developmental delays.
And he moved because the school district he was in was not very supportive of that.
And the new school district isn't either.
And his career is now dedicated towards writing about individuals with disabilities and the

(01:16:16):
legal ramifications as well as the philosophical ones.
So this is a way in which growing up changed what he cared most about.
And I admire him more than almost anyone.
So Kevin, if you're listening, good job.
But the fact that he was willing to do that, he took on a career risk.

(01:16:38):
He took on a reputational risk.
And he also is like doing this for his son, who he cares about and loves.
And he's trying to figure out how he can best be an advocate for his son.
So I think it, I think it takes, maybe it takes a special person or maybe it just takes

(01:16:58):
a person taking the time to do that.
And then it certainly takes guts to actually then take the next step.
I think that's a beautiful thing to do and probably no better impetus.
I recently became a father and it's amazing how that is just a light switch that flips

(01:17:19):
on and then somebody rips the switch out of the wall and you can't ever turn it off again
in the best possible way.
But just you couldn't possibly imagine what it was going to be like afterwards.
And you can now look back to your life before and say, oh yeah, no, I do remember that,
but it's everything has changed now.

(01:17:41):
But for, for the better life, life has so much renewed purpose and I think deeper meaning.
And that's a, it's a beautiful thing that he's basically made that entire change and
dedicating what I assume is a pretty formidable intelligence to this effort now.
Like that's for the best possible reasons.
That's beautiful.
I agree.

(01:18:02):
I want to be conscious of your time here because I know we did start late and that was my fault.
So I probably don't have time to get into what is time and the nature of reality and
other metaphysical question.
I know.
But maybe just for folks, this is just off the Bitcoin side, but more into the philosophy

(01:18:26):
side.
Why did you, well, maybe for anyone who doesn't know the TLDR of what is metaphysics and
why did you decide like what, why did you decide to study metaphysics?
Why did you know how do you, how does one get there and why?
The one version of the story is just I got interested in free will and free will falls

(01:18:51):
under metaphysics and the questions involved in thinking about free will, whether we could
possibly be free, whether free will is compatible with the world's being determined, whether
our being free is compatible with the world being indeterminate, like quantumly indeterminate

(01:19:11):
all turned out to be questions in metaphysics, things that science can't tell you.
There are questions about the world that you can't just run some experiments to figure
out.
So every couple of years, some physicist will come out and be like, I've proved that
there's no free will.
You're like, no, that's, it just tells you how little you understand about philosophy.

(01:19:33):
If you think that you, that's something that you could prove by doing an experiment.
So the other reason that I think I just kept going in it, even past the free will stuff
into other areas is because I really like puzzles.
And I really like seeing how the world fits together.
I, for a long time, when I'd go home on breaks from college, I'd meet up with a friend at

(01:20:00):
the coffee shop and we would do the New York Times crossword puzzle together.
And that was just like the way that we wanted to spend our time.
So metaphysics is a lot like that is to see how, how things fit together, what comes out
if you tweak certain assumptions.
So yeah, the nature of space, the nature of material objects, whether they have parts
or whether they don't have parts, how the parts are related to each other.

(01:20:24):
And then there's, there's this whole new area of metaphysics, that social metaphysics,
which I also find really interesting.
And I think money falls under that.
But these are things that are about the world, but only about the world because humans are
in the world.
So if humans had never come along, there wouldn't be any such thing as money.
Money is something that we made, but it's also now incredibly important because of the

(01:20:48):
role that it plays in our lives.
I think gender is like this and race is like this.
These are things that wouldn't exist outside of human behaviors and human attributions,
but because they exist, because we made them, they now play an incredibly important role
in structuring how people live their lives and how people experience the world.

(01:21:12):
And then there's, there's other less important areas of social metaphysics that I also find
fascinating like, like bands.
What does it take for one band at one time to be the same band as a band at another time?
Could bands lose members?
Can they lose all their members and still exist?
Can they completely change their musical style and still be the same band?
Can they change their name?

(01:21:33):
Anyway, so I just really like these questions because I feel like they have answers.
The answers aren't, you can't just say whatever you want.
There's costs to saying things.
If you think bands can lose their members or change members and still exist, well, how
many, how long can they change them all at the same time?

(01:21:56):
You have to, you have to bite certain bullets.
And I think, I think it's kind of cool to try to figure out implications of having various
views.
So on the one hand, it's just kind of like intellectually fun for me to engage in this
kind of puzzle solving.
But then I think there are techniques and concepts and ways of thinking that you learn

(01:22:21):
in these kind of playground sandbox kind of metaphysics areas that you can then apply
to important ones like race, which, which actually seems to matter in the world.
And if the arguments carry over and the concepts carry over, then you can actually learn some
really important things about how the world works.
From a metaphysics perspective, does one Bitcoin equal one Bitcoin?

(01:22:45):
Do bitcoins even exist?
Yes.
And also now.
So I mean, I think, I think Craig is right in, in calling Bitcoin a fictional substance.
I think also, I can't remember if Craig makes the point in the paper, but we certainly
make the point in the book that it's the same with dollars, right?

(01:23:06):
Dollars are not pieces of paper.
If they were, then when you looked up your bank account, it would represent some pieces
of paper somewhere, but it doesn't.
In fact, there are more dollars in the world than there are pieces of paper for that have
dollar symbols on it.
So the dollar can be pieces of paper.
What else could it be?
We think it's a fictional substance.

(01:23:28):
We started, the US government started printing these pieces of paper and putting symbols,
and those symbols represent quantities of a fictional substance.
And then there are rules about who can create more of the fictional substance and how to
move it around.
And that's the same with Bitcoin.
So yeah, if you think of both Bitcoin and dollars like Butterbeer, who gets to decide

(01:23:52):
how much Butterbeer Harry Potter has drunk?
Well, it's in the books.
And maybe it's indeterminate because maybe other things happened in the Harry Potter world
outside of the book.
There's a whole metaphysics of fiction that I won't get into, but the cool thing about
Bitcoin is it's not Bitcoin itself, the asset that makes Bitcoin special.

(01:24:19):
It's the network and the rules.
If there were no rules about how to move Bitcoin around, then Bitcoin wouldn't be interesting
at all.
It's the fact that there's nodes and miners and proof of work and nonces and merkle trees
and all that kind of stuff.

(01:24:40):
That's what makes Bitcoin this fictional substance worth something.
Like the fact that it's fictional, the rules governing who can publish transactions about
it are very strict and unyielding and impossible to counterfeit and break.

(01:25:01):
And that's why it's worth thinking about and caring about.
I love that.
You guys said one of the kind of central themes in the book.
And for those who haven't ordered one, I do highly recommend you pick up a copy of Resistance
Money.
But this idea that if you didn't know, if you woke up tomorrow, you didn't know who you

(01:25:22):
would be.
Would you want to live in a world where Bitcoin exists or where it doesn't exist?
I think that's such a profound question and one that if you're being honest with yourself,
even if you're a very harsh critic, if you didn't know who you'd be, I find it very
difficult to come to the conclusion that you'd want to live in a world without Bitcoin.

(01:25:48):
It's quite a brilliant question that you guys have asked there.
Really well done.
Yeah, it was.
So this is what I think is probably the most novel contribution that the book makes to,
you know, there's so many good Bitcoin books.
It's like, how could you do better than Lynn Alton and Alex Gladstein?

(01:26:10):
But yeah, it's this.
We talked earlier about critics and why critics believe what they believe.
And we acknowledge that we all have biases.
The critics have biases we think based on past statements and based on associations.
We also have biases based on our own experience with Bitcoin and Bitcoiners and now owning

(01:26:32):
Bitcoin.
So how do we get outside of that bias to evaluate Bitcoin neutrally?
And this is, we think the best way to do that.
And we don't, you know, we try to present evidence on both sides of answers to that
question.
So in giving the framing, we don't say, now we've solved the problem, right?

(01:26:59):
We still then have to go on.
You could wake up as this person.
Would you want Bitcoin?
You could wake up as this person.
Well, we can't do that for the eight billion people individually.
So we try to divide them into groups and say, you know, which groups of people are helped
and harmed by Bitcoin.
And it turns out to be really difficult to find the people that are harmed by Bitcoin.

(01:27:22):
It's really easy to find the people that are helped.
The people that are harmed are harmed several steps down.
There are people maybe who have been scammed into buying Bitcoin and sending it to someone.
There are people maybe who are living close to really loud Bitcoin mining facilities.
But of course, Bitcoin doesn't need loud Bitcoin mining facilities.
It doesn't need Bitcoin mining facilities at all.

(01:27:44):
It just needs some computers.
The other things happen as the result of externalities based on how the world around is working
with the addition of Bitcoin.
And so we talk about how many of those we can expect to continue to get worse, to get
better.
And we ultimately leave the evaluation up to the individual.

(01:28:06):
But we think if you're going to be anti Bitcoin, you have to say something about all of the
people who need a private digital cash.
You have to say something about people who need uncensurable digital cash.
You need to say something about unbanked people.
You need to say something about people who are living in countries with local currencies

(01:28:29):
that are inflating very rapidly, who don't have Schwab accounts, fidelity accounts, whatever.
And we think most critics ignore that.
They don't do the comparisons.
They only say things on one side.
And so, I mean, for our part, we had to say stuff on the other side too.
We can't just give all the positives and ignore the negatives.

(01:28:52):
So we tried really hard to find all the negatives that we could so that we could make sure we
were being fair.
Thank you guys for writing this book, because I think you can never have too many Bitcoin
books.
And I think this is a very unique one.
Just so you can never have too many Bitcoin podcasts, right?

(01:29:12):
We need a critical mass of podcasts.
We need to overwhelm the fiat podcasts out there.
Last question, because again, I'm doing my best to be conscious of your scarce time,
but I have so many other questions.
We're going to have to do this again just so I can pick your brain even further about
the nature of existence.
What are you reading right now?

(01:29:34):
Besides for anyone again, we'll plug resistance money.
But what are you reading that you would recommend?
Thankfully, I do not have to read resistance money again.
I've read that enough.
So I read a lot of fiction.
I read a lot of science fiction.
I teach a class, philosophy and science fiction.

(01:29:56):
So right now I'm reading The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, which are awesome seven or
so books, mostly really short, about a half human, half robot security unit.
So I'm really liking those.

(01:30:18):
The best book that I've read in the last year has been Demon Copperhead by Barbara
Kingsolver, which is a book about Appalachia and drugs and opioid usage and the abandoning
of Appalachia by everyone who claimed to care about it at some point, including tobacco
companies and politicians.

(01:30:40):
It's the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, incredibly written book in the world.
And then on the nonfiction side, I'm teaching a course on money for the Honors College in
this fall.
So we'll talk a bit about psychology of money, how money affects how our brains work.

(01:31:00):
So I just got to say that we start off with this paper called Money as Tool or Money as
Drug.
And you would think money is a tool.
It's like a hammer.
Hammers, pound nails and things, money gets you things.
But the way that it works on our brain is tools are not things that we acquire without

(01:31:21):
intention of how we're going to use them.
So you got to get a hammer when you think I have to pound some nails in.
If money was a tool, we would just acquire money when we had something we needed to buy.
But money operates on our brains much more like a drug, which is we try to get as much
of it as we can.
And then we hoard it just in case we might want it later.

(01:31:43):
So that's a quick hit of those dollars.
Exactly.
Just one for the road.
Just give me a couple bucks for the road.
So we do that.
We talk about wealth inequality, whether wealth equality is something that should be strived
for and what means are justifiable in order to bring it about.
And then talk about markets and whether there should be limits on markets or whether they

(01:32:05):
should be completely unlimited, things like selling sex, selling children, selling body
parts.
Some people think anything goes in a market.
And some people think, no, there should be rules about what you can buy and sell.
And then we'll end with whether money should be controlled by the state or not and the

(01:32:28):
moral landscape of monetary design.
So these are the two papers that Andrew and Kereg and I wrote before the book.
But also in that, on the wealth inequality, I use a book called Billionaire Wilderness,
which is about Teton County in Wyoming just up north.
And it's written by a Wyoming native who I went to grad school with and he teaches sociology

(01:32:49):
at Yale now.
And he interviews the billionaires who live up in Teton County and also the working class,
the nannies, the housekeepers, the taxi drivers, et cetera, to get a picture of how they relate
to each other and how they relate to nature.

(01:33:09):
And then Bitcoin books I ashamedly have not yet finished Lynn Alden's book.
So I read it every chance I can, but it's really long.
And I want to go slowly and carefully through it.
So that's what I'm reading on the Bitcoin side of things.
And then after that is done, I've got the Genesis book by Aaron Van Weerdum that will

(01:33:31):
be coming up next.
And then by the time I'm done, man, it's going to be, I'm so excited.
We do, we do like four or five pages about the cypherpunk history of Bitcoin in the book,
but I did a spaces with Bitcoin authors and Aaron was just talking about the importance
of understanding Bitcoin from this cypherpunk perspective.
And from my point of view, I talked about this, maybe a pub key or another podcast,

(01:33:59):
I think it was a pub key.
My, my biggest concern about Bitcoin success is a takeover by corporate entities like BlackRock
that are offering ETFs and successfully get people to believe that what BlackRock owns
is Bitcoin and what we have in our multi-sig wallets is not Bitcoin.
And so Aaron repeatedly stressing the cypherpunk history and the importance of self-custody

(01:34:22):
and things like that is, I think, so important in this next phase of Bitcoin education.
It's to tell people that buying a Bitcoin ETF is not the same thing as having Bitcoin
and Bitcoin and ETF is not resistance money.
Yeah.
I couldn't agree more with that.

(01:34:42):
Where do you want to send people?
Resistance.money has the first chapter of the book for free.
Hopefully soon also the fourth chapter of the book for free, which is, which lays out
this, if you didn't know who you'd be tomorrow, thought experiment.
We're only allowed to reprint so much of it for free.

(01:35:04):
So we're going to test the limits of our contract.
It also has all of our other writings.
We recently wrote an op-ed in Newsweek about Bitcoin and bipartisanship and stuff.
We've written a bunch of other things and done a bunch of podcasts.
So you can find everything on resistance.money.

(01:35:25):
And last question, I promise it's just a short one.
Do you guys plan to have any sort of endowment or a Bitcoin fund for the Bitcoin Research
Institute?
Is that something you guys can do as part of the university?
In Bitcoin, I mean?
That's a great question.
Thanks to Caitlin Long, she moved back to Wyoming.

(01:35:46):
Her dad was, I think, an engineer professor here.
So she moved back here after her Wall Street career and wanted to donate to the university
and wanted to donate Bitcoin.
And the university said no.
And Caitlin said, well, I'll donate, but only if I can donate Bitcoin.
So the university figured it out.
So we as a university can accept Bitcoin.
And then thanks to Philip Treick, who works in the foundation.

(01:36:10):
We also, as a university, have a 4% allotment or allocation of our endowment to Bitcoin.
So we can hold up to, I think, 458 Bitcoin without having to sell it.
And so yeah, if people want to donate to fund academic research on Bitcoin, I think right

(01:36:34):
now the university only holds 120 Bitcoin.
So we can accept up to 300 something Bitcoin without having to sell it.
And that just gets us a certain percentage of, or a certain number of shares in the endowment,
which also contains dividend producing stocks.
So then we can spend it without having to sell any of the Bitcoin.

(01:37:00):
That's awesome.
Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.
I mean, how amazing that.
Like, I'm here, I didn't come here for any of those reasons.
I didn't know anything about Caitlyn or, I mean, I wasn't doing academic work on Bitcoin.
I started doing that.
Come to find out Caitlyn's here.
Senator Lemus gets elected, who is, you know, very, very aligned with the spirit of the

(01:37:22):
book.
She provided a blurb for it on Amazon.
And so yeah, it's cool that it's all happening at the same time.
If you want to look at the Bitcoin Research Institute website, we put it up like two weeks
ago.
So it's pretty incomplete, but uwyo.edu slash Bitcoin is where you can go to see what we're
doing.
And if you want to.

(01:37:42):
I'll link that in the show notes as well.
And now I promise I'm done asking you questions.
Bradley, thank you so much for your time.
This was enlightening.
And yeah, really appreciate you sharing that scarce time.
Next time we can get into what is time and can you share it?
And other such deep questions.
I have written on that.
Not the sharing part, but the first part.

(01:38:03):
I'll have to prep for that for next time.
All right.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast.
If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
head to Bitcoinpodcast.net slash sponsor.

(01:38:27):
If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast, consider giving this show a five star review,
wherever you listen or sharing the show with your friends, family and strangers on the
Internet or don't Bitcoin doesn't care.
But I always appreciate it.
You can find me on noster by going to primal.net slash Walker.
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(01:38:50):
at Walker America.
You can also find the video version of this podcast at youtube.com slash at Walker America
and at Walker America on rumble.
Or just go to Bitcoin podcast dot net slash podcast and find links everywhere.
Coin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.

(01:39:11):
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.

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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;}The Bitcoin Research Institute, Metaphysics, & Money: Bradley Rettler (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

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The Bitcoin Research Institute, Metaphysics, & Money: Bradley Rettler (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

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