Welcome to the Free Cities podcast.
My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 136 of the Free Cities podcast.
Yes, hello indeed.
And welcome to this very special two-part conversation with the one and only Mr. Ben Gunn.
Now, this is a three and a half hour conversation full of absolute signal, as they say,
but the rather long length of it is not the only reason that I have split it into two parts.
Let me explain.
I am trying out something new this week with the folks over at Fountain app.
For those of you that don't know, Fountain is one of the biggest players in the value-for-value podcasting space.
Their platform has been the preferred one for people who want to stream and boost Bitcoin
to their favorite shows for a few years now,
and I've been using it to swell the Free Cities podcast's
strategic Bitcoin reserve ever since they integrated the platform
with the decentralized social network NOSTA
that everyone we know uses.
Remember, guys, Bitcoin and NOSTA.
These are the two pieces of tech you probably need
to get your head around as soon as possible.
In fact, after this conversation with Ben,
I might even say it's quite urgent now.
Well, as of last week, I have started using Fountain to host the Free Cities podcast.
We've migrated it away from Spotify.
And as a result, I can now try out a whole new roster of features,
including bonus episodes and subscriptions, etc. to name but two.
So what does this mean in reality?
Well, this week's episode with Ben is available to everyone as per usual.
But if you would like to listen to the second two hours, that will be a bonus episode available to subscribers only.
That means if you subscribe to the Free Cities podcast, once you finish part one, you can just connect immediately with part two for the full three and a half hour interview experience.
experience. It will just show up in your episode feed as per usual. As a subscriber, you will also
get all the bonus episodes in the future and early access to all the very long form shows
that get split into two parts, such as this one. You will also get a shout out each week if you
choose on the show and a subscriber badge on fountain. Woohoo! Plus any comments you make
will be read out in the intro of each show.
What's not to like?
There is a price to this, of course.
What is it?
Well, the price of a large Starbucks, in fact, for one month.
Yes, that's right, six US dollars per month.
And you not only get all the premium content I've mentioned,
but you also get to sleep deeply at night,
safe in the knowledge that you are supporting this show,
which is, well, this show is obviously something
I do as a passion project amongst other things. It does currently still require subsidizing with
my own personal time. However, my plan in the long term is to run it as an extremely profitable
business and subscriptions on Fountain will certainly be a step in that direction. So please
click the subscribe button on your Fountain app and commit to just six bucks a month. And did you
know you can even pay with your fiat that's right dirty fiat i would prefer sats of course but if
you would like to make a recurring payment from your bank account well go ahead and choose that
option on fountain now if you don't want to subscribe don't worry i still appreciate you
as a loyal listener you can still boost and stream sats to us and you will still be able to listen to
part two of this interview. You will just have to wait seven days to do that right onto the show.
I should say that if you're new to Ben, my guest, go and check out episode number 97 of this podcast,
which was the last time I spoke with Ben back in September of last year. That episode has a lot of
background on him and introductory stuff etc. Ben doesn't do a lot of interviews as you may know
to date I think only four over the last few years. This may be his fifth. Don't quote me on that.
Anyway this time I went up to his citadel in the Welsh mountains with nothing much in mind
other than to as we say shoot the shit and see what happens. Those are my favourite types of
Conversations, as you may well know well, the result did not disappoint.
This was an excellent conversation.
In part one, we explore key ideas around privacy, anonymity, digital identity and the evolving role of decentralized technologies like NOSTA and Bitcoin.
You may not know, but Ben's planning to use NOSTA as a decentralized identity and access control system for his place in Wales, aiming to balance privacy, trust and, most importantly, accountability.
We also touch on the broader themes of governance, digital freedom and what to expect if you choose to reside in the decentralized future.
really hope you do. Come and join us. Come on. Part two of this conversation, which you'll need to
subscribe on Fountain to listen to, is where it really gets going as far as I'm concerned. Probably
my favorite conversation of the year so far, if not this whole podcast. This part critically
examines Bitcoin's evolving role in the global economy. And if you know Ben, you'll know he
doesn't mince his words. He's a no-nonsense talker. We dissect its utility, adoption barriers,
political implications, and the broader philosophical meaning of the age which we are all living through.
There's some phenomenal stuff here in the second two hours. Here's a few bullet points to get the
juices flowing. Bitcoin's identity crisis and its polarised adoption in what's called a barbell
economic way. Look that one up. The middle class squeeze, debt and leverage, governments and the
mafia, the reality of Bitcoin versus the state and the state's slow motion looting of its citizens.
Ben frames the baby boomer narrative in a phenomenal way that I'd never thought of before,
resulting in his assertion that understanding demographic dynamics is key to navigating
the future. We also talk about societal breakdown and reset, leadership morality,
and Ben's vision for the future, including how to position yourself for the best path through this
mayhem, which we can all see coming. In particular, and this is my takeaway from the whole conversation,
this means finding the meaning in your life, my friends. Meaning is the key,
and it's also in my opinion the key to real freedom my meaning partly is this podcast and
i'm truly thankful that you come here each week to listen to the well let's call them weird and
wonderful people that i love to seek out in this world many thanks from the bottom of my heart for
supporting us take a look at the new features available on fountain.fm and join us if you're
not on fountain already come and join the value for value community don't forget to check out my
show sponsor also veritas village they're building an off-grid community of luxury homes built for
freedom lovers just like you www.ecovillages.life forward slash free cities everything you need to
know about all these things is in the show notes. Right, time for the man like Mr. Gunn.
I suppose you should grab your favourite rocking chair, put it out there in the woods nearby,
make sure your dog is tucked up nicely at your feet whilst you sit back, relax and enjoy part one
of my conversation with Ben Gunn.
okay nice one cheers welcome back thank you i think i'm going to prelude this episode by saying
yes you are looking every now and then at a picture of a cartoon character of a ben gun
no it's not the real ben gun obviously it's not even your your pseudonymous yes i think it's fair
to say but interesting though because i quite like to talk about that because i've had that thought
obviously i'm not obviously no um but in this day and age why be even anonymous i mean when you
think about it right what's it protecting you against because um number one someone can identify
you by your voice as easy as anything you know number two if i wanted to find out who you were
even if i'd never met yeah exactly so what is the point of like hiding your face just out of interest
it's deciding what the principle is and defining it so if it's privacy
then being sued anonymous is a means to that end right and if then you say well do i believe in
privacy as a principle and i think there's a lot of listeners who will and they know that everybody
else will say that but then how do you express that because privacy it's a little bit like hygiene
you know in the sense that there's a good practice to not be outright dirty which is to say you have
curtains on your windows and you have a reasonable amount of privacy but if you take it to a to an
extreme and become jason born digging a hole and live in a faraday cage it's the same as someone
who can't stop washing their hands and it's got that same kind of profile where you never can do
enough to be absolutely private but you can do something in the middle proportionately to support
the truth the principle of it which is privacy and the idea of of my maybe not being filmed or
going to the other side and just being public is because it's i'm quite small scale so it's not
going to matter to there's an element of what I'm doing that is not about me so it's about the fact
that anybody could do it and so therefore I don't need to be part of it and then there's this support
and a principle where just being a little bit private and a little bit more difficult to find
and not so easy to graph helps people who really get the benefit of the use of that graph where now
they're having to be sorted through 10,000 people like me or 10 million people like me
and they're in that and for people that do need to be private because their rights can't be enforced
in the way mine are currently then that's all to the good and i don't want to be hidden or secretive
because that identity still carries a reputation and so you can abstract that and you can you can
use that as a way to build trust with people they don't need to know everything about you
uh it's what nost is doing well and you can build up essentially legal like legal entities
up on these end pubs now and they don't need to be a real name because they might have a reputation
that is abstracted from that but i think in the future right how are we not gonna interact with
all that stuff like and i'm thinking like i've just been to america right and it's it's
it's different over there even more well it's definitely different from wales put it that way
you know i got in a car and the whole thing lit up like a bloody google services this certainly
other cameras pointing at me blah blah you know uh everywhere i went i was being monitored
basically in that world and that's going to happen here we know it especially i think cars
it's going to be very i'm already like on my old you're the same actually on my old truck i'm
already paying more more tax more road tax than a normal car because it's old right yeah and that
will keep going up keep until i'm i'm like why am i paying so much on the independence of that
versus something that can be turned off i think true but what i'm saying is how are we in the
future gonna stay anonymous like is it not we're not no so what do we do like what do you do
particularly because you really don't like being identified necessarily or it's not you don't like
being identified it's like you i think i get the sense you just want to be annoying to some people
that want to know who you are you know what i mean and that that annoying part is a personal
thing it's not that i use it and an ominous identity to be able to do that i think that
the schism you've got in in bitcoin circles and and freedom forums is that we do mix up secrecy
and privacy and and and privacy is just a level of dignity that you can have affairs inside of
loops that are private and you can express yourself in them in their proper context
and reveal them selectively or not and secrecy is where you are not visible to anybody for any
reason and yet want to still interact and go back out onto a social graph to do business or for
someone to invest trust in you and you've you're just like you've got a paper bag on your head and
when that paper bag carries a reputation that you don't do what you say you can take it off throw it
in the bin and put a new bag on and so i think people make mistakes when they mix up secrecy and
privacy where secrecy could be it's a neutral good it's a way to hide yourself now that could
be hide yourself so you can shoot somebody who you shouldn't be shooting or it could be hiding
because you're trying to hide from someone who's trying to shoot you so to the degree that you can
be hidden or revealed it's just a technique and it can be put towards good purposes and bad
where the tug of war is going on is that we want the society's trying to push for people to be
visible completely visible and it takes the choice of that away completely sometimes that freedom can
be used for bad to collude to plan and coordinate on things that are just evil and they're the
arguments made to reduce all freedoms but we shouldn't be using freedom and the ability to
express yourself privately or publicly as the way to throttle down on bad behavior it's the bad
behavior that's bad and the means to find that bumps up against free privacy and people have a
gut check when they hear that they're like right so i've got to have an identity card now
but that's obviously not just going to shut down criminality that's going to stay and now we're
just going to be identified for other reasons like vaccines or extra taxes or a new level of
regulation or to track what you think or say based on your internet profile that's linked to an id
so it's nefarious and they use arguments adjacent arguments to open that door and people can see
that this is neutral it can be used visibility is good total visibility is bad and people need
the control of that and they need to have some level of personal dignity how though do you i
mean let's face it most people out there in the world and i say out there because it feels like
it's out there when you're here to this nice but most people out there in the world don't care
and we'll just go along with it and be be tracked and be this be that so it's almost like you've
only got you've you've got these two lives one where you're behind your wall walled garden or
whatever citadel yeah and the other one when you go out in the world and you can't even be you can't
even be anonymous out there because you stand out by trying to be anonymous so is that is that is
that where we're at is it like citadels or nothing is it yeah it the pressure is pushing it there
and it's making people have to decide um and i don't want to sound despondent but yeah the
technology is fierce enough to sort of remove the even the ethical side of the argument if if a
government can cheaply deploy something that monitors you very closely and there isn't enough
will to press back on it as a population it's going to be enforced and i know that sounds terrible
i just suppose you wait for whatever happens in that environment that doesn't happen healthily
in a free society and then they'll get the consequences of it afterwards the problem is
we're all carried along with our majorities and it doesn't matter if there's 10 of you and 60
billion of 60 million other people you're you can't enforce that with with your own violence
or with your own protect you can't do that i mean you're making the case for small independent
jurisdictions with their own rules right there and i've always got to check myself when i because i
I often come back to that again and again and again.
And it's like,
um,
because,
and it's not just because this is the free six podcast is because when you
go down all the routes of the future,
you discover this place where,
like you say,
technology will very cheaply monitor everything you do very cheaply.
And even going in the future,
there'll be little tiny little nano drones flying around.
I don't know.
Or whatever.
But even,
even what we can imagine,
because it's already happening.
if you go out into the real world yeah you have to try to not be tracked it's not that you you kind
of like you know that you have to make a concerted effort to not be tracked so and you know within
not being trackable it gets to a point where you're more visible like you said you're more
visible by having no footprints than you are by having some that are obscured or along a lot of
other footprints and that's the level of conviction i have in my private identity i could care less
if I get quote unquote doxed or tracked down.
It doesn't matter.
I'm one hop away from finding out who I am
because my work is out there facing the public
and I don't really care that much.
But it's just small steps that make a bigger anonymity set
for people who really need it
or people who might need it once.
A sort of semi-obscured way to communicate.
And I just hold it open for that.
It's just a way to join a bigger group
where some people in that group need to not be found
or need to communicate in a context that isn't public and shouldn't be.
And that's my part of it personally.
But it's a complicated principle.
It's complicated.
And we've got to try and go into the middle of the two extremes,
which is complete secrecy,
where we cannot be sure of anything from a counterparty
we need to do business with or live around.
Because this is the other side of it for privacy people.
It's like, don't think that you can do what you want now
because you've got a mask on, you can do what you want
and then drop away and you're in a different network.
You just plug out like the matrix
and you're not that guy anymore.
Because it sounds good, but you're going to stay hidden
and people aren't going to see your values
because you can't show them anywhere that's public.
And you're going to be able to hide the bad aspects of you
in a way other people can't see.
So when we give up that visibility,
at its extreme the visibility is bad because people can take everything that you you are
on the digital map and turn it to oh look what he did there and look what he said there
but if you take it to the other extreme where everybody doesn't have any record of the other
person in their life we can't build up a pattern of good and bad behavior all right then so
correct me if i'm wrong but one of your sort of like methods slash theories is to use nosda as
identity yeah and okay so in in one sense you're you're basically and just a number
so you are kind of you know slightly private and in it and everything you do is based upon
the connections you have with other people so you can you can be vouched for very easily even in an
anonymous way but the truth of that system even is once you throw enough computer power at it you
can work out who's who and what who's doing what and everything so what's the what have we got just
do we just have to surrender to this idea that we going to be found out everything i think i think this without blowing the conversation up too much we at a time when there a lot in the headlines and sorry for the noise in the background no wait we at
we're at a working sawmill yeah so amongst other things but i was just going to say that it's a
really uncertain world and there's stuff going on in it that looks massive and stuff that we cannot
even control uh or influence it's just it's just borderline nuclear war regional conflict and all
the rest of the misery and it's very hard to just think and take it back to your individual life and
try and work out you know oh what should i be like on the privacy and what should i be doing and
under that it's just very hard at the moment to make definitive decisions and it isn't something
that i've thought a lot about i just had a avatar on twitter from years ago and just enjoyed that
kind of abstraction from me uh but understood it was more important to a group than it was to me
and the individual and that's really where i fell out on privacy but it under under what we're seeing
in the world i think it's one of those things as long as it's not one of the two extremes
and as long as gnostic and help i don't know record good behavior like an uber score and do
it under certain rules and it doesn't need to enforce like black marks and nasty comments and
things but we do have to have some sort of decentralized review system and use these mpubs
as entities and they can be companies or they could be groups they could be guilds private and
then using the same technology in bitcoin we can use that to control access to places
physical places or or forums or connections with other people that goes by goodwill and that's just
the way that we can make things cheaper because we don't have to interact with people who have got
a record of not pulling through on what they said uh it's where people wanted to put bitcoin directly
they wanted bitcoin to be the court of law and okay you know i can't see court cases going onto
the onto the time chain onto the base layer and i think nost is just a good it's the bitcoiner
layer and i think it will come with accountability and i think that's the square that the
privacy absolutists if you call people if there are people like that is that yeah you've got you've
got a right to hide and you've got a right to have some things that you keep to yourself
and that can be abused when they're given away that's all obvious but we've got to go more than
that if we go to the other extreme and just have total anonymous economic participants they're
going to realize costs by not knowing who they're dealing with and that's a big loss that's as much
a loss as having zero privacy so i just think that's how nostr is gonna divide the difference
and let you show a record of what you're best at and let it be verified in different ways by other
people and it isn't that you have to have your whole life put up in spotlight because obviously
that's being used to coerce people and threaten them to make decisions and things and introduce
an opinion they have in one area to the detriment of their life in another.
And it just chills everybody down.
The same way that dealing with people who are completely secret would be,
not knowing who the other person is.
You only need to know enough to transact.
If we're talking about capital allocation,
we don't need to know everything about you.
And I don't need to know what you were like at your worst moment.
That's private.
so we need the tech that can enforce that stuff that is just group agreed that you have no right
to see and if you do see it we've got to be sensible enough to say that's taken out of
context because that was in a private group and you've just published it on a on a daily mail blog
of course it's going to look terrible you've taken it out of the way it was said abstracted it
and curated it and put it somewhere else to set mischief and that's harder to do when you've got
this n-pub relay structure and all it's going to take is more development to take it from social
media uh clones like twitter and the type of stuff we see on nostr which is good and develop it so
that you can put more scale and weight and more economic significance on it so we go from funny
memes and zaps to prove the fact that we can swap content for money on a micro scale but when you go
up orders of magnitude in what we're trying to do and we talk about free cities and circular
economies and things it's not one degree more difficult to do something that you'll have to do
on on a jurisdiction that wants taxes and things done to regulations and things um i'm trying to
do something in the middle and i'm trying to support these technologies as they come along
and use them immediately when they are so i mean you in a way like is this correct i don't know
is this public knowledge that you would like this place to be,
like your ID to be verified by NOSTA to even come in and out?
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, okay, right.
People know that, right?
Well, it's not something I'd hide.
But it's a good experiment because it's...
No, I've got to spend money in one place, right?
And it's security.
So you can't have...
It's rural Wales, so it's not...
it's not like downtown Baghdad,
but you also sometimes lose your quad bikes.
And sometimes you've got people on who are a nuisance,
who can visit because they can walk in the gate.
And you could see them or not see them,
but they've not booked an appointment.
And the minute they're on ground that you're responsible for,
you're sort of legally responsible for them.
So you've got to buy a gate.
And then you look at the tech
and you've all these different proprietary systems,
20 pound a month, and they do your NFC.
but NOSTA is doing it alongside open source and you can and it's it's translatable into other use
cases so I might use NOSTA I might say to you right use your NSEC and I'll add you to a whitelist
and then you can just beep in with a signing device or something on this day and then when
that window closes if you try and beep it there's no one home and that's a great use case but that
same NPUB that does access control you know under another use case let's say we develop badges
and I say, right, it's cheaper for me to be a host of people who've got first aid training.
Do I need to know where you did it? No. I need to see a badge associated to your end pub that says
you've done first aid. And I need that badge to be issued by someone who's known and verified to
do good first aid training. And they've said, right, you did a course with us. You're a good
bloke. You didn't kick off and you'd listen to what we'd said and you've got a skill you didn't
have stamp. And it makes the, it makes the privileges I can give here cheap to give out.
but if we did total secrecy who are you mate don't know you from adam well trust me it's like
well hang on a minute we were doing trust a minute ago and now we're going to go total maximal
privacy where we don't know anybody where anybody's from or what they do or they can't show anything
about themselves that's makes things expensive again to host so nostre if we develop on nostre
for access control we've got a nostre user that can use the other suite of tools in nostre
along different use cases that are common to a site, this site and others.
All around the world, someone will need, if they've got a location,
they need to know who that other person is on their development.
Now that's like, oh God, what, you've got an ID system?
Yeah, we've got an ID system.
So it's not Chinese social credit score stuff.
It's identification.
I suppose that's the middle of these two extremes.
is that you don't want to be identified, over-identified,
where your entire transcript of your life is stood up in light
against its purpose.
And you don't want to be a complete black hat.
Because you can't get anywhere.
You'd always be meeting an interaction
at someone else's maximum defensiveness, right?
So, you all right?
Yeah, sorry, that's flashing.
Never seen that flash before.
As long as I'm not flashing.
We were talking about NOSTA.
identity and you said um you know it's very this isn't a kind of chinese style
you know governance system right blah blah but right it it's not that dissimilar to it
no it's not that dissimilar to it right it's not now check this out because i had this really
interesting conversation in america about a couple of few months ago with this guy ian underwood his
name was he's a libertarian in new hampshire lives out on a homestead in the middle of the woods it's
amazing you'd love it out there and he had he told me about this new way of governing that he thought
no one had sort of like mentioned before and it's quite incredible and it's actually probably
the way few the way forward but when we were talking about it i noticed the same thing that he
that we are just thinking about there is that oh shit this is quite near the social credit system
I'll give you an example. His idea was you have everyone basically decides.
He said this is a cure for the democratic system, which basically means like you vote for mob rule.
Yeah, you vote for the difference. You vote for someone and half the people lose out.
Why don't you turn it back the other way? Why don't you say you can decide what you want to vote, but not geographically you vote.
so if you want to say you believe in um free health care right so you just so you just assign
yourself to that party and you pay into that party for free health care but you don't do it
geographically you do it you do one country it's a good uh way to it's like a it's like a rhetorical
way of understanding two things better but it's not a viable way to run an area no but you could
do it like follow it follow it because i'll tell you why sorry i'll tell you why because the because
the people that sign up for free health care don't pay for it yeah i know but that's the thing it
would it would it was a be a free market in governance so those those kind of ideas would
disappear they're not voting because they have the choice to buy health care or not they just
want the principal it does voting because you get it for free if they vote and they don't get it yeah
but the point is if you really are say you're in america if you're really a democrat and you really
believe in free health care for example you're willing to pay into the system so you don't but
now you don't you don't vote to get your guy in and force everyone to pay into the system
you just get all the democrats to pay into the system and they basically identify themselves
because it's very technologically it's very easy now so so you you don't need a geographical
boundary to your you know your political sphere the democratic model works by setting
the majority against minorities in turn yeah we're not doing a democratic model here we're
doing everyone so everyone has an identity so you have an identity say you have a nostril identity
and in that identity you say what you believe in and what you're prepared to do and if you go if
you go against that so say in your identity it says i will not steal if you steal then you get
punished if you don't steal everything's fine um if you believe in free health care because you want
free healthcare at some point then you say yeah i'm willing to pay into that system and you're
like cool so you're you're you agree to those ideas but you might be dispersed amongst your
neighbor over there may not he's like no i don't i don't actually want to pay into that system
and and um every everyone has a unique id which basically carries with it what what they believe
in and what they want to do and how they want to operate in the world and everyone gets what they
want basically why because the people that want free healthcare can't afford to deliver free
healthcare even to themselves let alone to the majority yeah but wouldn't theoretically there'd
be enough people that believe in it no right in that case free healthcare is not a good idea
correct right exactly but that's how that's a good system we're not here because it's the best idea
we're here because it's the easiest enforced they can you can you can abstract 80 of your rights
you're born with into a voting box for a four-year renewable promise to be treated well when you're
ill and they go for it or you could invest some money wisely as an individual and you would have
enough money to pay for your health care yourself no no but i mean like you could do that if you
wanted to yeah but then all but that that incentive to invest is taken away from your taxes which pay
So you're charged to win and you're given 100% of the right to lose.
But in this system, taxes are almost non-existent because you can choose whether or not you pay them.
You can be someone, all you have to pay for is the upkeep of the system because the system is basically very cheap to upkeep.
It doesn't need a huge amount of bureaucracy.
No, you have to pay for the cost of defending that from a next door state or next door town that are like, well, that's not going to work for us.
So why don't we just go and brass them up?
Right.
But that might be the one thing you pay for.
Well, that's what you pay for in government.
It's a set menu.
Your health care and stuff, that's like political preference.
But what you're really connected to is the peace of mind.
You're not being invaded right now.
Right.
But when you look at it.
And when you pay for that, it can enforce all of the other things that majorities want in that.
Yeah, but I agree.
You might want to pay for that one thing, which is the protection of private property anyway, or rights, some kind of rights that you deem are rights.
The rest of it is a choice.
The rest of it is a choice, like the health care, the way the schools, the funding of schools, the things, the that, the rest of it is a choice.
And as a free market, what should transpire over the long term is quite a properly kind of democratic so far.
You're talking about a partnership, like an old-fashioned equity partnership where votes are done to form consensus, but they're prorated against your stake in whatever your entity's voting on.
So, you know, old Goldman Sachs, old banks, 20 partners, each, let's say, each has 5% stake and their votes represent five in every hundred votes on a particular issue.
And then it's done on majority there.
But that's a fairer form of majority because it's not nominal, like just a show at hands who thinks that we should burn the teachers and not pay them anything and give them money to the police.
like that's a different format than all the partners having equity
and long-term upside in that system.
We're breaking here because people aren't brave enough
or intelligent enough perhaps to understand
that this way of getting things done is terrible.
As in the democratic system.
The democratic system and the way it's funded
and the purposes it's turned to, often to them.
uh i just think we're in a very low courage very low confrontational mindset take that all right
take your idea of using nostor to be an identity and finding a middle ground then in it where you're
private enough but not too private yeah when that scales say say for some reason it scales
say it's not just a bunch of well maybe you think it is do you think it'll scale
I think it'll definitely have to scale because it's got the lowest route to...
You've got a right to use it without any requirements.
And the other thing is it's not mutually exclusive.
You're not saying, right, pick up NOSTA and burn your passport.
This is an extra sort of form of membership, sort of a form of a LinkedIn.
And you get an Uber score and you live and die on your reputation.
And it's okay to record that as long as it's pre-agreed.
and NOSTA's open. You don't have to associate any activity to your NOSTA profile. If you want to
post cats and get zapped and have a bit of fun and just show a tiny little bit of yourself,
just a couple of funny posts, it doesn't have to be anything to do with you. That's one end pub.
But what about the one where you're a plumber? Do you want to have a secret plumber
who's got a type of work that could manifest itself as poor in six months or more?
no i want to i want to go on google i want to search by average review on amazon i want to
speak to people i want anecdotal evidence i want to hear both sides of a blow up and i've got to
decide like how much risk do i put on that counterparty and this is a way to show the
aspects of your character that you want to market or show in these subsets of groups or into the
public on a broad relay or in a group within nostr where you sort of have an access to it and you can
make comments and do activity in the context of that private group that's exciting because it's
not that hard to do as far as code and it hacks quite a lot of bitcoin's technology except proof
of work and finite supply and it keeps the encryption side and we can build quite a lot
on that i mean i'm talking about utilities for real economy and the only difference between that
and a social credit system is it's decentralized if decentralized it's peer-to-peer as opposed to
hub and spoke where the central panopticon maintainer of the database that sits you know
under westminster or under uh washington or wherever and they just make pseudo admin changes
to who you are based on the situation as it changes and what you think of it um and you don't
get to choose what's being recorded like that's another big thing isn't it like on nosty like set
you could have a setting you could have different accounts and it's like don't track my location
whereas what they want is the all or nothing they want right you did slide d anything but up to
basically a tattoo on your head so you can be recognized wherever you are and and once you're
in your own front door it doesn't stop there because it's ring doorbells and it's alexas and
it's all mapped and that's what that's what they want and they'll take it because they can
because no one else is going to fight back on it.
So basically, it will arise inevitably
in the same way that decentralized money is inevitable.
Inevitable.
So decentralized identity is inevitable.
Yes.
It's the cheapest to deliver on the problem
of transacting with other people
without the centralized court
and without the social credit system.
What's the cheapest to deliver way
for you to reveal an aspect of yourself
that can't be forged that lets someone else make a decision to take risk with you
or for you to take risk with them and then you're into commerce you're into commerce you're into
contracts and bills of credit and you can build end pubs up with transcripts of quasi public so
we did a contract did you get to see the price of it no did you get to see the nature of a contract
yes and can you see what both parties said about it very similar like to a peer-to-peer bitcoin
exchange if you were to go on one of the big ones like peach uh then if that's big or not but it's
a nice one yeah hodl hodl bisque they all have reputation systems they have to because it makes
things so precipitously cheaper if you prove that you do that side of an escrow consistently and you
don't push things into into the grievance the mediation or the governance system of swapping
money so you just extend that into social interactions and into certifications for
instance for people you can demonstrate a competence or a capability something you're
good at something you're professionally good at hobbyist and it's combination of badges to
confirm certifications which is just a decentralized same way that you get university degrees and
qualifications for adventure training and stuff like that you just do it on NOSTA with badges
isn't though the centralized version more efficient because it's it's a it's as in
yeah more efficient basically you know in a way it depends what you're what you're what you're
it depends like efficient for i mean if it's if it's well let's let's look at an efficient hub
and spoke identity system because i have a small background in diving in scuba diving
and look these are plastic cards that come out in the mail from Paddy and from these they're great
until you dive with a Chinese guy who's got fewer dives in his logbook than the minimum entry
requirements for the badge he's got to get on the boat it can't manage his buoyancy and then it's
not efficient then and the way that Nostra improves on that is that it becomes it's a matter
of fidelity you can go an extra step with NOSTA and prove not perfectly but prove well that
something went down the way it went down and peer-to-peer keeps that more honest than us
hub and the hub and spoke thing oh yeah we've got some certification mill problems yeah you've got
people double spending your certification stamp and the the quality of that to the people who
get the cost of it which is the introduced scuba instructor or guide have to roll the dice to the
degree that sir is could be milled or it could be not quite legit in the dive that you're taking
your life to take people out onto the ocean on and i imagine that would be the same with welding
qualifications and structural engineering and all sorts of things that are issued out of a tower
that still have a low fidelity
compared to just proof of work
and progress and transcript
and doing things by practice.
And we can record all that on NOSTA.
And it's going to sit wrong on people
because some people are like,
I'm not going to show myself on there.
I don't know.
I'm not going to show.
And it's like, hang on a minute then.
Because you get to keep the choice
and you won show any part of you that will stand up to scrutiny in any community small or big maybe you not as good as you say you are Maybe you just going from group to group and emptying pockets or telling fibs and moving on like a gypsy
And you're getting away with it because it's the downside of a privacy argument which can be turned left into total secrecy or right into total visibility.
and the issue in the middle is identity so we capture them bits that we get the benefit of
identifying another person and we take it out of that low end scale of friends and you know that
sort of informal way to identify somebody and try and extend it so i can get a good impression of
somebody at distance that i can make a reasonable decision to interact with them and have an
expectation that's going to make things cheap and it's going to mean we can do things at bigger scale
of economy than we do at the moment, like a hackathon, blog post, one-man band, one-man
armies, which go by well on total secrecy or the right to. But if you're trying to build
up to bigger levels of investment, you're trying to do bigger things, bigger things
at scale, you need to have more surety. I think it'll come through as well in insurance
because the other thing that building up a profile on NOSTA would allow you to do is
prove that you've lowered an average risk in whatever you're asking to be covered by
and insurance is a good pricing mechanism for the types of risks that we take you know so if you've
got a good track record like having a no claims bonus nobody's screaming at the rooftops because
the insurance companies know how many years it's gone since you've left last crashed no one's
arguing that that should be private data and the reason is because everyone understands it's like
ah I get it
if you can prove
you don't crash your car
you get your insurance quote down
and you get my insurance quote down
so that's alright
it doesn't mean
but they want to put a tracker
in your car though
to track you
to work out
whether you're going too fast
it's this constant argument
like there's a
there's a good reason
to have a tracker in your car
if it gets robbed
it's easier to find
like if you're an insurer
tracking your car
it might not be nefarious
on one aspect of it
but the ugly part
is when they take good reasons
to have tech do things
and smush them in to a set menu where in a click of a finger or the change of a boss,
they can use that same map to attack somebody.
Having sold it to them as something that will defend them,
which is put a tracker in your car, get your insurance quote down.
Because when it gets robbed, we can track it and you can prove to us live
that you're not going 80 mile an hour around the B roads as a 17 year old.
That's not that.
That's how we get your insurance quote down, mate.
If you don't like that, it's five grand a year.
and if you don't like that it's because look at the statistics for children who crash cars
at your age your front your brain's not connected to the back till you're 24 so it's a box in your
car in it so there's a validity in that but then you get caught on the wrong side of it it's like
ah you want people tracked it's like well no i don't want people tracked i want to track what
they're doing when i'm underwriting the risk of it i don't need to know what that guy's politics
are to throw them out of the insurance market so I don't need the rest of it.
And I think Nostas are just a really readily available
back end to build these utilities on the front end and people can pick
to what level they're visible and how much they connect one thing
to another in their life.
You can be private in the things that should be private
and you can be public in the things that we benefit from being public in.
and that's the that's the middle i think of this whole issue about privacy and secrecy
and and you can argue both ends and the extremes of it kind of comes around to the same problem
so does it begin in this world in these kind of and then become adopted and does it ever
become adopted on the scale of what you know the the the opposing thing being id cards does it ever
get adopted at that scale or is it always this parallel system where people use bitcoin more
people use privacy tools more people use noster more you know the i think the the truths of any
of the issues are where the world's trying to pull to so what i mean by that is if we did go
full china there's still a pressure in that society to be free and it goes somewhere and i
think that's where the situation is the least sustainable i don't think a chinese total totality
model is an end game it's a it's it's necessarily fragile and the problem with them is that will go
down and it will fall in on itself one day and when it does there'll be total collapse after it
and i suppose the other side of it is we can't all live in sort of hobbit holes and
not not not engage and do anything or take risk because you're not really realizing the potential
of your identity of like who you are as a person you're not going to get there if you're constantly
defending yourself and we're we're just going to go through the middle of it and all these attempts
to be free they'll manifest as extremes they'll manifest as events these sort of volatility blips
that point out where we're missing the truth of something and we're delivering a system that
steers away from it and it'll just have to play out some some organizations are trying to go in
at the top down and then approach a government get the government top cover for their project
where it's free over here and we'll just have to trust that that entity will follow through on
what they've agreed with and then you've got bottom up which is it always risks being
a little bit larpy you know part-time anarchism and but living on the suburbs of uh fiat developed
country and just sort of moonlighting on the weekends uh being a being a sort of edward snowden
and not really having any impact so it's hard to draw the middle and i think all these projects
are trying to do it in a different way obviously a lot in bitcoin and free cities is grassroots
So it's people have deep convictions and have to live in an environment that's not the same values.
Do you abdicate that?
And you're just like the black sheep in a society and making comments on it and sort of adapting to it.
Or what, revolutionary guerrilla warfare or something?
No, it's not that either.
and I think the pressure just to transact freely and get things cheaper and make things better
quality and give people what they want is just going to force a path through the middle and
that's why I like the NOSTA stuff so much. You could argue that it might follow the same trajectory
as Bitcoin which was quite larpy to begin with you could you could say and now we sit at this
moment in history when it's bizarre i remember you know one news article about bitcoin coming out
like yeah eight years ago and going off and it being a big deal just to get a mention in a
newspaper right it was just this remarkable same feeling by the way same sort of disorienting like
what i've just heard that from and like eight pieces of news every day about about something
weird happening you know like we take a 24-hour snapshot just for everyone to remember inside a
24 hours we've had Israel bombing the tar out of Iran's nuclear facilities we've had the US Nimitz
carrier strategic group move away from Taiwan towards the Middle East that's that's huge stuff
we've had a Bitcoin venture capital sorry a gold miner VC based in UK move into Bitcoin mining
just only a constellation of events inside of one little slither of time
gold miners are becoming bitcoin miners in the year that the the america the u.s created a bitcoin
strategic reverse yeah um within two years of the biggest head fund in the world creating the biggest
etf in history yeah i mean it's all a bit like it's almost like a joke now it's almost like well
if you nothing nothing matters you're trying to track the path of something that's sort of like
the cousin of bitcoin the younger cousin of bitcoin i think in nostor it's not the same it's not like
brother sister because it lacks vital aspects of bitcoin but it's just it's a network that's not
optimized to be money it's a network to optimized for the user of bitcoin it's the bootloader for
the user of the emergent tech which was bitcoin so we got our money right before we found a way
for us to interact with it safely bitcoin's fine bitcoin doesn't care about the battle groups
not much it doesn't care about the this or that things that affect bitcoiners bitcoiners are still
in big trouble we're still carbon and we're still subject to the laws of violence we can still be
coerced we can still be threatened there's a massive spike in bitcoin kidnappings crypto
kidnappings uh ledger ceo got shut down for five million quid with it just a straight up robbery
so that bitcoin didn't care like the bitcoin was all safe it didn't crack the encryption of bitcoin
they didn't interrupt the mining supply they didn't change the amount of nodes pointing this
way or that bitcoin is fine the problem is that we we are using it and it's the only reason it
exists is to serve us and we can't interact with it as safely as it can interact with itself it's
abstract it's completely digital and abstract and that's great but it's over there we just
just having that asset it's a big deal because it's an ultimate right of property isn't it you
no one else can destroy that ownership but they can still definitely have fun with you and the
demand and the implications of good money that can't be used at scale because we're still trying
to use it on a fiat map that has regulations and taxes and orders by violence force things that are
majority popular but aren't true huge issues things that push costs into the future health
care everyone has a right to free health care but it's always on the generation that's not been born
yet to pay so that's why we're generous we're just eating our own grandchildren to get kidney
dialysis today and it's gross the reason is the money isn't enforced in the analog world
it's a perfect principle and it can be perfect because it's digital it has zero grams of weight
without stating the obvious you can't stab it and you can't destroy it
and that's already happened in a way that already come out the canon and it's already
been adapted to the world has it completely shattered the system it's in no it's kind of
warped it the the system can't destroy it so it has to adapt to it it's like a it's like skin
going around a splinter or something so it's adapting bitcoin's not ubiquitous they have got
control over aspects of it bottlenecks and flows but they haven't defeated it and it doesn't feel
captured and now we've got nostos of what three five ten years behind it it's hard to tell but
like in the in the in the street in the what you call it the stream like in behind bitcoin benefiting
from what and we also get the look at what where did we stop where did bitcoin stop where was
bitcoin attacked along the way and we can sort of have a guess at where nosta will go based on where
bitcoin is and i think that's gonna i think that's where it's aiming at it's aiming at this middle
economy this real economy and it's saying okay this is interesting um here's bitcoin i log in
with that and i move utxtos here's nosta i log in with that with the exact same encryption and i post
notes and they're informal and there's an unlimited amount of them but you know they're from me and no
one else can send them and we just build on that but where it builds to like lego is out of social
media accounts and you follow your mate who's a funny guy or the guy who just checks in every now
and then and you follow a business and you follow them to look at their history and decide whether
you want their product or not and the more that that business can show that's provable and at high
fidelity instead of just marketing bump and the more it's punished for doing poor products leaving
people worse off than they find them i don't think that's an erosion of privacy at all i think that's
highlighting exactly what you're meant to highlight in a productive economy what you're good at what
will you come through and do and what does it cost you not to because you only have to cock one thing
up to not have that reputation anymore as we know so that's what nostril do it'll allow us to scale
to hire projects than one person
without needing to go right the way up to a state-level government
and argue a clause in the constitution
and bet that they're going to follow through on that and not change it.
It's funny, over the years of being into the free cities thing,
I've learned to really appreciate the difference between, you know,
i always i see it like this now bitcoin was um freedom in the digital realm and as much as is
possible the ideas that we look at on this podcast and in the whole movement are trying to create
freedom in the physical world which is is probably not possible it's certainly not possible to the
degree you get it in the digital world put it that way that's so true right but let me let me
just go on a bit so so if you think about bitcoin and the freedom in the in the digital world
that's new it's new the the scarcity is new that there's lots of aspects of bitcoin which is brand
new to the human mind to actually live this thing what does that show us in the physical world
how do we get it right in the physical world because i know that we probably can never get
true freedom in the physical world so we're trying to optimize it aren't we we're trying to get the
best thing you know one one method is put a fence around your bit of land and and then within there
you get freedom another thing you know blah blah so where what do we where do we go with this where
where do where do we go to get maybe using NOSTA maybe using whatever you know because we've got
all these new technologies yeah you know so it's this is a strategic question and it's a really
hard question this is this is us stirring into the constellation and guessing where the future's
going and while things are so uncertain it's it's hard it's to take account of what you've just asked
is where does this like absolutely batshit never happen before thing travel across a map that's
never happened before and never been more volatile but strategically if you were talking about a
freedom movement in a reverse of the way potentially like a socialist revolution happens
where one of the pillars of socialism is fractional reserve banking what you would see in an emergent
freedom movement that is persistent and and and reinvesting its gains and enjoying more space than
before is in a removal of that pillar that undermines what that pillar puts up which is
socialism collectivism and mob rule until it runs out of food and so let's let's look at this as a
strategic thing and we've already unlocked a denied area of economics and society by being
able to ultimately transact on a separate network so there's a now there's a there's a there was a
closed prison cell and bitcoins broke open a door that allows your property to step in there and
lock itself up safely and can't be destroyed that's crucial if you can destroy something
and have the final say in its destruction with no repercussions or repercussions no one's prepared
to take on you.
You own it.
That's a physical,
that's the physical realm.
Sam's not too happy about that.
I think we've got to talk about security.
Yeah, yeah.
This or chickens is probably the best.
What's that noise?
It's a slow moving tractor
he thinks is on the land
and it's not.
It's just coming up the road.
All this fares up and all that.
But it's super handy.
Yeah, we've got a very small dog
but she still barks
when anyone's like half a mile
down the drive.
And then like within three metres
of getting towards him
having looked like that.
Yeah.
It's just squeaking,
lick your face.
Lick you to death.
Yeah, it's just a guy
moving some...
He's been on this
like 10 runs a day.
Is that the rocks guy?
Yeah.
Where's he taking it?
Are they building a road
or something?
I don't know.
I just know that you can't
bag it and sell rock.
You're into the environmental stuff.
But if you've got a rock pit,
you can take it
and you can put it
another site and and because you're not selling it you're allowed to just keep going at it well
you could i mean we we've ordered a few tons of rock to build a wall you know off a quarry yeah
they'll be like they'll have all this regulatory this and environmental that and planning rights
but if a farmer i mean you've got a hill and it's made of rock with grass on top if you're chipping
away at it to cap your own road it's okay but if you do that put it in bags and sell it to you for
your driveway you're a quarry you're into quarrying see like these division of labors and the way they
regulate stuff and that but that's just the environment we're in yes and it's hard to do
commerce like that's uh sympathetic to bitcoin its principles oh yeah you think i need more of that
i i bought cold coffee because i thought we'll probably i thought you won't give me coffee
it's the caffeine i just yeah me too i'm just gonna nip out for a little all right subject
Go on.
Hold your question, though, mate.
Sounds like a good one.
Sorry, mate.
Are we still recording?
Of course it is.
Okay.
I always like that.
Sorry.
Rogan does that.
People go out and have pisses.
Apparently, you can go for like six hours.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that's one of the...
I think he did one with Alex Jones,
which was six and a half hours.
Now, I want to go back to this question.
Yeah.
Bitcoin digital world freedom.
free cities or something yeah it's the biggest blue bottle of everything something in the real
world that's the equivalent and it's to do with governance because it's to do with freedom and
it's to do with should i be governed should i be free right this this area of adoption is the bit
that i'm at and it's the hardest it's it's outside of the net the lower bound of larping and part-time
activism which is fine and it's nice to know at conferences and things that people are into the
same things you are feeling the same way about things but above informal and outside of black
markets which were illegal anyway and probably for good reason the root of it things like silk road
doing sending heroin to teenagers or whatever the narratives are the ability to do that's probably
wrong but they're they're things that are enforced and they just happen anyway but then there's this
other thing and while everybody's still frothing at the mouth about like ripping down fiat institutions
and it's all gonna pop and the money's all debt it's it's true but there's an element of overlap
in in what of all this shit we have to put up with that's still valuable and still quite a good way
of doing things you know let's take out good like building regulations because they're bureaucratic
okay but let's keep the principles of the values of the structures so that we're not building houses
that flop over and i say this because if we're going to reduce the state influence we have to
diminish its responsibilities and its and its ability to have to hold them properly and it
doesn't enforce the laws it speaks to be responsible for broadly it doesn't always enforce borders it
doesn't always give you a good health experience and when they fuck up it's an inquiry or an
apology at best 10 20 years after something's happened and in the free market it would be a
right quick dust up and a bankruptcy and the people who got the benefit and profits from doing that
lose everything that part of the economy we want to keep that like family businesses are adaptable
in fiat economies you can still have them they might be undermining the reasons why families are
important and and all of that with regulations where they can set on and off but but the bit
where we work with a family business or work with someone with a long reputation why keep that
and this area of adoption is the one that sits above what you can do furtively or no one cares
about because it's like el salvadorian coffee or something it's not to diminish that is to say
that's below a scale that these entities these governments and state authorities care about
as long as you do it on the edges of their map they don't care the bit that's hard to do
is the bit that still allocates capital at scale so you have a meaningful life and you need skills
and you need to feel good about what you're doing and have it that it's sympathetic to bitcoin
sympathetic to privacy and sympathetic to freedom but can still grow to a scale where it's not
attacked in the real economy so it has to render to caesar and pay its taxes but it also has to
support the mission and the progress of freedom and that's hard won ground and going back to your
question about bitcoin and nostril and strategic i think this area of the economy is where the tools
on NOSTA will be picked up and developed for real use cases and help us demonstrate the alternative way without the full cost of an alternative system We can map NOSTA to the processes that fiat
channels use and can chop and bend and coerce you with and just build a parallel scaffolding
framework around the same risks so that when they get cut their perceived damage to you is
lower because they know you've got a rope to fall back on so nosta might go a long way just keeping
up with the basic affairs of the people that use it in terms of commerce and reputation and it might
only be used when the fiat rails fail and so you'll get the nosta adoptions in spikes like we did with
bitcoin this is why it's similar over crises and over things that draw the eye and draw the attention
wiki leaks huge period of time for bitcoin silk road huge period of time for bitcoin
uh public adoption with the uh recent deification of michael saylor
it it's a big moment and uh there's loads you disagree with with mr saylor but you don't have
his perspective so why would you agree with him on everything as a piece of litigation and
investor management, it was a masterclass.
He rotated an investor base
legally
and profitably
and ethically into a Bitcoin
treasury and did it on a public
company that templated it and shown
every other company that's listed exactly what
course they plotted through the map to get
the bit they wanted out of the Bitcoin tech
but not make themselves
so adapted to it that they're illegitimate.
And that's a hard, that's a
fucking hard thing to do run that thought experiment with nostor then what would be
a situation or a person or a company that would do the operate a similar plan with nostor okay
well let's take something we know exists already uh and it's simple but it's in use and we don't
need to argue it let's go back to these peer-to-peer exchanges so it's the simplest level
of abstract commerce you have bitcoin utxos i have a fiat bank account we enter into an escrow
there are time windows there are standards to meet like an old law contract old english law
is not written into the bitcoin blockchain so it won't serve as a basis for us to do legal contracts
but if you log in and you've got your hodl hodl account and you've done a few good trades in the
past you're set up to be able to show that you can do a future contract from your ability to do
previous ones and then you enter into that contract and it's pretty it's like all of the
iterations inside that add up to one in terms of probability which is to say once you've put your
deposit down and once i put mine down and we both agreed to do this one of two things happens
either both parties do it and they transact as agreed or one fails and there's a there's a
grievance procedure not a single point is the local jurisdiction been involved
this is where it is applicable in two places because you've got the local site-based reputation
system and its rules that are enforced first and after that transaction is still eligible for
potentially a small claim like when you don't get your amazon parcel delivered then you claim
against the seller and it can be enforced by a fiat law and so the way to adopt bitcoin is not
to think of it that when things are adopted in bitcoin it's at the expense of what's there
already what you want to do is make shapes and transactions and products that run on fiat rails
but also can run on bitcoin rails and you try and match them as closely to each other as possible
and it's hard that is that is damn hard to do if you stand out too much and you make yourself so
not uh like alien to where you live and the community you serve it becomes an exclusivity
thing you're alienated and then you're attacked and brought low and so the best thing to do is to
be eligible for both systems i think which is to say we don't take anything we meet our requirements
we follow our law but we've also got tech that we're doing that because if we don't we'll be
destroyed by somebody we're not doing it because it's the way to regulate the structure of buildings
we do it because we're told to but if we had a customer who wasn't subject to those laws we can
still demonstrate that something's strong or of a certain quality just by itself evident proof
proven the qualities of it and that and the way that that's shown on and potentially on a nostr
account is that you do go through that with somebody and they don't need all the stamps and
stickers but they still get a product they like i'm just thinking about and then tell people that
they had a good interaction hey i got this product i paid what i expected and i got what i expected
I'm just thinking about maybe NOSTA
maybe the digital identity thing
once again is
Bitcoin and NOSTA are so important to work together
because
do you believe Bitcoin defunds the state first?
simple yes or no
yes
okay
and NOSTA emasculates the government
simple yes or no
yes
right
so the the state is kind of co-opting bitcoin slowly they're not they're not fighting it and
they they've probably got a plan to sort of you know control it in some shape or form whether or
not it works we'll have to we'll have to see i think people like you and me imagine imagine you
got two runners in a race and one is freedom tech and one is government tech there's a point where
the runner stops trying to run for the line and runs to the other runner to beat them up
and the the boundary we push as bitcoiners is where you push push push in the same direction
a government's trying to claim like we'll look after your finances we'll look after your food
supply and bitcoin and the freedom tech and all the stuff that supports it from farms through to
core devs through to the totally abstract are racing against an ability to do that for themselves
saying no we don't need these laws i make a choice for my health decisions and as it's like cops and
robbers when the freedom tech allows you to unlock areas of your life that would have been denied on
purely fiat rails it gives you an off-ramp it gives you an ability to trade get everything you
wanted from what the government set menu promised but without any of the side effects and without
any of the abuse potential that's where bitcoiners get the most benefit it's but it's also the
hardest area of the economy to win because the minute you go out of the abstract and the hackathons
and the github forks and the little programs you can put on a torrent and never be seen
once you move into stuff of substance that affects people's physical quality of life
and what they experience inside of an actual day in a human skin not as a utxo on a chip
I think some people live on these Bitcoin signers they think that their money's safe and they're safe
or they just have two different modes where their Bitcoiners when the Bitcoin hat's on and then
just part of the crowd the rest of the time and I think the hardest area to sit in is where you're
still serving the real economy at scale because that's quite a powerful position to sit in and
you just have to be sympathetic and use as contingency and in NOSTA's case sometimes it's
cheaper just to run NOSTA than it is to get some privacy uh anti-privacy tech for instance remote
viewing or access control it's cheaper to use Keet hole punch to do video streaming because it's free
than it is to get a google account and do meat so the freedom tech stuff is actually sometimes
on a real project the cheapest to deliver for that capability that you need opening and closing gates
it's either wall garden ring doorbells that you pay subscriptions to and you don't own the data
or it could just be a nosta uh pull down but at the end of the day the state can come in with guns
and shut it down right now but this is why i was saying that the bitcoin element is so important
because over the long term theoretically bitcoin defunds that ability that's where they work
together yeah right because like you know i don't think we can ever solve for the state coming in
with guns basically like or going for communism or for whatever you know like we we don't have to
uh the truth always wins historically but how do we justify that well truth always wins
but the truth is often losing
in that moment
is the truth not winning
you know
it's losing
it's losing along the way
you could say that the truth always loses in the end
it depends which part of the cycle you're in
that might be a better way of putting it
the truth
no no
I mean the truth always loses
if you're in the point where you're losing
then you'll think
this is the end
oh it'll win in the end
but then it wins in the end
it's cyclical I'd say
and it might be one of
a little bit like owning bitcoin
is that you constantly
every day
day day
you feel like you've given something up or you're losing but then there are just these moments and
days where you go knocking out that's that's gone up a lot it's that constant feeling that we're
losing ground we're being attacked where things are getting worse things are getting worse but i
mean historically for us to even be here has been only the result of that argument being won over
and over and over again in human history so things are different in that the magnitude of everything
is pretty bad maybe the worst ever but we are only here because this argument's been worn over and
over and when it's come down to it there's been an awful bloody fight over it but there's been an
awful bloody fight over it and then it's won on that on that battlefield literally and then it's
enforced and then it's degraded again and then you have to go and fight for it again and i think that
um the progress of bitcoin has been non-violent that's what's so impressive about it it's had no
physical enforcement whatsoever. It's took nobody, well a handful of people maybe arguably,
to risk themselves physically. It's quite bloodless but there is this all or nothing
issue at stake and I'm just saying that we need to survive the middle bit
and not get taken out too quickly and just see if you can support it and keep it going and keep it
alive and concentrate on that so much as working out whether it's going to win or lose and how
it's just to keep it going and bring it back use bitcoin principles and use the tools to the scale
of your life and try and adapt them into your life in a negotiated way if you're too extreme
you'll stand out if you're not extreme enough you'll have no impact and the movement doesn't
go on and it's that dangerous middle ground and where we are in terms of like 2025 middle of
summer is the world's kicking off the volatility that's been stored up over maybe a lifetime
is starting to crackle like an earthquake and big things are happening big big things we can't
control but there's this middle ground that's the next challenge i think that extends the freedom
movement and it's to move into that visible part of society it's not to no longer be furtive and
separate and satellited but to actually try to adapt the normal comings and goings of life with
this technology as it improves and as it becomes more ubiquitous i still don't think we have bitcoin
at an acceptable level in money at least not in the uk and regionally but in the us there'll be
large sections of places or industries or places where you can just get stuff done in bitcoin
and that wouldn't have been the case 10 years ago and nost is the same it's just a few years behind
and it's solving for a different problem it's kind of onboarding bitcoiners and entities into
this into this web of trust where money went first in its abstract and then humans didn't go with it
and we need a layer to get the principles of bitcoin but apply them at a human scale
in a normal life not to get small and hide on a ranch uh not that's a bad thing i like my ranches
It's just to say there's a run away and hide over there until they've had a fight.
Or there's a stay engaged and get big enough and stay with the pack enough that when it
does become critical, you've got some sway.
You've got some capital allocation and you've got some capability that people have to choose
between burning you or burning what you do as a job or a life or what you produce.
and the more responsibility you can have the more protected you are from it being taken off you
because if they take it off you they lose the capability of what you have so you've got to
constantly be pushing your values and i think if you just do it at an individual level or you try
to like go to that small scale you're doing the right thing but you're not having an impact it's
the difference between someone who litter picks around their village green and it's not to
criticize that as an intent i'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do i'm saying the scale is
not big enough to have an impact that's not the work the work is like the ocean cleanup like that
young lad who took shipping containers out into the pacific ocean he pulls 50 tons of trash out
of the ocean that's scale that's hard it's the same principle it's just damn hard and i think
The bit we're pushing into with Bitcoin, Nostra and FreedomTech is into the real economy.
It's making meritocracy more socially acceptable again.
It's making doing the right thing valuable again.
Not having it washed back into a taxation budget.
And not having it that we've got an anonymous society that can roll through groups and defraud them.
Or hurt them.
or just not do what you're going to say and then go
and have the blanket of that to hide your trail
under an umbrella of privacy.
It's perverse.
You're basically describing like a kind of return to morals
and, you know, in a very 21st century way.
No, but it's interesting, isn't it?
Because lots of generations have said the same thing.
You know what I mean?
They haven't had the ability.
From the minute we were able to scratch words into the paper,
we've had an ability to record what's happened.
But it's not had high fidelity.
it's been hard to prove you know everybody's got the ability to publish but what if we started to
tie these data points to things that are harder to forge than noise than words what if we tied
them to locations well what happens then is you've highlighted yourself as a location to
people who mean you harm so how do we abstract the ability to say you're here and that you're
of substance but it not be a big deal if people know where you are you've got to the trick is to
negotiate what you've learned about bitcoin and how it's better and how it's truthful and what's
good about it in the long run and take the principles and abstract them into places that
bitcoin isn't dominant which is the physical world the physical economy what's interesting about
bitcoin though that i've noticed is years ago the theory of what might transpire was laid out and
was talked about and discussed and it's kind of happening that way for example um people use
bitcoin as savings now they do not just people but like or whatever countries right okay you know
but that's yeah but people people said that would happen and they said that would be part of the
process as well and it is part of the process and it is happening now and now i hear it on them on
the most mainstream of mainstream news yes that people are preserving their wealth in this digital
and gold this is what's interesting a gold miner switched to bitcoin mining and they've been able
to make the case in an investor note by saying this is gold mining we're still expending energy
to have something that holds its value so they're getting it on the level that it was it was designed
that and it's changing because they realize well it's all mining we're doing a difficult process
for a steady rate of income on something that can't be diluted so why is bitcoin out of the party
and that's that's where you want to be in a freedom argument is where the merits of what
you're bringing in in still enforce whatever all the regulation and all the good intent tries to
but it does it better and it leaves the downsides of dictatorial systems and fiat systems
out of the picture that's the that is the golden middle of where adoption needs to go it's also the
hardest place to stand it's miserable to try and adapt something that is supportive of bitcoin
runs on bitcoin rails to the degree it's possible but also isn't doesn't stand out as an enemy or in
the wrong side of the law in the place it's operating and you need a place to operate because
it's real economy it's stuff that bitcoin won't get for us it's soft commodities it's water food
and all of that prepper stuff but that's the next part to adapt to primary industries and secondary
industries and small verticals that's a real circular it's a circular economy but it's scale
it's gdp points it's it's it's productivity with a capital p it's not proof of concept
and small and proving that the tech works on a little sandbox it's applying it to it to a post
code and letting it lower the price and increase the quality of goods as a result of using that
that's the argument you can make and you say right well you take that away you take my prices go up
or the business is gone so you pop that part of what you're trying to affect me to do
and you'll take the whole lot you'll take everything away and you can't recreate it
that's the argument but it's a very hard place to stand and it's very dangerous place to stand i
think because you are very visible and you don't ever want to be the most visible lightning rod
because those people get killed coerced made a fun of made example of yes but like you say
of all the revolutions that's ever happened,
Bitcoin has been quite a non-violent one.
So far.
So far, correct, yeah.
Because the Tea Party was non-violent
compared to the War of Independence.
Like we've got our riots,
we've got our, I call them volatility blips,
like these releases of pent-up aggression and energy.
It's false peace what we're in now.
I wouldn't mean to say that Bitcoin is bloodless forever.
It's to say that so far,
given how much of the area it's unlocked to people
who just want to transact without banks,
it's done it with an awful small casualty list so far.
But...
Why do you think that is?
Do they not get it or something?
Like, why didn't...
Like, is there a point going to come
when they suddenly realise,
oh, shit, you know,
this is undermining everything we use to maintain power.
What is the one thing in an entire train set of somebody,
like these controlling people,
what is the one thing they can't destroy?
They can destroy literally anything.
On a focused beam, they can blow up anyone and anywhere and anything,
anything except Bitcoin.
I think that's why it's been bloodless.
Because blood doesn't take away from its ability to transact.
There's no way, no way to get that system to die.
But what I mean is if someone in power decided to confiscate Bitcoin on scale,
they'd start, there'd be blood in the beginning.
I think they'd soon realize it's very difficult to enforce.
I mean, I don't think they can.
But owners of the Bitcoin, I mean, the first guy that has his door knocked on.
Yeah.
What's he going to do, just hand it over?
What about the second guy?
Yeah, exactly.
I think in the end, it goes really quickly.
You're getting close to your 30th guy,
and the government costs are $2 million.
And the yield on that attack might be two.
Do you think by the 10th and the 50th person on that list,
they're up in profit?
And do you think they look any better
for taking people house to house and looting them?
How did that look to anybody else
with Sindhu in history?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, funny, I was listening to a pod on the way over here
and they were talking about the Nixon shock
and go and listen to that speech
and realise what an absolutely outrageous thing that was.
Basically, someone, the premier,
the powerful person in America stood up
and said to the rest of the world,
hey, you know all that gold you gave us?
We don't have it.
It's ours now.
Yeah, we might have it.
No, no, literally, you can't have it back.
Well, it wasn't Nixon. I mean, the first time that was 33, it was the banning of gold in the US.
Right. But what I mean is no one in power has ever been shy to do absolutely outrageous things.
I mean, when America says, you know, all that gold you gave to us, the rest of the world, and these are big countries, these are ancient countries.
We've got it now and you can't have it back.
And because we can, basically, was the answer there.
They're bullies.
They're not stupid.
They're bullies, but they're not stupid.
And they know, like bullies know, you can't fight everyone.
You can't.
You are your profit as a bully is to the degree you can threaten people
without spending energy.
And that doesn't mean bullies don't spend energy.
We see focused attacks all the time.
but those attacks have to do more than the
kilowatt value of those punches
they have to do more, they have to chill
the nine other people who are represented by the people who are being punished that a public execution It enough to change individual decisions to doing something a certain way by seeing what happens when someone tries it once
But the lie, and the same lie that goes on in prisons all around the world, is that the capacity of the prison isn't totally strong enough to overwhelm the prison guards.
it is constantly but it's it's it's kept in place because one crab has to climb out the barrel first
and nothing good ever happens to that crap bitcoin maybe has been bloodless because
it's so coordinated and and there's no part of it that stands proud of all the rest of the parts of
it as it grows it's very hard to pick what point of it you're going to spend your energy on
because it's it's just so synchronous and so hard so abstract it's not physical you can't check
someone's house for bitcoin like you could with gold bars or drugs it's it's totally abstract but
we still keep that hook of value we still use it as a scoreboard to swap value around and it pervasive It not gone anywhere It got bigger And worse it been adopted into the fiat systems in some form of legitimacy
Ten years ago, it was a scam.
It was an unregulated scam.
When did the US start holding it on their balance sheet?
Is it still a scam?
So things change really gradually, and under that, everybody's quite down,
and it's scary.
but look at the progress that's been made without really any there's been blips there's been people
who've been made examples of there's been disasters and calamities in bitcoin but bitcoin's center has
moved it's grown out like directional progress in bitcoin's amazing but the the day-to-day stories
and threats and arguments are what it feels like but the reality is it's moving directionally in a
in a freedom direction without having a pitch battle in the middle.
Right.
What did you think of that?
Ben one of my favorite human beings to speak to in real life The next two hours of this conversation is where we really get going So pop on over to the Fountain app to listen to part two
If you're a subscriber, it will be there for you in the episode list. If you're listening to this
more than a week after the release date, well, just go ahead and listen as normal in your
podcasting app. Don't forget, the full episode will also be available on the Free Cities YouTube
channel, but that will be much later. And before you go, one last reminder to check out our show
sponsor, Veritas Village at www.ecovillages.life forward slash Free Cities. That link also includes
a long form interview with Patrick, who founded the company. It will certainly give you a good
sense of who they are and whether you would like to do business with them right see you in part two
over and out