Hey, welcome back. Here we are. So Lucas and I are present with you, the world, for another episode, discussion, deep chat regarding Bitcoin, Bitcoin literature specifically.
Today we're reading, we read a really interesting paper. It's a working paper by Salvador Ernesto Pineda de Paz, who goes by Sal Pineda.
It is called Leveraging Bitcoin to Rebuild Economies and Strengthen Justice After Conflict.
It's kind of a mouthful of a title.
It gets everything in there, though, that you need to know.
And it's academic, so it has to be that way.
But I want to orient us to what is essential here and kind of set the tone for how deep
we're going to go here.
I have some poetry here that's not part of the paper, but I think is going to get us
in the right framework and right mindset.
So it's called The Dance.
It's by an Armenian poet, Siamanto.
I'm just going to read the first portion here.
In the town of Bardez, where Armenians were still dying, a German woman, trying not to cry, told me the horror she witnessed.
This thing I'm telling you about I saw with my own eyes.
Behind my window of hell, I clenched my teeth and watched with my pitiless eyes.
The town of Bardez turned into a heap of ashes.
Corpses piled high as trees.
From the waters, from the springs, from the streams and the road, the stubborn murmur of your blood still revenges my ear.
Don't be afraid. I must tell you what I saw so people will understand the crimes men do to men.
And so that's what we're going to talk about. That's poetry about the Armenian genocide.
In this paper, roughly speaking, it's about transitional justice, which is a framework for redressing historical grievance after mass atrocity, essentially.
So Sal's personal story, we'll start kind of talking in earnest about the essay now.
He integrates his own story into the essay and the framework he's discussing because Sal, his personal story is he was born in 1988 during the El Salvador Civil War,
also a time of mass atrocity and torture and horror, really, for a lot of the populace in El
Salvador, actually assaulted his mother and him and kidnapped his father. They were able to flee
in 2001 and seek political asylum in the United States. He's now, Sal, is a, let's see, his exact
qualifications. He was, where is, I had it right here. He's got a master's in Latin American studies
He's from the Georgetown.
Yeah, from Georgetown and an MBA from Cornell.
And he's doing his Ph.D. right now, right?
And yeah, he's a former diplomat, too, according to his bio.
And also he's on Twitter, Sal underscore Pineda one.
So he's got after having the experience he did in El Salvador, he comes back.
He's a diplomat.
He gets all this education related to political science, kind of the nature, he says, of violence.
how to redress the roots of violence in society, that leads them into this field of transitional
justice, which, again, is the substance of this paper is kind of talking about the framework of
transitional justice and how to amend it to take account for an important theoretical insight that
Sal has. So again, transitional justice, how societies, it's about how societies can transition
from an era of conflict, civil war, mass atrocity, genocide, into a new era of stable governance,
and human rights. And this paper then also adds in how Bitcoin can play a role in that.
So how can a society recover from something like the Armenian genocide, from something like the
Holocaust, from something like what happened to Rwanda? How do you go from a deeply traumatized
society and rehabilitate into a functioning democracy with functioning institutions,
forward-looking, etc.? So this transitional period is very critical, and it's happened
kind of around the world, you know, post-World War II. And then during the Cold War, we've had a lot
of countries that have had to do this transition. And so there's a framework has arisen within,
I think, political science is the correct domain to talk about how countries can do this in the
best way possible. So this essay then, what Sal does here is first, the essay describes the
traditional framework for transitioning from these dark periods. The traditional framework has four
pillars. We'll go in the kind of depth discussing those, which are truth-telling, criminal prosecution,
reparations, and institutional reform. That's the traditional framework for transitional justice,
for helping these societies transition out of where they were into a better state.
Sal, then, his theoretical insight, he's going to say, you're missing an important part. We need to
talk about economics and infrastructure as a fifth and foundational pillar. And then in the third
part of the paper, he then says, once we begin to recognize that, this thing called Bitcoin,
and then he brings Bitcoin into this field, this already existing field of transitional justice,
he begins to talk about how Bitcoin can benefit these nations that are transitioning out of these
dark periods. So let's first, we'll look at those three parts of the paper, the traditional framework,
the new pillar Sal wants to add, and then the role of Bitcoin within that new pillar.
And then Lucas and I will talk about the different elements. So the first pillar is truth-telling.
It's always great to start with the truth once you're coming out of mass atrocity genocide because you need to figure out what really happened.
And this is actually hard to do.
It's hard to get people to tell the truth in a transitional society because people will fear incriminating themselves in the atrocities that took place.
And they're going to fear societal rejection for having participated in a previously authoritarian or murderous regime.
There's also, as part of the problem with truth-telling, financial insecurity. People, you know, are going to lack the ability to collect and document all of the stories if they don't have the financial infrastructure to do so. Things as mundane as transportation and housing can be obstacles to collecting all this data.
The second pillar, so you collect all the truth, you collect what happened. Pillar two is criminal prosecution. So following mass atrocity, there may be forms of like amnesty, but generally there's going to need to be some accountability to reinforce the rule of law and restore public trust.
Just like getting to the truth, it's also difficult in a transitional society to have like impartial, neutral, due process filled prosecution.
And the economic situation in transitional societies even worsens that.
For criminal prosecution, you need to have properly funded court systems in order to ensure independence and neutrality, that prosecutors are not going to take bribes, that they're not going to be dependent on the purse strings of corrupt politicians.
So that's the second pillar. The third pillar of the transitional justice framework is reparations. There's two aspects of justice. One is you give people what they deserve. Maybe the aggressors are owed punishment, but also the victims are owed some sort of recompense or compensation.
Justice mandates that they deserve some sort of reparation. Reparations can run a wide gamut from financial compensation to even just symbolic acknowledgement or remembrance that what happened happened, telling the truth. Don't be afraid. I must tell you what I saw so people understand. Just acknowledging that something happened.
And reparations, though, often falter as well due to budgetary or political constraints.
You can imagine coming out of conflict, it's hard to make right, even symbolically, the
harm that was done.
And then economic instability is going to make that even more difficult.
The last pillar of the traditional transitional justice framework is institutional reform.
After conflict, institutions of a country are weak and in disarray.
The court systems were involved in the old atrocities and, you know, everybody's compromised institutions. Nobody trusts institutions. Nobody trusts the police. Nobody trusts the garbage man. They're going to, you know, tell they're going to go through their garbage and reveal some secret about them to the authorities. Nobody trusts anybody.
The challenge then is how to rebuild trust when you have political pressure, elite agendas, corruption, weak fiscal capacity in a transitional society.
That weak fiscal capacity really exacerbates and makes difficult creating stable and trusting institutions.
You will even have, as part of how things are done now, high debt burdens in transitional societies. Institutions like the IMF or World Bank giving loans with restrictive conditions that are compromising institutions, structural adjustment programs that are designed to promote fiscal discipline will actually sideline domestic priorities and make people trust their own institutions less.
So institutional reform is a key part of transitional justice, but difficult to do because of the economic state of ex-authoritarian regimes.
So you have these four traditional pillars of transitional justice, truth telling, criminal prosecution, reparations, institutional reform.
Sal's insight then is to say, we need to acknowledge the key role of economic sovereignty and
infrastructure, infrastructural stability as a fifth pillar, which is actually kind of
foundational to all of the other pillars.
Sal notes that, you know, economics and infrastructure are often conceptually brought into the fourth
pillar, institutional reform.
But given their importance, he thinks it should be separated out.
That's the theoretical innovation for transitional justice, make economics and infrastructure
a fifth foundational concern or transitional justice.
So then with this theoretical insight, that gives Sal the space to move to the third part
of the paper, which is Bitcoin.
That is Bitcoin's potential role within this fifth pillar of economic sovereignty and infrastructure
as foundational to the other pillars of transitional justice.
Some of the overarching problems in truth-telling, prosecutions, reparations, judicial reform
is funding and also preventing that funding from being lost due to corruption or diverted
or manipulated by interested elites.
The general problem in transitional societies is a lack of trust.
Bitcoin is excellent in low trust situations.
It's auditable and transparent.
You can account for funds on the blockchain.
You can see who has what money and what Bitcoin, what coins and where it's going.
Bitcoin also has a stable and inherent monetary, a fixed monetary policy that everybody knows in advance and that no one can change.
You can trust. You don't have to trust. You can verify that it's not going to inflate. It's going to issue money on its schedule.
Quote Sal here in a beautiful passage.
In post-conflict societies where truth and legacy systems has been shattered, Bitcoin offers something powerful.
Mathematical certainty in an age of uncertainty.
It provides a base layer of financial truth in places where political truths have long been contested.
So Bitcoin's characteristics, its technological characteristics and social incentives help with each pillar.
For the first, if the first step in transitional justice is truth telling, it's essential to have a money that tells the truth. And that's what Bitcoin is through its transparency, auditability and fixed nature of its issuance.
The second step, prosecution, benefits from these aspects of Bitcoin as well. It helps provide independence and impartiality, which is key for prosecutions because a prosecutor's office partially funded by Bitcoin will be more insulated from exterior political control because Bitcoin is subject to the rules of the protocol, not to the kind of whims of the elite. It's hard to censor or block, and this imparts more independence.
The third step, the third pillar, rather, reparations benefits from, of course, the financial qualities of Bitcoin, both as a number go up technology, but also more poetically.
Here's Sal again.
While Bitcoin cannot heal wounds or restore lives, it can help ensure that when reparations are promised, they are delivered not only in full, but in a currency and system that cannot be quietly eroded over time.
And Sal also discusses how reparations can be maybe better conceived of in the form of economic rehabilitation than as a one-time grant of some money, like here, here's some money for what we did.
Instead, Bitcoin can help through companies like Gridless, a company that uses Bitcoin miners powered by stranded and underutilized hydro or solar power, miners that buy excess power from stranded sources.
These can lead to the build out of infrastructure in nations that have had their infrastructure reduced or destroyed exiting war atrocity, which is a way, a more stable way of doing reparations than, again, a one time gift.
It's a new way of doing things. Decentralized energy plus Bitcoin mining equals a new economic model, according to Sal.
It creates shared incentives for governments, energy companies, and local communities to all work together.
The companies get the Bitcoin, the government gets tax revenue, and also building out of infrastructure.
Sal notes again, this approach would effectively convert computational energy into tangible social repair,
creating long-term value in areas once marked by extraction and abandonment.
So all of the and then all of these noted qualities of Bitcoin its transparency its auditability its fixed issuance its number go up power and this way that Bitcoin has of creating a new economic model through its mining and incentives All of that of course helps helps with institutional reform which is often Sal notes derailed in developing societies for economic reasons which Bitcoin can help
kind of address those. Sal concludes by addressing some of the common critiques of Bitcoin,
that it uses too much energy, et cetera, et cetera. And then he also mentions Jason
Lowry's software thesis, which is not something that I imagine happens too much in an academic
paper within an academic institution.
He also, in mentioning Lowry's thesis, he notes that Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining could
help not just transition countries away from conflict and atrocity, but also help integrate
them into a future of mutually assured preservation through the peaceful power protection by
participating in the Bitcoin protocol with both friends and enemies.
So I'll end this summary with a quote, which I think is in itself a good summary of Sal's
article.
This is something he says toward the end of his essay.
As BlackRock and Fidelity have both noted, Bitcoin's provable scarcity and decentralized
validation mechanism position it as a modern alternative to gold, one that operates 24
seven without reliance on legacy banking systems or physical intermediaries.
This makes it uniquely suited for a post-conflict context where institutions must be rebuilt
from the ground up with openness, auditability and monetary integrity at their core.
So that's Sal's essay, the traditional framework of transitional justice, his proposal that it should be amended with the recognition of the importance of economic sovereignty, and then his ideas that Bitcoin would be a good way to help power that economic sovereignty.
So, Lucas, what were your thoughts on Sal's proposals here and his discussion of transitional justice?
My main takeaway is that it's good to be rich. Societies that have prosperity are going to have less violence. They're going to have less, obviously, poverty.
They'll have less of all of the things that come with having a fiat-type currency that can be debased. All of these issues plaguing countries that have debts spiraling out of control, drug problems, societal problems with marriages that are falling apart, these can all be linked in one way or another to prosperity.
Some are fairly direct and some are a bit more on the periphery, but they all have a direct causal effect.
And so that was my main takeaway is that it's good to be rich.
And it's much better than the alternative.
The alternative is to be poor.
That sucks.
We know that.
But before we went on camera, we were talking about this very briefly.
And you mentioned, you know, kind of the framing that the rich have in today's society, which is oftentimes quite negative.
And it takes me to think of just the, you know, the revelation that the people that are calling for this that are, you know, they want to see Elon Musk destroyed and they want to see Mark Zuckerberg destroyed and they want to see Sam Altman, all these, you know, techno giants that it's done out of a place of not hating or not loving the poor, but hating the rich.
Yeah.
Yeah. Because these are, you know, the same people are the ones that curse the homelessness and curse this, you know, curse the homeless.
Yeah. And so it is somewhat hypocritical in that regard.
You almost wonder there's like a Christian bias that money is somehow sorted and taints us.
And so a lot of what I don't want to say, not just progressives, but people who believe in human rights generally often have a focus on abstract notions that are very important, like liberty or truth telling or these types of things that, again, are very important ideas.
But at the end of the day, if you don't have the economic infrastructure to allow these types of to allow the protection of human rights, they mean nothing.
And so one really has to acknowledge that, OK, these are all very great ideas like due process and these different freedoms that you're envisioning.
But if we don't have, you know, people don't have housing and clean water, if they don't have money in the bank and a means to get more of that money and assure us that that money is not going to be taken away, inflated away, something like that, you know, these other things are for naught.
And so I think Sal's, you know, acknowledgement openly that, hey, economics needs to be acknowledged as the fifth pillar, economic sovereignty, which itself sounds like an abstraction, needs to be acknowledged as kind of undergirding in a very substantive way all of these other excellent notions of transitional justice.
And I think that, I mean, that's acknowledging the central role that finance and economics and money play even within human rights is something that is very important.
Yeah, you can go down his list and just so truth telling.
It's so much easier to tell the truth when you when you're financially independent.
You know, that's where the that's where the term fuck you money comes from.
That's we need to give transitional societies fuck you money.
Exactly.
Because, you know, because otherwise, then you're you're always afraid to speak out for fear of losing.
Sure.
You know, because you're you're subsisting on the edge of survival anyways.
Yeah. And criminal prosecutions. When I read that, I actually thought I wasn't thinking so much about like bribes and stuff, but I was thinking more about like just the kangaroo courts of, you know, after after the fall of, you know, when you have when you have a head of state replaced or fall of power like we experienced in the United States where for the last four years or arguably longer, but definitely the last four years.
The judicial system became highly weaponized against certain people, you know, crypto people, people that were involved in January 6th.
Yeah.
Mostly pleasant visit to the Capitol with some with some people that did some things that were bad, who may or may not have been on government payroll.
Those those kind of things like highly weaponized.
And now I see I could very much be someone who is a liberal and a Biden supporter, and I could very much understand how they could look at the United States judicial system today and make that very same argument and say that that the Trump administration is weaponizing it against against their side or whatever.
I personally would disagree with that. I would say that they are aggressively pursuing injustices that have been kept out of public light. But I can definitely see how someone who had different values than me would think that reparations, you know, it's something it's it's such a trope in the United States because it's brought up so often to talk about slavery.
And it's become become a bit of a meme. You know, give me my reparations. My Dave Chappelle show had a show had one of the greatest, greatest sketches on this with everybody getting their reparations money and a guy driving by in a in a semi truck full of cigarettes that he just bought.
or, you know, like everybody's getting all their cash and they're bought. But it does have to be
done. And this, I do believe that this is going to happen. Like in the United States, I think
we'll see this happen. This is such a timely topic to discuss. And Sal does a good job of
highlighting it because there are not just a few, but dozens of countries around the world that are
experiencing drastic alterations in their political makeup and going through that right now.
And, you know, will there be reparations for COVID-19 victims?
Yeah.
Right.
That would be something that would fall into this.
And do you want to be paid in, if you do get a rep rate, do you want to be paid in a currency
that they just printed in order to pay you?
Right.
Or do you want to be paid in something to keep?
There was one thing he had in there I wanted to ask you about, which was like one of the components of reparations is symbolic gestures or something like that.
Symbolic acknowledgement.
Do you remember that part of it?
Yeah.
It was down deep.
It was down deep, down deep, down deep.
That's 16.
But yeah, it was just like, you know, because it was like, it's not just giving reparations.
It's not just about giving money.
It's about giving like infrastructure and it's about giving like access to education and communication and energy.
And it's also about it was, yeah, it was like symbolic representative gestures or something like that, which I didn't really understand.
And I wondered if you had any take on that.
You were asking me about symbolic acknowledgement.
And so, yeah, I mean, that's an important thing.
Like I was reading.
What is it though?
Is it statues?
Like what is it?
You know, it could be.
It could be many different things.
One example I will give, I think, is simply acknowledging that events took place.
So that's part of truth telling is you have people get the stories out and then maybe the country comes out and says, we acknowledge this happened and we apologize.
So I read that poetry from the Armenian genocide that happened in 1915.
Still, I believe, to this day, denied by Turkey, which is, I don't want to get into like the weeds of, you know, people disagree about what happened, I think, but that Turkey committed ethnic genocide against the Armenian population and the what the eastern part of Turkey or something like that.
And so like just having Turkey and Turkish people maybe, you know, acknowledge that the genocide happened would be important symbolically for the horror that happened there. And so symbolic acknowledgement could be any of those sorts of things, just like, you know, a country formally acknowledging what happened, which I don't think that's a small thing either.
You know, we think that, you know, start off saying that economics is the most important, but also there's a movie called Ararat. It came out in 2002 about recognition of the Armenian genocide. It was, you know, this happened in 1915, this genocide. And the director, Adam Ego-Yen, is making this movie in 2002 about how this wound is really still fresh for Armenian people because it's just not acknowledged.
And they have like, you know, grandparents that died in their, you know, whole culture.
They go back to Armenia to visit these places where this genocide happened.
And it's just stripped of any acknowledgement that the people there once had a particular way of life.
So, yeah, symbolic acknowledgement.
I wanted to say something else.
You also mentioned like reparations after COVID and something like that.
And I think that is an interesting part of the transitional justice framework is in what other situations can you apply a similar thing?
Like, you know, post-COVID, should there be truth-telling about why certain policies were adopted, you know, the containment or lockdown policies, why certain vaccination mandates, why these things were adopted based on the science?
And then based on that, should there be criminal prosecution or reparations or something like that?
And then this framework, you can see, applies itself in kind of, as you were pointing out, in a miniature fashion whenever a new administration, presidential administration takes power.
They want to get the truth out from their point of view about what happened during the last administration.
They want to maybe do a little bit of criminal prosecuting and then seek reparations in some way for what happened and then rebuild institutions in their favor.
So even though we're talking about transitional justice as this thing that happens after like genocide and mass atrocity, it happens, I think, in miniature whenever you try to revitalize after any occurrence.
And so it's interesting maybe to see how Bitcoin could be incorporated even into those miniature transitional justice cycles.
Yeah, it would just make it so much more difficult for that type of thing to be perpetrated. You know, I mean, just like genocide in general, war in general, just like any type of any type of any type of offensive action like that. You know, the money's got to come from somewhere.
and currently the money comes from the future without a vote by the people who are going to
pay for it right you know like all of the money that funds wars is debt that is it's not the
government's debt it's the people's debt because the government is it's just a it's ideally it
should be a symbiotic organism that exists in alignment with the people and it makes their
lives better but what always happens because they can control the money is that it becomes a parasite
And it ends up attempting to kill the host and just sucking the lifeblood out of it to the point where it doesn't have anything left.
And then that's where, you know, it either genocide occurs and you wipe out an entire people or revolt occurs and you end up going through this bit of transitional justice where you're putting a new system in place.
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, like, I don't want to change the subject, but I'm going back to that.
Like, I think the not just reparations, but like if I look at this list of the four pillars of transitional justice, truth telling, criminal persecution, prosecution.
Reparations and institutional reform like this is exactly what I think people want to happen with regard to COVID I think they want to be told the truth Like the truth is definitely not that it came because a wombat ate a pangolin
and then got chopped up in a wet market. And there certainly appears to be plenty of evidence
for criminal prosecution. If there were injustices that were committed on American people and on
people around the world, then reparations would probably be in line. And then the thing that
enabled it all was the institution that had the power to do this. And so clearly institutional
reform has to be on top of that list as well. And so, yeah, how does Bitcoin contribute to that
is that it doesn't allow for the parasite to suck the lifeblood out of the host because
that you can't take someone's Bitcoin without them giving it to you.
You can't just take it away.
You can't reach into the future and grab Bitcoin either.
So, yeah, again, like this is a Bitcoin fixes this type of.
Yeah.
And if, you know, if Bitcoin is used to fund a body that is going to oversee prosecution
or amnesty or reparations or institutional reform, that thing gives that body a sort of
independence because the purse strings, you know, you can't block the money, you can't inflate the
money, you can't reach in and take the money back, you know. So it does give the sort of neutrality
and independence that, you know, because we're all so used to the dollar and the dollar is so stable
and, you know, debanking doesn't happen too much in the United States, kind of, you know, have this
monetary privilege, as Alex Gladstein says, that this type of independence, monetary independence
of institutions is not needed. But step outside the United States and, of course, even increasingly
within the United States. Yes, it is. And Bitcoin does or could play a role in fixing that type of
lack of independence. A good phrase that Sal used that I wanted to mention in this context,
we talk about Bitcoin as a store of value. And he says it could also be a store of integrity.
a nation struggling to rebuild. I think that's, you know, a good mimetic phrase, maybe that,
you know, the transparency, the auditability, the fixed issuance of Bitcoin make it a store
of integrity too, because you have to, you know, act a certain way in relation to it,
simply because you can't act a different way. It enforces a certain integrity in its participants
that is not enforced when one can manipulate and change the money according to one's whims.
Yeah. I want to change gears and talk about software. I love that he quoted Jason Lowery and brought up the logical conclusion, I think, of the world being on a Bitcoin standard, which is that it's mutually assured preservation, which is that it discourages competition and encourages collaboration.
and it does certainly stabilize the grid to provide power where none existed before.
But what I think is really interesting is when you think about the frame of,
let's think about like a country that just went through a revolution
and now they are starting effectively ground up.
But it's never ground up.
They're always at a certain starting point wherever they are.
And it's typically, you know, leftover Russian weapons from 1980s.
And then they go and they get some giant loans and maybe the giant loans allow them to buy some leftover equipment from the United States from the 1990s.
And now they're a third world country with second world equipment.
What Bitcoin allows you to do is that, you know, creating that hash, like mining Bitcoin as a country and taking advantage of your natural resources, taking advantage of your sunlight and your waterfalls and your rivers and using that power in order to mine Bitcoin and also provide power to your energy grid is when it's viewed through Jason Lowry's lens of being a power projection weapon.
It allows a third world country to instantly catapult itself up to first world status in terms of terms of defense, in terms of cyber defense and the ability to defend their their capital and defend their own livelihood, I guess, in terms of the energy and time.
And so that's actually kind of cool because, you know, you think about like if, you know, El Salvador goes through and Bukele becomes president and then all of a sudden they just instantly are able to have nukes and they're able to have a drone army that competes with China and they're able to have, you know, long range ballistic submarines and all that.
Like that's the equivalent of being able to just turn on Bitcoin miners.
Yeah.
In your country.
So, yeah, it catapults you into the first world immediately in terms of capital and currency and money, which is pretty invaluable.
Yeah, no. And that's one of the, I think, cool parts about Sal's insight into the nature of transitional justice, really reasserting the importance of economics and infrastructure is it's not just rebuilding a country.
It's positioning that country to be on equal, on parity with other countries so that it can, you know, not have happen again what happened in the past.
You know, to begin immediately participating in mutually assured preservation on equal footing with other companies by harnessing one's natural resources to, you know, participate in this financial protocol that everybody's participating in, and much more than a financial protocol, if Lowry's correct.
You know, that's not that's a sort of institutional reform.
That's not just reform in kind of the neutral sense of getting back to where one should be, but really putting oneself in the best footing to be, again, on equal footing with other countries.
You know, on that same note, Sal does discuss Bitcoin mining as in the same vein, you know, when we talked about Ben Kincaid's article, Bitcoin Africa and U.S. national interests.
Ben Kincaid, also an ex-diplomat, emphasized Bitcoin, emphasized that Bitcoin mining in low income areas in Africa could be a way to utilize stranded energy to build out power grids and other infrastructure.
It's interesting that these two ex-diplomies both see, you know, the potential for institutional reform, infrastructure buildup in countries that really need it and see Bitcoin mining as a new economic model, something that like software and, you know, consistent with the software thesis is really about making a country modern and self-defensible and all these things.
Yeah, I think I really do believe that the institutions decay as a result of the money decaying.
Yeah.
I think that it's, I think that the institutions, Rome had very strong institutions for a very long time.
They also had a very strong money for a very long time.
I think that you can't look at those things and not the belief in the institution is partly due to, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's far less able to be corrupted.
if the money is incorruptible. And so the knock on effect of that is that you have institutions
that you can trust, that you can not trust, but you can verify. And you can, you know,
you don't have to trust them. You shouldn't. And I think it's very hard to say that and understand
what it actually means because we think of trust as being something very good. But what we're saying
is that you shouldn't have to trust. You should be able to verify. Like it's better to know than
to trust. If you know you have firsthand experience, if you trust, then you're going
off of somebody else's word. And they're always going to optimize for their outcomes rather than
yours. No, I was thinking about that as I was talking earlier, too, about the interrelationship
between trust and verification. And they're like two different epistemic models for how you can
orient towards the world, a kind of active and passive one. But I think, you know, you can't
always be an active verification mode.
You verify, you do the research,
and then so you can trust.
Like your trust is based on verification
and the knowledge of possible verification of something.
We don't have to constantly be verifying
that the Bitcoin network is functioning as it should
because we learn and educate ourselves
about the social incentives,
the technological backend,
these things that make it function
as the tick-tock next block, you know, inevitable clockwork that it is.
And so our trust is based on our continual self-education
and potential verification of the network.
But yeah, trust is an interesting thing when one thinks about Bitcoin, what that means.
Well, I think it's because we probably more commonly associate the opposite of trust with being lying.
Like you think of trust and truth and truth and lies, as opposed to in this context, it's being used differently. It's the difference between having the information for yourself, having it verified, being able to look at it yourself and go, that is that, as opposed to reading the newspaper or taking what the institution puts out in a press release or testifies to Congress.
Right. There's penalty for perjury must not be high enough. I just like it just because it happens all the time. Like you're a lawyer. I was briefly in law school and I just remember like the perjury thing. And I'm like, I don't know how anybody would not perjure themselves. Like they're just always going to lie. Like, of course, you're going to lie.
Like you think about like, I mean, basically every single court case has one side lying and the other side telling the truth and just praying, praying that the jurors get it right.
No, that's a cynical statement.
Okay.
But it's always, it's always, oh, these are different stories.
I did this.
One side says you did this and the other says, no, I didn't do this.
Yeah.
And then we come out and we say, oh, you did this.
Like that person doesn't also get convicted of perjury.
No, I mean, it's because people can be mistaken about what happened and interpretations differ in good faith.
I mean, Kurosawa was I think it's ran or whatever.
One of his movies is about like all these different people witnessed the same event and they all have different interpretations of what happened, essentially.
And I mean, like reality is perspectival.
We all have our own subjective perception of what's happening.
And then it's, you know, we know that eyewitness accounts are not reliable for many reasons dealing with human psychology and the way that our brains, you know, preserve our memory and recall our memories, things like that.
It's not, you know, that's why the truth telling pillar is so complex as the first step of transitional justice.
I mean, not to sound ridiculous, but what is truth?
Like you can get as deep as that.
You have different people's experience of what happened.
their own particular perspective of the event.
But, you know, it's tough to unpack all of that as a series of purportedly objective facts.
Truth commissions have a difficult task ahead of them.
You can collect a bunch of narratives.
The narratives are going to be colored by, you know, both.
Sal mentions this in passing.
You know, even different ethnicities have different, not ethnicities, different cultures have different ideas of truth, have different ideas about why things happen the way they do.
You know, when you tell a story, you make certain background assumptions about the way their reality functions.
If one culture has a different back-end truth about the way reality functions, their story is going to be different.
And so, like, again, truth is a difficult thing. And I don't think it's ridiculous to say that. And also that truth is in some sense culturally bound because that colors our interpretations and our interpretations is what we collect and try to sort out. I don't know if it makes sense.
I mean, I like it is. It is a huge it is a huge topic. I think that was the I think that is what Jordan Peterson and who's the guy that's got like horrific. He's got horrific. What do you call it? Donald Trump syndrome. He left Twitter. He's a philosopher. Sam Harris. I think I think I think I think one of their debates, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, I think it stalled out and they had to quit because they couldn't agree on a definition of truth.
So, yes, I agree with you. But what I'm saying is a guy is accused of murder. He says, I'm not guilty. They play a video. It shows him murdering the guy. They convict him of murder. Why aren't they convicting him of perjury, too?
Because you have a constitutional right to not incriminate yourself. You don't you can your plea of not guilty is. And I mean, it's, you know, it's really saying you can't prove me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And so you get to have your trial. I mean, it's, you know, we have constitutional right. You can't self incriminate. And so that's it's protected. It's not perjury. You can't be forced to self.
You can't self. Yeah, you can't self. Obviously, you can't you can't confess. Right. Yeah. If you want to, for sure. I mean, go ahead.
I don know When I was doing criminal defense I would always just have the most wide open epistemic model possible and be like you know maybe this person is involved in some sort of Matrix dream scenario and they misremembering the facts And so we can take a broad base of skepticism and say anything could have
We'd want that in our own case.
You know, it is the case that like freak events occur.
And so somebody that 99 people say is guilty could be like wrong place at the wrong time, buddy.
I don't know. I didn't do it.
But my fingerprints are on the gun. Can't explain why I'm innocent.
And so it's beautiful we have a system where we could defend people like that, I guess.
It is true.
I used to watch those crime documentaries, and I was always like, no way did this guy do it.
Like, totally not.
And they're like, oh, yeah, he definitely did it.
Like, here's the video.
I mean, they should have.
They definitely should have.
We found the head in his freezer.
The head in the freezer is always a tip off.
They're like, god damn it.
Yeah.
Dude, that happened on Joe Rogan.
And Joe Rogan had this guy on that had been in prison for, I don't know, like decades or something like that.
And he was like let out for one of the I think it was the Innocence Project got him out.
And he he gets out, you know, goes on Rogan, tells a story about all the injustice, blah, blah, blah.
And then like a week later, murders his neighbor and just like dismembers the person, puts them in this freezer.
It's like, yeah, that's not good at all.
Yeah.
About publicity, to say the least.
Yeah, we should have a cathartic moment at the end of each trial where after they say not guilty, the defending gets to stand up and point at the jury and say guilty.
And they'll walk out like, like, it would be fun.
They should be able.
It should be like, like when you're playing poker, like you have the choice.
So like, like if you and I are the last two and you decide to fold and you give the pot to me and I win, I win the pot just because you backed out and you chose not to bet more.
I do have the choice if I want to.
I can show you my cards.
and i can be like i got you you know like i got a two to seven i bluffed your ass right yeah that
would be if you just gave people like like no double jeopardy like you could just be like i
did it i did it you didn't get it i know because how sad was we made oj live out the rest of his
days trying to find the true killer all these so to redirect he goes and writes the book he writes
the book if I did it.
So good, beautiful.
So to redirect back a bit, there was a beautiful quote that Sal ends with I wanted to read
here because this says something about what Sal, I think, is doing with some of the other
projects he's working on.
He has a sub stack that you should all we should all read.
I'll read the quote here.
As I step forward with this work as a voice, a partner and a bridge, I do so with deep conviction
and genuine openness.
The path toward justice is long and it cannot be walked alone. But with the right tools, the right frameworks and the right people, we can help rebuild not just economies, but hope, not just governance, but dignity, not just nations, but the future of our one world.
And so I see in some of Sal's other projects, which I would inadequately summarize if I tried to summarize right here, but I'll inadequately do so and say he's kind of constructing, you know, a political economy of Bitcoin and tying together, connecting the dots.
He says that his Twitter profile with all these different projects that are going on.
He mentions creating a Bitcoin alignment index in his new sub stack, talking about how to rank different entities for their alignment with Bitcoin so that people can have a way like a consumer ranking with different groups.
So, you know, you're dealing with a Bitcoin group, whatever.
He has all these plans.
But I think this quote is beautiful because, you know, we are we can all be a voice, a partner and a bridge.
And every Bitcoin podcast, every Bitcoiner ranting in the street, you know, every Bitcoin technologist who is really participating substantively in the debates about the protocol.
Well, everybody really can step forward together here and, you know, bring together reform, not just economies, but our world and not just governance, but dignity.
If we really do have and keep on promoting the ideals of Bitcoin and, of course, the adoption of Bitcoin, too.
Yeah, it just comes down to do you want your government to be able to control your money or do you want them to not be able to control your money?
And if they can't control the money, then there's a whole lot of fairness that comes into play that didn't exist previously. And that will be good for everyone. It'll be good for the government. It'll be good for the people. It'll be good for the people that are in other countries that see that as a model and yearn to have that type of thing.
I think, yeah, he, you know, he notes like what's happening in the, he notes what's happening in other places in Africa. I think maybe in Nigeria he talked about as well. It's very encouraging to be able to look at these places that for so long, there's been this story that's been painted in Western media about these third world countries as like, oh, they're just, this is how they are.
Yeah, they're just it's just that those those people are like they're violent and they're they're lazy or they're not striving or they don't value education or they're they're locked left in the 19th century or something like that.
they don't strive or anything. And I don't believe that is the case. I do believe that
all of these countries are the victims of bad money and that it devolves into subjugation and
into worse, into just atrocity. And I think we have a very bright future ahead of us being on
the side of a decentralized money that everyone has access to that no one can take advantage of.
Yeah. So what's the transitional justice framework for the end of the fiat autocracy?
What is the truth telling that will be required of the central bankers and the financiers?
What are the prosecutions that will be needed of people who manipulated the money or amnesty for feeling generous?
What sort of reparations will be needed once we, you know, realize that Bitcoin's distribution wasn't perfectly equitable?
What sort of thing, if the, you know,
transitioning from a fiat into a Bitcoin model,
maybe their reparations need to be done in some way.
I don't know.
And what new institutions are we going to build?
So maybe the, you know, the TJ framework
can also be applied kind of broadly,
even as we exit the general fiat world
we've been inhabiting.
Yeah, I do believe it would be very chaotic
because there are people that will hang on to the old
and be left out in the cold.
you say hang on to the old you left down the cold did you do that yeah that was good that was pretty
good i like that i never heard that little turn of phrase uh but yeah i you know balji talked
about this in his recent uh his recent keynote at uh bitcoin asia is that yeah i mean there will be
just like there is now there will be gross inequality because there are people that
recognized it and built wealth and there are people that will hang on to the old system and
they will not build wealth. The difference is that the Bitcoiners are not backed by the government.
They're not backed by the violence of this is another one of those tenants of decentralization
is that nation to nation violence decreases, but interpersonal violence increases. And so
you will probably see a continual proliferation of person to person crime. And so that's, you know,
get a gun, learn jujitsu, don't hang out in places you're not supposed to be.
Don't broadcast your location and stuff like that. Operational security is going to become
something that I think is very part and parcel to every human. And it should be. If you're entering
an era of self-responsibility, then that should be one of the logical consequences.
Yeah. I lost everything. Bitcoin, house, car in a boating accident, location. It was all in the boat. It was a houseboat. It all went down together. Gosh, I shouldn't have. Don't put everything in a houseboat and go sailing on rough waters. That's bad.
I didn't.
The boat was in a bigger boat.
That boat is gone.
Everything, man.
I'm telling you.
So there could be a lot of submarine operators out there, like with submarines going around, like where are all these boats at?
We're going to find these keys and we're going to get all the monies.
I love those people so much, like to have the balls to just be like, no, no, it's gone.
It's gone.
Prove it.
well there we're getting into truth territory and the you know so yeah i love it i love it so much
i saw a stat the other day that says on average 14 bitcoin are lost per day yeah that's a lot
i think there's like there's like 4 million that are considered to be completely lost
i mean i i mean i i believe it ish in that i don't think there's a lot of there's more and
more estate planning going on, but people also just like,
it probably, you know, just like, you know,
a lot of young people own Bitcoin and when a young person passes away,
it's not fortuitous often.
So the things that they had are just like,
you can use a court to get a lot of things passed on and sorted out.
But if the Bitcoin's lost, the Bitcoin's lost.
Yeah. And yeah, it's not something you immediately think about.
And it's, oh, well, yeah.
150, what did I read the other day?
150,000 Bitcoin have been bought by corporations so far this year and only 20,000 have been mined. So the supply shock that is about to come is just incredible. And I think like I do continue to hold the belief that I hope for the sake of society, I hope that it happens insanely fast so that people are forced to make a decision as opposed to slowly grinding and grinding and grinding.
because then you can always like talk yourself out of it.
But if it's like, oh, life or death now,
I need to make this choice,
then I think people will do the right thing
and rip the Band-Aid.
I know that's a bit of a tangent,
but it was just something that was top of mind
that I was thinking about.
You know, it is becoming very apparent
that the number of buyers exceeds the number of sellers,
even though that's not certainly reflected
in the price of the last two months or month and a half.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think somewhat of it.
Well, I think we're going to mark the price of Bitcoin.
This is the movie coming out, Killing Satoshi, right?
You see that in 2026, there's a new Hollywood,
there's a new Hollywood level flick called Killing Satoshi
that's going to be popular in the theaters.
To tie it back to transitional justice, reparations,
You asked about symbolic recognition, acknowledgement.
I think in reading a bit on the side about transitional justice, like art and poetry and theater, things like this are an essential part of an essential part, but often play a vital role in transitional justice and getting a society to come to terms with atrocity, genocide, things that happen.
And I think that even within Bitcoin, too, like the role of art has heretofore not been as great as it could be.
There's just like references to Bitcoin within a movie, within a song, stuff like that.
But there hasn't been, there's been some Bitcoin sculptures that are nice.
But like the role of Bitcoin, or the role of art rather, and, you know, all of the modalities of art, poetry, music, theater, movies, etc.
I think are going to mark an important part of the continued adoption of Bitcoin.
And, you know, I don't think it's going to be a Band-Aid come off moment of skyrocket.
it's going to be like increasing infusion into the popular culture to where people hear more about it,
not from some talking head on financial news about the price of Bitcoin.
But they watch a movie, hopefully like Killing Satoshi, which hopefully is not terrible and hopefully doesn't have a bunch of misinformation in it.
I think they need to hear it from the comedians.
Those are like those comedians are the bellwether as they, you know,
they've always meant to be the bellwether of absurdity in order to shine or, you know,
show a mirror back at the ridiculousness in society.
And they were very suppressed for a decade and canceled, you know, and forced out.
I will say as a consumer of quite a bit of comedy, most of the comedians are still making
fun of Bitcoin.
Some are not, but most of them still don't understand it.
Yeah.
They, you know, it's the crypto bro thing that they talk about.
which we had the discussion at breakfast the other day about the difference between the Bitcoiner and the Crypto Bro, which is a very big difference.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, for sure.
The Bitcoiner, like that's also the next stage of Bitcoin's adoption is separating the Bitcoiner from all of those other affinity scammers,
the Crypto Bros and the people that want to latch on and come in under the like, yeah, guise of.
So, but, well, I think that's pretty much I've said all I had to say and much, much more.
So.
Same.
It was a joy.
All right, guys.
Have a good one.
Sal, thanks for your excellent.
That was an excellent article.
Yeah, I would have said that, too.
I began.
I began by saying this essay has a wordy title.
I'm dimming the.
As soon as I said it, I was like, oh, shit, man.
It was an excellent.
The title was good and well suited for the audience, which is academic.
And the essay was good.
I just want to be on record saying that I liked it.
And he's read Softwares.
God bless that man.
Absolutely, man.
Good work.
All right.
Konnichiwa.