First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,
and just like we do with magicians, we typically ignore them.
But at some point, the absurdity of the new thing falls away
as the absurdity of doing it the old way becomes obvious by comparison.
If I had a choice, why would I use money whose buying power, at best, is cut in half every 10 years?
Why would I use money which can be taken from me if my political ideals do not align with those in power?
Why would I use money whose availability is determined by the whims of a dozen non-elected officials
making decisions based on metrics they adjust to fit the narrative they want to disseminate?
At a certain point, these questions stop becoming academic and start to become a matter of survival.
And it becomes clear that the survival of the old system is at odds with the survival of your right to dream,
to own a home, feed your family, to pursue your God-given talents.
It is unclear which stage we are currently at with Bitcoin,
likely because it differs depending on who you ask and where you are.
One thing is clear though, those who benefit most from the old system will do the most to
maintain control and will become more and more desperate as the outcome becomes more and more
obvious. There is a war being waged across the globe. It is a battle for attention and assault
on liberty. The weapons are algorithmic, the payload is propaganda. And the only way to win
is not to fight, to exit the battleground and move to a higher domain, to take the cumulative
value of your life's work and escape to a place of peace. In that regard, today we discuss chapter
eight of Natalie Smolenski's The Satoshi Papers. This article is by Ovik Roy, and the title is
Then They Fight You. Grant, tell me what you learned. We're going to learn together here. So
thank you for that introduction, Lucas, to set the stakes. We have the stakes out there. We kind
of know what they are. If you live in the United States today, if you live among mounting national
debt as we have for so many years. You know the stakes, but Then They Fight You. That's the title
of today's essay. We're going to get a summary out so that we all have the facts and arguments
on the table so we can discuss them from a place of knowledge rather than just kind of speculation.
This essay by Ovik Roy is a meditation on that phrase, Then They Fight You. Ovik is the founder
and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, director of the Texas
Bitcoin Foundation.
And then I could keep reading one of those people whose kind of, you know, backstory looks
like just an incredible set of accomplishments and current story to follow him on Twitter
A-V-I-K, I believe it is at A-V-I-K.
Then they fight you.
So Lucas read that whole phrase, first ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, then you win.
And Ovik knows that that's from Mahatma Gandhi, kind of disputed, but that's where it's the
provenance of that phrase that we hear so often in the Bitcoin realm.
This essay unpacks that, didn't they fight you?
There are three potential ways Ovik thinks that the U.S. government will respond to monetary
collapse.
So in this essay, he first kind of lays out where we're at, where we're going.
And then once we get there in 2044, which is kind of the tipping point in this framework,
what the U.S. government does to respond.
three ways. A restrictive scenario where the U.S. attempts to aggressively curtail economic
liberties. A palsied scenario where there's kind of partisan paralysis that prevents the U.S.
government from doing anything, either pro or con, either to kind of damn the destruction and flood
of the U.S. kind of monetary currency, the value of the dollar. And the final one, the munificent
scenario, which is where if you are in the United States and a citizen or a citizen of the world,
you have to hope that we're moving towards where the U.S. assimilates Bitcoin into its monetary
system and returns to a sound fiscal policy. So those are the three scenarios we're going to look
at. In this essay, as I mentioned first, Ovik starts off giving what is going to lead up to
one of these three scenarios, which is kind of the coming fiscal and monetary crisis.
We're in 2025 now.
The author notes in 2024 the interest on the federal debt exceeded for the first time spending on national defense.
He has a bunch of other indications, projections, which you're very likely familiar with if you kind of follow the decline of the dollar in our present age.
For example, the CBO Congressional Budget Office optimistically predicts that debt will be 139% of GDP in 2044, I believe.
Currently, it's 99%.
With more realistic predictions, though, Ovik thinks we're going to get to 288%.
So we're going to imagine then that Bitcoin rises as it has as this economic crisis continues to rise as well.
So the rise of Bitcoin is going to be concomitant with kind of the collapse of the dollar.
That's the direction we've been heading if you look at trends.
And if you follow those trends out, that's the direction we're going.
Ovid then estimates that Bitcoin at the tipping point in 2044 hits 1.5 million per coin.
and by 2044 as well, most people have grown up with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has matured.
People are familiar with it.
It's just like any other reserve asset.
Meanwhile, you've had the depreciation value of the dollar.
Maybe we have extreme fiscal austerity attempts to cut entitlements and welfare.
The Fed raising interest rates to increase demand.
And then if they raise above 30%, OVIC says, causing the markets to crash.
so these are kind of all the indicators again it doesn't matter which specific indicator you look
at the the important part for this essay and for i think everybody considering the future of the
united states and generally the world under its current monetary regime is the way we're going
is not sustainable and what happens when we get to the point that that becomes manifestly obvious
three one of three scenarios as kind of a u.s government response ovic thinks as i mentioned
at the beginning. The first one was the restrictive scenario. That is financial repression,
the government forcing people to hold on to a weak currency. Very common throughout history.
You look at this in broken money, Len Alden went into that. Just how common it is cannot
be understated. Price controls, capital controls, confiscatory taxation, those are the norm
when the currency begins to decline, not some aberration.
Price controls.
Ovik notes that the Roman emperor Diocletian imposed caps on goods,
and then he blamed the unprincipled and licentious person
who thinks greed is a certain sort of obligation
and ripping off the fortunes of all as kind of a reason to put caps
on the price of goods and services.
Nixon also put a cap on wages, or rather he froze wages and prices for 90 days,
And he, just like Diocletian, blamed, in his case, money speculators, throwing the blame off anything other than the debased currency and the inflating, in Nixon's case, dollar when you try to go off the gold standard.
So price controls, capital controls, that's when the government attempts to prevent the flight to a stronger ledger in the way that Alden framed it from one currency to another or for a reserve asset.
FDR did it with Executive Order 6102, prohibiting Americans from owning gold, bullion, gold certificates, and forcing a surrender of gold at a fixed exchange rate.
Argentina's done that. China still does it in a very authoritarian way.
And this was a really surprising part in the essay, one of the things I want to highlight because it's astounding.
And it's also just such an indicator.
The IMF in 2022, Ovik notes, harbinger of things to come, the IMF revises its institutional view of capital controls.
It was opposed to that, right, because that's a sensible monetary perspective and just like the freedom and liberty perspective.
But then in 2022, they changed their institutional view, saying that capital controls are appropriate for, quote, managing risk in a way that preserves macroeconomic and financial stability.
In a restrictive scenario, then, we get to that tipping point where the U.S. dollar is collapsing, Bitcoin is rising.
In a restrictive scenario, the U.S. imposes capital controls, maybe price controls, maybe confiscatory taxation, maybe at $1 million per Bitcoin, the point where there's more Bitcoin billionaires than fiat billionaires.
they began to impose hefty capital gains tax on Bitcoin.
As another harbinger, Ovik notes that Janet Yellen,
the Treasury Secretary under Biden,
I did not know this either,
had floated the idea of an 80% tax on crypto gains.
And then, of course, Warren had also floated
an even more incredible idea of unrealized,
of taxing unrealized capital gains.
It's just unprecedented, most likely unconstitutional.
So in this restrictive scenario, there's all these possible price controls, capital controls, confiscatory taxation, ways that the U.S. government can, out of enmity, resentment, or just the felt need to redistribute Bitcoin wealth and try to bolster the dollar, can engage in all these forms of financial repression.
And Ovik also notes, if you think that this is just a left wing thing, he mentions the U.S. Patriot Act passed by the Bush administration in relation to the war on terror, but also increasing AML, anti-money laundering and KYC, know your customer requirements.
Things that now can easily be kind of weaponized or just used in a restrictive scenario.
So in the restrictive scenario, then we see the end of America's exorbitant privilege.
This is a common phrase that's been used to denote the U.S.'s ability to loan money in a currency that it can print, essentially, so that it can pay off its loans by just printing more.
When that ends, so much of the U.S.'s monetary, not just privilege, but monetary power and then military power also goes with it.
In that scenario, if the exorbitant privilege ends, then U.S.'s sphere of influence declines.
The world becomes a multipolar world.
Maybe, Ovik notes, maybe we have more conflict in that scenario.
Maybe BTC refugees, in fact, can flee and do flee to places like El Salvador, Singapore, capital as well.
So that's the restrictive scenario. The decline of the U.S., the imposition of financial oppression, a scenario that we really don't want to occur, I would think.
The next one is the palsied scenario. This is kind of the middle ground to where we're going. The palsied scenario. This is kind of U.S. is unable to act against Bitcoin, not kind of out of a lack of will, but because maybe a lack of concerted will. There's partisan divide.
The action on legislation becomes, it's already very difficult to get anything through Congress.
And in the pausing scenario, that kind of continues.
Restrictive measures like a CBDC are not able to be passed.
Although, again, the pausing scenario is kind of a middle ground.
It's also not, we couldn't, that sort of partisan paralysis doesn't necessarily freeze up the regulatory apparatus.
So you have, for example, like ETFs, all the money, all of the Bitcoin locked into there as a regulatory target.
Centralized exchanges also subject to federal regulators more so than needing Congress to pass new legislation.
So in the palsied scenario, there's not the decisive financial repression you see in the restrictive scenario, but it's also not great.
The Bitcoiners and Bitcoin capital may not flee, but they're going to be caught up in the paralysis and caught up also in just the general decline of the U.S. economic situation.
In this scenario, you know, it's not completely hopeless.
The Bitcoiners are in a position to help.
They've held on to an asset that may be hope for the future.
The third scenario is the munificent scenario.
So this is best case.
This is where, of course, we hope we're going and where Obik thinks we should dedicate our resources to ensure we are going.
The U.S. in the munificent scenario, the U.S. responds to this 2024 rise in Bitcoin, collapse of the dollar by staying ahead of events.
Maybe there's a Bukali Malay type character who's elected in the United States, a dynamic pro-Bitcoin candidate who reduces U.S. debt burden, does something like peg the dollar to Bitcoin.
Ovik floats the idea of 67 sats to a dollar, which is 1.5 million a coin.
Maybe this dynamic candidate cuts entitlements in a way that does not hurt people through things like means testing and encouraging innovation and competition among providers.
And then when hopefully the situation stabilizes, we reset. Social security is backed by Bitcoin and then move forward in a world where the dominant monetary regime is freedom money.
And the U.S. is then poised to continue, maybe not continue, maybe for the first time, really truthfully expounding on ideas of liberty and freedom around the world.
China, again, if it continues with its authoritarian political regime, not likely to adopt freedom money.
The U.S. then, in the munificent scenario, really coming out on top.
Giving history, just giving what has happened historically when the monetary ledger begins to crumble,
ovic thinks that the restrictive scenario is the most likely and he assigns um the least likelihood
to the munificent scenario history is not often in its outcomes munificent although the u.s has i
think a couple of times the u.s revolution um thwarted that and reset to a munificent timeline
so i want to stop right there to discuss those we're going to go on to discuss ovic's suggestions
of what can be done to put us on the munificent timeline, what we can do, what the U.S. should do.
But before we go there, Lucas, I want to talk about these three scenarios, the restrictive scenario,
the palsied scenario, and the munificent scenario. Where do you think we're going?
It would probably be unwise to assume that we're not going to follow the path of the past. I think
that the restrictive scenario is probably the most likely.
We know it's the most likely.
I think that Roy makes a good point
when he talks about that there, you know,
there's always going to be more have-nots
than there will be haves.
And so the have-nots have the same vote as the haves
in a democratic system.
Yeah, like the amount of Bitcoin distribution, I'll just get that on the table.
That was surprising to me.
The stats on, because we think about the U.S. dollar being very unequally distributed, and it is 1% has.
I think it was like 34.
Yeah, 1% of fiat holders have 34% of fiat wealth.
And I wouldn't say maybe not fiat holders because the 1% has diversified their assets, right?
But 1% of wealth holders hold 34% of fiat.
Within Bitcoin, though, it's worse.
It's 0.3% of wallets own more than 82% of all Bitcoin in existence.
So it's hard to interrupt there, but get the numbers on the table.
No, I thought about that too.
Yeah, so what that does, obviously, is it makes that 0.3% a massive target for the 99.7%, right?
But I don't think that's the proper way to think about it.
And when I think about it, I think, so what that number is, what the author is trying to tell us that number says is that there's an unequal distribution of Bitcoin.
Or maybe it's not what he's trying to tell us it says, but how people will interpret it.
But what I think about it is that if you look at the rest of the Bitcoin holders, the other 99.7%, that's more equal.
Like the distribution among them is far more equal than the distribution of the U.S. dollar among the other 66%.
Is that the case?
Yeah, because like most of the wallets are below that, you know, whatever, 10 below that.
Like I think it's like 10 Bitcoin or something like that.
And so I actually look at that number and I interpret it as, oh, there is – I actually think that there's more equality on Bitcoin.
And I know that when you first glance at those numbers, that's not exactly what you think.
But the way that I think about it is like, look, there's always going to be outliers. It's probably better that we have just a couple outliers. It's only 0.3%, right? So it's one, almost one fourth, one, you know, more than a, less than a third of the amount that holds 34% of the fiat money.
everybody else is a lot more equal and the way that i look at bitcoin adoption we know that it
happens primarily among those who need it and so the ones that need it are the one that suffers
the most under the old system so you kind of have this interesting accumulation accumulation mechanism
where those that are least privileged that have the least amount in this system adopt it before
are the ones that have the most. And because the price goes up, there's kind of this equalizing
thing that goes on where, yeah, it kind of is going to equal out as the poor adopt it earlier
and the rich adopt it later. And then we do still have this to the side. Yeah, there are people that
adopted it very early and they took a huge risk and they took a massive jump. And yes, there's
some smart people there yes there's some people that were just trying to buy molly and uh and buy
drugs on the internet yes there's people that were just um happened to happen to explore it and find
it but um so now you're bleeding into the you start off saying that it would be unwise to
yeah think we're on the restrictive timeline but now you're bleeding into the munificent scenario
and thinking that bitcoin's going to be or is equally distributed enough among the um least
economically, you know, well off.
I mean, that begins to look like.
I don't think that they're, I don't think that they're, I don't think that's the same
argument.
I think that, I think that you can have equal, or I think you can have a more equal distribution
yet still have people that look to that 0.3% and want to take it away.
Yeah.
That almost like a fourth scenario I was thinking about which is I would say the munificent socialist scenario where you have the like the like unmade people who own under one Bitcoin go untouched
And then everybody else is subject to increasingly confiscatory taxation or something like that.
I'm not advocating or not advocating that scenario, but maybe that's the one of the timelines that's, you know, not it's munificent if you are of leftist orientation and you naturally think that like vast wealth accumulation should be redistributed forcefully by the state.
Yeah. What do you think we're in now? What if you were to look at globally or regionally as far as like the U.S., what what scenario are we in?
Then they've, I think we're in the, then they forgot about you stage.
So they laugh at you.
What is this?
They ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they momentarily forget about you when there's not price action.
Where it just starts to grind away.
Then they begin to fight you again.
Yeah.
So I think we're in that like kind of Bitcoin's out of news stage, which is like part of the,
then they fight you as maybe a series of skirmishes leading up to battles, right?
Do you think it's intentional?
I think it's intentional.
No, I don't.
Like intentional by who?
Like the world is seven, eight billion intentional actors.
Intentional by who?
I think that there is a concerted effort right now to depress the price of Bitcoin through.
Concerted by whom?
By capital accumulators, primarily in the U.S. government, whose goal.
I know that this starts to get complex, but we saw the precedent for it with Intel,
where the United States government basically forced their way into owning a significant percentage of this company.
And so you are, we have a precedent now for nationalization, like outright nationalization,
not the quiet nationalization like we had with the banking industry and the automobile industry,
but outright public nationalization of individual companies.
And so you think about so we've got like massive accumulation going on through like BlackRock and through strategy and other companies that there is now a precedent for the United States government to step in and say, hey, we own 10 percent of you now.
And thus we can now use that to back our dollar and spread our spread our stable coins around.
Right. It is possible the U.S. is playing, like, what do they say, a four-dimensional chess on the – because the Bitcoin reserve is kind of – people have been wondering what's going on.
You have this announcement, what's going on.
You know, the smart move would be to try to accumulate in a way that doesn't stimulate the rise to skyrocket upward.
Yeah.
So maybe the administration does have something brewing, in which case I'll hand it to you.
Maybe there would be something intentional to that.
I mean, I tend to think that markets, we ascribe intentionality to things that are not intentional because we are primitive animals and we see animal forms in the clouds.
That's kind of our evolutionary state of mind generally is to see patterns when there are none.
What is it, tricked by randomness, something like that?
Yeah, but no, that would be a potential scenario.
I can see that.
But is it never ascribed to malice?
That can be explained by incompetent.
But also or just like random atomic patterns for whatever, like swirls of matter or something like that.
Yeah.
But, you know, and the reason I say this is because I remember watching Howard Lutnick on Pompliano's show like eight months.
No, shit.
Oh, yeah.
A year.
That was before the election.
Before the election, right?
And literally lay this all out.
Like, oh, yeah, this is what we're going to do.
Like, we're going to accumulate.
We're going to nationalize.
You know, I think that the United States has a right to have warrant, have bonds, or have ownership in these companies.
You sell all that?
Yeah.
I listen to him.
Yeah, warrants.
Yeah.
Interesting.
I had to learn what warrants were because he kept saying it and I had no idea.
What are warrants?
Yeah, I mean, he literally, Lutnick basically spelled out all of this.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, I think I don't know what the opposite of don't ascribe to malice, what you can blame on incompetence.
But it's like don't ascribe to chance what you can explain by brilliance or by just somebody literally telling you their plans on a podcast.
That's what's happened, right?
People have been surprised when in the Trump administration they've done things that they've promised to do,
which maybe is surprising for politicians when things happen that they plan.
But I don't know where that places us, though, on the restrictive palsied or munificent timeline.
Again, maybe it's setting up a form.
It sets us up for a possibility of financial oppression, right?
A capital control or a seizure, rather, of these sort of bottlenecked or contained –
you contain enough Bitcoin into a monetary vehicle like an ETF.
It becomes easy to do that Intel 10% take on it.
Yeah, well, because I think right now it feels like the real driving force is to promote the use of stable coins.
And stable coins are easily confiscated.
They are dependent really upon Bitcoin.
You know, you can't you can't blow these stable coins out of the water in terms of your ability to issue new debt if you don't have something backing it.
There's I don't remember who it was, but oh, it was the the thing that we saw the Russian at the Russian analyst that was talking about this.
Like, look, the United States goal here is to take all this debt, the thirty seven trillion dollars of debt and throw it into a crypto cloud and then disperse that debt over the entire world instead of keeping it in the United States through the use of stable coins.
And, yeah, that works because right now everybody wants to have – everybody thinks they want to have stablecoins that are backed by the U.S. dollar.
But comparatively speaking, if the battleground is between a U.S. dollar that's backed by U.S. treasuries, that's backed by violence, and the other side is a BRICS sort of CBDC that's backed partially by gold, which the BRICS nations have been accumulating gold at rates never before seen.
then you're going to see the value of the U.S. dollar decline precipitously compared to gold simply because of the hardness of gold.
And so you have to back that stable coin with Bitcoin.
And so how do you do that?
Are you going to seize it through the nationalization of these companies?
Are you going to issue a new 6102?
What is your mechanism going to be?
And are you going to try and put everything under the purvey, everything under the idea of a previous ruling, which, you know, you mentioned the, you know, unprecedented Elizabeth Warren trying to tax unrealized gains on cryptocurrency.
But there is a precedent, and the precedent is simply real estate taxes, that we have unrealized gains that are taxed on real estate values.
Bitcoin is –
In the form of –
So when you – every year your house is assessed, like the value of your house is assessed, and you pay taxes based on the assessed value.
So it's a type of unrealized –
So these are – that's an unrealized gain, right?
You can say that.
Yeah, I mean, there's really no other way to say it. Like, that's exactly what that is, is that you buy a house for $100,000 and five years later you're getting taxed on $400,000, right?
And so you end up rebuying that house multiple times over the time that you own it. And Saylor does a good job of explaining this, like the amount that it costs to own a house over time because of the inflationary nature of assets that are harder than money that people flee to.
If you can tax that without like it's just sitting there, you didn't sell the house, you didn't realize a gain, but you're being taxed on it literally every single year.
We do have a precedent for that.
And so that puts us in. To go back to the original question that we're kind of posing each other, I do think that the restrictive scenario is most likely. And it feels that even though there's a lot of talk about other things going on, I feel like it's still what we're in. It's still what we're in.
Yeah. Yeah. The restrictive scenario seems psychologically. You said feels like the way and that's something we're kind of operating on feels here. It's kind of what you have to do. And also just because like when you're predicting the future, you're predicting we're doing some psychohistory in Asimov's terms. And that's I as I feel that that's kind of like predicting the accumulation of psychological states of all of the actors or something like that.
And like envy and resentment is such a deep-seated part of the human condition.
And that seems to like the darkness of the restrictive timeline is like from direct from the dark heart of resentment.
You just see the those lead that leads to that one.
The Munificent scenario to the extent it doesn't channel, to the extent it relies on like altruism and doesn't channel self-interest.
You know, that's going to be tough to get us there because the munificent scenario needs to be fueled also by a psychologically powerful motive to get us there.
Which, you know, people, patriotism could be something like that.
Or if enough people are invested in Bitcoin and you begin to channel self-interest and enough people were able to kind of get out of our partisan morass and maybe there is something to that.
But I feel restrictive is most likely, but I want to make a case for the munificent scenario.
Yeah.
Please do.
So is patriotism advantageous for the munificent scenario or is it also what we will call upon in order to maintain a restrictive scenario?
Yeah. Patriotism, as we've seen, is kind of a weaponizable sentiment with like the Patriot Act. That's one of the right wing forms mentioned as a right wing form of the restrictive scenario. And so that occurs when you have an attack on the U.S. You have some it wasn't a false flag event, but you could in the future see.
How do you know that?
We won't go down that rabbit hole today.
You can see like a false flag event in the future that leads to like we see right now.
And I don't know enough about UK politics to opine.
But, you know, this seems some are saying that there's this backlash against immigration.
And now they're using that to fuel a national digital ID.
And so there could be something like that in the future where some other issue is used to fuel a restrictive measure that also has the ability to be a form of monetary repression.
And then patriotism could definitely be harnessed.
You know, the U.S. is attacked by a foreign enemy.
So we have Patriot Act 2.
And then that includes also hefty AML and KYC stuff that becomes a way to monetarily repress the people.
Yeah. And right wing, I think we need to make the distinction that right wing is not conservative. Right wing is, I mean, if you look at the actions of right wing, it's effectively socialism.
You know, that's what the Patriot Act was, was a very socialist, oppressive, 1984-esque type of government oversight that does not fall in line with conservative, I don't believe, politics.
That it doesn't stand for individual rights or liberty or the ability to have freedom to transact or freedom of movement or anything like that.
it's just cloaked in the name right wing. And it just so happened to be that there was a,
you know, Republican in office at the time. But, you know, that Republican's vice president was
one of Kamala Harris's biggest supporters. Right. And so is right wing really any more a
conservative? Like, they're just bad nomenclature. Yeah. Well, they're just there. The right and
left wing are different wings of the same damn house of this socialist house or this, you know,
this whatever you want to call it, but this government oppressive house that they they seem to they seem to want to achieve the same ideals just through different messaging.
Yeah. And for the most part, like so going back to Smolenski's introduction, the Satoshi papers, I mean, it's a play on the Federalist papers.
And so the values that unite this anthology are not left or right wing, but supposed to be a throwback, an attempt to go back to the values of the founding.
And like she talked to me in the introduction about the Bank Secrecy Act and all this legislation that seems to have and maybe does have some sort of like good impetus and need to regulate in a way that seems good.
But it always ends up, you know, imposing some limitation that we would think based on our conception of the founders that they would find to be very egregious.
Yeah.
There's some movie, I can't remember what it was, but I just remember this line in it where they say that a person is smart, but people are stupid. And, you know, the masses will move in a direction that otherwise individuals would not do alone because they can be caught up in the moment and swept away by emotion and these words like patriotism and freedom and whatever.
It's interesting. Like the mob, when we call it the mob, yes, that's the thing of passions. But then we think there's two ways to aggregate persons. There's the mob and the market, right?
Yeah, and the hive mind, right?
But I'm saying like the market, the outcomes aren't as emotional or devastatingly bad as the mob.
Like the mob lynches people.
The mob cancels people.
The market, people then have to put their money where their mouth is.
And so they become like less likely to try to replace objectivity with emotion because they're thinking of their own futures and their families and their well-being in a way that they – when you're part of the mob, you momentarily forget that.
and then act out, you know, the, like the Girardian satanic impulse or whatever of trying to scapegoat somebody.
Yeah.
You get caught up in the moment.
Yeah.
But the skin in the game of being in the market reveals your true preferences and it reveals your true intentions.
We hope so.
I'm not to, to what, what's the opposite of eulogized?
I don't know.
God, it's a word for you.
As opposed to like when somebody dies, you have a eulogy and this is like when somebody's born.
Right. There's some word when you say a bunch of good things about something. There's probably a lot of words for that. And anyways, not to do that about the markets. Markets can also probably have bad outcomes. The palsied scenario. So, you know, restrictive, munificent. I mean, there's a good case for the palsied scenario, too, because like we see partisan like deadlock. That's the nature of the game in Congress.
That's why we have like the executive Trump doing all these things through executive orders, right?
Because you're not going to count on Congress to pass anything.
So what do you think about the policy scenario?
So that's the one if I was when you ask me, like, what's the most likely?
I think it's the restrictive.
But when I look at the environment that I see right now, the policy scenario is the one that.
If you try to consider everything, you're like, well, there's a lot of advancement going on in certain states that is moving Bitcoin in one direction.
There's also a very entrenched and incredibly well-capitalized opposition that is doing what they can to halt that.
So the palsied scenario is kind of the one that the lived experience kind of gives you with, you know, obviously we have a democracy that is created for the purpose of not moving quickly, for the purpose of checks and balances.
Right. And so we live in a system that is literally designed for that palsied scenario that we would rather do nothing than do something wrong or do something right.
Possibly. Yeah, I think the palsied scenario is incredibly feasible.
And it's the system is designed for the palsied scenario, I guess is what I would say.
Yeah. No. And I mean, I think you're right. You say lived experience. That's maybe where we were. You have in the Biden administration a different view on regulating ETFs and Bitcoin than you do in the Trump administration.
And one, yeah, where the regulatory apparatus is what is used to inflict pain on Bitcoin holders or the opposite, right?
And not law or legislation.
And so that's the policy scenario.
We just kind of stumbled forward with policy, unable to act.
And the dollar gets weaker and weaker.
Bitcoin does gain in value.
And so maybe bad for the U.S., not as bad as a restrictive scenario, like bad for us as a society that we can't get our shit together.
I mean, we kind of know that that's part of our national DNA, as you mentioned, but not the best, not the worst.
So, I mean, that's kind of a little promising.
The palsy scenario, when you mentioned like we may be in the stage of like then they forget about you.
Yeah.
Like that's kind of palsied too, where it's like, just whatever.
I'm going to put it out of my mind.
I'm not going to – we're going to do like what humans typically do with problems is we're going to try not to think about them and hope that they resolve themselves instead of taking action.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Or just like replace one problem with a sexier problem, like the one that's more exciting.
That's the culture wars all about. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
We're so easy. It's more emotional. Oh, there's this other thing over here.
You know, they're deporting people without due process.
Things like that. Yeah. That sees the national consciousness.
It's much more difficult to think about. We're going to bankrupt or we're going to have like this huge debt to GDP ratio in 2044.
We need to do something now. Yeah. Try to mobilize support for that.
I mean, we have a huge debt to GDP ratio right now.
Like that's the hilarious, like you look at it, it's like if you look 20 years ago, 20, no, 30, like close to 30 now, we had a surplus.
And then we had what we determined at the time was a huge debt to GDP ratio.
And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And we look at it kind of in terms of this relative like, oh, well, we're not as bad as Japan.
And so we must be fine because Japan still, you know, we have this survivorship bias where it's like, oh, they still have a flag.
It still exists.
There's still people that are alive there.
So Japan must be doing fine.
Yeah.
And, you know, A, that's really not the case.
Like in their economy.
Their economy is not doing well.
And B, the only reason that they are able to do that is because they are propped up by the United States government because they are the largest holder of U.S. debt.
And so you're not going to cut them off.
You're not going to hang them out to dry.
You're just going to keep pushing them further and further and further out onto the ledge in order to suck up as much of that as you can.
Yeah, so there's this there's this survivorship bias.
There's this relativity thing, you know, where it's like, oh, I weigh 300 pounds, but there's a show called, what is it, My 700-pound Life or 800-pound Life or 600 or I don't know what that is.
Yeah there been inflation in the amount of obesity you have to have to be like on a reality show Exactly Yeah Well yeah Like we talked about this you know it like you come back and I like oh I fit for America
Yeah.
You came back from Malaysia.
Nice job.
Yeah.
Like I'm fat in Malaysia.
Well, not Malaysia, actually.
People are kind of chunky there.
But if you go to like, yeah, Africa, like I'm fat for Africa, but I am ripped for Kansas.
Yeah.
You know?
And so it's all relative. And we can take that relative approach to the United States debt scenario and say, oh, yeah, we're doing just fine, just fine.
But the reality is that I think it's like no one has like only 2% of all countries that have ever gotten to this level of debt have continued to exist.
And the 2% is Japan.
Like they're that.
And then there's the caveat of like the only reason they're still around is because they're being propped up because we want to have a shit ton of military bases over there to keep an eye on China.
And so it's in our best interest to make them effectively a vassal state.
Right.
No, but I mean if we're in the then they forget about you state kind of stumbling forward in a palsied manner.
I mean there is the decisive event.
Maybe that's 2044.
But there's going to be some manifestations.
You know, we have symptoms of economic problems now, but maybe there's going to be a decisive event that makes that the forefront of the culture war.
Right. And then it replaces all other issues when people see that Bitcoin's at one point five million and the dollar takes like sixty dollars to buy a hamburger or something like that.
Yeah. So 1.5 million in 2044 seems like an awfully pessimistic view, not pessimistic, but it seems like a very low estimate.
If you look at the adoption rate and you consider the past growth, you know, that's only like a 12x from here.
And so that's something that could easily occur in a four year period.
Yeah. You know, especially as we're like we we've now there's this case that I actually think has a lot of merit. There's a case that the effect of the halving cycle is over. And the reason that that is over is because of the buying pressure from all of these Bitcoin companies, which is creating scarcity that didn't exist before.
where you've got like in on on a Monday, Michael Saylor buys three weeks worth of issuance.
Right. And he's one of now 160 companies that are doing that. Right. And that number of companies is
growing rapidly and their purchases are growing rapidly to where you now you see like Metaplanet
is taking advantage of the weakness of the Japanese currency, the yen carry. And they are
They're making larger purchases than strategy.
You know, this is a one hotel operation that is now buying four times as much per week as strategy.
And when they do that, then they're buying, you know, like they're literally buying a month of issuance at a time.
And so it is really only a matter of time until that supply shock truly occurs.
Because you've got, and especially when you look at, we're on the precipice of the inclusion of strategy and soon to be other companies into these, like the S&P 500 or into certain funds that instead of individual buys of their equity, you'll then have automatic buys, which will be like, that's a tidal wave.
Maybe that tidal wave occurs. Maybe the price action occurs in that way. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe the supply shock is just blunted by the gradual price appreciation or something like that. I think for Ovic's essay here, take your point that maybe it's a conservative estimate of Bitcoin's value, but maybe that just accelerates the timeline, right?
In any case, where we come to the fork in the road between restrictive, palsied, and munificent.
So it seems like we kind of both think restrictive, likely, palsied, we're already doing that, so likely.
How about the munificent scenario?
The munificent scenario is, like, I think in order to have that, that you have to admit defeat of the fiat system.
Like you can't continue on with this idea that they can coexist side by side.
And so I think that the possibility of that is just so incredibly low because the exorbitant privilege exists.
the veil would then have to be lifted where it is, you know, it is revealed and made clear to the world that this system only exists through violence, that it only exists.
I mean, that's revealed in all the scenarios, though, right?
I mean, it's not just a munificent scenario that has, I guess you're saying they have to accept that in order to proactively deal with it before it's happened.
So they're not put the decisive occurrence in the way the restrictive one is.
They kind of proactively in the events leading up to it began to move away from fiat without having yet collapsed.
Well, it's like, you know, OK, so it would be like playing poker and you're sitting there and you've got the largest stack of chips.
Yet you realize that there is no way for you to win the game.
and so the only way for you to win is to take your chips and cash out and go to a table that's fair.
And so I think that the likelihood of somebody doing that,
if you and I are playing poker and I've got all the chips, not all, but I've got most of the chips,
and I also, by the way, have the ability to create more chips whenever I want them
and you don't have that ability,
Yeah. It's really hard to convince me to leave that game because right now I have all the advantages and I can continue to play.
Yes, it is.
Yeah, I can continue to play.
Trenched interests.
And so the munificent scenario, I mean, we'll talk about, oh, we can move on to that right now.
But like what Obick thinks is going to be necessary to help us move toward the munificent scenario.
And yeah, entrenched interests are something that militate towards not having a munificent outcome.
I hope for it, though.
And I just want to say, you know, I made the case earlier that resentment is such a strong driver that psychologically it seems like the restrictive scenario is where human nature takes us.
But I just, I don't know.
You feel the vibe right now after Charlie Kirk's assassination, right?
Maybe you feel on whatever side of the vibe you're on.
But on the positive side of that vibe, there is a feeling that something can be done to change things, a feeling that we can build.
I feel like there's a building positivity or optimism despite the terrible event that occurred because of it, of course, in a way that people want to move forward in a way that's more positive.
And there's like a national optimism potentially that can come out of that if it's channeled in the right direction, I hope.
I think the public sentiment right now is this collective realization as more and more people are exposed. And I think you and I are both in this category where we weren't like fervent Charlie Kirk supporters or followers of his content.
But now, as a result of his assassination, his murder, we're seeing more and more of it. And we're realizing that there is a path, there is a way that you can engage with other people and be kind and be loving and be accepting of people and meet them on the field of discourse in a loving way.
And for so long, like that has not been promoted as an idea that is achievable.
And now we're like we're seeing an example of somebody who just lived this in such a beautiful way that it is.
I think you're right.
I think if you.
I think you feel public sentiment.
Yeah.
Having a collective realization of hope.
Because if all you do is read the culture war backlash or the culture war manifestation of the assassination, you just think inflammatory right wing figure, you know, was murdered. It's tragic for whatever. But if you didn't go back and look at what Charlie Kirk did in his videos, I was like, you know, I hadn't watched them before.
Even aside from the politics, they just represent, and we were talking about this yesterday, there's like certain norms of civil discourse are enacted that if one watches those videos, you can see the practice of steel manning.
You can see the practice of compassionately dealing with people from different backgrounds, genders, sexualities, things like that.
You can see the practice of giving other people time to expound a position. You can see the practice of trying to get people to breathe and lower their heart rate to begin to talk in a way that's conducive to civil discourse.
So, like, for me, apart from whatever politics were discussed, the fact of civil discourse is what it forefronts for me. And, like, that's, I think, the magnificent scenario. If civil discourse can be achieved, then that makes, you know, we get out of the policy scenario because we begin to be able to, oh, there's a bigger problem than the culture war left right on these issues.
It is like the, you know, all of our economic well-being, essentially, and the dollar is not sustainable and Bitcoin is accumulating in value.
It has these objective technological characteristics that we can harness.
You know, if civil discourse is possible and if that comes out of a certain martyrdom of a figure who tried to engage in that, then maybe that helps steer us towards a munificent scenario.
At least I hope it does, right?
Yeah.
Every concentration can be bettered through communication.
and that was charlie kirk's message is that when we stop talking to each other then we stop
um being able to coexist and at that point we we become combative towards each other so
yeah that's what the restrictive scenario is is a form of combat conducted through monetary
repression we're not going to talk about this we're going to take what you have um whereas
the munificent scenario is a sort of negotiation between the havers the people who have bitcoin
and then wanting to rebuild the U.S. system on Bitcoin.
So I feel like it's also an enactment of a sort of civil scenario.
And just like on the level where monetary oppression does depend on state violence to enact it,
you have to, if you're going to have confiscatory taxation,
you have to have the soldiers come in to make people do those forceful transfers when they don't want to.
I want to make the point that I think that all roads lead to the munificence scenario eventually.
But I do think that they're...
Yeah, I just like, I don't think that you can stop Bitcoin.
I think that it's been tried by.
But even the restrictive scenario says Bitcoin appreciates in value, right?
Yeah, but I still think that regardless of what approach you try to take, that eventually you end up in the Bitcoin world.
Like eventually we realize that there's no use for fiat.
If we push out these stable coins in order to continue to push out debt, then what we're going to do is we're going to continue to devalue the dollar relative not just to Bitcoin, but relative to other global currencies.
You end up in a restrictive world where there is Bitcoin.
Did you end up like in the cyberpunk future where people are evading?
For a short term.
Like the state actors become even more rogue warlords trying to steal from, you know, individual private parties.
And in the short term, maybe 50, 100 years.
I mean, what's short term, right?
Yeah, it's all relative.
Yeah, I mean, out of that, I think the magnificent scenario, part of that outcome is we can preserve the U.S. government, U.S. United States.
We can preserve the United States.
I don't know why that's a project we have.
Like, munificent is where we are relating that to good.
And I don't know why it's good to preserve.
I know this sounds like I don't know why it's good to preserve the United States.
Spoken like a true network society.
I had a note.
I wanted to bring that up with you.
I mean, I forget what exactly it was in relation to.
But, yeah, the munificent scenario says, I think implicitly there is something worth preserving.
And again, that's the whole – the Satoshi Papers is a reference to the Federalist Papers that the U.S. project is something worth preserving.
And so we – Bitcoin can help us do that.
It can help us get out of the monetary trap we've set for ourselves.
I think the idea of rights and liberties and Christian foundational values, I think that those don't need the continued existence of the United States government in order to survive.
I think that those truly are God-given and that they exist because they exist and that the United States government—
them in the middle of like China or Iran or something like that? Do they still survive?
Well, I don't think that again, like I don't think that the Chinese system survives. I don't I don't
think that the Chinese system survives in a world of Bitcoin. And I think that we have a
an analog to that. I think that we have a lesson from history that also comes from China
when they failed to adopt gold as the world reserve currency and instead kept on silver
and lost so much buying power versus the world that they entered a century-long period of what they call,
I think, the 100 years of tears or the 100 years of shame.
And I think that they're going to do that again.
Like, if they are going to ignore Bitcoin, the relative appreciation of gold versus silver during that period back then was,
yeah I don't know it was like it was like eight eight percent a year or something like that
if you think about Bitcoin where it's appreciating compared to these other
assets at you know 40 or 50 percent a year more then I think that you're just going to end up in
a scenario that's even more like you can't run that Chinese system if you don't have power and
if you don't have Bitcoin to power the system you can't run it like you can't run it on debt
So I just don't think that – I don't think that that –
We survived before Bitcoin.
We survived with Bitcoin as an alternate that other people don't want to get on that ledger and they're prevented from getting on a ledger through force.
That's how I feel.
I don't think that – I mean, Bitcoin is a great technology, but so is political violence.
So is like the violence of the state.
You have a relative – I just don't think that they – like I think that, again, like I talk about this a lot.
That kind of violence, it doesn't actually scale in a Bitcoin world.
It doesn't scale.
If you have people who self-custody, yeah, I can imprison you.
It scales with AI surveillance, right?
It scales with, there's other technologies that are also scaling as Bitcoin decentralizes.
There's centralizing tech that in the world, there's potential futures that are terrifying.
If I have self-custody Bitcoin, then you can take mine away and you can take, you know, you can beat it out of me and you can beat it out of a couple hundred thousand people.
But you can't beat it out of the world.
And there's always going to be more people that are trying to keep it for themselves than there are trying to go after it.
Not necessarily.
If there is mass extermination of people that hold Bitcoin by the state, there's going to be a lot less Bitcoin holders.
Well, if you, again, so then that's self-defeating. Like if you're going to kill those people, then what are you going to do? If you kill those people, then their Bitcoin disappears and it only makes richer the remaining people who hold Bitcoin.
It does make them more rich.
Not a lot of people, if you exterminate Bitcoin holders and say, if you do Bitcoin transactions and are discovered, we're going to kill you.
People are going to be like, I don't think I'm going to use this Bitcoin thing as much as I otherwise would.
I disagree.
I think that people recognize, like, I think that in those moments that we see that type of fear that's being played out, we also see the freedom.
And I think that we should never underestimate the ability of humanity to move in a direction of their own good as opposed to being led by people who are moving in a direction of bad that benefits a few.
I don't like – I know.
It may be optimistic.
I think it's very optimistic.
I don't see that.
I just don't see that those systems cannot survive because their ability to impart violence is dependent upon their ability to issue debt.
And if they can't issue debt because no one wants to buy it, and we're seeing this right now with the United States where the largest percentage ever of debt being issued is being purchased by the Fed because nobody wants to buy our debt anymore.
Yeah. So we're losing our ability to power violence through issuance of debt.
There was violence before debt. There is violence.
Yeah, but it was violence on like relatively speaking, it was violence on a minuscule scale.
I disagree. Genghis Khan slaughtered a large percentage of the world population.
He didn't need the fee. He didn't need fiat money to do it.
He wasn't issuing debt. He was just beating shit out of people through merit. Right.
That's all it takes.
But he was doing it in, like, you can argue, like, if it wasn't Genghis Khan, there would have been somebody else because he did the things that you should do.
He adopted the technologies of those people, right?
So somebody with potentially AI tech and drone armies, they can do this, too, or whatever.
I just, but in any case, let's make the case for the potential munificent outcome.
What could enable this type of outcome?
So Ovik does give us a set of things that he thinks could put us down the path of preserving the United States as a project, as a society, while Bitcoin also appreciates in value, preserving our ability to have entitlements like Social Security while also not destroying ourselves through debt.
So what can be done to help lead us to this munificent outcome?
I'm going to throw out some of these things.
We can discuss them.
He mentions, first, Bitcoiners need to recognize that lobbying is important.
One kind of reaction Bitcoiners have, a lot of Bitcoiners are very libertarian.
A lot of them want to stack sats, stick their head in the grass or the sand or whatever, like an ostrich.
And just kind of like, for me and my own, I'm going to buy a farm and get out of here or whatever.
But Ovik wants to say, nope, lobbying is very important.
Things like the Bitcoin Mining Council, Satoshi Action Fund, Bitcoin-specific lobbying specifically, right?
There's this crypto conflation that a lot of them want to do to like get crypto in on the back of Bitcoin.
Think tanks to kind of grow out the ecosystem of people thinking and talking about Bitcoin.
To grow the Bitcoin ecosystem as such, like through financial, not just financialization, like financial products, but getting people to use transactive Bitcoin.
So there's more people that there's like pro Bitcoin businesses, right?
Once you build up a third rail of businesses that also have Bitcoin, then they have their own interest in not wanting to have a restrictive scenario.
Like L2s, that also increases the amount of people who are invested in Bitcoin being a part of our economic system.
If there L2 products based on like lending borrowing tokenized securities or whatever then you have more businesses that are using Bitcoin in some productive way including miners as more L2s begin to in some way interact with the Bitcoin base layer
with a new product, transaction fees increase,
and then mining infrastructure builds out.
More businesses are in some way participating in the Bitcoin economy,
so it's less likely there's going to be this restrictive crackdown as such on Bitcoin.
Um, those are some of the things. Do you think that those things are good and viable and might lead us down a munificent path?
So I feel like I'm being difficult, but I'm not trying to be.
My stance on this is that the idea of lobbying, it assumes a hierarchical relationship where it's like we are assuming that we are down here and we are going to spend money and participate in what the world recognizes.
but we don't see in the United States as a legalized bribery system, which is what our
lobbying system is, that we're going to participate in that system and come at it from a level
of we're down here, we know you're up here, and we're going to give you money and ask
for scraps and ask for compromise.
And my position on that is that, and this is, by the way, this is Bologi's position
too, which is you have voice, exit, and loyalty.
where you can be loyal to the system, you can fall in line and be steamrolled by it.
You can voice in the system and you can try and lobby and fight for your interests.
Or you can pick up your chips and you can leave the game and you can go to a table that's a fair game.
Yeah, you can go to Malaysia if you want.
And you can wait for those other people to follow you.
And you don't have to go to Malaysia to do that.
All you have to do is buy Bitcoin.
And so the most effective form of lobbying is people exiting the system because then it leaves this gap where you can't like it continually decreases the size of that vacuum and that echo chamber of people that are making these rules.
That increases the size of the echo chamber.
If you have one side cease lobbying and go off to play with their Bitcoins in a corner, then you have one people talking to the legislators.
No, because more and more people leave.
Like, I mean, more and more people leave.
If only one demographic leaves, the Bitcoin demographic, then the anti-Bitcoin demographic is exceeded.
It doesn't grow.
Nobody's selling Bitcoin and joining the fiat system.
It's only moving in one direction.
But again, regardless, if those are the only people lobbying and talking to legislators and getting legislation passed, then even if it's shrinking, they're still the ones that control the laws, control the monopoly of violence.
And we don't want that.
And do you want Bitcoin to have friendly regulation if you want to not have to die on your farm because a drone army is coming to take its 90 percent unrealized gain on your crypto?
Then you want to talk to the legislators, right?
I don't.
You don't have to be a lobbyist. You recognize a poor job lobbyist without Lucas having to be a lobbyist.
I mean, that's one of the – like living outside the United States system, it becomes so clear that we have a legalized bribery system that benefits and reinforces the elite system to stay in place.
But it's good that we have a legalized bribery system because if you don't, you have an unregulated illegal system that is just based on bribes and corruption.
It's based on merit.
I mean, so if you think that all these –
It's based on power.
In what sense, I guess?
I mean –
I mean, you know, new generation cartels got more power than the old one.
And so they can take –
So if you want to live in a cartel-controlled society by all means, that's a libertarian paradigm.
We live in a cartel-controlled society.
A government is a cartel that has legal violence.
Right.
They're the same thing. They just wear suits.
Go to Mexico and live in Michoacan with like the level of violence.
Try to negotiate with them, try to lobby them, try to go to them and try to get some of their policies changed.
Like that's not going to work out. So, I mean, yes, the government is a monopoly on violence because throughout history you've discovered that just allowing violence to be controlled by private parties has not been good.
Is democracy perfect? No. Is the nation state perfect? Nothing is, right?
And so, I mean, you know, you can, if you want, stack sats privately.
You can, if you want, leave the United States.
Exit is always an option.
But I disagree with Bologi that exit is the answer.
I mean, it's good to have one needs to preserve always the option of exit, but it takes some combination of voice and loyalty to win.
Like loyalty is the first principle of any sort of like victory in politics or society.
One needs to be loyal to something bigger than themselves, bigger than Bitcoin even.
And that's something that, you know, we need to really preserve and not think that – I just think that a lot of – I used to be a libertarian.
I have libertarian impulses.
But to the extent that libertarianism tries to get us to a cartel-controlled society by saying that government is functionally equivalent to that, I vastly disagree.
What is bigger than Bitcoin?
Are you saying that the U.S. government is bigger than Bitcoin?
No, I'm saying things like belief in Bitcoin is one technological protocol that could fail or succeed.
The principles that one has that lead them to Bitcoin are more important than Bitcoin, like belief in freedom, belief in certain forms of freedom to exchange with others.
Family is more important than Bitcoin. Religion is more important than Bitcoin.
These like foundational birthright type of God-given values or God-given rights or something like that.
Liberties.
Culture is more important than Bitcoin.
Like society is more important than Bitcoin.
If there was a future where there was no Bitcoin, but there was like still functioning society or a future where you have your Bitcoin, but the world is a wreck and nuclear bombs have gone off or whatever.
To put a stark contrast.
There's many more important things than Bitcoin for sure.
Well, I didn't say more important. I said more powerful.
There's many more powerful things for sure, too.
It depends how you define powerful.
But the munificent road, though, doesn't, I don't think, depend on acknowledging that one way or the other, Bitcoin is the most powerful thing.
It just kind of acknowledges that for whatever reason, Bitcoin is monetizing for many reasons.
And it's monetizing as a scarce asset for all the reasons that it has.
people's ability to self-custody, to transact peer-to-peer and all these reasons.
And so how can we integrate that into society in a way that the restrictive outcome is unpalatable to most people?
Because like businesses are now pro-Bitcoin.
A lot of individuals are holders of Bitcoin or interact with it daily in some way.
They might not even realize because it's so woven into the financial system that the thought of regulating it becomes like a too big to fail, turn the bank's argument back on themselves, right?
I guess I just think about this as like, so my approach on social media, I remember in like 2017 or 18, I realized that because I used to be one of those guys that would go back and forth with people and like promote, oh, I'm going to put my ideas and you're going to hear your ideas.
And it would be over everything from politics to football.
And it was absurd.
And I got riled up.
Riled up.
That's what they do on social media.
Yeah.
And then I realized, I was like, okay, so there's three options I have here.
And one is, like, I can agree with them and I can give them my like and my retweet and my repost.
And I can say this and we can be on the side and I can signal that I'm with them.
Two is that I can fight them and that I can engage and turn it into this like where on your Facebook wall, there's 37 comments of you and one moron going back and forth.
And the third is that I can just – that was on KU Football, by the way.
Well, the you and one moron framework is pretty generous.
Yeah, that's two morons.
Two morons on social media.
If you're debating with a moron, that's a mirror right there.
And the third is that I can just like go outside.
Yes.
And so that I think like that's what I'm saying.
Like I think that I frame it in that type of way where to me the munificent scenario is a redefining of the capacity of the United States government where they return to the idea of what is a government actually supposed to do.
And I think it's there to defend property rights and it's there to defend borders. And beyond that, I don't think that it really has a whole lot of true – I don't think that it really has a whole lot of true responsibilities.
No, that's the Satoshi Papers project, too, is a government-backed accounting project.
and they benefit and the people suffer and see that the continuation of these things,
it only hangs us further out.
It only tightens the noose.
So, yeah, I think the munificent scenario in my estimation is like a top-down redefinition
of the United States government and what it does.
Yeah. I see what you're saying. You define munificent as total victory for your libertarian principles, whereas the author—
Not libertarian. Well, maybe libertarian.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying the author's definition of munificent is more open, where it's like kind of acknowledging you're still going to have political dissension on essential topics. Like, is an entitlement system a good system?
Like his is kind of a compromise. And we talked really about like how civil discourse is so important and then how that might be embedded in the potential of a magnificent outcome is just the ability to disagree with people but to still move forward to say I think entitlements are bad.
I think entitlements are a manifestation of like violence toward the individual because it depends on state power and its monopoly of violence.
But then to still work with people who are like, no, I think entitlements are necessary to protect the sick, the weak and the elderly, things like that.
So that's why OVIC at one point suggests that entitlements might – this is based on some research – might work themselves out better if they're means-tested and if there is competition among providers, which is kind of a pseudo-private system.
So maybe compromise is, you know, that's the core maybe of the project and the magnificent outcome doesn't kind of define itself based on total victory for any one political party or system or ideology, more so that we just don't utterly crash ourselves into the reefs of a dying currency and an attempt to staunch the bleeding through financial repression.
I mean, my dad's on Social Security right now, and I would certainly argue that the entitlements that he receives are not doing hardly anything to help the sick, weak, and elderly, of which he is all three.
You know, that it's this survivorship bias idea that, oh, because you get a check in the mail every month, that that is a good thing.
And again, we have to look at all of this stuff relative.
And the relative is that if you had been able to take that money and to put it into effectively any other investment, that you would be doing better than having participated in the Social Security system.
And that just because you get like it's the amount and the buying power of that is really what's determining it.
And, you know, right now it can pay for groceries and maybe gas.
Like that's about it.
So, yeah, I think that Ovik makes a really good point when he like, yeah, we maybe this gives us the power to renegotiate those systems.
means testing, I think is, you know, I continually go back to the, I think it's in the FFA motto or
one of those is like, I believe the future farmers of America. Well, it's not anymore.
It used to be, it used to be now. It's just, they just call it FFA. They literally took out
what the, what the acronym stands for, but it used to be, but in the, in the creed or the motto,
it's, I believe in less need for charity and more of it when needed. And so institutionalizing and
regulating and enforcing what is in one way seen as a charitable donation.
I think that the manifestation of that into the real world is that we end up,
the people that it's intended to benefit are the ones who end up suffering the most.
And so the means testing is, I think it's a great way, means testing, you know, where it's like,
hey, if you're rich, you probably don't need to get a social security check.
But if you're poor, maybe the rich people can help you out.
And I do kind of like that.
All right.
We've cured you of libertarians once and for all.
So we've got you a magnificent outcome as a sure word.
I just said maybe.
I didn't say that you go to prison if you don't do it.
I said that you can be encouraged.
If you can get a libertarian to maybe, I define that as total victory.
Because if you can get the ideologically pure and unsullied to sully themselves with a bit of the real world, it's a beautiful thing.
So I wanted to know one other thing, too.
pro-Bitcoin businesses.
What can we do
like day to day
to make this an outcome?
There's a very small thing
that all of us can do.
Our mutual friend,
Chris Winski, does this
and anybody can do it.
Next time you're at any business,
just the first thing you say
when it comes time to pay
is just say,
oh, can I pay in Bitcoin?
And they say yes or no.
And fine.
So maybe they say no,
but then they're curious.
Maybe it leads to a conversation.
And so if everybody
asks that question,
it's a simple question.
It requires no effort.
It's except for like you got to put yourself out there a little bit because you kind of like got to say maybe a weird thing in a social encounter.
And so it's difficult.
It's a little bit of friction, but it's something we can all walk out here and do today.
You get a haircut.
Can I pay in Bitcoin?
You know, something like that.
This is back to the Charlie Kirk thing, like the power of public discourse.
All we're trying to do is have a conversation.
And that it turns out that when you have that conversation, that that is more powerful than anything else that you could do.
So, and yeah, it's just, it's very simple.
It's very easy.
It takes nothing away.
You want to do it.
I'd rather pay in Bitcoin than I would in fiat.
Yeah.
You know, it's easier.
Now that I know how to use that system, I realized that it's 10 times, you know, it's
the difference between learning how to ride a horse and riding a bicycle.
One of them is a lot easier.
The bicycle is not going to kick you.
So, you know, it's not going to have a bad attitude.
It's not going to break.
Like, once you get on it and you write it, you literally never forget how to do it again.
So, yeah, you can just ask.
That's great.
The other thing I was going to say is that Ivan, Ivan Makadonsky, like, you can do what he does, which is like, I'm just going to go.
And I'm going to take your phone and I'm going to set it up for you.
And here you go.
And now you can do it.
No, and help people. I think that's what Chris does too. So say the conversation leads to no, but I'd like to. If you educate yourself enough to where you can help somebody set up some sort of rudimentary wallet, and then, yeah, you can pay on the spot. And so maybe that's the next thing we need to, Bitcoiners need to self-educate in how to have the easiest way to help another party set up and transact on the spot. How can you do that? And so just have that.
What would your choice be if you were going to set me up right now?
I'm done. I couldn't do it.
That's right. I'm a failure as a person and a Bitcoiner.
So when I say educate, when I say we, I'm always saying I.
Like we need to do something.
It's really just me trying to defeat responsibility.
This is like my blog, right?
It's like letters I write to myself.
Like I'm not writing a Substack post in order to educate other people.
I'm merely doing it in order to try and beat into my own stupid brain
these lessons that I want to know.
Yeah.
I'd use Strike.
That's the one I use right now.
strike or swan swan's really good and it's good you can like literally take somebody else's cell
phone in two or three steps have it on their phone in a non-invasive way something that they
can then control easy enough and then hand it back to them and this is where i'll abandon some
of my libertarian principles and i'll say that it's actually really good that we have these
platforms strike and swan and um because they make i i know that it's a hot wallet i know that
it's not self-custody but it it makes it easy for somebody to engage in that process and not
not lose it instantly.
Like the really, I can't remember what the comedian is.
Some comedian was famously gifted a thousand Bitcoin by Max Kaiser and then lost it.
Right.
And so he would be enormously wealthy now.
But if somebody set you up on strike and you had, you know, a thousand dollars in there
or on or on Swan, because they are these exchanges, even if you lose your password,
you're going to have access to be able to get back to it.
And so that is a vote.
I'm trying to put myself out.
I'm trying to move towards the center.
I'm trying to say that I support these companies
because what they're doing is they're making it easier
to onboard people into this environment.
Yeah, and Obik talks about that and talks about that in his podcast too.
He's not an anti-ETF person as some are.
These products are types of L2 solutions in a sense.
They're just like the layer is off the blockchain altogether in a way.
And so, yeah, I think they make it easy for otherwise people who would not be inclined or able.
I like it.
Yeah, I'm a fan.
Yeah.
So then they fight you.
Then Lucas and I fought.
Then we resolved it.
And we're now 100%.
You know, the munificent timeline, I think the takeaway for me is it's the only timeline.
You know, you don't live your life.
You maybe prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.
and hope is what your true effort and action is going for.
Again, like, that's one of the things
that I really took away from the Charlie Kirk assassination,
seeing what one person can build
and the change that they can have,
aside from, again, any sort of political views involved therein.
It's just that if you hope for a better future,
the possibility to enact that future
is much more within our grasp than we suppose.
Suppose. So, yeah, don't don't let percentage chances. It's not over till you're dead and we're not dead yet.
Yeah, you live in a world that is the creation of your own mind. You know, your perception is your reality and what you believe will happen will happen. And so you have the opportunity to participate in not just the future, but in this very moment right now in an optimistic manner.
And you can look at it as good things are going to happen, and that's going to make you more likely to take the action that leads to good things.
Or you can look at it as bad things are going to happen, and that's going to make you more likely to take the action that leads to bad things.
So, yeah, I do.
I believe in the munificent scenario.
And I love that it's your view as well.
I think that's fantastic.
Well, let's do it, man.
All right, let's get out of here.
We're going to go back to the Then They Forget About You part and hit end on this and forget about it.
Go back to living our lives.
Sounds good.
Have a good day.
Yeah, you too.