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Hey, welcome back. So Lucas and I today, we're going to finish off our discussion of Lynn Alden's broken money, why our financial system is failing us and how we can make it better.
this caps i don't know six weeks or something of conversations on this and it does tie everything
together this final portion um my book has the tatters of that shows that reading it has
discolorations i don't know why it's a pink discoloration some sort of nameless fluid which
will remain nameless um but it's showing the wear and tear so we're going to move on from it after
this but i'm happy that we get to talk about it and summarize the whole work and its significance
So part six, the final capstone portion, is financial technology and human rights.
There's going to be three chapters that comprise that.
I'll summarize that.
But before, so as we usually do, we're going to give a quick summary of the state of things
up till now, the book till now, put everything in context, and then Lucas and I are going
to discuss it in more granular detail.
So a quick summary of the book up until chapter six, a very short arc of this book, just to
give what we're going to talk about context.
You can listen to any of our past conversations, of course, for more detail on this.
But a quick arc of the book is the nature of money is not as any particular thing that we have used as money.
It's not shells or gold or banknotes or even credit.
But the nature of money is as the ledger itself, that thing that we used, whatever it is, to record stored up value and to note the transactions of that value that occur between us.
banks develop because the thing that we were using to kind of record the state of the ledger
gold was kind of the culminating instance of this that ended up being very slow and difficult to use
in an increasingly kind of international economy difficult to move it around difficult to authenticate
for day-to-day transactions so people preferred to have banks maintain a ledger for them this
distances the ledger from the underlying substance used to record the ledger.
We then have an even bigger problem for gold.
The age of telecommunications occurs.
This is the final nail in the coffin, essentially, for gold as a monetary standard, because now
transactions could be done at near the speed of light.
The exchanges of information that we do to note that we're going to exchange something
of value.
But the actual exchange of value, the settlement of that transaction when it was gold, occurred at a very, very slow pace.
So their transaction and settlement, there became a speed gap between those in the telecommunications age.
People initially began to deal in abstractions still based in gold, like a claim for gold, a piece of paper that said, I'm worth X amount of gold and redeemable in gold.
And then banks circulated these and recorded these on their ledger.
But with time and the speed of telecommunications, gold eventually drops out of the picture entirely and we enter into the fiat era.
Our money is backed by nothing and is based only on notations on a flexible ledger ultimately controlled by a central bank.
The flexible fiat ledger has many problems.
The book discusses them in detail.
For example, it leads to constant inflation of the currency as governments secretly tax people by printing more money and thereby draining value from savings without kind of angering people by explicitly taxing them.
This also, the fiat monetary system, leads to increasing speculation as people continually seek to leverage that empty credit in order to exchange it for scarce real-world assets like real estate.
in this story all these problems develop the entropy of the fiat ledger is described in detail
by alden but technology doesn't stop we have this kind of interregnum period of the fiat monetary
system but now we have new intervening technology if speed gives us the fiat system that we now have
what is our what our new technology is going to give us specifically the internet and encryption
When you combine these, do we get some sort of new monetary order, some sort of new ledger?
So Alden describes two primary contenders for Internet native money.
One is Bitcoin, a decentralized ledger hard capped at 21 million Bitcoin and secured by real world energy.
And the other one is our CBDC, central bank digital currencies, which are centralized ledgers, which kind of continue the fiat abstraction and financialization of everything, but add the ability for additional control and surveillance by the government.
That brings us up to the last part of this book, which, again, is financial technology and human rights.
We're going to see the importance of those things and why Bitcoin emerges between, you know, between CBDCs and Bitcoin, why Bitcoin is the one that is going to help us preserve human rights.
So there's three chapters here.
The first one talks about privacy.
um in the past privacy was ensured because it was physically hard and costly to surveil people
you had to follow them around and stuff like that and in the past physical bearer assets were used
as money like gold which you know that was the entirety it was trend it was the value was in
the object and you gave that and you completed the transaction and settlement at the same time
gold shells these types of things they're private when you give somebody that they don't know you
don't have to tell somebody else why you gave a third party gold. Cash is also private in the same
way. You can pass someone $50 without the government knowing about it. But now people
mainly hold money in banks, which people are encouraged to do so by inflation. If you don't
have your money in a bank, if you just have cash under the mattress, it's continually losing its
value. In addition, governments encourage this transfer of money into bank accounts. France
banned cash transactions over a thousand euros. Germany required background check for gold
purchases over 2000 euros. So governments are encouraging people to put money in bank accounts
because bank accounts allow for government surveillance. In the past, we've talked about
the Bank Secrecy Act. Transactions over $10,000 have to be reported to the government. There's
various ways in which bank accounts just centralize our money. And of course, the banking system
ultimately is under the surveillance of the government via the central bank of whatever
nation maintains that central bank. But now technology, in addition, technology is enabling
mass violation of privacy over time, the way in addition to bank accounts, other technology has
developed. So we can't expect laws to protect our privacy, because it is the government that leads
to the encroachment. And Alden kind of gives a timeline of justifications that the government
has used to encroach on privacy via new technologies. In the 70s and 80s, we have the
war on drugs. A new technology comes out, pagers, and there's a moral panic because drug dealers
are using pagers. And so the government institute credit checks for people that want to buy pagers.
In the 2000s, there's the war on terror. And of course, there are many different,
We have the Patriot Act, many different infringements. Alden discusses Edward Snowden's leaked information from the NSA in 2013, revealing that the government had the ability to tap or obtain email, video and voice chat photos, social networking details, that there were secret courts and unclear protections for American citizens in this process.
And programs like this still exist, still a relic of the war on terror.
Also, she notes, there's client-side surveillance, things that were intended for military surveillance, military usage, but ended up being turned on civilians.
Things like Pegasus, a mobile phone spyware app created by an Israeli cyber intelligence firm that can covertly spy on a target cell phone, including utilizing the microphone and camera.
Purportedly, this has developed to monitor terrorists.
Now it's frequently deployed against activists, human rights advocates, pro-democracy advocates, and authoritarian countries.
In the 2020s, then, we now have, as an excuse for the government to encroach on privacy, kind of wars against trafficking and suspicions of foreign alignment.
Ah, this person is a Russian asset, something like that.
In the 2020s also, and earlier, China has turned surveillance into an export.
Domestically, we've talked about they require QR codes in certain places to move around the country.
They have facial recognition that allows for monitoring of civilians.
They have a social credit system and automatic bank freezes, things like kind of a minute control and surveillance made possible by technology.
And China is now exporting this, Alden says, internationally. They're the world's largest exporter of surveillance tech. She notes that, and this is very interesting, this is actually part of their Belt and Road initiative.
We talked about that in past chapters, the Belt and Road Initiative being China's attempt to kind of duplicate neocolonialist monetary practices like the kind of Western bloc uses through the IMF and World Bank predatory strings attached lending to developing countries to get them hooked and to extract value.
China does that through the Belt and Road Initiative. And one of the things, one aspect of that is they subsidize and encourage the spread of surveillance tech to other countries.
So in this way, the government is not something you can trust. Historically, it's encroached on privacy with various pretexts. Alden also notes you can't trust corporations, of course.
we have this idea of surveillance capitalism. In the 2000, 2010s, we enter what you could say is
the age of surveillance capitalism. This is a term that was popularized by Shoshana Zuboff
of the Harvard Business School. Under surveillance capitalism, services seem to be free that we're
getting online, but that's actually because our user data is being harvested and monetized by,
Of course, Facebook, Twitter, we're all aware of this, to create targeted ads.
There's extensive monitoring, even by our physical devices, a Siri, Alexa, and then now everybody has a ring camera on their door.
You know, everybody's taping everybody.
Massive amounts of data being collected about ourselves, by ourselves, through corporations.
There's been countless data breaches of both corporations and government.
All then goes historically through many of them.
You know, it's the extent of data breaches is always something that it's very jaw dropping to read about from both whole scale government breaches in Brazil to credit bureaus leaking everybody's information.
It's pretty massive, the amount of data that has wound its way to the dark web, all of our data.
And so overall, we see developing a surveillance and control mindset, the idea that privacy must be given up so that nothing bad will happen to us.
The solution, in Alden's estimation, we need to release new unstoppable tech, which is kind of the theme underlying your whole book, that tech is unstoppable and that changes the material conditions, which then changes history.
And then new laws will follow privacy technology.
Don't lead with laws, lead with tech.
Which brings us to chapter 29, asymmetric defense. These are the defenses that are arising to defend our privacy. So there are both centralizing and decentralizing tech, centralizing all the stuff we've talked about, the surveillance tech, government control of the financial system, monitoring bank accounts.
There's also decentralizing tech. Historically, the printing press allows mass printing of the Bible, mass reproduction of pamphlets so people could talk about the Bible, give their own interpretations, and kind of almost wrest the word of God from the hands of those who would use it to control others and talk about what they think that the authoritative natural law indicated.
another decentralizing tech is encryption enabling private communications which enables private
communications between individuals because you know encrypting them prevents them from being
openly exposed on the internet encryption is hailed as a liberatory liberatory technology by
the cypherpunks this is a movement um you could say that begins in 1993 with the publication of
a cypherpunks manifesto by Eric Hughes, who is a mathematician and cryptographer.
So the cypherpunks were about actively building and preserving systems using encryption tech.
And Alden talks about the manifesto in detail. I'll read a couple of the quotes she has from
the manifesto because it's really beautiful that it summarizes also what they're getting at.
We, the cypherpunks, are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending privacy
with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with
electronic money. They also write in the manifesto, cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has
to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to
write it. We publish our codes that our fellow cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our
code is free for all to use worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software
we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut
down. History has vindicated this. One example is Phil Zimmerman creating PGP, Pretty Good Privacy,
in 1991, making it open source. And so Lucas is going to summarize the description of that legal
saga and what that signifies. Yeah. So Phil Zimmerman codes this piece of software that allows
for encryption that can't be broken so far as we know.
He puts it out and he finds himself facing the United States military.
They are, well, the United States attempted to classify his code under the Export Control Act,
which is the law that we apply to make it illegal for me to build a nuclear bomb in my basement and then sell it to someone in Canada or Turkey or wherever,
or for me to build an attack helicopter and send it to somebody.
It's meant to protect the advantage that the United States has on the military battlefield.
And so Zimmerman gets brought up.
They try to classify it as a munition.
So they're trying to classified code letters and numbers as a munition, as a object of warfare.
Takes us back to Jason Lowry's thesis, Softwar, where he definitively, I think, has done an incredible job of acquitting himself of having the opinion that Bitcoin is a form of munition.
And in fact, it's the most powerful.
Zimmerman, in facing this legal battle, decides to prove his point, how absurd this is, that code is being classified.
And so he publishes it under an MIT open source license.
So he basically writes a book on PGP and gives out the source code.
Um, it becomes popular at the time for people to in the know to wear t-shirts that have like the code on the, on the t-shirt. And then it says like, this t-shirt is a weapon. This code is a weapon.
um and uh anyway so what happens then is that though they don't necessarily give a reason
possibly because and i think we'll get into this later because i want to hear the rest of your
summary possibly because the government would have had to reveal some things in order to make
their case that they didn't want to reveal um or possibly because they just saw that it was uh
a pretty worthless approach and they were attacking free speech um they decide to drop
the case. So that case never, never was resolved. So there is a, not necessarily a precedent for
code in terms of being upheld as free speech, but a precedent in the more native sense of
this was tried and it didn't work. They literally didn't even go through with the court case. So
that kind of a little bit of background on that. Yeah. And then after that, cryptography goes on to
play a very large role in making e-commerce secure. So we have that initial saga and then
cryptography is now part of the internet. Governments are now seeking to regulate
cryptocurrencies in the same way that maybe they initially sought to regulate something like PGP.
It's justification often being that we need to do this for anti-money laundering purposes,
that crypto is used by Russian oligarchs, by terrorists, by drug traffickers in order to
longer their ill-gotten gains. But Alden poses, you know, we can argue that with the empirical
nature of that claim. But I think Alden tackles this in a very interesting way. She poses three
questions to regulators. And I think that the three questions are first to acknowledge the
trade-off, second to examine the motivations, and third to be realistic. So first, acknowledge the
trade-off? What should be given up to ensure that the small fraction of the population that engages
in this illicit activity cannot do so? So first, acknowledge if you're going to be doing a trade-off,
any anti-money laundering thing, you're going to be doing some sort of trade-off of other values
like privacy. Second, examine the motivations. How honest are governments regarding their motivation
for these trade-offs? And she gives the example of Argentina, the currency rapidly debasing,
And so people beginning to flee to a different ledger, ledger of crypto government.
The government then adopts provisions against this to prevent this capital flight, but cites anti money laundering as the reason, whereas Alden thinks that that's not the real reason.
And then third. So acknowledge the tradeoff, examine the motivations.
And third, be realistic, be realistic. Can the government even enforce it?
She mentions Napster, centralized, you can shut that down.
BitTorrent, decentralized, much more difficult to shut something like that down.
Bitcoin, closer to BitTorrent.
So can the government actually enforce any purported regulation of cryptocurrency?
They need to first ask themselves, is this actually something we can regulate?
So legislation, she notes, that seeks to ban, for example, open source wallet anonymizing techniques is simply seeking to ban some iteration of some form of mathematics, which is very similar to the Phil Zimmerman situation.
This brings us to the last chapter of the book, a world of openness or a world of control.
The stage is set for us to enter one of those two worlds.
Bitcoin's potential is to support an open world.
The past chapters have mentioned how human rights advocates, activists have been funded by Bitcoin when authoritarian governments debanked them.
And now Alden gives an example that's more perhaps morally complex, more close to home for people in Western democratic countries, the Canadian trucker protests in response to COVID mobility restrictions.
The protesters needed money.
You always need money to fund a protest.
you're away from work. They were debanked though. Their GoFundMes were shut down.
It turned out that Bitcoin was one of the only ways they were able to be funded.
So without going into whether you agree or disagree with that cause, you should at least,
Alden thinks, be pro-ensuring the freedom of speech and due process, which is what Bitcoin
enables. To quote Alden, custodial financial services allow governments to freeze accounts
first and then sort out who was guilty or innocent later. Self-custodial financial services force
governments to actually charge people with the crime before they can use pressure to freeze their
accounts. So the government can't just shut down debate by freezing bank accounts. If Bitcoin is in
the picture, they're actually going to have to allege that the people are doing something against
the laws, find the laws and charge them, which in an emergent situation can be difficult. So what
does it mean to support an open world in this way? And this, I think the Canadian trucker example
really opens us up to this question, because some people, you know, would say, well, I didn't,
you know, I thought it was good to restrict mobility a bit to prevent the spread of infectious
disease. And we need to have that ability as a government. So Alden poses the question about
maybe the implicit or native politics of Bitcoin. What exactly is the political nature of the
network. Is it only for cypherpunks and libertarians? Alden thinks not. She thinks that
what it is is anti-authoritarian and anti-authoritarianism is not just on the left or right.
And she gives a good example of the, after the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting
selective bailout of the people who caused the crisis, we had both the emergence of the Tea Party
on the right and the Occupy Wall Street on the left, they're both emerging to protest the same
point, the use of the flexible ledger to bail out those closest to power who are already rich and
powerful. So to quote Alden, today, Bitcoin as a network collects members from both types of groups
and partially organizes them in an emergent way by giving them something to use and build on
so that they don't have to rely only on protesting. It offers them a way to potentially
opt out of the existing financial system that they view as being heavily corrupted and to build a
parallel peer-to-peer financial system instead. And Alden develops the point, you might say,
the leftist take on Bitcoin. She doesn't do that for the right. And we can see maybe because,
you know, there's already kind of a dominant libertarian picture of what Bitcoin could and
does represent. She develops the leftist take on what Bitcoin could represent. And she says,
a way to curtail corporate overreach and crony capitalism in that Bitcoin provides a check on
really all forms of consolidated power. It's designed to take back the public ledger from
where it is currently controlled, you might say from a leftist point of view, by corporations in
the form of the revolving door between them and the government. And so Bitcoin is going to in that
way hopefully combat crony capitalism. She also notes that the left kind of generally tends to
oppose war and they did oppose the Iraq war, which was financed through opaque taxation,
which is made possible by the fiat ledger. So it's not just white crypto bros or shadowy coders,
she said, and she does give a list of human rights advocates who are currently working on
Bitcoin in different capacities. And it's a great list to read through if you want to get,
If you want to learn about interesting new projects and perhaps people to follow on Twitter and to maybe broaden your view of Bitcoin if you do come at it with a default libertarian view.
In any case, people of all political orientations are beginning to feel that the system as it is, the fiat ledger and the current monetary system is not working for them.
And Bitcoin is a technological reaction that will have freedom expanding consequences whether you right or left Alden ends with the overarching question then that has defined her book who controls the ledger That the nature of money for her ledger as a ledger And so who controls that ledger is a recurring question for her
In early history, nature controls the ledger because commodity monies like shells and then gold have a natural scarcity and natural physical characteristics like their portability due to their physical nature.
And so in that way, nature, roughly speaking, maintains the ledger.
Technology, though, ends this control.
There's new shell-making technologies that people can use to debase that currency, and then there is the technology of speed that allows for an abstraction overlay on gold.
And so technology breaks the use of commodity money in its past form, which leads us to banking in the central banking area, which leads us to the fiat system in which governments gain control of a flexible ledger and can devalue savings and channel value toward their purposes in an opaque way.
And so now we're at the digital era and we have new technology, again, the internet and encryption. And so who controls the ledger? There's two possible futures here. Neither one is set in stone. We're all going to have to collectively fight for what we believe is right.
Either bottom-up decentralized control ledger through something like Bitcoin or top-down – so bottom-up decentralized ledger like something like Bitcoin or top-down centralized – a top-down centralized ledger through CBDC, central bank digital currencies, controlled by governments and their central banks.
so in this um in alden's estimation bitcoin is not about eliminating the state but about putting
it on a level playing field and making it operate more transparently bitcoin represents the closing
of the gap between transaction and settlement which was initiated by that age of telecommunications
which effectively ended the gold standard but now with bitcoin we can move away from fiat as a
temporary solution to the speed gap and also move away from the abstractions and the financialization
that were enabled by the fiat era. Bitcoin then, in Alden's estimation, to end this summary,
could herald an age of simplicity, transparency, and robustness. So that is a summary of Lynn
Alden's broken money. We've finished it out there. There's a lot of really interesting points in this
chapter. And in fact, we kind of, Lucas and I talked about it last time we got into some of
these points, because they were already beckoning towards these kind of ideological questions.
Just to start with a question, what do you think about Alden really focusing on
what I call the leftist take on Bitcoin and emphasizing, and you know, and saying it's not
about eliminating the state. I think some Bitcoiners are of more markedly anarchists
or crypto anarchists, anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, call them what you will,
where the kind of elimination of the state is the end goal. But for Alden, it's not about that.
It's about, you know, making it more open and transparent, putting on an empty plan,
an open playing field, ending corporate and crony capitalism, the things that corrupt the state.
So what do you think about that leftist take on Bitcoin? What I call a leftist take on Bitcoin, I guess.
Yeah, I think because you have to call it a leftist take on Bitcoin, I believe that drops some clues.
And I think the biggest clue is that because we have to call it a leftist take on Bitcoin,
it's somewhat of an overt reminder that the actual leftist take has been abandoned by the left.
And that the principles that liberal left-leaning ideologies were built upon no longer seem to be the ones that they are espousing in recent years.
And, you know, these were people who believed in free speech above all else, that they should not be told what they can do in terms of their bodies, what they can do in terms of their affiliations.
You know, the right to protest, the right to really be a combative element to the state that is coercive in the means that it provides the constant tension that you need.
Like you need to have tension in order to make sure that one side doesn't go too far.
You need to have something pushing back because the nature of the state is control.
And I think we need to separate state and government because you can have government without having a state.
You look at even down to the family level, you know, a mother and a father certainly govern their kids in a way that they call parenting.
If you look at Native American tribes, they have a gut like a governing council, but they're not a state.
And so what's the difference?
I think the difference is that the state is the control mechanism that enables government to get out of control.
Without the control, and specifically the control over the money, then you can't really abuse people.
And so we're talking about, let's go two paths. And one path would be the open source, decentralized money that is Bitcoin. The other path would be the easily censored, heavily surveilled, government-controlled, state-controlled form of CBDC.
and I want to go back to that that state cbdc the we talked about this as an early earlier podcast
there's an old country song um called uh I think it's called 16 tons and it's about a coal miner
who is bemoaning his existence in that he has to work all day and have nothing to show for it
because he works for a coal mine and the coal mine issues the money that he uses.
and in everything that he buys, he has to buy from the coal town,
which adjusts its prices in order to extract his money back out of him.
And so it just creates a cycle.
I load 16 tons and what do I get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me because I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
And I think that that provides this perfect microcosm of what we are sure to see and what we're already seeing in places that have instituted a central bank digital currency.
you see that the issuer of the money has total and complete control over the citizens
and they have no choice but to remain in the system because
the money that they have earned in exchange for their energy what they have given their life for
is taken from them so that they have no control over it and they cannot use it
in order to escape, in order to better their life, in order to do anything.
So I think it's the perfect example to demonstrate, you know,
a central bank digital currency is that's just the coal company issuing company script
that they then devalue whenever they want to.
And if it turns out that they hit a tough spot and everybody dulls their pickaxes,
and to the point that they all have to go buy new pickaxes.
In the company store, there's the new pickaxe,
but it's five times the price that it was before.
And so, yeah, it steals away the opportunity to do anything.
I guess that's where I go first when I think about that,
is a 1960s country song about a coal mine.
Yeah, well, I think because that summons up the values
that we associate with the left,
which I think is what Alden is talking about here.
So the values that we typically associate with the left, looking out for the common man, especially with respect to big corporations, very powerful financial interests.
And that is, you know, maybe the spirit of Occupy Wall Street as well. And that iteration of the left, maybe the Noam Chomsky left, is something that it's much easier to sympathize with than, as you began, as you noted, like the modern left, postmodern left, you might say, is different than that, in that it's an infatuation with power and state control as such.
and perceiving not that the leftist values are important and the means to arrive at those are kind of to be decided,
but instead looking at the means and saying government control, the means to arrive at the things is the thing that is important.
You know, if you're going to support the working man, it necessarily means a more powerful government to do so.
So that seems to be a sort of default leftist take from today instead of saying, no, what's important is the small coal miner worker.
Maybe some sort of government intervention is what helps them.
Maybe a union strike against the corporation, maybe a protest, maybe something else.
But it just seems like there is – when I was reading this, it just seems like there are people – the modern status calls themselves leftists, but they're not a leftist.
And maybe Bitcoin can be one of the small ways in which we reassert that actual ideological leftism on the spectrum is about freedom and liberty and not about any specific means to achieve that, such as using state control to do it.
And that maybe Bitcoin can be that thing that the leftist can seize on, can see that the underlying values are more important than the specific historical vessel that we've used for the past, you know, since Roosevelt or whatever, which might be kind of a leftist idea of using strong government power to intervene and help out.
which is actually a very authoritarian model as we listened to that Curtis Yarvin interview.
And, you know, he kind of motivates a sympathy between kind of contemporary leftism and his particular view,
which is very right wing and endorsing a monarchy by saying, you know, Roosevelt was almost a monarchist,
you could say, in the way that he operated. And I think that modern leftism can be very statist.
And just to tie this back again, maybe Bitcoin can represent a liberation of leftism from statism and a reassertion that's what is important is that coal miner who can now save in Bitcoin, who is not going to be kind of opaquely taxed by inflation to fund a war, that they're then going to send the coal miners' kids to die on foreign soil to support some cause that's actually dictated by crony capitalist interests.
through corporations that are trying to sell defense technology or something like that.
So, yeah, I think you're totally on with that analogy and hearkening back to, you know,
what's really sympathetic about the left and what real and true empathy means.
Yeah.
Yeah. So I think it's really important right now that we pay very close attention to what things are and not what we call them.
because there's this very strong anchoring bias to be held captive by whatever it is that we grew up with.
So we want to call a cell phone a phone.
We want to call an iPhone a phone because it derived from a cell phone.
But it's not. It's a supercomputer.
Right. We want to call Bitcoin money, but we're stuck with the idea that the dollar is money.
we're we're moving into an era where these new things are being developed that are replacing
the old things and we're struggling to we're struggling to understand the new thing the new
technology because we're so anchored in what the old technology has meant to us and i think that
also applies to definitions of a political party. You can call them the left, but I think this is
actually probably why it's been more popular to refer to that type of ideology as woke, because
it's not left. It's not liberal politics. If you look at what they stand for, you know,
stand for segregation of people based on, not necessarily segregation, but discrimination.
Discrimination based on race, discrimination based on sexual preference, discrimination based on
gender, identity, all of these things, they stand for that. They stand for controlling speech
online. Um, and, and even so far as to boldly and overtly say that it's not just things that we
don't like that we don't want to see. And it's not just things that are untrue that we don't
want to see. It's also things that are true that are inconvenient and we don't want to see that
either. And so there, if you look at it from that perspective, then it's very easy to see that this
is not a liberal left type of politic. This is something new. That is also something very old,
which is, as you correctly point out, it's just an authoritarian, statist regime mindset. And
And, you know, if you can't beat them, join them.
I think, you know, I feel and I know a lot of very good left liberal thinkers.
And I feel for them because their movement has been hijacked and they were infiltrated.
infiltrated and much like the strangler vine from jason lowry's thesis is that they were somewhat
taken over and choked out and now they're trying to get back out and um be that be that tension on
the system that's needed so um yeah i it's a it's a it's it's really good that she takes this
approach because less than an appeal to the left, I feel like it's a subtle reminder of
what are the left's core beliefs. And if you're reading this and you believe that you are a left
leaning person, do these core beliefs resonate with you? Because if they don't, then you have
been captured by something. And, and it's a good time for reflection and thought, in order to think
about really where, where your beliefs lie, and why you have those motivations you do.
Yeah, I mean, something like Bitcoin, it's an FAFO type thing, fuck around and find out. It's like a
natural law. If you have an ideology, and that ideology is not true in some sense to the human
condition, then it's not going to interact well with something that has truth as its
primary criterion.
I think that maybe one of the entropies of the fiat monetary system is kind of a definitional
entropy in that fiat relies itself on abstraction, and it enters us into an age of abstraction.
We're no longer trading a real thing that is gold.
We're going to trade claims for gold.
And then the gold drops out entirely. And like all of value is now an abstraction that you can print. And if you can print value, it's like, you know, then power really is the primary condition of reality.
Once you can print value, the postmodern idea that power underlies everything and not truth becomes palpable.
And so people begin to think that that is maybe the philosophy we should all follow.
Power does seem to be what matters because those in power print value for themselves and their friends.
And I think you're right that this awoke ideology, call it what you will, some form of a left-oriented statism that has actually forgotten leftism's core values has arisen. And I think we maybe attribute that to the entropy of the fiat ledger. It's abuse, it's corruption. Yeah.
Yeah, I think you also need to really come to grips with what printing value means, because this is the thing that is a direct exchange. It is a direct equivalent for a person's life, you know, for their productive capacity.
Um, this is the thing that we exchange for our application of focus and effort in life.
And so printing money is stealing life.
And, um, the more, the more life is stolen, there finally comes a breaking point.
I think we're a revolution of sorts.
Bitcoin, when people call Bitcoin a revolution, I kind of get what that means, is that it very much is a silent revolution.
But yeah, steal enough life, bleed someone enough, then they will find some way to fight back.
um yeah i i was pretty touched by the just the the deafness with which alden approaches this last
this last bit i'm very very calculated very thoughtful calculated not a good word because
people think that's a negative connotation but but calculated in the sense that um you know i
she acknowledges I think that the anarchist libertarian
esque bent is is very well represented already in Bitcoin and does a good job in trying to
bridge the gap I and I think what we saw in this election was that money is not a political issue
because one side tried to make it a political issue
and got destroyed by doing that.
You have one side that says,
we need to stop spending all this money.
We need to be more reasonable.
And another side that just continues to spend that money.
And where the people voted, I think,
really reveals that it was in 1996 or whatever,
James Carville got famous because he, he told Bill Clinton when they were trying to figure out
strategy, I don't know, 95 or maybe earlier than that, what was the strategy to win the election?
And Carville goes, it's the economy, stupid. That's it. You know, like, yeah, people care about,
um, having the right to do this and the right to do that, but they, they really care about
being able to get up, put in a good day's work, have a fair wage paid to them that they are then
able to spend before it devalues in a society that's not trying to extract from them all the
time. And you mentioned that, you know, we have entered this age of surveillance capitalism where
the value is just being continually extracted by these free services and free products.
And Elon Musk, I was reading another book about him, like one of the earlier ones.
And there was a quote in there from like, he was like 20, I think he was like 27 or something at
the time when they're interviewing him. And she asked, why is it so important for him to
do these things because at the time it just seemed utterly ludicrous like utterly absurd he
he gets a payout from his first business and instead of sitting on his laurels and waiting
for something to come he knows exactly what he's going to do next and then he gets the payout from
that business so he sells zip2 makes paper gets gets in with x.com and paypal sells that
and then funds everything.
Like he knew exactly what he was going to do.
And he claims to have had this, he claims to have, um, you know, had this vision for
his life since he was like 14.
And there's a quote in that book.
So she's asking him, you know, why, why are you doing this?
What is so important about this?
And he says, you know, nobody else is doing it.
Like, I would go make, you know, arcade games and video games, but I'm not really seeing how that benefits the world and nobody else is innovating.
And he said that, you know, like the greatest minds of the greatest minds of the generation have been lost trying to get people to click on stuff online.
All the greatest physicists that would have been turned into financiers, lawyers, and social media entrepreneurs.
and so we
we've just seen this
huge drop in innovation
where
you can't
it's made it
the money has made it so impossible
to do anything
long term because you can't
save money long term that everything
has become short term and
extractive
I think it really reveals
the kind of the sad nature of what happens as a fiat money really starts to spiral and fail
is that people people feel kind of hopeless at the end yeah yeah um and i mean i like to say about
money not being a political question or issue because i mean just kind of someone hearing that
would say that's ridiculous it's the most political question there is but alden when she's summarizing
the Canadian trucker protest says, quote,
my conclusion was that technologies that make it harder to freeze money are not avoiding legitimate laws but rather are about ensuring that government themselves follow their laws
So again, like Bitcoin as an almost natural law constraint on government
is something that is above government in the same way that gold's characteristics
of being portable and durable, divisible, those are things that governments don't control.
And so it's not political that gold has certain characteristics,
It's also not political that Bitcoin has certain characteristics.
You know, it's adoption and whatnot.
It's going to be mediated through politics and whatnot.
But at the end of the day, it does present a constraint upon government rather than something that governments will ever be able to constrain.
That's the Philip Zimmerman story.
You can't hold back mathematics in the long run, something like that.
So Bitcoin is a new technology in the same way that telecommunications was.
And it's going, you know, strap in and see what the consequences are to a certain extent. I mean, we need to still facilitate its adoption and make it, you know, help to bring it about. We can't just say it's going to defeat CBDCs without more, but it's got, you know, it's an easy and good thing to defend because it does have this almost natural law force behind it.
it acts as a truth-based constraint rather than a power-based construct.
And so it's long-term, I think that that's a good thing.
Yeah.
I like that you're bringing us back into the math thing because I wanted to,
I wanted to have you lead us into a little discussion on Cody Wilson and
ghost guns and kind of draw some comparisons.
And there's something that I wanted to say about Mark Andreessen as well,
kind of with relation to that.
So, yeah, I mean, I wish kind of give us an idea. Link us from Zimmerman to Ghost Guns in a way, maybe. And then kind of give people a little background on that.
Yeah, I mean, I wish we were talking about this right before the podcast. And, you know, that's when the connection crystallized for me, because we were talking about I wish I would have went back and kind of boned up a bit on the whole drama or whatever. But basically what happened. So if you're not aware, Cody Wilson was an advocate and entrepreneur for gun rights, essentially, the Second Amendment.
And what he did was instead of just he was in law school, but he began to take a more active material role.
He drops out and he starts.
That's a great mind save from being a lawyer.
Yeah, no, definitely.
From a, you know, a imposer on others to a doer oneself or something like that.
And he starts a company, long story short, to 3D print firearms.
firearms. And so the question in this, the government comes down on them like a bag of
bricks or whatever, that all these lawsuits from the ATF and the federal government, they don't,
yeah, they don't want him. They don't want people to be able to buy a 3d printer, go on the internet,
download a file and print all the pieces for a gun to assemble it in their own house. Even though
people do have rights to assemble their own firearm, they didn't like the code. He made it
so easy and breaks it down no no but but they didn't like that they can't track them yeah they
didn't like that they don't have control over them because right now every firearm i have has
to be registered in my name or else it's an illegal firearm there are right isn't that what
they don't like about it um right they don't like to be able to serve they want to be able to surveil
and control yes firearm distribution um and cody facilitated something that was against that
So there's all these lawsuits against him, and it's similar to the Zimmerman thing in that – I mean, Cody's making the point that – a couple of points.
First, once these gun files are on the internet, they're available to anyone, and anyone can get a 3D printer.
Cody Wilson is facilitating this maybe, but it's already out there.
Anybody can already do it.
You can't stop this technology.
Go ahead and try.
But the second thing is sort of Zimmerman-type argument.
The Second Amendment now gets filtered through the First Amendment. And what seemed to be a weapon is now information once it's on the Internet. And you can then begin to make constitutional arguments that are stronger or different in force than under the Second Amendment.
it and those lawsuits as i understand it there's a really good documentary called death athletic
by jessica solche it's an excellent documentary it walks through all of cody wilson's um legal
kind of the legal drama that's going on these different lawsuits i i don't know there's been
so many lawsuits against him i don't know what palpable gains he has made if there's precedent
set regarding
information
and it's, you know, whether
guns can be information and therefore
protected by the First Amendment.
That's unclear.
But that's the connection there,
is that that's a literal instance where
an arm is now
sublimated into information
and possibly therefore subject to
a different regulatory framework
and also the way that
information, once decentralized
and put out into the ether is almost unstoppable.
Yeah.
So that's a really good example.
Cody Wilson and the ghost guns is a really good example of an attempted application of
arms control against free speech, free speech in the way of code.
And one of the things that you talked about in the summary was the, you know, the question of what is what is reasonable in terms of like concessions made in order to be able to track transactions.
transactions. You know, this is the debate that this is the debate that we need to have.
But what I think is so very clear with an example like Cody Wilson and Ghost Guns or with PGP or
with Bitcoin or with Tor is that it's not a debate. This is Jason Lowry's famous quote,
technology does not negotiate. There is no debate. You can outlaw
me being able to use a mixer, which anonymizes my Bitcoin so that you can't trace the transactions.
You can outlaw that, but I can still use it. It's still there. It's still out on the internet.
There's open source protocols for this. It's just code. And so what can you do instead? Well, you can encourage them to domicile in your jurisdiction so that you can then shut them down.
um and i think i i kind of have like a little different view i guess on the
um so trump wants to make the united states the world capital of crypto um and i am actually
really leaning more towards a very libertarian view of i think i would like to see crypto
developed in places that have no rule of law, as opposed to the strongest rule of law, because
the good things always come up to the top. If something is not useful long term for
parties involved for the people that are using it and the people that are providing it,
then it just doesn't live.
And so I like the sandbox.
What is an area that has – a sandbox, that's not an area that has no rule of law.
That's an area where there's a sandbox constructed within a rule of law system.
You always need the rule of law.
You need property rights protected with guns.
I mean you need the rule of law in order to have any sort of system.
What I'm saying is we have seen very clearly that it doesn't matter what the law says.
you can't rule against free speech and digital code.
Like it, it just, so, and this, um, like I'm not, I'm not saying what I'm saying is that it's not a debate.
It's not a negotiation. Um, you can outlaw the code and then, or you can outlaw the app, but I can get a VPN and I can use the app.
so you can get a you can get a vpn because you have a laptop and a house which is secured by
um the rule of law system that you exist so that's like the threat that's like you can get a vpn
because i allow you to have a house and i allow you to have a computer right i mean which is
different than like if you're in north korea or eritrea or um some venezuela like those are very
strong rule of law places i disagree the rule though that's where the rule they have very strong
laws it's a definitional thing i think the rule of law has broken down there they don't have the
rule of law they have the rule of exception they have what maybe they have a law on the book but
it's always the exception that matters it's always the state the state coming into your house and
saying oh this law says this but you can't cite it against us we don't believe it has law-like
applicability and yeah that's no different than the u.s like i can't remember who it was somebody
it's quite different somebody did somebody did an analysis of all of the regulations uh this is
floating around i don't verify it but um it was from a was from a very well-respected researcher
he says on average that the average american commits three felonies a day yeah there's a book
that they don't know i believe right yeah yeah yeah i mean the the only thing that's different
is that we don't yet have a whole lot of people having their doors kicked in by the government
and coming into their house and taking their stuff.
We're just on the lower end of the spectrum.
I agree that we have much stronger rule of law.
But we still have that occurrence all the time.
Definitely.
We have things like that that occur.
But we do have much, much stronger rule of law.
And I think probably the strongest rule of law, if not one of the strongest,
if not the strongest rule of law systems on the globe.
And that's why we're entrusted with the financial order as it is.
I think – I mean that's why people buy into the US as an idea.
And I think it goes beyond our laws too.
There's like norms and institutions that underlie the rule of law that make it possible.
We have people who believe strongly in the First Amendment.
In other countries where there's no rule of law, you maybe have a default presumption that speech should not be free.
These are – I mean cultural values and norms are – substantiate a rule of law system.
I think that – I don't know. I think a capital of crypto on the presumption that it's going to be the rule of law system at least is a good idea and that I think the rule of law is important for a technological center to thrive.
It's not binary. This is a sliding scale. The rule of law of the United States may be stronger than any other country in the world, but every country in the world has been trending more and more away from rule of law and more and more towards authoritarianism.
authoritarianism. And so that you, it's, it's just rule of law is not a yes or no thing. It's a,
it's a relevant sliding scale. And just because we are currently the cleanest dirty shirt,
we're still a dirty shirt. And we're not. And the thing is we haven't been getting cleaner.
We've been getting dirtier. The whole pile has been getting dirtier.
I was thinking exception was saying that we should go to where there's no rule of law instead of
where there's not it's not it's not we so that again that's another as the crypto it's not
developers or whatever the people who are going to do this are going to go where they can be
in peace yeah it doesn't matter like they'll right they'll find a way to get there they're
they're going to right now they're going to portugal they're going to argentina they're
going to the united arab emirants uh and they're going to uh like uh i don't know soviet bloc
country, I think, but I can't remember. But I mean, there's no we, it's like we, we don't decide,
we don't decide where this is done. The way that the law looks, and the way that the people are
treated, that decides and no, definitely. Yeah. And, and, and if you, if you are somebody who is
creating products, that when you put them out into the world, they change the world. And they
change the world in a way that is undeniably better for all the people in the world.
If you're trying to negotiate with that person, you have no foot to stand on because the thing
that they put out into the world cannot be stopped by you.
Like there is no, like what I'm saying is, I think it's laughable that governments think
that they can negotiate with crypto.
But you just said that crypto,
like a sandbox is a negotiation with crypto.
If a country establishes a sandbox
as a regulatory framework,
that's an attempt to lure crypto to your country.
So governments can do rule of law things,
which is to create an open atmosphere
that protects property rights
and doesn't regulate crypto
and prevent what they can do.
I mean, that is a thing that a country can do.
The world is a sandbox.
I mean, like the United States is a sandbox.
It was designed to be 50 experiments or however many states.
Everybody's going to have their own experiment and we're going to draw whatever works best from that.
We'll apply it to the other ones.
We'll adopt it as it works.
The world itself is a sandbox.
There are some that have this.
There are some that have that.
And if you're the guy who is going to create something that revolutionizes the world and you have the choice, guy or girl.
And you have the choice to go to this country where in this little certain area of the country, we're going to say that we're going to lessen the amount of restrictions that we have on you.
Um, but outside of that, um, these overt restrictions, oppressive restrictions are still going to apply. And in exchange for letting you, um, work, uh, without being thrown in prison in this little area, um, we'll take, uh, you know, a 30% cut.
if that's the negotiation, then those people are going to go, well, actually, I can go to this place
and they don't care. They're just happy that I'm here because I'm contributing to their economy
by the amount of value that I'm creating. And so it, I don't know, it's a legitimate argument
to be made right now because governments are currently so strong and have so much oppressive
force at their, uh, at their availability that they do kind of have a way to turn off or, or
like they do have a way to encourage, um, negotiation, but that power is weakening every
single day. And the power of what they're trying to negotiate is getting stronger every single day.
And it's just, I think it's a very short-term thought to go, oh, we're going to control this.
We're going to have rules on this.
Because very clearly there will be jurisdictions that say we're not going to have rules on this because it is no different than sending a text.
Yeah.
And we don't have rules on sending a text.
So if a jurisdiction says we are not going to have rules on this, you don't trust that jurisdiction unless it already has a rule of law system where they're held to that promise where you can then litigate if they go back on that.
It's those authoritarian countries that say, oh, come here.
We're going to have a sandbox.
We're not going to have rules.
And then you go to like Dubai or somewhere like that.
And then they can pull the rug whenever they want.
You need a default like background set of norms.
You need a strong constitution.
You need a legal framework that protects the freedom of speech and equal human rights to a certain extent before you can rely on a promise that come here, there's not going to be laws.
And that's what the United States offers.
I mean, is a strong constitution backed up by the blood of revolutionaries and the revolutionary sentiment that lives in our breasts.
And that's something that you can't just recreate in another country by saying we're not going to mess with your company.
Oh, they're going to mess with your company when it suits them because they don't have a background set of rules and assumptions that prevents them from doing that.
So that would be my point.
I think you can't like this.
Don't undersell the United States and its revolutionary fervor, I guess.
What that means for the free.
Yeah.
This is the network state was like, you know, we'll just we'll put it, you know, we'll put the Constitution out there.
Anybody can adopt it and then run it.
Right now.
It's like here's the source code for.
Yeah.
That doesn't work, though.
Right now, there are countries that printed the United States Constitution and tried to run them.
It didn't work because they didn't have the default norms.
It doesn't work because you can't fix the thing.
You have to build a new thing.
Yeah, and you have to actually like – you have to derive the values for yourself that underlie a set of words that you call the Constitution.
The Constitution is just like, oh, a nice sounding set of words.
We can even make a better one, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,
It's this beautiful flowery language that protects you in every way, cradle to grave.
But it means nothing if people aren't willing to die for it and haven't had ancestors that died for it and don't live in a country where they're willing to like, you know, go to the mat to protect something abstract like a freedom of speech.
That's not a background human value we necessarily have by being human.
It's something that grows in your breast because you're raised in a particular way in a particular country.
So that's a good – yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's a great argument for patriotism. And I believe I do believe that, too. I do believe and agree that patriotism is you need to be proud and you need to be willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
And it draws people together.
And this does tie back to another part of this chapter that I thought was really interesting, where Alden talks about China exporting surveillance tech, essentially, through part of their Belt and Road initiative.
One of the reasons she says that they're doing that is not just to control another country because they subsidize their purchase through some sort of predatory lending.
That's one reason that they want to export surveillance tech and then subsidize its purchase by some country that wants to be able to surveil its citizens.
But they also want to foster the underlying norms and values that it's okay to surveil your citizens.
If China subsidizes surveillance tech in many different countries, then those countries begin to normalize that it's okay and right to surveil your systems. They go to the UN, they vote in that way.
So by spreading surveillance tech, you begin to change values when people then accommodate themselves to the way that the world is.
So the question is, then, can Bitcoin combat that and be an antivirus to that virus or viral in a different way and change norms and ideas relating to privacy, surveillance, and control in other countries serve as its own propaganda, in a sense, in the same way that China is trying to change world norms by spreading the violence of surveillance tech?
yeah that's you're again we're back to
so it's monetary colonialism it's not like actual we're going to land and we're going to take over
and we're going to put our people there but it is still colonialism and colonialism is at its heart
the exporting of the ideal or whatever your ideology is the underlying beliefs that you have
And so, yeah, influencing, you know, reaching out and and trying to expand your area of influence in the world to expand the dominion over which you somewhat control entropy, I guess, might be might be a way to think about it.
when i was in africa and when i was in uh when i was in morocco um i was i was blown away by how
much surveillance technology i saw like and it was all huawei brand um yeah the cameras
everywhere like i i've been in i've been in um bigger cities in the united states that i feel
have a lot of security cameras not like this um and just very overt um and and you see
you see how people self-censor there i mean it um there is i remember when i came back and i think
you were one of the first people i talked to no well no it was but anyways i remember when i came
back, I told people, um, cause I went from Morocco directly to Colombia.
And those are two entirely different worlds.
One is a police state and the other is a cartel state.
And, um, in Morocco, nobody ever smiles.
Nobody looks people in the eyes.
They don't trust each other.
There's a very, very, very low level of social trust.
Um, and in Columbia, um, where it's leaning more towards anarchy.
you know everything's done in everything's done in cash everything is done um kind of out in the
open um private transactions are very private um the people there smile and they there's this
really vibrant um motorcycle taxi system where uh for for like one peso or whatever i don't know
I can't remember what it was. It was one coin. For one coin, you just get on the back, they hand you a helmet and away you go. And it's a very, I know this sounds weird, but it was a way safer environment. At least it felt safer. I don't know.
um but yeah it exporting that type of that type of surveillance and trying to normalize it
having experienced that like that was that's the only place i've ever been in morocco that's the
only place i've ever been where i didn't feel comfortable i didn't feel safe i didn't really
want to be there um because it felt like um you were always being watched and someone was always
trying to catch you doing something. And this, this brings me so the summary talks about how we
moved through the war on terror, or sorry, the war on drugs to the war on terror, and then to
the war on trafficking. And I was thinking about that. And I think it's more, we declared a war on
drugs because they were opening people's minds and there was rebellion.
And then we took over the trade of drugs and use that to finance our own operations.
and by doing so we enriched ideologies that then we decided we needed to put down
because they were becoming a threat so the war on drugs creates the war on terror
and then i would say after the war on terror we actually because we then had a war on terror
where for 20 years you grew up, you either grew up terrified of the Russians or you grew up terrified of people in the Middle East.
And that war on terror funded by the war on drugs creates a war on hate where now we have really created these people in our minds that we hate just because of the way they look
Because we have been told that they're terrorists who were emboldened and enriched to even be here because of the war on drugs.
And then that war on hate, I think the war on hate, what is hate?
Hate is viewing people as less.
And if you view people as less, you can treat them like commodities.
And treating people like commodities is trafficking.
And now we have a war on hate that has created a war on trafficking.
And I wrote all those things down and then I crossed off war on.
And I just put, here's the mechanisms for control that have been used by the state.
Drugs, terror, hate, and trafficking.
And the next logical is basically thought.
And so that's really what I think you see in these countries that have gone in deep with the Belt and Road Initiative.
is that the war on thought is very obviously being fought and lost by the people
because of the manner in which they interact with each other and self-censor
and continuously accept more and more punishment
in terms of losing liberty in exchange just to not be crushed under the thumb of the state.
So yeah, that's my little meander.
I think that gets on.
Yeah.
So Alden had three questions for regulators.
If you're thinking about regulating something, we already hit the last one.
Be realistic.
Can the government enforce it?
We talked about that at length.
And I think you just got to the second one.
examine the motivations how honest are governments regarding their motivations for um you know
actually regulating the thing that they say they're purportedly regulating like again the
argentinian currency example we say we want to go after anti-money laundering but actually the
motivation is to cut off capital flight from a burning fiat ledger and so right and i mean
I bought a, I bought a tour bus one time. I bought a tour bus and I had to pay cash for it.
I had to go to the bank three days in a row to draw out cash so that I wouldn't be reported
under. And it's not, you know, I, I, I could have drawn it all out. I, I think maybe they
would have given it to me, but I self-censored, like there was something in my mind that said,
oh, if it's over $10,000, then I'm going to get reported and I'm going to have a file or whatever.
And it made me change my action just because of those kinds of capital controls.
No, and they are intended to change actions.
Like that is for sure.
Like the explicit ones mentioned in France and Germany where they're 1,000 to 2,000 euros,
not a huge sum of money, but those are to prevent – I think it was in Germany to prevent capital flight to gold
And then in France, just to prevent people from accumulating cash because, of course, they want money in bank accounts so they can surveil and control it.
It's like a used motorcycle.
Like you can't pay cash for a – or a nice bicycle.
Yeah, right, right.
You know, if the French ride a lot of bikes, that's like a nice bicycle.
You can't go pay somebody cash for a bicycle.
Now you begin to cut into the informal economy that way potentially.
I mean, I wonder what the effect has been on like resale, you know, private resale, things like that, because now you have to have like a credit card machine so people can use credit.
They would have gone up, right?
They'd probably have to go – wouldn't they go up in price?
Yeah, right.
So if it begins to cut off that market, it begins to be – right.
It drives up the price for the people that can stay in it to negotiate that way if it's really important to you to get it on the resale market.
it um yeah now there's all sorts of secondhand consequences when the government begins to
regulate and you you know their motivations and it ties back into you know us pontificating that
maybe modern leftism as statism has different motivations than it proclaims or says that it
has so do you remember the story wasn't there a story about um like a kid that they decided some
I don't know what country, but they kicked in the door and they found that he had cash and they decided to hang him.
Wow. Yeah.
Fairly recently. I can't remember what.
But yeah.
Yeah. When I was practicing criminal law, Alden mentions here civil asset forfeiture, you know, in the United States, that's one way in which surveillance implicitly occurs.
When I was practicing criminal law, there was an individual who was traveling from Missouri to Colorado with a large sum of cash in his car.
He gets pulled over.
And so Colorado at the time has weed that's legal.
Missouri does not.
Traveling with that large sum of cash in his car to Colorado was enough for the police to confiscate, to steal his money and take it in order to get that money back.
So we told the police, no, this is for a vacation I'm taking to Colorado.
We plan to spend it there.
We're going to ski resorts.
It's going to be expensive.
They took the money.
In order to get that back, it was a complex civil, federal civil lawsuit that had, it
had to proceed through district court.
And that's an expensive thing that, you know, most people wouldn't do because you're, you're
essentially, you know, paying the money that you're going to get back to the attorney to
do that thing for you.
And so that in itself is a way to discourage people from having too much cash because there's
the presumption that it's illicit or legal, the mere fact that you have cash. So we might not hang
someone in the United States, but we begin to implicitly categorize them as a criminal and
impose civil criminal consequences on them for having cash. I read a book about that. And it's
the amount of abuse of the civil for civil asset forfeiture power is shocking, especially in Texas.
um, there were stories about, um, they, they stop a family that has like four grand in cash.
And I can't remember what the deal was. I don't, I don't think they had anything.
It wasn't, it wasn't a big deal. Um, but anyway, so they, they say, well,
we either take your money or you have to spend the night in jail, you know,
that's fine. You can spend a night in jail. And they're like,
what happens to our kids? They're like, Oh, we put your kids in the system.
And, and so then, you know, they don't have any recourse.
It is,
it is a very calculated way to extract value from people by making it
prohibitively costly for them to get it back. And right. Yeah.
I'm really glad you brought that up because there are people listening to
this that aren't aware of what the civil asset forfeiture power is and how it's being abused,
I encourage you to look into it. Just Google civil asset forfeiture. And there's one example
of like they get a warrant to go through some lock boxes at a safe deposit facility. And instead,
they just go through all of them. And so they just take everything. And then if you want it,
you have to come prove that it's yours and prove that you have it legitimately when they had a
warrant for like one box or something like that so um yeah like there's there's a lot of abuses
of power being and one does not have already in the united states yeah one one does not have to
be to tie back to this left-right dichotomy one does not have to be libertarian to see right see
this because in addition to this in ferguson there were these ferguson missouri right this is um a
is a suburb of of st louis right or we're not a suburb it's a part of st louis that that's
yeah i drove i drove yeah so it's a municipality there right and so there were race riots there
um was somebody shot there's been so many of these racial things what was
yeah yeah it's it started um it started with a police shooting um the riots yeah they after they
did a like a post-mortem on it to figure out like why were there so many racial tensions here what's
a problem with ferguson and there's a report you can read on this and they had like there was this
really predatory municipal fining of people for small traffic infractions and they were doing that
for like having like dirty windows or like uh bald tires or um like uh not being able to see your
not being able to see your license plate and by the way this is so this is very real still there
When I was there and I was driving Uber, I would pick up people and they would tell me this specific area, this one specific street, really.
It's like, this is where they take you.
This is where they pull you over.
And they were just like, so they talked about it.
So matter of factly, it's like, you're white, you're fine.
You're going to be okay.
but um anybody else they'll get you for stopping to uh like stopping too fast basically or like
anything yeah sorry i cut you off but that i mean that's that's still a very real thing yeah
just another three months ago no another way that um the government is harvesting people for cash
opaquely taxing people through municipal fines instead of outright doing it and so yeah what a
great system we have yeah it's uh yeah i think when you realize that you have the power to extract
again this just is the same with the government realizing that oh if we can print some money we
can print all the money um you know like you you just have to again throwing it back to to elon but
i like to give him credit because he says these things that really stick in my mind but you have
to think to the limit. You have to think, okay, if we're going to do this thing, how far can it be
taken? Because how far it can be taken is how far it will be taken by somebody. Somebody will get
there. Somebody will do it. They will plant a flag. They will move. They will shift the Overton
window. We will continuously move closer and closer into this direction until a limit is reached.
And what does that limit look like? And the limit-
Yeah, what does it look like?
Yeah.
Oh, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, the limit looks like that show Mr. Robot, which I don't think you've seen.
I have not, no.
The guy, I forget his name, but the dude who played Freddie Mercury in the Queen movie.
Incredible, incredible series.
I encourage everybody to watch, which is basically the rise of the central bank digital currency and the corporation and the state applying all of these overt extreme surveillance powers on the citizens.
So, yeah, it's a very dark dystopian.
but it also is a very, very real view in terms of what we're seeing across the world right now.
Yeah. No, I was just interrupting to throw some shade to see if what it looked like for a person
to think to the max was to promote Dogecoin.
Not good, right? Like seriously, not good.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Even as a joke, even as a memetic kind of like,
whatever is the funniest outcome will be the outcome that actually happens.
I mean, that's trying to meme into reality, hilarity as a future.
And I don't think that's a good idea.
This is actually another quote from Musk when he was working on PayPal was, I mean, he defines money the exact same that Alden does.
You know, money is just a ledger.
It's just an entry in a database.
And, yeah, promoting Dogecoin is wild.
Have a talk with your boy there, man.
Have a talk with your boy.
he's wild i don't understand it now let's also let's also acknowledge that his company is the
third largest owner tesla's got a stack yeah so yeah this again you know think about what what
actually matters you know where is your skin in the game so yeah i i personally think that he knows
exactly what it is and that in order to maintain relationships with a very litigious government
that had been increasingly targeting him.
I think that he really toned down
any sort of slaughtering of golden cows
or golden geese for quite a long time.
Yeah, I think he runs public corporations
that depend on public largesse.
And so Bitcoin is vaguely threatening to him
with what he needs to get accomplished.
His only goal is to get to Mars
and he's been working with the government as it is.
And I think you stack Bitcoin
because he's smart enough to do so.
But I mean, I think he's like most CEOs probably are.
He has a point that goes beyond
what Bitcoin's liberatory potential is.
And so he wants to get that done.
And if Bitcoin vaguely threatens that in some way,
then maybe it's not your biggest priority.
Not saying he's against it, but I don't think-
Maybe take another view of it,
which is to say that I think,
so he had the very personal experience, right?
Of having one of his children be chemically castrated.
under the like trans encouragement laws in, uh, in California and, um, has, has really struggled
with that. Like he, you know, he lost, he sold all of his houses, he sold everything and just
sleeps on people's couches now. Right. And I think he just identified that as a bigger problem.
And I, I, I can't disagree like, because the, the fundamental, um, aim of that ideology was to,
um, outlaw free speech. It was to, um, force people to, um, it was, it was to, to, to promote
forced speech, um, and forced, uh, and, and take one step closer to legislating thought.
So I, I think that if you have Bitcoin, but you don't have, um, you don't have the antidote to
that, then I don't think you're better off. But I think that if you have the antidote to the woke
mind virus, then I do believe that Bitcoin naturally, kind of like the way you were talking
about with the values that arise, I think that Bitcoin naturally finds its place in that system.
So maybe it's more of just a, I don't know. I think it is, to me, I think it's a close personal
thing where it's like oh i had i have this trans yeah you know i have no insight into his mental
state his i wouldn't psychologize him farther so i just think it's that's a good point he's an
interesting person yeah so that's part six financial technology and human rights i mean that that
concludes the book for us and like i said at the beginning man my book is it's seen some damage
here and it's so much fun to like so thoroughly and rigorously get into a person's head to read
their thoughts in this way to reconstruct it for yourself explain it to yourself take copious notes
it's like a different reading experience and i just wonder what i mean is there something overall
that you wanted to take away from broken money i mean obviously we've had hours of conversation
on this but just given that we've concluded this book just any concluding thoughts on the book
itself. The thing that I wanted to talk about that I think is just a very real example of
technology matters more than ideology. Technology matters more than willpower.
Technology changes things. The very first use of Bitcoin, she talks about it here in the final,
The very first real use of Bitcoin was to help fund WikiLeaks after they were cut off by the United States for revealing abuses of the government.
So I think that just that right there, that first use of Bitcoin, puts everything into an encapsulation for us.
This is a technology that can't be stopped, that is viewed as a killer by the thing that it is trying to kill, which it's not trying to kill government, it's trying to kill abuse.
and we're trying to move past and move forward to a system where we can no longer be unilaterally
abused and have things taken from us that are ours, our lives, our energy, our contributions
to society. They can't just be taken from us. And people rose up in the 60s because of this,
but the technology wasn't there and i would say the motivation was probably way stronger than
you know people had a lot more fight in them and and and certainly you know there were riots and
there were massive gatherings and there were protests everywhere and people just actively
dropping out you know the um tune in what is it tune in turn on and drop out that's kind of today's
like silent quitting or you know people have just like removed themselves from the system
because the system not only does it no longer serve them it never serves them it just finally
revealed the extent to which it would take the abuse um and people have have uh
people have done what people always do, which is find a way and rise up as one for the betterment
of each other. You know, at the end of the day, we are all humans and we all feel a certain kinship.
I think this is why it's very important for people to travel, not because of you want to go see the
world. But what you want to do is you want to go to another part of the world and experience humanity
and share the existence of life with someone else that you may currently think of in some sort of
partitioned, separated, discriminated way in your mind. So yeah, I think that's the last thing I have
to say, I am really glad that you chose this book because the second time through reading it,
it really came to life. And having the discussions about it made me realize
what you had said when you originally promoted the idea was that this was just the best top to
bottom, back to front to back, um, not editorialized version of money and Bitcoin.
And there's, it's not commentary on society.
It's, this is what happens as a result of this.
This is cause and effect being laid out to us in a very systematic way by a systems engineer.
So I, I commend you for the book choice.
I really took a lot out of it, like I said, especially the second time around.
It got to be so much more of a deep read for me, and I enjoyed it.
Now, one of the things I took away from it, and this maybe is a qualification on what you said.
So this is a book about technology.
It's a book about the way that technology has disrupted our financial system, our monetary systems in the past.
and given that we have new technologies,
how it could disrupt going forward in the future,
especially given the flaws that our current system has.
The one thing that I really,
especially during a conversation today,
was reflecting on is technology will inevitably change things,
but the direction in which it will change things
is not necessarily set.
So we have a world of openness,
or what a world of control posited as two potential futures cbdcs and bitcoin you know
um one is the better money more sound money one has a lot of state interest behind it and the
state being so intertwined with powerful elite financial classes also has a lot of support from
them, CBDCs. So on a long enough time frame, maybe good prevails, but humans don't live necessarily
on the longest time frame because we need to prevent ourselves from mutual destruction and
nuclear war. Wars, of course, on Alden's thesis, made more likely under a fiat monetary system.
um it accelerates us towards wars and finances those wars so you know maybe bitcoin you know
slays cbdc's on a long enough time frame by itself but we don't necessarily have a long
enough time frame we need to do it asap and so we need to do everything we can to um as trump's
new executive order bans cbdc of technology but we also have um cbdc cbdc type technologies
like XRP being advocated for at the highest levels. These are debates we need to have.
And we need to ensure that the centralized outcome is not the winning outcome. And it does,
you know, we have to fight it ourselves. It's not going to fight itself. You know,
you can take your Bitcoin stack and go out into the mountains or whatever,
and do that thing where you disappear. Or you can engage with these debates,
read these books, talk to your friends and family, vote conscientiously and work within the systems we have to build the systems we want to have.
And so that this is a very realist book. It's I don't think ideologically slanted, but it does present to you, all of us, a choice.
You know, do you want are you willing to work to get the future that you want, even though you think that the technology is inevitable?
And even though it may be in a long enough time frame, what are you going to do today?
Here's all the information about why things suck and why they could unsuck themselves if we're willing to do something about it.
So, yeah, I thought it was an awesome book.
And I do agree with the sentiments you expressed that because I guess you relayed that they came from me is that I do think it's one of the best like top to bottom introductions to Bitcoin to a Bitcoin.
And like if a person is intellectually capable of kind of reading through a 400, 500 page book and they're willing to do that, this is what you hand them, I think.
If they're maybe vaguely of the left or moderate, this has a really good take that's not going to alienate them with a too aggressive Austrian economic scheme, a too aggressive freedom maximalist or anarchist schema for looking at things.
it's really going to give them a sober recounting of what money is kind of historically,
anthropologically, what our monetary system is and where it came from, why it has certain flaws,
both as perceived from the left and the right. And again, from the left and the right,
why we should settle on Bitcoin as a solution. So I'm really happy we read this for sure.
Yep. Broken money. Go get it. It is fantastic. Yeah. Great deal. All right. Well, I guess we will
get together again soon and talk about something new. Right on. Thanks, man. All right. Bye.
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