Stefan, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Nice to have you here.
Good to hear.
Yeah, fantastic to have you here.
I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time.
So the first long format video I saw with you, I think it was the, you were on my friend Robert Breedlove's show doing a couple of episodes, right, on intellectual property and all of this.
Correct.
And yeah, I don't know how much you know about me and my background, but I fell into the whole Misesian rabbit hole somewhat at the same time as I fell into the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
And I've been delving deeper and deeper ever since.
I even wrote a beginner's book on praxeology here.
I've seen that.
Yeah, I did see that.
Yeah, I was looking into that a few months ago.
There we go.
Yeah, so one of my goals with this book was to get to know some Mises Institute people, because I came to this completely from the Bitcoin angle.
But I've been devouring Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe in particular, but not limited to and reading up on libertarian thought.
And yeah, I just love it.
Yeah, I find it interesting that there's a – I think most people get interested in Austrian economics because they're libertarians and people get into Bitcoin because they were libertarians and Austrians.
But I think there's a subset of people that it's the other way around, right?
Like they get interested in Bitcoin, so then they get interested in economics and then they become libertarians and Austrians and that kind of thing.
I find that fascinating.
Yeah, for me, I'd say it's a bit of both.
I mean, I grew up in Sweden, and I was always freedom-oriented and, you know, understanding, having an intuition for how freedom is much more powerful than people think it is.
But it wasn't right. And I'd heard of the Mises Institute and stuff, but I was unaware of the thought tradition and everything and didn't do the proper deep dive until basically Bitcoin and Seyfedin pushed me over the hump, so to speak.
yeah so
where would we start this
like I see a lot of people
online and a lot of people
Bitcoiners too, specifically
Bitcoiners who are unaware
of how real
Praxeology and
the Austrian theory
is, they think it's optional
or they think that it's something
you can have opinions about
and I
try my best to tell them like
yeah but
give me a good argument against first principles.
Give me a good argument against one of the claims praxeology makes,
and I never get a good answer out of them.
So why do you think that is?
Why do you think so many people have such a hard time
grasping how real this branch of science really is?
I think it's because it's been corrupted.
I think in the last, say, 70 years or so, there was a sort of corruption of philosophy in the sense of and you hear about this now.
People say that, oh, science proved with like Darwin and with relativity that we don't know anything.
And then Kant, you know, we don't know anything for sure.
We can't know anything real.
And so your average person just sees this incomprehensible discipline of thinkers in philosophy. And it seems to be unscientific and all over the map, and you can't get anything from it.
So there was a retreat to the hard sciences, the physics and chemistry because of all the successes in the early 20s science as the natural sciences.
And they started dismissing the humanities and philosophy.
And then economics was in this position where it was like a soft science of human action, trying to understand the implications of human action in the marketplace, right, in the human society sphere.
And to jump onto this wave of pro-natural sciences in the 50s with Milton Friedman and positivism and things like that, it switched from the old type of soft science to pretend empirical science.
So now it's dominated by people that the economic profession is dominated by people that do calculus and math and equations and plots and econometrics and trends and regression theorems.
And I think that's basically pseudoscience. And also, I think the average person is bewildered by that, just like they were bewildered by philosophy before. And they just dismiss it because the so-called experts and most of the prominent economists are now prominent university professors or employed by the government, like the Fed of the chair or the Treasury secretary, people like that.
And so they claim to know what they're doing, but then the economy is always in a shambles.
So people just don't trust it. Right.
Just like they're starting to not trust regular science with the with the way covid worked out and vaccines and the new skepticism of everything, everything institutional and authoritative.
Everyone's questioning everything now.
So I think that's the main reason is because they don't know who to trust and believe.
And it's bewildering. And I think economics has been on the wrong track for 50 or 70 years.
But economics is unavoidable
The typical person needs to have an understanding of a lot of things in their life
They need to understand facts
They need to understand basic laws of cause and effect
You know, gravity
The fact that if you eat poison it will kill you
You know, things like that
You know, virtues like hard work leads to prosperity
And laziness leads to the other things
Honesty is a virtue because it helps you in society
You know, common sense, things like that, and knowledge of math and language and reading and writing and grammar and history and the basic sciences is a useful thing, right, which is why the average educated person knows something about most of these things.
And they know something about the market and transactions and finance.
Okay, so that's why there's a need for economics as a way to understand the implications of that field of human life, which is market transactions, exchange and trade, because it's an important part of our lives.
And so there's a need to understand it both on a common sense level and on a more systematic level as a theorist.
So that's the need for economics, and I think that's the reason people need to understand praxeology.
Now, I will confess that when I was a young, budding Austrian-interested person and libertarian, I was intrigued by all these concepts I read about, like epistemology and praxeology and ontology.
But they all seem to me to be almost unnecessary made-up terms that are overcomplicating the issue that I didn't see any use in, any utility in.
But over time, I started understanding why there's a field of philosophy about knowledge called epistemology and why it's not bullshit.
And even ontology is like – it seems like a very nuanced thing, like we're splitting – it seems almost like armchair philosophy by grad students or something.
But ontology and metaphysics and ethics and these are all branches of philosophy that study different parts of reality.
And so ontology is the study of the basic types of things that exist.
And even this is important.
I don't think you need to know that on a day-to-day basis for the average person. But epistemology, you need to know something about how we can know what's good evidence, how we can know what's true, how can we reason to things, how can we trust our senses, that kind of thing.
And praxeology, I used to think, was a throwaway term. Like, you could just describe all of economics without it. But – and I always – I also think that people, especially amateur theorists, and there's a lot of them now because there's people on Twitter with opinions that just – they're actually usually pseudonyms, so they don't even have a name.
and they're not educated and they just had these theories.
And then there's cranks, lots of cranks.
And because of self-publishing, anyone can write a book now.
So one thing I, one rule of thumb I've settled on in my life is that
if someone comes up with a new term, they coin a new term,
it's a red flag that they might be a crank.
Now, there's exceptions.
Like I would give Mises an exception because Mises coined,
as far as I can recall, two terms. One is praxeology and the other is catalactics.
And that's about all you can get away with if you're a super genius like Mises.
But you understand why he came up with those terms. Now, there's others like Eric Vogelin
and even Hayek. They come up with all these needlessly complicated terms like taxes and
cosmos and things like this, which no one can remember or keep. So when you start coming up
with your own vocabulary, it's a sign that you're a crank. Now, there are certain exceptions,
right? Like Wittgenstein or world-class geniuses like Kant or Mises, give them a break. But anyone
who comes up with too many terms, there might be a crank. All that said, I've come to appreciate
praxeology. In fact, in my mind, I was really attracted to the, my favorite aspect of Austrian
economics personally was always the epistemology and the methodology. My favorite book by Mises is
his last one called The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science. It's very short. It's sort of
like the culmination of his life's work on the understanding of what economics is, right?
And it explains why the concept of praxeology is needed. So the word praxeology, for the average
person, they can roll their eyes and just think that someone's talking gibberish. But really,
It's just a word to describe one of these sciences, one of these systematic studies of a realm of phenomena in human life, just like biology is a field of systematic study of what biology covers.
And in physics and chemistry are these fields, like mathematics is another field.
History is another field.
And praxeology studies the logic of human action, right?
Which is just a formal way of saying, when we try to understand market phenomena, human cooperation, human production, things like this, the creation of wealth, market transactions, we're not looking at history.
We're not looking at data.
We're not looking at finance and entrepreneurship.
We're looking at narrowly what are the implications of policies and human action in a world of scarcity because that's the world we all live in.
That's the fundamental insight of economists and especially those like Mises and Hoppe is that we live in a world of scarcity.
So the central insight of praxeology is that it's just simply to understand the nature of what it means to be a human and to act.
Okay, this is something any person can understand, even if you just throw away the word praxeology, it's the inquiry into the nature of what it means to act.
And what it means to act is to be purposive, to have a purpose, to have a goal in mind, to see the world around you, to understand that we live in the present.
There was a recently past past.
There's a future that's coming.
We all know this.
There's a world of facts around us and a world of materials around us, other people, other resources.
there's things we know about the world causal laws laws of cause and effect recipes that we
know we can use to make things happen how to make machines and how to catch a fish and how to cook
we know all these things and so we're faced with the always we're faced with the choice what to do
next that's what human action is is so we we see what's coming and we try to do something about it
we try to interfere with the world interfering with the world means to act it means to use your
body, which you can control, and to use that body to manipulate other things in the world that you
can also control that can have an effect on changing the outcome of things, the course of
history. And those things are called scarce means of action. These are scarce resources. So the world
is full of scarce resources, which if you have knowledge, you can employ to make things happen.
So the structure of human action is, which is what praxeology studies, is simply that we have,
We are human actors that are imperfect. We live in a world of scarcity. We live in a world where the future is always coming, and we always have the necessity to make a decision about what to do next to increase our satisfaction in the world.
And we do that by using our knowledge to manipulate our bodies to employ scarce resources that we think because of knowledge that we have about cause and effect that we think are causally efficacious at changing things So you can see that the key elements of human action are two things In addition to control and possession of your body right which is what it means to be a human actor or a human being with a body a corporeal body
The two essential aspects of human action are you have a purpose in mind, but you have to achieve your purpose to act.
You have to have knowledge.
You have to know something about the world.
You can't be a vegetable.
You have to know what can achieve your ends, what ends are possible, what ends you want to achieve, what means can achieve those ends.
You have to have knowledge, technical knowledge, and you have to have available means you can use to achieve your outcome.
So it's a combination of these two things, knowledge and scarce resources that combine to result in an output, in action.
And then it's either successful or it's not successful, right?
Either you achieve what you want to achieve or you don't, or you might achieve it and then you're dissatisfied.
But ahead of time, you thought it would achieve what you wanted to achieve.
So that's called. So all these basic categories of economics are implied in that basic common sense story.
Profit and loss, opportunity, cost, means, cost, success, failure, happiness, dissatisfaction.
All these things are implied in what it means to act.
So it's just the verbal and logical and reasonable unpacking of this that is what the core of economic analysis is.
And any intelligent human can understand that, I believe.
And then it's the more sophisticated unpacking of that and development of that, which is what Austrian economics is.
And then modern economics took kind of that basic framework and they started changing it to an empirical discipline where instead of having that rational understanding of how humans act, they started trying to do what physicists do.
And they say, let's just hypothesize a law and then come up with an experiment to test it and see if it's right or wrong. That's logical positivism. And I think that that's largely misguided. And that's – anyway, so that's sort of my –
how I view economics and its relationship to human action, human life, and the other disciplines like philosophy, law, math, business, finance, etc.
Yeah, if I look back on my school years, I remember like the harder the science, the more I like the subject,
because basically because it meant I just had to understand stuff and I didn't have to do a lot of homework.
It was all about understanding instead of memorizing shit.
And the softer the sciences and the more I got into the social sciences, it was more about remembering stuff, memorizing stuff, and also about things that, you know, if you have an inquisitive mind, you're in this wait-but-why mode all the time, and they tell you why it's important to vote, but they don't really explain why, and so on and so forth.
And once you stumble upon praxeology, you realize that there is a hard science for the social sciences.
There is actually a way to do this, a methodology that works, that is as robust as mathematics.
Like it is to the subjective what mathematics is to the objective in a sense.
And that's a holy shit. That was a truly light bulb moment for me because it sort of proved that what I learned, I had to unlearn everything of the social sciences because I realized that it was truth. It was just opinion. It was just tailored to suit the people who paid for the whole thing to have me brainwashed in a way.
I mean, this takes a long time to get to that conclusion.
But yeah.
Yeah.
And what I've noticed is that a lot of very smart people or moderately smart people, they sense that there's this chaos and confusion and this pointlessness to philosophy and all the official opinions they hear.
So they just throw it all away and they retreat to what you did.
Like they retreat to the sciences.
They say, OK, here's what I know.
Technology works and physics works.
But it leads to a sort of anti-intellectualism among some people, and it also leads to – because they're impatient, they also don't want to have no answers to the bigger questions that science just can't answer.
Like, I don't know, is there a god and free will and what's the purpose of life and politics and the softer things?
So they try to reduce it like the economists do.
They try to reduce it to a scientific question, but of course that can't work.
So you can't just say, well, let's just do an experimental. Let's just – let's look at – we saw this in COVID. Like, look, what does the data say? What is it? They always talk about the data.
And they just fail to understand that just even the very scientific method itself, which is what people retreat to when they're logical positivists or empiricists, that itself is not a testable scientific theory.
In other words, assuming that the only meaningful scientific statements are those that are falsifiable and subject to experimentation, that assumption, which underlies all of physics and the hard sciences, that assumption itself is sort of a pre-scientific assumption.
It can never be proved or disproved.
So you can see how philosophy is at the base of science.
It's more fundamental than science.
But people don't have the time for that, and they've thrown away philosophy, so they just ignore that problem.
and they move on.
I love that because that reminds me of a part of my favorite Austrian economics book,
which is Economic Science and the Austrian Method by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
It's so dense and so beautifully written.
And there's a passage in that where he explains that the empiricist's claim is that we cannot
know anything to 100% certainty.
We can only like get closer to the truth, but never get to an absolute truth.
But what the empiricist doesn't realize is that that statement is in itself an absolutist statement.
Correct.
So it's self-contradictory.
And that was just such a mind-blowing.
And Mises said this.
So Mises and Hoppe.
Hoppe says that in that small pamphlet.
And Mises says that also in, I think, in Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science and probably elsewhere.
So yet they both saw the same thing.
Yeah.
And Hoppe is just like sort of underlining how or highlighting how right Mises was and like how he, the action is the bridge between the subjective and the objective and all of these beautiful insights.
I think that was one of Hoppe's biggest contributions was to sort of extend and bolster Mises because Mises has long been criticized by like the objectivists and Randians because the Randians had this understandable aversion to Kant.
Okay. It's understandable for two reasons. Number one – well, the primary reason is Kant was a little bit murky of a writer and kind of inscrutable.
And there has been a whole Kant industry after him. There's so many interpretations of him.
But one of the interpretations is this sort of skeptical or relativist idea that we can't know anything for sure because we don't know the real world.
And if you take that interpretation, which people like Hoppe have argued is not really the only or the best interpretation of Kant, that there's a more realist interpretation of Kant, which is compatible with the realist view of the world, which the objectivists are in favor of.
But that was more of a continental or European interpretation of Kant.
In the American side, there was a more skeptical interpretation of Kant.
And I think if you take that interpretation of Kant, you can understand why the Randians rejected him.
But it has led them to have this knee-jerk hostility towards even the Kantian language.
So Mises adopted just a very tiny part of Kant, and that is his language and concepts and terminology, the categories, right?
Like a priori and a posteriori, synthetic and analytic knowledge.
But Mises was ultimately a realist, and by realist, I mean Mises did not deny – he did not employ Kant's concepts like some American philosophers may have to say that we can't know anything about the world.
To the contrary, Mises was just trying to find a useful vocabulary to describe human action and praxeology.
So he's talking about different types of knowledge, scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge, and knowledge of more fundamental things like a priori concepts, things you can't – things that you would basically contradict yourself if you deny.
And ironically, Ayn Rand herself also believed in certain fundamental categories that are undeniably true. She called them axioms, a little bit eccentrically called them axioms, like the idea that there is existence, that there's consciousness.
The basic things that you can't even deny without accepting them as true, which is also a method Hoppe used ethically in his argumentation ethics, like to say that you can't object to basically self-ownership and private property rights because they're presupposed by the normative presumptions of argumentation itself.
So that's his argument there. And then Mises, of course, used something similar with his opriary categories. And Rothbard, of course, which I'm sure you've read, is an interesting hybrid example because he was influenced by Rand and he was a Thomist and an Aristotelian.
But he didn't have this hangup with Mises using the Kantian concepts to describe economics and praxeology.
But he did sort of give a more – he tried to show that there's – they can be understood in the Aristotelian terminology or framework.
I do think that – anyway, what I was going to say was this criticism of Mises that he is contributing to relativism and Kantian skepticism because of his use of their terminology and also because of the Randians' eccentric use of the word value and subjective.
They mean the word subjective to mean this Kantian idea, according to them, that we can't know anything for sure, that everything is just subjective to the person.
Like the reality you're seeing is not the real reality.
That kind of thing is subjective to you.
So now Mises meant the concept of subjectivism to mean that value is an implication of teleology or human action.
It just explains why you're acting.
You chose this means to achieve that end because that's what you preferred.
You valued it.
That is not subjective in the skeptical sense at all.
It's just a different use of the term.
So the point is you have this sort of uncomfortableness with Mises by some libertarians because of this – his baggage with Kant.
But Hoppe in that pamphlet, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, he points out that, look, if you actually deeply understand the implications of Mises and praxeology, he was showing that praxeology is the bridge, as you were just alluding to, I think, is the bridge between your personal experience of the world, which I mean Kant might call the nuomenal world or phenomenal.
I always get them confused. And the outside world, like it's because to achieve an end, you have to employ a means that actually is causally efficacious, which is why I used that word earlier.
A means has to be causally efficacious. In other words, it has to comply with the real world laws of cause and effect to achieve something.
This is why like a rain dance is not really hardly a real action. Like if you do a rain dance to make it rain, you're not really using a means that is going to make it rain. So if you have knowledge.
Well, you think you are. You think you are. You're just failing to reach your end because your means were insufficient.
Yeah, and economics, I think a rigorous understanding of economics helps you understand what's going on there.
Like why is this guy – now, you might have a guy doing a rain dance in a movie.
He's an actor. He doesn't believe it or someone doing it for fun.
But someone really who did that 300 years ago might have falsely believed that that was one way to make it rain.
So that explains why he would do it.
it also explains why he would have a loss, right?
Why his effort would go to waste
because he wouldn't achieve the outcome desired.
So I'm getting an image in my head here.
I haven't thought of it this way before,
but could one say that the end is subjective
because it's in your head?
The means is objective
because it something in the real world something physical And if the action is successful then you reach your end meaning that you successfully bridged the subjective and the objective
But you only successfully bridged it if you didn't do the rain dance,
you did whatever, geoengineering or something instead.
That actually led to it raining.
I mean, so.
Well, let's think about that.
Let's think about that.
That's interesting.
I think that the means and the end both have a hybrid aspect.
They both have an objective and a subjective component.
And here's why.
So let's take the means, the rain dance, for example.
So it's subjectively viewed as a means because you actually falsely believe that it will cause rain.
Okay.
So that's the subjective aspect.
But the objective aspect is that it really won't. Right. So things work a certain way. So it really won't cause the rain to happen. So there's a there's a combination aspect to the nature of that means. Right. It's regarded as a means because of the subjective perspective of the actor.
And by the way, Hoppe also has another related comment in – I think it's in A Theory of Socialism, Capitalism, and also maybe repeated in Economic –
ESAM.
No, the second book, EEPP, his second English language book, EEPP. I've got it on his website. But he's got a long passage where he talks about the character of goods as not being – there's no – just like there's no intrinsic value in things, which is another false belief of modern economics and of Marxism too.
By the way, this idea that the value of a product is an objective characteristic based upon the labor put into it, that kind of stuff.
But the characteristic of a good as being a good – and this, by the way, relates to Bitcoin, which maybe we can get to.
Oh, and I wanted to say, I have your pin.
I have your infinity over – what's it?
21M.
Yeah, yeah.
I have that pin and a T-shirt too.
I'm just aware of it for an interview, but I forgot.
Yeah, I've got that.
Yeah, I saw the T-shirt.
You didn't buy my ones, though.
You bought the – but I don't believe in intellectual property just like you.
I bought the one.
I could buy yours.
The problem is I started to understand – I was asking, why did you use that?
And you explained, well, it's sort of a signaling method to tell the people that you know that you get it with Bitcoin,
but without telling the kidnappers to kidnap me.
But I think –
It's a good object.
I don't even want to wear that.
I'm afraid to wear it even that, to be honest, because I don't want to be kidnapped.
I don't want people to think they should kidnap me.
I don't have any Bitcoins.
I'm just a theoretician.
So, yeah, yeah.
Go on.
But I was going to say, so Hoppe, there's another comment he makes in his second book,
is that there's no – it's about the public goods.
It's like some people say there's public goods, and that's why we need the state.
He's like, well, there's no such thing as a public good, just like there's no such thing as a capital good in the sense of its intrinsic characteristic.
What a good is depends upon the way it's valued by a given actor, right?
So it's characteristic as being public or private or being a consumer good or a capital good or being a bad.
It could be a bad. Like, you know, if oil, if I have a big ranch and oil starts bubbling up, it might be a nuisance to me. It might be a bad, not be a good because I might not want to sell. I might not know I can use the oil.
So nothing is intrinsic characteristic. It's the way they're valued. By the same token, when you have something you're aiming at in the future.
So we'll get back to this hybrid concept.
So when you aim at a future, when you act, you're actually trying to, I have a blog post on this where I characterize, I envision people as little gods because every time you act, you're trying to basically create, you're trying to change the future universe that would otherwise come.
So you're trying to go from universe A to universe A prime or universe B.
but of course that might be incompatible with what other people are doing which is why
in competition only sometimes one person can win right i mean this is this is all fascinating stuff
yeah it might be literally true if we're if the multiverse theory in quantum mechanics is true
and we actually create a new uh an infinite amount and now you're now you're now you're
giving support to all the people that think that modern philosophy is relativistic and we can't
know anything uh yeah i'm necessarily i know i'm still doing it in one specific universe yeah i'm
a big skeptic of quantum theory and uh all that stuff but uh uh even even of relativity uh special
relativity i i'm i i personally i'm of the opinion that peter beckman was right that um
that the speed of light is not is not independent of the observer but um anyway that's yeah i don't
I don't know what's up.
That's a good subject for another pod at another time.
It is, yeah.
But I think that the name of the book you're looking for is The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, I think.
Yeah, EEPP, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, I want to try to steer this conversation into a specific direction because there's a thought behind the madness here.
And yeah, so we've covered means and ends and property and subjective and objective.
Real quick, real quick, let me interrupt just a second.
And let me mention why I would mention something and then you can get back to this if you want to.
The reason I mentioned Hoppe and his insight into the subjective analysis of what a good is, is I think it plays a role in this fungibility debate with Bitcoin.
People say Bitcoins are fungible because they're different.
In a sense, nothing in the world is fungible. Even if you have gold, every atom is unique. It's just that we subjectively decide to ignore those similarities.
And so the very concept of a good that is something that has a homogenous supply, that very concept of something that is a good that has a homogenous supply presupposes that people that regard it as that subjectively ignore the – they ignore certain aspects of it and they treat other things.
So for their purposes, gold is sufficiently homogenous and fungible.
So fungibility is a subjective phenomenon.
So when people say Bitcoin is not fungible, well, nothing is fungible.
I mean, it's only a question about – it's sort of like could Bitcoin be money?
Anything can be money if people regard it as a homogenous supply of divisible units.
And what they can be – yeah.
So anyway, let's go back.
I love this because this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, because you can express this so clearly.
And it's totally in line with my thinking.
I have this in one of my books.
I don't remember which one, but like pointing out how fungibility is in the eye of the beholder.
And in the Praxeology book as well, of course, homogeneity.
Like, well, who's to say what constitutes a homo?
That's why there's apples and oranges on the cover here.
So the orange is in Bitcoin orange, but that's the only.
They're both fruits.
I mean, they're both fruits.
I mean, what's the class or the category, right?
Yeah.
So one of the latest interests of mine in praxeology is the difference between law and ethics and natural law and how natural law is actually true and how that, like the foundation of that, why the non-aggression principle, because I've seen people argue online that the non-aggression principle doesn't work because there are psychopaths and stuff.
And I try to tell them that, no, the non-aggression principle does work because there are psychopaths. Like, if there's a psychopath, the non-aggression principle can tell you what an appropriate response to the crime is and how much retaliation that is ethically tolerated and stuff.
But so what are the foundations of that? And yeah, Hoppe's argumentation ethics, we can go deeper into that too, like the layers below it.
The argumentation ethics thing is, the conclusion is sort of that you own your own body, but you show that you do by controlling it.
So is control really ownership or is ownership something?
What's the difference here?
Ownership, possession, control.
What are the differences between the words?
Yeah, I think to make progress in these fields, I found that.
So the way I look at it, maybe a high level, high level view is.
There's been progress in humanity over the centuries, the millennia, and it's because there's been a sort of social aspect to humans, right?
We're social creatures. That's the way we developed. We evolved that way, which means that there's a certain natural dynamic. There's a reason people live together. Number one, that's how we procreate. We happen to live in that to each other. But given that we do, there are certain, you know, that's how the species propagates.
But the way we developed, so we've – there's a logic to it. There's a reason. There's a rational reason that people want to be with each other in trade, division of labor, all that kind of stuff.
But there's also just human empathy as part of our development. So people naturally – so it's natural that a species and each individual member of it has values and they act. They value their own life. You have to have self-preservation as your core value.
But we're not all completely sociopaths.
We happen to value other people.
We love other people.
We want to be around other people.
We value the species itself.
We value our life and the human race's life.
So we have these values that are all related.
So, you know, you don't live only for your own life, but you value.
So when someone else is, you want other people to do well, too.
You might not value them as highly as yourself, but you do value them to some degree, which
is why I think there's a possibility of society and why we're not always fighting with each other.
And then you have the virtues arise, like honesty, integrity, independence,
character becomes important, and then law emerges. Now, because we live in a world of scarcity,
there's always the possibility of conflict, right? So the benefit of living with other people is you
get to live with other people, and also you get to trade, and you can benefit from the division
and the specialization of labor.
But then you have the possibility of conflict.
That is a violent clash with someone over your bodies,
like rape or murder,
or over your own, your resources that you use in the world.
So these resources that you need to employ,
like land and food and animals and tools, things like that.
So because of this possibility of violent conflict
and because people happen to have certain commonly shared values
For the most part, there are the occasional sociopaths out there, but most people have a normal predisposition and they value each other.
They would value peace and cooperation over violence because it's less profitable and it's less fun.
Right. And so because of this, over time in society, laws emerge and rights emerge.
Now, when you have a deeper understanding of politics and law and the modern state and society and history and economics and all this stuff, then you start to have more careful distinctions.
So the distinction that you need to draw is fundamentally between possession and ownership.
Those concepts, those words are very important.
And what were you saying earlier that some people say one of their objections to say to ethics and the non-aggression principle is that we have psychopaths.
I'd say it simply doesn't work.
We need a state to control the criminals.
And I point out that, yeah, but they're –
And their mistake there is, like, as you say, if the – sort of like maybe Thomas Jefferson or one of the U.S. founding fathers said, if the world were angels, we wouldn't need government, right?
And what they mean is that if people voluntarily – if they just shunned all violent conflict and they respected each other's rights, then you wouldn't have any violent conflict and you wouldn't have any rights violations.
You wouldn't even need law and order or the government or police or anything like that.
But you do have that at least on occasion and that the purpose of having these laws and rules is because people that want to cooperate with each other which is the bulk of humanity even they don know what to do sometimes to avoid conflict unless they have a clear indication of who owns what which is why you have ownership rules which can tell you who owns what Now these ownership rules are what we so the mistake that people make when they say
that they're psychopaths and the rules don't work for them is they're conflating the normative realm
with the factual realm. The normative realm or the descriptive realm is a world of, say, facts.
It's like what people do, and that is analogous to the concept of possession.
So in economics, it's purely descriptive.
It's about the descriptive world when we describe what people do.
And like I said earlier, that story I gave earlier of apraxeology is purely descriptive because it would apply even to Robinson Crusoe alone on an island.
Every minute of your life, every day, you have to face a choice of what to do.
And to do that, you have a goal in mind and you employ certain means to achieve it.
That's not an ethical thing at all.
It had nothing to do with conflict or violence or right and wrong.
It's just what people do.
So to employ a resource means to use it, to have the ability to use it, to grasp it, to grapple with it, to control it.
And that's what possession means, right?
So possession is just a factual thing.
Now, sometimes a person might wonder, what should I do? What's the right thing to do? What's the right or the wrong thing to do? So then you have things like morals and ethics and philosophy and values and the virtues, study the virtues.
What's the, you know, it's best to be honest and to have thrift and to not be lazy.
And also the values of I value other people.
I value other people's well-being, too.
So I prefer cooperation over violence.
All these things inform a normative system.
And a normative system is like so you can have one type of normative system is your personal moral code.
Like, what should I do in this situation?
Even if you're alone on an island, like, should I be lazy or should I work hard?
You know, should I be honest with myself about what's going to happen if I don't save up enough coconuts for the winter or whatever, you know, or in society, should I be honest or should I cheat and steal?
Should I, you know, should I abide by these rules or not?
So there's a set of norms in society.
Some of them are minor, like we call them manners, like it's impolite to do certain things.
But some of them go to a higher level, and there's such a level that breach of that moral rule – it's not just immoral. It's not just bad manners, but it's actually so extreme that people think that the use of force is justified in retaliation.
That's what law is basically. So if I'm rude to my grandmother, people will disapprove of me, and they might ostracize me, but that's about it.
But if I shoot my grandmother, now I've committed murder, and that's such a violation of her rights, and that can be met with force.
Someone could use force to punish me or to stop me, and that's what law is.
But anyway, the point is these are norms that guide conduct, but they guide the conduct of the people interested in their conduct being guided.
It's basically a set of – it's not a recommendation for the criminal.
It's not telling the criminal how to live his life because that's personal morals.
The law is basically saying when are we as people that want to be moral or society in general, when are we justified in using force to sanction this activity, to punish this activity or to stop this activity?
And that's what law does.
Law tells us when we're justified in using force to stop someone from doing something that we don't like.
So what it tells us, and from time immemorial, the core of private law ever since the Roman days and even before Roman law, English law, and even modern law is that people have the right, property right in their body.
And they have property rights in material resources that they need to use to survive in the world that were previously unowned.
So that's why we have the rule of homesteading or original appropriation, and then the second rule, you can sell it by – you can sell it so then by contract.
So these three normative rules, which are legal rules as well, they mirror or emerge from the descriptive world.
The descriptive world says you have a body. You can control it.
There are resources that you need to employ their scarce means of action to get things done.
You can possess them. So possession, control, these are all descriptive things. They're not normative at all. Even the criminal and the psychopath has control of his body and needs to use resources.
But then a set of normative rules overlay on top of that and reinforce it.
So the way I look at rights is rights are normative support for possession.
So economics deals with the descriptive world and with possession and with the implications of human action.
Ethics and law and norms deals with how we should.
And so the thing is that ethics and law are like a normative support on top of it.
Now, what that means is that if I'm a criminal or a good guy, I just need to control myself and things I can control to get things done, to act.
But if I'm actually a moral person and a good person, I want to avoid conflict, so I want to respect people's rights.
So if there's a legal system that's established, a normative system, it can tell me what to do to avoid conflict.
It can also tell me what I'm justified in doing to stop someone who doesn't care about that.
So that's why it's irrelevant that you might have a criminal or a sociopath who doesn't care about rights because they're going to be dealt with, as Hoppe says, as a technical problem because they're not amenable to reason.
Now, okay, on occasion, you might have a robber or a bad guy, and you could persuade them not to – it's like don't kill the baby.
Come on, guy. Don't kill the baby, and he might listen to you. He might not.
Hoppe tells this funny story about a friend he had who – I think it was a true story.
And he's using this story to show that democracy is horrible because every democratic government is terrible because, as Hayek said, the bad rise to the top.
democracies are horrible. Whereas like in a monarchy, on occasion, you might have a good
monarch. You might have a stupid one, but you might have a good one on occasion. And just like
you might have a private criminal, like the story he told was his friend was like at an ATM, like at
night in Germany or somewhere, two in the morning, and some guy robbed him. He just took some money
out of the ATM and some guy robbed him. And he handed the $500 or euros over to the guy and he
He says, man, I was going to use that to go buy a couple of beers and to get my cab ride home.
So the robber gave him like $50 back because he felt bad for him.
Sounds like a government program.
Well, but the government would never – if the government takes your money in taxes and you say that I don't have enough money to take my vacation, the government just says tough luck, too bad.
At least on occasion you might have a nice robber.
The point is sometimes you can persuade a robber or a bad guy with the force of moral suasion not to do something.
But if you can't, then you have to resort to force.
You have to treat him as what we call a technical obstacle.
Now, man in the world has to deal with many challenges, right?
There's scarcity, lack of abundance.
There's poverty.
There's pestilence.
There's hurricanes.
There's tigers.
There's lions.
And we don't regard a lion as an evil thing. It's just a fact of the world, and you have to take a precaution and treat the lion as a technical problem.
How do you protect yourself from the possibility of lions attacking you? There's ways you can do that, and we have to regard criminals as the same way.
It's just that the bulk of humans are moral, and they only want to do what they're justified in doing.
So when there's another man and they know they need to treat him as a means of action, right, which Kant talks about as being an immoral thing, treating someone as a means, sometimes you need to.
And the question is, when are you justified in doing that?
And the non-aggression principle basically says you're justified in treating someone else as a means that is doing something they don't want you to do when they're doing something to you that you don't want them to do to you.
In other words, when they're initiating force, when they're committing aggression, they're using your body or your resources that you legitimately acquired by homesteading or by contract without your permission.
Then they breach the peace and they basically entered the world.
They've admitted they've admitted in a sense by their conduct that they don't respect your rights.
They don't believe in law.
So they really have no complaint anymore if you use a similar type of force against them to stop them.
That's why in the mind of the person wanting to be moral, he regards his use of force against that person as just.
And that's why there's law.
That's why law emerges and why it has a certain characteristic.
That's why law across all societies has certain things in common.
It always protects self-ownership.
It always protects the right to acquire an unknown resource.
And it protects the right to acquire or sell that resource by contract.
That's the core elements of private law.
And it has to be.
The one that's what the criminal deserves or the largest punishment that the criminal can deserve.
But anything above that is then you're a criminal yourself.
And anything below that is, of course, OK.
You may choose to forgive.
And there's a great power in forgiveness sometimes.
So usually the punishment wouldn't be two eyes for one eye, but something milder.
And yeah, that book is very eye opening too, I think.
I totally agree.
In my book, my book here, my book there, chapter five, I have my own unpacking of punishment theory and rights theory and this kind of stuff.
And now I think Rothbard's way of putting it is more of a – it's more of a shorthand.
I think it's a way to – I don't think that there's any mathematical formula.
You can't say it's just double the punishment is acceptable because there's a subjective aspect to all this.
Yeah, but that's not what he says, though, to defend Rothbard there.
He says that that would theoretically not be criminal, even though he points out that that would never be a real scenario.
STEPHAN KINSELLA Correct. But – yeah, he got that from Walter Block as well. I'm just saying that I think that that's a useful way to understand the fact that the way that we justify rights is because what we're saying is our institutional or personal use of force against someone who doesn't want you to – like the criminal doesn't want you to use force against him.
So he's not consenting to it. He's objecting. But the reason why it's okay to override his desires is because he's doing something similar to you.
But what that means is that there's a limit to how much of a similar thing he's doing to you, and there's a limit to how much you can do in response.
So I think what Rothbard is getting at, that's the reason why there's a proportionality requirement. There always was, and that is implied in the eye for an eye idea or in the two eyes for an eye idea.
It's not that it's a mechanical formula
It's more that that gets at the heart of the reason why there's a limit
Now, in reality, because values are subjective
And because there's a difficulty in administering any system of justice
There are certain practical aspects to it
Which I believe, and I talk about in that chapter 5
Lead to certain things that the law has settled on
Things like burdens of proof and standards of proof. So, for example, I think that what you do is you always have a rule that says in a case of doubt, we favor the victim of aggression.
So if you say, well, this guy did this to me, what exactly would be a proportional punishment? In some cases, it's not always clear, right?
Like let's I mean, I don't let's say I have one arm.
I'm a one arm guy and some gun chops off my right arm.
So now I have no arms.
I mean, is it is it the same punishment to chop off his arm?
Because he still has one arm left.
I mean, things like this are like you can see why you can't have a formula.
But the point is, you would so you have to you have to you have
I say we have to give the maximum flexibility to the victim to choose what he wants to do within a reasonable range of procedures as overseen perhaps by a judge or by a jury who looks at it and says, yeah, using our judgment, I think that's the best you can do, and then let's move on.
So that's how any legal system has to work, and that frustrates some libertarians who fed up with the way the positive law and the legal system has dealt with things.
they just want to throw it away and have like a Rothbard sit down and write a book and give you
the answer to everything and say, okay, for my armchair, if there were two guys doing this,
here's what the answer would be. And here's what the answer would be. And here's what they want
answers to every question. And it frustrates them if you say, well, we don't really know.
You have to just let a jury hear it and make a decision. They want to have a solid answer,
but you can't always have an answer to things because the answer depends because life is complex
and you can never predict all the factors that would be relevant to a given dispute.
And that's why you have to have a trial and a jury and people that can take evidence and ask questions of witnesses
and take into account custom and context and history and the way things are done.
No, and crime and law in general are especially complex because you cannot see what didn't happen. Like if I steal from you, I might stop you from doing something else that may or may not lead to a third thing and so on and so forth.
It goes into why taxes are so criminal in themselves, because if I steal from you every month, then I probably cause a lot more harm than if I steal a lot once.
Like, this is super complex.
But, yeah.
By the way, I think Leisner Spooner has a comment about that where he compares the highwayman to the government because the highwayman doesn't rob you and then keep following you around for life and then reminding you about what a good thing he did for you all the time.
Like the government always hounds you, they tax you, they never let you go, and they always keep acting like they're the good guy helping you out.
Welcome to Knut's super awesome Bitcoin school.
Should you use fiat money?
Of course not.
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And you should buy Bitcoin instead.
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And remember, bullbitcoin.com, bitvolt.sv, bitbox.swiss, and thebitcoinadvisor.com.
Use code infinity everywhere.
And don't forget to brush your teeth.
Over and out.
So let's try to get into the Bitcoin side of things.
So a TLDR on my, like after 10 years in this and my sort of deepest insight, like the thing that intrigued me from the very get-go with Bitcoin was that here was this promise of a number that couldn't be copied or something in computers that couldn't be copied, which like blew my mind.
Like this must be bullshit because that's the nature of information, right?
Right.
Information can be copied.
Correct.
Or data can be copied. Information is sort of data interpreted by human beings, I guess, but all data can be copied.
So that's what sent me down the rabbit hole.
And I quite soon understood why that would make perfect money or damn near perfect money
and why there could only be one because any copy of it would like...
It's pointless at best to make a copy of resistance to copyability.
Like it's obviously counterproductive to try to copy that property.
so so i got into all that but like uh it took me a long time to really put words on why uh why the
satoshi is sacred compared to all other data and and why only that can be scarce and the conclusion
i came to is that the reason you cannot copy them is because they're not really on the internet
They're in people's heads or the ability to move them is in their heads.
Like the private key, either the literal private key, the 12 magic words or the location of a hardware wallet or it's all about keeping a secret from everyone else.
So owning a Bitcoin is or possessing a Bitcoin if you want or controlling it is something you do by keeping a secret from someone else.
And you cannot really say that you own it because here we go into intellectual property, your favorite subject, and you cannot own data.
It's impossible to own data.
And it's impossible to prove that even if you have control of your own private key, you do not know if other people also know that same information, if they also have the private key or have access to it.
meaning that the reason you can act as if you own the bitcoin is is because you you understand how
improbable it is that someone else has access to the same key as you and you also understand how
improbable it is that the system itself will change to such an extent that it will render
your bitcoins worthless but but i've come to the conclusion that you cannot own them
What you can do is act as if you did.
Does that make sense to you?
100%.
And you have to remember, money is a practical thing, right?
So it just has to be good enough.
I mean, yeah.
Bitcoin doesn't have to be around forever.
Bitcoin might work for 50 years or 10 years, and then maybe something else would come around.
And that's okay because money is not wealth.
It's fine for money to transmute.
The way I look at it is Bitcoin – gold is let's say 90% good as money in the old days, right?
It had some drawbacks, but it was better than barter.
So that's why it worked.
But the problem with gold was it could be commandeered because it needs to be stored.
It could be commandeered by the government eventually.
So it failed.
And the problem with fiat, of course, is it could be inflated.
And if it can be inflated, it will be.
Yes.
And to me, Bitcoin is like 96% good money.
Yeah.
And if it becomes the world-dominant currency, it could be that Bitcoin, too, would be slightly better, but it's just not worth the cost to switch to it.
But eventually, it could be.
Maybe the block size is too small.
Maybe in 50 years, we'll see the block size.
I don't know.
We don't know.
The point is money is not wealth.
And so it's fine if you transition from one money.
I think it's really hard, but you can see that happening in the future.
Well, I see it slightly differently.
Here's why I disagree.
I don't think there's a Bitcoin 2.0, but I can see a future where Bitcoin adapts and becomes Bitcoin 2.0 itself.
Yeah, sure.
But it wouldn't.
Which is the same thing.
Well, resetting the whole thing and forcing people to buy new stuff is not like that.
It has to have the property that you have to, that if you do nothing, you will still have them.
I agree.
I'm just saying you could imagine, like, let's suppose the Bitcoin network somehow there's a flaw, no one's found and it breaks down.
Or let's imagine and we colonize another planet and someone there starts out with their own currency because.
They would have to.
They would have to because the hatch horizon.
Yeah, the time delay is too great.
So they have their own currency.
So let's suppose it's Mars and there's Bitcoin too there.
And let's suppose eventually their society becomes to be the dominant one.
Maybe then they would absorb the Earth.
I don't know.
You never know what the future is going to be.
Well, the argument against Mars coin is that anyone bootstrapping that on Mars would have insider information about how insanely valuable it can get.
And therefore, it wouldn't have the same, like Bitcoin is, the way I see it was totally dependent on how these things played out.
And Satoshi disappearing and MT Gox and all of the events that happened led up to this point.
I mean, we know that we live in a timeline where Bitcoin works.
We don't know if it would have worked had the parameters been any different.
It's sort of like the constants of the universe.
We cannot know because we don't exist in that.
We know it works here because we do exist.
Yeah, the anthropic idea.
Well, I mean, this is slightly tangential, but like my friend Jeff Tucker used to be a Bitcoin guy, but now he's joined with the Roger Veritypes and all this.
And he's always he's saying that, oh, it was going to be a payment mechanism.
But because the big blockers, I mean, the small blockers refused to adapt, then that allowed Venmo and Zelle and PayPal to rise to the fore.
And I'm like, so you think that there was only like a three-year period where Bitcoin could have worked?
It could have become the payment system that Venmo and Zelle and PayPal would have been.
But because we delayed, that gave PayPal the chance to become dominant.
And now it's too late for Bitcoin to ever work.
I mean its promise never was that it was just a little payment system reducing the friction of payments a little bit.
But – so let's go back to your point though about acting as if you own it.
To me – so the more I thought about this, and it goes back to, number one, the point I made earlier that Hoppe's view about the character of a good being subjective and how that relates to the concept of fungibility.
That also relates to the suitability of something that is a commodity, that is a divisible supply of something. And by the way, it doesn't have to be a physical thing. Some of the earlier Austrians had this regression theorem criticism of Bitcoin, which I think is completely wrong.
Number one, I don't think the regression theorem is what they think it is.
It's not a proof that money has to arise the way that Mises thought it would.
And it's not a proof that it has to, you know, anyway.
Can I interrupt and just counter-argue that?
Because I think Bitcoin proves the regression theorem because we actually have the first transaction.
Before that, it's a curiosity and a collectible.
and then Laszlo buys two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins.
That is the moment where Bitcoin becomes a medium of exchange.
Perhaps, perhaps.
But the point is the Austrians of 2011 or whatever
who were saying, oh, Bitcoin's impossible
because it violates the regression theorem.
I think they're just wrong
because they were assuming that it has to be a physical commodity
and it doesn't have to be physical.
My point is it doesn't have to be.
Well, Mesa said it had to have had some use value, right? But use value can be, I mean, a baseball card can have use value.
That's a subjective thing. So it doesn't have to be a physical thing.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, basically, Bitcoin is, so what are Bitcoins, number one? When you said you act as if you own a Bitcoin, you're right that you have, because of the password, you have the ability to control it.
who you can transfer it.
But when you say transfer it, what is it?
It's basically one of the many units on the blockchain,
on the spreadsheet,
maintained in distributed computers around the world.
It's just an abstract entry in a data system,
which we regard subjectively as something that's interesting.
Like if Satoshi had not a little bit dishonestly named it Bitcoin put the word coin in there in an attempt to bootstrap it if he had called it distributed spreadsheet it would be the same thing
But people wouldn't think of it as money.
They would just think of it as a useful, if very inefficient, distributed spreadsheet or ledger system, right?
Yes.
And I wonder what would have happened then if it would have worked even better.
So I think it's a little bit dishonest to call it Bitcoin. It's also a little bit dishonest, I think, when people – well, the big blockers are dishonest when they keep going back to the title of the paper saying, oh, this is a cash network.
That's why we need it to be cashed and all this kind of stuff.
But back to this other point. If you go back to what I said earlier that property rights are normative and they're the normative support for possession, then you can see that the reason is you need normative support for possession is that people have free will and they can choose to violate rights.
They can choose to use your resource without your permission. If I lived in a very peaceful community where no one ever committed robbery, I wouldn't pay money to put a lock on my front door of my home.
But I do that because it might happen on occasion, and I can afford to put the lock on there even though it makes the house less convenient to use, and it adds cost.
Right. Likewise, if people never commit violated rights or if it's impossible to violate rights, like if God was up there zapping people that tried to steal from you, then you wouldn't need a lock on your door.
You wouldn't need to defend yourself from people. Right. But because that's not the case, we need laws which provide a disincentive for people to violate your rights.
So the purpose of law is to provide normative support for property rights or for possession.
But that's because it's possible to violate those properties.
It's possible for there to be violent conflict.
But Bitcoin designed a system where you have possession of the Bitcoin.
You have the ability to control it.
And because of its design, it's almost impossible for someone to violate.
Semantics, you don't actually have possession of it.
You have control over the private key, which means you know a secret, like, because possession implies that nobody else has possession over it.
And you don't.
So control is, I would say control rather than possession.
That's fine.
You have the ability to, but you have the, whatever this ability is, you get the ability to transfer it to someone else and no one else can do that unless they know your key.
Correct?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And you believe that no one does.
But that's important because otherwise you wouldn't believe it was valuable.
Correct. But your belief is that it's good enough. The likelihood is good enough.
Exactly.
It's low enough so that this can serve potentially as a medium of exchange.
Okay. But the point is that your ability to control and to transfer is analogous to possession in the world,
which could, in possession of a physical thing, someone could violate that.
So you have to have rights and laws and ownership as a normative support layer on top of that to try to reduce the likelihood someone will do that.
But with Bitcoin, it's almost like there was a law that gave you ownership, but it's perfectly enforced because no one can violate it.
So it's even better than a law that prohibits murder or rape.
So you can just act as if you own it, and you don't need ownership because your ability to control it is even better than ownership would be.
So that's why it looks like ownership, but it's not. And that's why people use the term, I own my Bitcoins, because what they mean is they have control over it.
Yeah. And I talk about this all the time. Like you say, you cannot take it. The scenario there is I can point a gun at your head and say, Stefan, give me all your Bitcoin and you can give me a fraction of what you own. And I have no way as the attacker of knowing how much you actually had. And that's already true for every single person on earth. I cannot. There is no way that I can know how many Bitcoins they control because it's a secret in their heads.
so someone's grandma can have the private key to every Bitcoin.
You simply cannot know that.
You can make an educated guess, of course, and people do,
and they kidnap big crypto exchange holders and stuff.
But still, there's a fundamental shift here.
And to me, what the thing did was, yeah, I'll need to paint this as a scenario in a way.
So when you ask, what is a Bitcoin?
You asked that hypothetical question before.
Like, when I get the question, what is Bitcoin?
My short answer is it's an agreement on a fixed set of rules.
And the slightly longer answer is the reason we agree on this specific set of rules is that it's thus far the only rules known to man that are provably more expensive to try to cheat than to just follow.
you follow me here so i follow you i follow you i don't know if i i don't disagree i just
i'm a little uncomfortable with the terminology of agreement because agreement is illegal
but i know what you're getting at yeah yeah so it's a physical or a means of communication in
that sense and the wonderful thing it did to me is like point out that physical possessions are
actually less ownable in this sense than this ability to interact with people and just acting
as if you own a number. So it unlocked something that was true always, which is communication and
free trade is better than violence, than aggression. It's a literal, you have somewhat,
somehow Satoshi managed to boil that down into a beautiful equation.
And it's so powerful.
Like, it's just pointing out that all of these Austrian theories were right.
We're all better off if we do this this way, if no one can counterfeit, if we can't take shit.
What it leads to is more responsibility and, you know, number go up technology,
which is really just putting on a lens
that allows you to see the true deflationary nature
of the free market.
You can actually, if you measure in Bitcoin,
you can see how prices are falling forever
because people get better at doing stuff.
Like, would you agree to that?
Or is that too much hope?
No, I agree with all that.
And I, but I think it's so interesting.
Well, I don't, but I don't agree
that that's a good definition.
It's more metaphorical.
It sounds more like Michael Saylor talk,
which is driving me nuts.
Yeah.
Although I'm with you on the inspiring.
I just don't think it's a good definition of what if someone asks what a Bitcoin is and we should say we should really say what's it?
What is what is a Satoshi?
I don't think your answer.
This is this is the definition.
If someone asks, what is Bitcoin?
Like, no, what is what is a Bitcoin?
Yeah.
What's what's a Bitcoin?
Yeah.
It's not much harder to answer.
Yeah.
The Bitcoin is an entry on a spread on a ledger.
OK.
That's stored distributed ledger.
And that ledger, of course, is bolstered by this agreement that you're talking about, things like that.
But I just think it's an entry – it's an abstract entry on an abstract spreadsheet that people regard as an abstract thing called a Bitcoin ledger.
I mean that's what it is.
It's one of the units on there, and it has such a nature that it can be transferred by someone to another person if they have the key.
I mean that's the way – that's what it is, right?
Well, I love this because there is so much philosophy in this type of discussion, because all the important aspects of it are not the ones and zeros.
All the important aspects of what, because it's money and not just, you know, a database for something else for ordering stuff.
That means that all the important aspects of Bitcoin are the human beings behind it.
So the important part of a node is the person choosing what software to run, buying the hardware, installing the software and running it.
it's not the software that's the interesting part.
The interesting part is getting someone to run it.
And the same with a miner.
Like if I have a hangar full of ASICs,
the hardware itself is just the,
I call it a fancy abacus, right?
It's just helping the real miner,
which is the guy who bought the stuff,
to do calculation really, really fast.
But at the end of the day,
It's like a person deciding by his own volition, like purposeful action, purposeful behavior.
Human action is behind all of it.
It's just that we found a way or Satoshi found a way for us to do this that makes it more expensive to cheat than to try.
So it's an anti-lie machine in a way.
Yeah, I agree with all that.
I don't mind the metaphorical talk.
Like, Sailor drives me nuts with his energy stuff.
I think he's just wrong.
Yeah, because it's not backed by energy. It's backed by human action.
Yeah, he's too scientific about it. And the one question he never answers, okay, which I think people – I think there's an answer to it, and I'm curious what yours is.
The question is – so when people say, oh, it's just information, it could be copied, and it is true that there are many Bitcoins.
There's Bitcoin Cash. There's Bitcoin God. There's many cryptocurrencies. There's nothing stopping someone from duplicating Bitcoin itself. You can have an identical Bitcoin blockchain tomorrow if you wanted to.
My way of thinking of it is that that's all true, but if you understand Austrian economics and the purpose and nature of money and why it emerges, it emerges as a response to the two problems of barter, which is the double coincidence of wants problem and also the inability to calculate among heterogeneous goods which are not commensurate in value.
So barter solves these two problems. I mean money solves these two problems, but that means that you can expect there to be a tendency towards one money.
And also if you understand that money is not wealth, that money is just a special sui generis good that trades between things of value.
So that's what money is and why you can expect there to be one money, but it's not wealth.
And so you only need – so when people – like my friend Tucker tells me, oh, this Hayekian idea of many types of money.
Maybe you have one money among the merchants and one money for art and one money for secure transactions and for anonymity.
And one – like, no, no, no.
You're going to have a tendency towards one money.
And now my view is that there's nothing special about Bitcoin itself as a blockchain except that a crypto money has advantages over gold or a commodity money.
And Bitcoin is the first and therefore has the longest network – it has the longest blockchain in terms of time and the biggest network effect.
And so it's the one that's likely to emerge as the one that will tend to dominate in the future.
It's not guaranteed that it had to be Bitcoin.
It could have been Bitcoin Cash or something.
But I mean, would you agree?
Is there anything special about Bitcoin compared to, say, Bitcoin SV or Bitcoin Cash?
Yes, yes.
I love this question.
And I think I have an answer to it.
Like, I tried to put words on this in my second book, and I called it the one-shot principle.
That principle is absolute mathematical scarcity in a sufficiently decentralized distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention.
It cannot be achieved again by people aware of this discovery, since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability itself.
alluding to that the very point is that since it's just numbers and since it's just a number
trying to replicate the the resistance to replicability in this specific number 21 million
is pointless at best and a most of the if not all of the other cryptocurrencies or shit coins
are there to enrich their founders.
And Bitcoin had a founder that disappeared
and then it got distributed in a very specific way.
So the best analogy I know for this and why,
like Bitcoin, we can do the Bitcoin Cash example first
because it's super easy why Bitcoin Cash could never be it.
And that is because they wanted to increase the block size.
Now, what does that imply?
It implies that blocks are costlier to download.
So in the long run running a node will be more costly on the Bitcoin cache network than the Bitcoin network if the blocks are full that is Meaning that it centralizes over time faster than Bitcoin centralizes over time
You could claim that Bitcoin will also centralize over time because if you extrapolate into infinity,
then the cost of running a node will be infinitely high.
At least Bitcoin was resilient to that and understood that blocks needed to be smaller in order for the common man to run a node.
Otherwise, miners are in charge of the network and then it's not the same thing anymore.
Then it's not resilient to change.
But the analogy I want to make is the game of chess.
So let's say that Bitcoin is the game of money.
Chess is the game of chess.
the latest chess rule, the latest time
the rules of chess were changed were like
1100 years ago when there's a move called en passant
when you can take it. You know about the move like the
pawn moves two steps and you can take it on the square.
So that and the reason
that chess doesn't change is because of this wonderful
network effect and it's the same in Bitcoin.
It's so big that everyone plays this game and there are endless, infinite variations of chess.
And you can learn to play chess cash or chess gold or chess theorem or chess whatever.
Like it was another cryptocurrency, like chess theorem, for instance, the rules would change with every move.
Chess cash would have a 64 times 64 squared board and no pieces on it.
And like these are all, there's nothing stopping anyone from using Bitcoin Cash if they want to.
It's just that you cannot play the best game of them all if you do, because this is the game that allows you to play with the most numbers of players.
So it's almost like if you change it, you're setting the precedent that it can be changed and then it's not.
Exactly.
Yeah, but so your argument is what I said. It's the one that's going to be because it was the first, in a sense.
No, I'd say because it was the last, because there were precursors to this and predecessors to Bitcoin.
Right.
But they all died. So this one is the only one that actually worked after and still works after 17 years. It's kind of amazing.
It's the first one that solved the problems at the previous year.
I mean, so basically your view is it's the first one and it was good enough because.
Yeah, and it only ever needed to be good enough.
It never needed to be perfect, just good enough to last forever.
And the idea of a perfect money is nonsense.
It's impossible to have a perfect money.
Yeah, of course.
But it can change, but it's hard enough to change it for it to only change for the better.
Yeah, it's good enough.
I mean, I'm curious what you think about, I think, who's the guy that has the, I have his, the guy that had the formula for predicting the scarcity of Bitcoin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if you know anything about Austrian economics, that's bullshit.
I know, I'm curious what you think.
It's the guy, you know, he's the Austrian, the Dutch guy.
Yeah.
Plan B.
Yeah, plan B, right.
And he had this power law thing.
Yeah, what do you think about that?
I think it's bullshit because value is subjective and you can't, like, market predictions are all bullshit like that.
It's a good guess, I guess, but it wasn't a good guess since it didn't play out that way.
So, like, no, and you cannot know.
So, I mean, who's to say that this, like, technologies follow this S-curve adoption thing.
And if that is true for Bitcoin, that's true for the adoption of Bitcoin, but it's not true for price, because price goes absolutely bonkers if that happens.
Because people have more money.
Like, there's not like you, people can produce more goods and services during a lifetime.
So that means number can go infinitely high.
That's the everything divided by 21 million theory that's alluding to that this can go on forever and it doesn't have to end.
It can just go up forever.
Well, by the way, your comment earlier about in Bitcoin world, then prices are always falling, that kind of thing.
And I think – so that dovetails with my understanding of intellectual property and praxeology because if you understand human action as – is based on two key ingredients.
One is the availability of scarce resources in the world, and the other is knowledge.
Okay, so the reason that we're richer today than the Romans is because – not because we're smarter than the Romans.
We're probably stupider than the Romans.
Right. It's because we have more knowledge at our disposal. So every generation, we keep getting more. And the world is not doesn't have more resources than they used to have.
We might get to more of it, but basically we're actually using up resources. Right. So the world is like a ball of kind of a finite ball of resources.
But we keep – what keeps changing every year and every generation is we learn more and more ways to do things more efficiently.
Our knowledge increases, which is why I'm so against intellectual property because it restricts the one thing we have that makes us richer.
We have a world of finite, scarce resources, and the way we're richer is we keep improving our knowledge.
And to impede or restrict the ability to develop that knowledge is suicidal.
But that goes along with the reason why in a world of scarcity and in a world of a fixed money supply money like Bitcoin, that's why prices keep going down.
They keep going down because the human race keeps growing.
I don't know if they grow in numbers, but if they grow in numbers, the GDP goes up.
But also we go up and we increase in productivity because we keep accumulating technical knowledge, technological knowledge that makes us more efficient.
And so that's why prices keep going down.
Exactly. I mean, it's so simple. And once you see it, it's like kind of impossible to unsee and impossible to not be upset about because you realize how much they steal for you via inflation.
Since most people think no inflation would mean stable prices, but that's total bullshit. It means falling prices and falling in increasing rates too.
I don't know if you've seen – Seyf and Dean Amuse has been arguing this lately, and I'm trying to figure out whether I agree.
It's about interest rates.
And so –
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I actually – I met with him in Turkey earlier last year with Hoppe, and he was trying to persuade Hoppe of this.
And Hoppe is not quite sure what he thinks about it.
But Saifedean's argument, if I understand it, is that – now, I think he's trying to find a way to justify the Islamic –
Yes, I've had the same thought.
I think he's trying to find a way to justify the anti-usory view.
Okay, I think I can do a pretty good TLDR of it.
So the theory is that a money hoarder would at some point be the cost of owning the money.
Wait, wait, hold on. What kind of money? You mean gold, right?
Well, gold or Bitcoin or whatever.
Let's talk about gold first because I think there's a difference, but go ahead.
Yeah, I think Seyfrieden's theory is more general.
This is from the Principles of Economics book that he wrote.
a very good book by the way but uh uh it but um the the original idea in that book as is said by
safety and i'm paraphrasing him here of course but is that at some point the the cost of holding money
becomes so high that you're incentivized to uh lend it out uh at a negative interest rate even
um so yeah but but this is paired with his insight that over time time preference uh
goes down and over time the progress of societies that interest rates go down and down and down
so you reach a point where where the interest you could charge is less than um you it's not enough
to pay for your storage costs no no so so the the theory is that the the call if i understand it
correctly, that the cost of the storage would be higher than to just lend the money out with a
very low or even negative interest rate. Yeah. So basically you're, you're, you're getting,
you're getting a storage cost paid for by lending to someone, even if you get no interest,
because at least they're holding it for you. Yeah. But, but so he discussed that recently,
I think it was in the, um, in the, um, in some podcasts, maybe with Adam Heyman or maybe Bob
Murphy, but he was talking about his book, his new book, his novel, the gold standard.
And that's set in a gold standard world.
And my thinking is that he might be right for gold because there is a cost to holding gold.
There's a risk.
There's a cost.
But it's hard to imagine that that same phenomena happens with Bitcoin because the cost of holding Bitcoin is basically zero.
And there's no increasing cost with the amount.
So the cost of holding one Satoshi is exactly the same as the cost of holding all 21 million Bitcoins.
So it seems to me like that there would always be a positive interest rate that is above the cost of holding for Bitcoin, but I'm not sure about that.
No, I mean, theoretically, like, let's unpack that.
There is a cost to holding a Bitcoin, but how much that cost is, it's like, yeah, I mean, you could hold like trillions of dollars by memorizing 12 words.
It's possible, not advisable, but it is possible.
And the question becomes like – so, yeah, theoretically it may be true, but then again everything may be true theoretically.
Well, put it this way. Let's put it this way. If I understand Seyfedine's point, so the question for me is – I think he's correct that the development of the human species over time could be viewed as one of reducing time preference, right?
And so you could – and with increasing prosperity and reducing time preference and more long-term events, you could see the interest rate would go lower and lower.
So the question is, does it tend towards zero or does it tend towards some finite amount?
And if it tends towards – whichever way it is, you could see that it could get below the cost of holding gold in a gold world.
Absolutely.
So you could see that in a world where gold is the money, interest could go so low that you might be incentivized to loan it for no interest rate.
Okay, I could understand that.
I just don't know.
Simple fact, it might be more valuable to have friends than to have a vault full of gold because that's what that means.
Correct.
Yeah, you make them have skin in the game in a sense.
Yeah, exactly.
But let's say Bitcoin is tending towards – I mean let's say interest rate for money is tending towards 1.2%. That's the tendency. It's not going to zero because maybe he's wrong that there will be no interest. Maybe there will be some interest.
Now, I'm actually more amenable not to the idea that there'd be zero interest.
I'm more amenable to the idea that in a Bitcoin world, the concept of loaning would almost like every like I'm more I'm more sympathetic towards that idea that the idea of credit would almost disappear.
Well, I'd say say not disappear, but but these artificially low interest rates would disappear.
Oh, certainly.
Then we would have like a more proper interest rate, which might be like 20% or something.
But not just that.
The idea like that people's characters would change.
Like, for example, when you get out of college, when you get out of school, you wouldn't borrow money to buy a house or to buy a car.
You would save up and do it.
No, no, you'd save up.
Yeah.
So all those things, they would largely disappear.
So the question is, if you have a new business, would they borrow money or would they take investors?
So I don't know about that.
This is another brain tickler.
Yeah.
If we extrapolate to the year 2140, so all the Bitcoins have been mined, which means that not only is there a finite supply of them or a finite amount on the market, it's ever diminishing because people lose their Bitcoins.
People choose to huddle forever.
That will happen even when the last Bitcoin has been mined.
By the way, not only that
But let's suppose you die
And you're a billionaire
To donate the money to charity
You might just destroy your keys
Yeah, that's what Saylor says he will do
He's alluded to that
And because money is not wealth
That not destroying anything Yeah but just imagine this scenario Where you have this ever total supply of money then In that world very few people
would be able to actually have
black numbers on their balance sheets
in terms of Satoshis.
They would have what, Sagan?
Black numbers on their balance sheets.
So there will all be red numbers.
Like all stacks would be diminishing
because very few businesses
would be able to be profitable.
Don't get me wrong.
They would be very profitable in purchasing power terms,
but not in terms of the Satoshis themselves.
So it's the same thing with wages, right?
Your salary would go down.
Yeah, exactly.
It would go down every year.
In nominal terms.
So theoretically, you may start a business
not to actually make more Satoshis per year,
but to decrease the rate of decline of your stack of Bitcoin.
so that it diminished a little slower.
So you're looking at the angle of the curve rather than the curve itself.
It's such a mind-blowing world to even think about.
Do you think that the supply would go down of Bitcoins also because of friction?
How do you mean?
How do you mean friction?
well
every time
you make a transfer
I guess it's not for
I guess you don't lose
if I transfer Bitcoin
I guess nothing is lost
because someone gets the fee right
yeah yeah exactly
not a single Satoshi is lost per se
I guess for actually just from lost
but they are lost in the sense that
there's a minimum amount
so and also
at that point
it will probably cause
right now
sometimes the mempool clears and and it costs literally one satoshi to send a bitcoin uh which
is or one satoshi per vbyte uh which is the lowest allowed but you could theoretically have like a
very low amount of bitcoin in one address and never be able to to spend it because the fees
would always exceed the amount that is in that address so all of those bitcoins would be like
just effectively lost.
That's my point.
Yeah, I guess that's part of what I mean by friction.
Well, let me ask you, what is your vision of,
let's say 50 years from now, I don't know,
let's say Bitcoin is worth, I don't know,
$50 million in current money
and every Satoshi is worth, I don't know, $17 or whatever.
I mean, do you envision side chains
or do you envision that the protocol gets modified
to expand the decimal points?
What do you think is going to happen?
Super glad you asked that
because I think I have
quite original ideas about this.
I think the real scaling
is that we'll just spend less.
I think, you know,
micropayments are a very fiat-y thing.
So whenever,
if I go to the central station
in Amsterdam
and I need to take a leak,
then I have to pay a euro
to open the door to the toilet, right?
and then I have to buy a train ticket
and there's like 130 different types of train tickets
and I...
All of this...
So using money is going to be too much of a hassle
for people to bother with?
No, but imagine if you have a Bitcoin business,
it may make sense to you to sell lifetime subscriptions
instead of selling individual products
because then you get the money earlier
and since the money goes up in value forever,
it's better for you to get the money now than later.
So it's like the opposite.
Everything is the inverse of the fiat monetary system.
So in fiat, they always say the first million is the hardest.
In Bitcoin, it's the other way around.
Like the first million is the easiest, of course,
because the increasing difficulty applies to everyone.
So I think also we'll trust each other more.
This is also the irony of it. The theory is this, and I'd love to pick your brain on this. If you have 10 poor people who buy food every day for 10 days, then there's 100 transactions because each of them goes and buys noodles for themselves and eat in their apartment.
If 10 wealthy people do the same thing and they're friends, they might go to a restaurant every night and one of them picks up the bill each night because they're nice and friendly people and they can afford to do that.
So at the end of the week, you have 10 transactions instead of 100.
My point is that it's very expensive to be poor in the fiat system.
and if everyone's on a Bitcoin system
and everyone benefits from everything in the economy
because it's not a zero-sum game,
all prices go down forever,
then fewer transactions are necessary
because you can bundle them.
And you're also incentivized to bundle them
since there's a fee to sending the transaction.
And you're incentivized to use
all other types of trust models between people.
At the end of the day, this is just communication.
So all of humanity will act more
like you do within a family.
You just give the other guy a meal
because you know you'll get it back at something.
I can see that changing,
but the question is,
but that kind of assumes there's only one,
everything's on chain.
I mean, it could be that side chains develop
to augment what you're talking about.
All I'm talking about here is off chain.
None of these transactions
actually have to happen on chain.
And also, you don't even need a side chain.
If you trust the person,
then you don't need any blockchain.
You don't need any...
No, no, no, but that's a type of sidechain conceptually.
It's a type of sidechain.
In other words, you're counting on getting paid back somehow.
Yeah, you and I, like I trust you already from just internet reputation
to if we ever had transactions together,
we could just keep a tab on one another.
I wouldn't mind that.
Like I wouldn't need a blockchain.
So I wouldn't need a banking system.
I wouldn't need anything.
I'd rather just keep a tab.
I don't know, but I think that's all fascinating and good and right,
but it still doesn't answer the question about what's actually going to happen.
50 years from now, when Bitcoin is a dollar per Satoshi,
do you think that the decimal points will be modified and there will be sidechains?
I mean, I'm curious.
No, why would they need to be modified?
I mean, over the Lightning Network, which is like how when Bitcoin is used for everyday
commerce, like in El Salvador, for instance, everything is over Lightning and you can do
sub-Satoshis on Lightning. It's trivial. So you can divide it into-
Okay. So you don't see the decimal points in the blockchain, in Bitcoin changing, but
you're imagining a sidechain though. You're imagining a sidechain.
I wouldn't call lightning a side chain necessarily
Why not? What would you call it?
Because it's
To be honest, because I've never heard it described as a side chain
I don't look for it as a side chain
What would you call it?
I think lightning is not a side chain because it's not a chain at all
There's no chain involved
Oh, I see, okay
Yeah, you're just staking, you're devoting X number of Bitcoins into a lightning channel, and then someone else does the same, and now you've opened a channel and you can interact on lightning.
But it's a channel that can be funded with and settled in Bitcoin, correct?
Only.
Yes, it cannot be. It is the Bitcoin because at some point it settles back on chain.
So it's like, it's like, it's conceptually a little bit like a debit card, right?
Yeah, except there's not a debit card.
But you load it with, yeah, I know there's no bank, but I mean, you load your channel with a certain number of Bitcoins by an on-chain transaction, correct?
Well, it's a distributed IOU system, I guess, except that it's totally accountable.
I mean, I wouldn't call it as robust as Bitcoin, but even if Lightning Channel closes too early, all that happens is that the balance goes back to its rightful owner.
So there's like no way of like gamifying and rigging the system.
It has the same.
Do you actually use Lightning yourself right now?
Yeah, yeah, I do for a lot of things.
And I try to use Bitcoin as much as I can.
Of course, it's hard.
I mean, I live in Europe and the governments here have decided to suspect me and treat me as a criminal because I'm using a means of communication that they cannot tax or they cannot inflate.
So I'm being criminalized for refusing to use something that they counterfeit.
So earlier you talked about Bitcoin as money.
Do you regard it as money now?
Or do you think it's got degrees of moneyness and it's on its way?
Where do you view Bitcoin at in money?
I mean, the definition of money is something like the most dominant form of medium of exchange, right?
Yeah.
So I think it's on its way there.
I view it and I think the terms medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account are somewhat confusing, especially store of value.
Since value is subjective, you can't really store value.
I prefer medium of exchange over space and time.
It's just medium of exchange.
and who's to say,
and all I get,
I get these questions so much,
like how will we transact
with one another
on a Bitcoin standard?
But the thing is,
transacting a lot
is a very Keynesian concept,
like transacting over time
with yourself.
Yeah, velocity of money is bullshit.
So I think we'll all get into more like,
what it leads me to
is less materialism
and less consumerism
and you only buy quality over quantity.
Like quality is really the opposite of equality.
Like you get into the mindset.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I agree with that,
especially as we get richer because of Bitcoin
and we have lower time preference
and money has a cost to use.
Yeah, yeah.
And you'd rather keep the Bitcoin
than buy the frivolous shit
that you otherwise would have bought.
so so like it's not about the fucking lambos like if you can do without the lambo you own the lambo
like so i've always i've always thought and maybe you disagree with me on this because of your
view about bitcoin's unique uh status as money i've always thought that uh yeah during the
monetization phase it makes sense to hold it um for speculation if nothing else but let's suppose
it sort of starts plateauing and becomes the world's dominant money.
It would go up in value because of productivity, but it wouldn't keep going up hyperbolically, right?
Or parabolically.
It would finally plateau at a certain point.
And at that point in time, it seems to me that you would only hold a fraction of your wealth in money
because of the risk of collapse or the risk that it might fail.
So let's suppose I'm worth, I don't know, $200 million in wealth in Bitcoin.
I would be stupid to hold that in cash.
I would hold maybe 10% of it in Bitcoin,
and the rest I would have to put in the stock market or buy real estate or something like that just to diversify.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's correct. I do think that after it sort of plateaus, I don't envision it like, because say that total goods and services and productivity in society increases by about 10% per year in today's economy.
Yeah.
I'll imagine. But what we leave out then is that a Bitcoin economy is a much more free market oriented, much more well-oiled machine.
So it might increase by 25% per year still after everyone's adopted it.
But we're not at 10% now.
Are you imagining we're at 10% now?
Like more goods and services per year globally?
Yeah.
Aren't we?
What do you imagine?
What would be a good number?
5%?
3%?
4%?
3%.
Yeah, yeah.
But thought experiment is the same.
Say it increases from 3% to 15%.
It's still super incentivized to hodl the Bitcoin and wait another year before you buy another lawnmower.
Like you're still incentivized to save rather than spend frivolous.
Yes.
So that's the gist of it.
That's the point.
And also that.
When everyone has it, the rate of which they're lost is much higher.
So you have the decreasing supply and the increasing demand like forever type of thing.
I have a hard time envisioning what that actually looks like, like everyone else.
But I try to think about it, but it's super strange.
Well, and with the simultaneous advent of robotics and AI, these things are all going to go together.
I mean, what is your personal prediction of the adoption of Bitcoin?
What do you think that the next, you know, when do you think it's going to hit X?
And do you think it'll be a soft transition or a worldwide disruption as the U.S. gets?
What do you see is happening with hyper-Bitconization or whatever?
I love how this turned into you being the interviewer and I being the interviewer.
Sorry.
You know more than me about Bitcoin, I think.
Yeah, but I love because I love this discussion.
So like every Bitcoin, I'm waiting for hyper-Bitcoinization like any day now.
It's going to go parabolic tomorrow and all this.
But I think it's more like, you know, I grew up and I first started traveling around Europe in the early 90s.
So like very close to the falling of the Berlin Wall and all of this.
And no one spoke English.
Like if you went to France or Spain or Germany, no one spoke English.
Like English wasn't around.
And today, everyone under 20 speaks perfect English in Europe today.
Like there's no, maybe not perfect everywhere, but it's...
It's become the default lingua franca.
Yeah, the second language.
My Swedish kids speak English to one another rather than Swedish.
And they don't have to.
With the other Swedish friends too, they speak English.
For some reason, they just do.
And I think that Bitcoin adoption happens in the same way.
Because I think the boomer generation will never get it.
The hurdles are too big.
The rewiring of the brain that is necessary to understand just a fraction of what this implies is just too much.
But I think the younger generations, if they actually grow up and they have a wallet on their phone and they start using it, then it becomes second language.
And sooner than you know it, everyone speaks Bitcoin.
And yeah, if you look at merchant adoption and stuff, we think it's super small and we still are super early, but it is like doubling every year.
It's just that we haven't seen the real effects of that yet.
We haven't seen the exponentials always start small, right?
And so when it happens, I mean, I think we're in for a ride.
I don't know when the last cycle is, but I think we're going to go in cycles
for a couple of more times like over one or two decades more And then there a point where it just goes up forever until fiat dies Like if it works like how could it not How could it not at some point go up forever in terms of dollars
Because all they can do is print them.
If it causes so much societal disruption that it triggers some kind of nuclear war
or some kind of societal meltdown, I think that could slow down adoption
if the human population has been decimated
and we're living in the stone age again, you know?
Yeah, but the more people we get on board,
the less likely that is.
Because wars are funded by fiat.
Like the more we go out to a Bitcoin standard,
the less we take away the resources
for these assholes to do these things
and the incentives at the same time.
So yeah, and this is utopian.
I know I'm a hopium salesman.
But I cannot get these thoughts out of my head because they're too beautiful and it's too hopeful.
And hope is, in my opinion, a rational choice.
You're going to die anyway, so you might as well live as a hopeful man and as a free man.
Most people wouldn't believe this, but that's basically my approach, too.
That's my view, too.
It's a long-term hope, and it's also a hope that doesn't have anything to do with activism.
Like either it's going to happen or it's not because the logic is there and it makes sense.
It's not because libertarians or even Bitcoin activists are out there promoting it.
Like if Bitcoin needs libertarians or Bitcoins to promote it, then it's not going to work.
It's got to have a logic of its own for it to work.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, I'll stop interviewing you if you have any more with me.
Have you read The White Pill by Michael Malice?
I came to think about it here.
I have it. I've read most of it.
Yeah, yeah. The sort of core of that book is that totalitarianism and authoritarianism falls on its own weight at some point. There is always hope.
I mean, in a way, that's sort of a modern version of what Fukuyama said, which I know is crude and neoconish.
But I kind of see something to that idea of the end of history and but maybe not democracy.
But I do think that I've always thought the human race is in its infancy. Right.
And we're early. We think that we're advanced because we've been on the moon.
But and we have lasers, but we're really still primitive.
But I think the best is yet to come if we can survive the growing pains.
So I think the future is one of unimaginable, like it could be an unimaginable future, like the golden age of John C. Wright or something like that.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm half tempted to have cryogenic storage for myself someday and wake up in 500 years and see what the world looks like.
Like Hal Finney? Did you know that his head is cryo-frozen?
No I didn know that but maybe he Satoshi right Maybe Satoshi gonna wake up someday Listen to this Maybe he memorized the private key before he cryo froze his head and what if we resurrect him and move that bitcoin 400 years later well there there
actually a book i just read a book uh there's a science fiction book where there's some guy who
wakes up um it was a kind of a a pulp novel i'm trying to remember the name of it but uh it's
about a guy that wakes up in the future and he owns the entire earth because of some fluke
So he almost starts a war because people are fighting over control of him because he owns the entire planet Earth.
So you could imagine someone waking up and they revive 3 million Bitcoins that we thought were not part of the money supply anymore.
It's either that or idiocracy.
Yeah.
Anyway, Stefan, is there anything else you want to talk about before we wrap this up?
Is there anywhere you want to send our listeners or something?
So let's see. Now I'm – anyone interested in these ideas can read my intellectual property stuff or my libertarian book, which is here.
I'm working – so Murray Rothbard died – I was sorry. He was born 100 years ago, March 2nd, this coming March.
So I'm editing, putting together a book of essays on Rothbard, which we will release on March 2nd on his birthday.
It's about Rothbard at 100.
So working on that right now with Hans Hermann Hoppe and some other people.
Well, that sounds fantastic.
So that's one project I'm working on.
Well, we're going to release the essays on March 2nd and then the book in September for the Property and Freedom Society meeting.
So that's what I'm working on right now.
Well, I'm interested in that.
Where is that?
Is that in Bodrum in Turkey?
It's in Bodrum every September.
Yes.
And we just said we just released the announcement.
If you're interested in coming, email me later and we'll talk.
I'd love to.
And yeah, yeah.
We'll definitely talk more about that.
And September should be relatively free.
Yeah.
We'll talk offline.
I just finished.
I was in Prague twice this year, once for the Free Cities thing and once for the – and it was wonderful.
I hadn't been there in 30 years.
It's a wonderful city, and I went to the Liberland thing in December.
I just released last year a project I was working on with a guy named Freemax and Alessandro Fusillo and some others.
It's called The Universal Principles of Liberty, and it draws upon that book and my own writing and my property theory,
which is inspired by Hoppe and by Rothbard and Mises, but it was sort of like a concise, systematic statement of libertarian principles.
It's called the universal principles of liberty.
It not a constitution and it not a detailed legal code but it more like here the principles of property rights and self and justice that we agree to and that have to be agreed to in any free society And that on my website stefancasello So if anyone interested in these ideas take a look at my book my intellectual property ideas
and the universal principles of liberty
and the upcoming Rothbard book.
Fantastic.
Are you planning to go to any Bitcoin conferences
by any chance this year?
No, I went to a couple in Miami
about three, four or five years ago.
I haven't been lately.
That's unfortunate.
The Bitcoin magazine ones tend to be quite apologetic to shitcoiners, I'd say.
They take a lot of money from that.
I think I would only go to a Bitcoin-only conference at this point.
But is there any good ones coming up that might be worth going to?
Well, if you love Prague, there's the one in B2C Prague in Prague in June.
That's a very good one.
There's the biggest European one.
Yeah, I'm going to one in El Salvador here.
I mean, probably after this episode is,
I would have already been there
when this episode is released.
That's like two,
less than two weeks from now on now.
You know, I tried a few.
I just find, I go there and there's,
I'm just a hodler.
I'm just waiting.
So I'm not an activist.
I'm not a promoter.
I'm not into the business.
I don't really see what,
and most people are not that theoretical
or libertarian.
So there's nothing to really
interest me at the conferences.
Yeah.
There's one that I think you'd like that I'm co-organizing.
I'm biased here, of course.
It's called B2C Hell in Helsinki, Finland in October.
We've only done it once, but it's going to be done again.
It's around 1,500 people and a lot of good speakers.
We can definitely do some Austrian economics talks.
I think
I have a lot of friends that are coming
I could be persuaded
If anything, something like that comes along
I could be persuaded
I'm potentially interested
Yeah, great to hear
I think we're in talks with
Seyfedin this year
I'm going to talk to Rahim about it too
Rahim Tagisayed again
And we'll see
I'm going to push for
More Austrian economics content
Inside that
conference.
Yep, but that's it for me.
But I appreciate your work too
and I've learned from you too.
So I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It means a lot.
Yes, anyway,
I absolutely adored this conversation.
I hope we get to meet in real life soon.
We'll talk about details
about Bodrum after this.
And yeah, go follow Stefan
and read up on your praxeology people
and brush your teeth.
this has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show
thanks for listening
thanks Stefan for coming
thanks