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Guy, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show, thanks for joining us.
What is up?
I still put it as, I still put it as freedom footprint in my calendar.
And then when I went looking for the email, I again
searched for Freedom Footprint.
And I was like, shit, where's the link?
I went, I, I, I like kind of panicked for like four or five minutes.
And then I was like, oh, you fucking idiot.
It's the Bitcoin infinity share.
Yeah, that's the problem with rebrands.
Uh, yeah.
What, what, what was your original brand?
Crypto, uh,
was the crypto economy.
It's a crypto
Yeah.
Ooh.
that before crypto was like, a straight up bad word.
And part of my reasoning, it was becoming that, and part of my reasoning was I
was trying to trojan horse, is that because crypto was like the popular
term, I was like, okay, well maybe I'll get like a bunch of shitcorners,
and I'll convert them into bitcorners.
And then it like slowly got worse and worse, and it was like, crypto was
just like, gross, more and more gross, like over the next like two years.
And I was like.
Man, I think I made the wrong bet, and it wasn't working, it was still
just only Bitcoiners listening to the show, I didn't trick anybody.
fantastic.
And I was like, I gotta get rid of this thing.
I gotta drop this shit.
Guy, uh, I mean, it's so good to have you here.
We haven't done a pod in ages, which is just weird.
You are one of my favorite people.
Yeah, you're one of my favorite people in the whole universe.
You've just finished recording with, this is a bit of insider information here.
Well, you've just finished recording Bitcoin the Inversive Clown World,
the audiobook, which is probably out by the time that this pod comes out.
So, so like, Yeah, that's, that's absolutely great.
I've listened through it and I absolutely loved it.
You've stepped up your game.
Everything is better, even though it was fucking super awesome before, so,
what are you saying about the last ones, man?
You saying I was shitty?
no, no, no, I'm not saying it was shitty, I'm saying, but, but maybe, like, I didn't
believe it, I didn't believe it could get any better, but it could, like, uh, yeah.
Then again, I didn't believe I could write any better, but I could, uh,
when I got a Luke to write with, so
it, dude.
Such a good book.
Such a
thank you, thank you.
But before we go into this, um, back and forth about that, or, and about other
things, uh, for our listeners that don't know you, why the fuck you wouldn't, I,
uh, but, like, anyway, uh, can you give us the TLDR on the voice of Bitcoin, MrGuys1?
Yeah, I'm the, I'm the guy who's read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know.
Went down the rabbit hole in 2011.
Uh, and literally fell so far so fast that there was never, there was never
a way to come out and, um, started the podcast, um, not to be named,
which is now known as Bitcoin Audible, uh, in 2018, 2018, March of 2018.
And, uh, so I'm coming up, I'll be coming up on seven, six years.
Now 2024 was six years.
Oh my god, I'll be coming up on seven years in 2025.
That's coming in March.
All right.
Um, and, uh, and also I've started a number of other podcasts just around
tech that I've always been a techie guy.
Um, and I've read audio books and Knut, if you've, if you've got any of other Knut's
books, I've read all of his audio books.
They're all great.
Um, I've done, uh, Broken Money, uh, by Lend, Fiat Standard, uh, from
SAFE, uh, uh, Layered Money, I mean, just, I think I've got like 15 or 16
now, somewhere in there, uh, getting close to 20, getting close to 20.
Maybe I'll just stop at 21 just for the hell of it.
Um, uh, but, uh, yeah, so I, I read everything I can get my hands
on about Bitcoin, Econ, Tech.
And also have the shows A.
I.
Unchained and The Pair Report and a little bit of, uh, I don't know, I keep
saying that it's not dead, but I still have yet to bring another episode back.
I think we only have done nine episodes ever, but Shitcoin Insider.
It's never, it's never truly dead.
It's never truly dead.
There will always be a reason to talk about shitcoins.
Yeah, just like the shitcoins themselves, they never truly die,
They never truly die.
For better or for worse, they're always there.
Alright, so, so yeah.
Um, um, where do we go with this?
Like what, what have we been up to?
Uh, uh, like yeah, accept this.
I mean, you've been, you've been given a lot of talks and doing small videos.
I've enjoyed them immensely.
That little Milton freed money, four quadrants, others people's money thing.
I love that.
Yeah.
The bullshit matrix
yeah, uh, did I mean the give a shit matrix, excuse me?
the give a shit matrix.
Yeah.
How does that work?
uh, wait, you want me to break down the give a shit matrix right now?
Yeah, why not?
Why not?
Yeah, so Milton Friedman has this, uh, really fantastic, it's so funny
how many, how often we get lost in kind of arguing about surface stuff.
You know, arguing about kind of the waves in the ocean rather
than thinking about the current.
Like, how critical that is.
Fundamental incentives are and that you can't get around those things you
the when you screw up the underlying it does not it does not matter in the
slightest what you do on top of it and one of the most powerful and inescapable
underlying principles of how to spend resource how to use up resources which
is everything that we do we just use up resources we are either producing
Or we produce and then we use it up.
And the, the goal is for those resources to go to the best, the most
optimal, and most positive use case.
How does it produce the most possible value?
How do we care the absolute most?
About how it is being used, and like, about what we get out of it, what are the
results of the use of these resources, and how many of the resources does
it take to accomplish those results.
Those are the two primary concerns that we have, always.
And everything is scarce.
We've run out of all of it.
If we don't care about those two things, inevitably, we are wasting
resources in some form or fashion.
Either we're using too many for too crappy of a result, or we have
a crappy result, and no matter how little we're using, we're still
just not getting anything out of it.
So, Milton Friedman has this great talk, or just kind of an interview that I
remember hearing, talking about how we have four different ways to spend money.
Is, I can spend money that I earned on myself.
I can spend money that I earned on myself.
On you or somebody else.
I can spend money that you earned on me, or I can spend money that
you earned on somebody else.
And the fundamental connection to the cost and the re and the results
are different for every one of them.
If, and this is, this ultimately creates the bullshit matri I
mean the, the give a shit matrix.
Why'd I call it bullshit all of a sudden?
The give a shit matrix.
And so if you put on the, uh, x and y axis the how much we care about the results and
how much we care about how much it costs.
When I am spending money on myself, money that I earned, one of the most
important things to understand is that money is a weighting system.
It is weighing the value of something.
And only the money that you earn can you actually feel the weight of.
Because it is you who put in the blood, sweat, and tears
in order to make that earning.
To pull in 300 today, and that 300 is literally your lifeblood.
It is your way to interact with the economy, to get your food, to get, you
know, save up and get braces for your kids, to have any kind of a break so that
you can relax and get your head straight.
That is your lifeblood.
So, when you earned money, And then you spend it on yourself.
You care absolutely the most about what you get out of it, and you feel every
bit of the weight of how much it costs.
Because, you know, when you buy a sandwich for yourself,
you have to eat the sandwich.
You want the best possible sandwich that you can get.
And if they're charging you 20 for a sandwich that feels like 10, you're
going to be very unhappy because you know how much that 20 weighs.
You mean I'm at the airport?
At the airport, exactly like at the airport.
Um, and when I am spending, now when I am spending my money on
you, I still feel all of the weight of the resources that go into it.
How much it costs.
When I buy a 20 sandwich, but I don't really care so much about what it tastes
like because I'm not going to taste it.
I'm not going to eat it, and there's no way.
It doesn't matter how nice of a person I am.
Doesn't matter how empathetic I am.
It's not relevant.
It's the sheer fact that I will not go into my lived experience.
That I cannot feel or care about the result as much as I would with me.
It is axiomatic.
And in fact, if you are a very empathetic person, it still just means
you will still more, it just means that you care more than other people.
It doesn't mean that you care more about what it is when it's you.
So, I care a lot about the cost.
But I don't care so much about the results.
You know, if they accidentally put olives on your 10 sandwich, you should really
just, why not, how about, don't bitch about it because I bought it for you.
You know?
if you put olives on my 10 sandwich, I'm gonna be very, very mad.
Then there is spending your money on me.
Suddenly the weight of the cost goes down drastically.
This is the equivalent of getting the company credit card to go out to eat.
You're going to spend a whole lot more time thinking about Exactly what you
want off of that menu, then you are going to be looking at the, the sidebar
with all the numbers on it, right?
You're not that worried about the cost, but you're definitely going to make sure
that you get something that you want.
In fact, you might get a little bit excited because now you can
actually get dessert when you usually don't because it costs too much.
So you care a lot about the results, but not the cost.
Then there is me spending your money on somebody else.
I have no connection to the results.
I don't have to live in that.
I don't have to eat that sandwich.
I don't have to, I don't even have to see the result.
In fact, I could just get somebody to write a report for me and have
them judge whether or not those results are worthy of my time.
Sure.
Good.
There was some number ticked up.
Great.
We did a great job.
And I also don't give a flying F what the cost is.
Because it's not mine.
I don't feel the weight of any of it.
And all you have to do is casually look.
Understand every single thing that the government does is in that quadrant.
It's in the bottom left quadrant where you do not give a shit about
the results and you do not give a shit about the cost and all you have
to do is listen to them to recognize this and then flip it around for you.
Imagine if you think about how much, you know, I once.
We were trying to buy a vacuum cleaner, and this is when we
were kind of stressing balls.
We were having a hard time.
We weren't making a ton of money.
And we had to, we needed to buy a vacuum cleaner, and honestly, I, I'm,
I'm a little bit, my mother is a clean freak, and she has passed some of this
down to me, and so I want a really nice vacuum cleaner that's going to last,
I don't want a cheap piece of crap.
We literally spent two months.
Reading reviews, looking around just like casually every single day.
We put more, more work into making sure we got a vacuum cleaner,
which mind you, we still have like 15 years later and it works.
It is a solid vacuum cleaner.
We did a really good job.
It was 120.
That is the amount of care and concern we put into 120 worth of costs.
Now think about how much concern went into a 3, 000 page bill that not one
piece of shit in Congress even read.
Because who the hell can read a 3, 000 page bill worth of legal nonsense?
Written by a bunch of lobbyists who are entirely in the quadrant of I'm
gonna use your money to spend on me.
And then submitted to Congress, forced a vote in a matter of like two or three
days in which the best they can do is skim through and has more zeros than anybody
can actually comprehend in the cost.
And where Biden gets up in front of a podium and talks about bajillion,
trillion, million, billion, like doesn't even, he can't even say the number, it's
so big and absurd, and compare that to when it is actually you spending it on
yourself, the amount of concern, there is more concern, I promise you, Up, down,
left, right, fucking sideways, there was more concern in the 120 I spent on my
fucking vacuum cleaner than they spent in 3, 000 pages that distributed 2.
5 trillion to a bunch of corporations and lobbyists.
You're talking about a factor of literally trillions.
In the degree of concern about where that money went, which is mind boggling, you
are looking at a system that literally destroys society trillions of dollars at
a time, because no one gives an abso no one gives a flying fuck what it costs.
Or what you get out of it.
And in fact, in fact, they are incentivized for it to get worse.
For the results to be so shitty that people will demand they do it again.
It is better for them for the results to be awful.
Because then they get to say we didn't have enough money.
When that's not the problem at all.
The problem is that their entire world exists in the bottom left
quadrant of the give a shit matrix.
Mm
absolutely.
I, I, I, beautifully illustrated.
It reminds me of, I did some practice at the, uh, what's it called?
Like, um, it was a, the municipality of the town I grew up in.
They had like, uh, uh, some institution for roads, and, uh, and stuff like
that, and for, for shoveling snow in the winter, like, uh, the municipality,
is, uh, taxpayer pay, paid, and one winter it didn't snow at all, so they
went under budget by quite a lot,
Mm hmm.
Of
but, this is how these things work, like, what do you think happened, that they
got a lower budget, that the people got their money back for their taxes back?
Of course that
No!
What happened was that everyone working for the snow shoveling thing got a
bonus, uh, because of work well done.
There was no snow on the streets.
So, so, they made sure that they, that they made their budget, like, That they
cost enough, like, and, uh, optimally you would want your government funded
or no taxpayer funded thing to cost a little more than it did last year.
Every year, like it can never cost less because then you get less money.
And it's wild to think about how unbelievably backwards that is and
how people think they're getting a free lunch with the government.
You know, if they don't see the bill come to their doorstep, they think
that the money has no cost because they fail to recognize that the money
has nothing to do with anything.
The cost is the resources.
Money is just a proxy for resources.
It's just, it's basically a receipt system.
It's a collective receipt system.
How do we have a receipt for favors rendered that we can
use for redeeming favors later?
That's it.
I did something for you, you gave me a receipt, and now I have this
receipt and I can come back to somebody else and I can redeem them.
Government, anytime it prints money or goes into a deficit,
is just redeeming receipts.
It's just counterfeiting receipts.
It's just redeeming all of our favours and all of our resources and all of our
time and our houses and our cars and our fuel without ever contributing anything.
It's a fake receipt.
It's just fraud.
Yeah, it reminds me so much of, uh, one of my favorite analogies about printing
money is from the great artists of the 20th century in Southern Europe.
So, Picasso and Salvador Dali and all of those guys.
And there's one incident where Salvador Dali had a car accident.
It's one of, one of the previous books.
It's in, uh, Independence Reimagined?
Yeah.
because I heard of that after I, I told that story and he's, he's
running into another car and wrecks the other car somewhere in France.
And the, the French man walks out and he's all mad.
And what Dali does is that he signs the car wreck making the,
the car wreck more valuable than the original cost of the car.
like the original price of the car.
That he destroyed, because he's so famous at this point.
And apparently these painters, they used that for their restaurant bills.
So instead of, uh, their restaurant bills.
So instead of paying for a meal, they started signing the receipts.
And the receipts became more valuable than whatever the dinner cost.
Except that they couldn't do it forever.
Because there was inflation in signed receipts.
All of a sudden everyone had Salvador Dali and Picasso signed receipts.
So, and, and it's a perfect metaphor for money printing, right?
And also like , A couple of things come to mind when you tell
the story about the quadrants.
One is the, the, um, uh, famous Mar Margaret Thatcher quote.
Uh, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other
people's money, which is loading to the, the, that's that the resources go
away if you don't use them properly.
And the other thing is that.
Bitcoin is at the very, very best point, and it's at the very top
corner of this quadrant, right?
The very top corner, because it's giving a shit, uh, on steroids.
You give a hundred percent shit about your money.
You, you don't trust, you verify, you make sure that it's actually
yours and it's being spent by you on stuff you wanted to buy.
Yes.
So, so it's the, it's the most give a shit point.
It's, it's the apex of the job that money is supposed to do, but there's actually
a feedback system in sound money itself and how money is supposed to work,
which is brilliant because it amplifies.
The giving is shit, even outside of the weight of what it meant to you,
because you also have a reflection of the prosperity increase of
society, of the productive increase of society reflecting in your money.
Therefore, the longer The longer you hold onto it, the deeper the
weight is, the more you realize that if you don't use up resources that
you don't need to use up right now, in two years time, you can actually
get access to a lot more resources because society is getting better.
So what you, what you actually have is you have two things.
You have both the weight of the resources and how much you earned.
In, in knowing what the value of it because you know what you put
into it in order to achieve it.
But you also have in the back of your mind this incentive to wait because you
know the, um, uh, to, to give it time because you know that the weight of
everyone else's resources is the same.
are going to, are going to increase over time.
You know that it's going to be a greater portion of the economic pool, or excuse
me, it's a greater percentage, it's the same percentage of a greater economic
pool of resources later in the future.
And therefore, you benefit also, not only from conserving your own resources, But
conserving society's resources for the sake of making society better, and you
don't have to know, you don't have to know that that's why, but that's why, that's
why it's happening, is incentivizing you to hope, or to, to make a decision in
order to make society better, for the purposes of making your own life better.
It is aligning you in that way.
So there's a collective benefit at the exact same time that
there's an individual benefit.
Yeah, and that, that reflection we refer to as number go up.
That, that is what that, that is what that reflection is.
And, yeah, and the opposite is true as well, like, um, that's why you
see empty shelves on supermarkets in countries with price controls.
Because, uh, socialism and other natural disasters don't fail
because of a lack of incentives.
They fail because of a manipulation of the price signal, first and foremost.
They fail because of the success of their incentives.
Yeah, in a way that's true, but like, the thing is, if you have a gun to your
head and some general tells you VACK, VACK, you will work, like, so it's not
the incentives, it is the pricing signal, because if you have no proper pricing
mechanism, people don't know what to produce and when and in what quantities.
So it's the literal opposite of the, of the number go up technology in Bitcoin.
It's not, it's everything go down technology, like, uh,
everything go to shit technology.
No, I, uh, I'm glad you appre uh, uh, enjoy the, the two sats video series.
Um, I haven't had a ton of time to dedicate to it.
Um, but, uh, I've literally got like 23 of them as far as, like, projects
started for, like, little ideas.
Um, and I'm trying to figure out which one to do next, uh, and it's really hard
to break a lot of these ideas down into, like, four minutes, like, cohesively,
and that's kind of what I'm trying to do is sub four minutes as my goal.
Um, if I could get into two, it would be perfect, but it's
unrealistic for a lot of them.
Uh, to really explain it, uh, but, uh, I've got one that I want to talk
about because I think it's not really appreciated, um, is that there's
a reason that technology doesn't make our lives better, that, that
technology Think about it in the context of the last 30 or 40 years.
Think about the absolutely incredible scale of innovation and drastic
changes in our technological landscape.
How is it that we don't have more time?
We have no more time.
more time.
In fact, quite the opposite.
A lot of people have less time.
Technology has gotten drastically better, but all it has done
is sped up the economy.
It has not freed up the economy at all.
And this is explicitly and only because we don't have sound money.
This is a mechanism that has nothing to do with technology.
Technology is actually doing its job, but what it is actually allowing
is for the inflation to be worse.
And I don't mean that in the context of like CPI, like price inflation, it's
actually a massive deflationary force from the technological standpoint.
I mean the amount of inflation that is needed or enabled that
would actually keep prices stable.
purpose of technology is that prices are supposed to fall.
As things get better, and as technology gets better, it's supposed to fall.
And if we actually had sound money, we would actually have just gargantuan
amounts more time at our disposal.
Like, we would have our leisure.
To make decisions, or to change what we want to do, and it wouldn't matter
that our job got automated away, because that would be better for us.
At the exact same time that it got automated away, what we got paid all
year is also 10 percent more valuable.
So, you'd actually, you'd be constantly ahead of the game every single time
it appeared that there was a fallback.
Whereas what we have with inflation, when you're printing money and
rushing to catch up, wages are always the last thing to move.
Wages, salaries, they are literally referred to, even in shit fiat
economics, they are referred to as sticky prices, because they are the
slowest moving, longest contractual obligations in the economy.
Therefore, it's weird, and it's a difficult thing to change them.
It's extremely easy to change the price of a coffee.
In five hours, change the price of gas.
You can see it happen live.
You can pull into the gas station and watch that thing
tick up a penny, two pennies.
Like, they change it immediately.
As soon as the commodity changes that they have to purchase,
the price of the good changes.
Your wages will take a year to catch up to that, at best, if you're
lucky, which means that you are always racing back to zero under
inflation, under a fiat system, whereas literally the exact opposite is true.
Occurs.
Your wages stay where they are for a year while the price
ticks down during inflation.
Which means that you're in a permanently ahead of the game even if you do nothing.
Even if you do not change or better your situation, you are benefiting.
It's literally, it's literally the perfect analogy are those
stupid sidewalks in the airport.
Is fiat is going the wrong way on the sidewalk at all times.
And if you stop or do anything, if you're not moving forward, you
are literally moving backwards.
And you only get to move genuinely forward, forward in space, in a realistic
sense, if you are running faster, then the moving sidewalk is going the other
way, and you also don't know how fast it's going to be moving at any one point
in time, it'll just get really fast suddenly, and you'll have to sprint,
whereas Bitcoin, or just sound money in general, is literally on the moving
sidewalk that is moving in the direction that you're supposed to be going.
If you are walking forward, you're making real progress.
And, if you aren't walking forward, you're still making progress, because
everybody else is, and you get to share it with the foundation of the money.
It's so crazy, it literally is the difference between society at each
other's throats, competing for resources that are constantly depleting, or
society in cooperation, and everybody benefiting at the same fucking time.
It is the exact same thing that everybody pontificates, and gives some bullshit.
Bullshit speech about how we're gonna make society have everybody work together,
and then they do it by slitting each other's throats and putting a gun to
your head and stealing all of your shit.
And it's like, well, if you just stop fucking with everything and
putting fraud at the base of the entire system, well, guess what?
It would just happen naturally.
Because, turns out, Bitcoin points out the obvious.
That things are a whole lot better if we just fucking cooperate.
Yeah.
I, I love, I love the passion, uh, of the delivery guy.
Like, like, and this is why I love the my two SATs videos because of the
passion of the delivery of the message.
Because you can tell that it's, it's heartfelt and like this is, um.
It usually comes with cursing.
I I have time to bleep it out in my I have time to cut it out in my two sats.
But, uh,
Yeah, we don't fucking curse on this show, man.
We don't fucking curse.
yeah?
So, so, so the thing is, uh, there's a, one of the chapters in the Clown
World book, uh, starts by, by asking the question, and this, this is very
much tied to this whole phenomenon.
It asks the question, uh, if you practice do it, doing something over and over
again, do you usually get better at that task or worse at doing that task?
And the answer is obvious.
Like for most people, if they practice, they get better.
Like, yeah, if I practice.
Playing Beethoven on piano, I might still be shit, but I'm better than I used to be.
Like, and this is the thing, the follow up question to that question
that nobody asks themselves is then, why are prices going up then?
because if we, if we practice
way to frame it.
And it was like in the opening paragraph or whatever, just to, to
set the stage for that whole chapter.
Which one was that one?
What was that?
What was the
It was one of the latter chapters, I think, but I think
that's, that's the gist of it.
So, yeah.
Uh, I'm, I'm, we are gonna take the opportunity of course, of, uh, um,
as asking you what you thought about the book and if you, what your main
takeaways are and what, what, uh, how this differs from my previous books
and what, what, what, what's your
does it differ from previous books?
Hmm.
That's a
forget that, then just, just your general thoughts.
Well, I'll, I'll think on that one.
I'll, I'll let that one, I'll let that one simmer for a minute.
May maybe we'll come back to it.
Um, I love the book, obviously love the book, um, I've, I've always, I've
always like, I've always had a thing for your writing, um, and I love that
Luke has been added in on this one to, to piece this together, and, uh, what
you said towards the, I think you said this at the end, in the, the postface,
if I'm not mistaken, Um, but how, like, Luke did a good job of giving it
structure, and, and putting it together in almost, almost kind of a story fashion.
Like, like, it, the pieces, the, uh, puzzle, puzzle's probably
the better analogy, is the pieces put together really well.
To end up with a picture.
And with the picture that I think you were trying to illustrate really well.
Um, and, uh, but absolutely love the book.
Probably my biggest takeaway,
it's hard to say, because I, I'm, I'm gonna mix everything with previous books.
It's hard to separate out this one from the entire, the entire
work, the, the entire set of works.
But I think, going back to the point that you just made about, uh, or the
analogy that you just made on if you practice at something, does it get better?
Why doesn't this, why doesn't this result in falling prices?
I think one of the best things about this book is how well you've put
together, and this is what I've tried really, really hard to do in my two
sats videos, and I want to continue to do in my two sats videos, is
taking something that's very obvious.
And attaching it to something very difficult.
Like, very not obvious for most people.
And, and you can't, you hit that, you guys hit that in basically
every single chapter, right?
Is you start with, this is, this is the simple idea that you know.
Like, talking to the readers, like, you know this is true.
You know this is true.
Wouldn't this have to follow?
How on earth have we been led to believe that it's the obvious, I mean,
that it's the opposite, when applied here, when you know this is true?
And, Boiling down to an analogy or that like kind of pinpoint idea that
makes that clear, as someone who tries to do that a lot, is very difficult.
I know that that is very difficult, or at least it's very difficult for
me, and I try really, really hard.
So, that's probably my biggest takeaway with this book is, is how well, um,
I've probably got like 7 or 8 like solid highlights from this book that
are, uh, purple highlights which I, I refer to as, I'm gonna come back
and I'm gonna post this somewhere on Twitter probably at some point.
Um, and, uh, I think pretty much every single one of them is an
example of something like that.
Where there's an extremely, like a very obvious or intuitive
When you apply it in the right way to the larger economic idea, or
the, the, this is what happens in clown world, why would that happen?
How could it possibly be that this is naturally occurring, and
then breaking down in the rest of the chapter why it's not?
Like this, it's just not natural.
And what you've missed is that this, this incredibly important piece of
the equation is turned upside down.
Um, and I think that, that is, which is funny because what you're doing
is you're taking a good idea, a solid idea, or a really foundational
idea, and you're flipping it over and then you're explaining clown world.
So it's funny, you're taking the inverse of an obvious idea in order
to explain why clown world exists.
Which is Bitcoin the inverse of clown world.
Exactly.
I mean, I can, I can, uh, identify with so much of that.
It is very difficult for me to, to, to take this simple idea and to
explain a more complicated subject.
But I think that's at the core of what all I don't know how
explanatory creative things are.
Like when, whether it's popular science or anything else.
Like, you have to sort of take it back to first principles and take it back, like,
take a helicopter view of the problem.
Like, this is true and this is true, so therefore, and why
the fuck is it this way then?
Well, it isn't, but you're pretending it is.
Like, so, so, so that's, that's, um, No, I love to hear that.
It's great.
And it ties back to,
when you, like in the beginning of this show, when you passionately describe the
Friedman ish four quadrants, I realize that that's the gist of the book, really.
Yum.
It's,
It's explaining that in a bunch of
yeah, it's the TLDR of our book.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it all comes down to the same.
I mean you can, you can describe Bitcoin in so many ways and you can
describe it in, uh, describe the underlying problem in so many ways,
but at the end of the day, it's It's the same underlying problem that we are
being stolen from by counterfeiters.
And if we weren't, then we would all be better off and
at an ever accelerating pace.
Uh, which is what Bitcoin has blatantly pointed out to everyone who has
understood it to a sufficient degree.
Uh, and no, that's, that's it.
if I had to, if I had to say for my, my biggest takeaway on how it's different
from your other works is I think each chapter, like, like with both Sovereignty
Through Mathematics and Independence Reimagined, um, I feel like because these
are more Bitcoin specific rather than the Praxeology book, um, is You do a
good job of hitting, like, main ideas for each chapter, but I think these are tied
together in this way, and this is probably Luke's fault, um, is these are tied
together in a sequence better, where not only does each chapter cover, like, The
ground of a really strong idea, but each chapter builds on the last one and then
consecutively, you know, kind of like a, you know, your final exam is all of them.
Like, it does a good job of building up as you read, uh, rather than having
standalone and then just trying to wrap up or something, you know, maybe like,
that's probably the biggest takeaway on how it's different or how it felt
different while I was reading it.
No, very happy to hear that, because that was the main, one of our main goals with
this one, was to make it more coherent.
So, so, no, very, very happy to hear that.
I'm glad I got to do the audio, man, as always.
No, I'm super happy you did.
Speaking of Bitcoin, and more specifically Bitcoin, and this
give a shit matrix, and everything.
Like, I'm curious to take Your take on the whole spam debate and the attack
vectors on Bitcoin and attacks on layer twos and whatever like because for myself
I've become more and more of a monetary maximalist and I even cringe when I
hear this that they're timestamping the Guatemala election on the timeshame.
Don't do that!
This shouldn't be filled with anything arbitrary like
I would say that's different because the, the purpose of the global timestamp
server is literally just to have an order of events, like as a chronological
history, and explicitly the entire thing is a hash, which means that basically
the transaction isn't even a hash.
Bigger than just a normal transaction like the way the only thing like simple the
way simple proof is working with Carlinos and everything that they're doing is the
most efficient means of getting that value out of it possible and Like literally
you're talking about tens of thousands in this tree of hashes that exist in one
hash Like, and it is stamped one time.
Like, that is the only way, and it gives you all of the proof
that you could possibly need for anything underneath that.
As soon as you start extending this out to things like selling constellations
in the sky, which is the equivalent of stamping a picture, a JPEG, into
a, into a blockchain and then selling it to somebody like they own it.
It becomes so unbelievably, both useless.
Because it doesn't even give, it doesn't even give the, the actual capability or
the actual utility that it supposedly is selling, like it doesn't even
exist, you can't own something in the blockchain, it doesn't move with you,
it doesn't, you don't transact the JPEG and then put the JPEG somewhere
else, you literally, literally there is no connection to it, it is, it is
like selling somebody, um, the moon, Just being like, I sold you the moon.
You could just as well just say, well, I'm going to do it this way, and
I'm going to sell you the moon, too.
Like, you could have somebody else do it, and they're just like, oh,
well, I accept this guy's moon.
This guy says I own the moon.
It's like, well, the other guy says I own the moon.
It's like, well, it just exists there.
It's on everybody's blockchain.
I can look it up on my computer.
It's on my node.
Whether I want it to be there or not, I wish I could delete it,
Yeah, that's the thing.
You're not only selling the star in the Andromeda galaxy, you're
also forcing people to look at it.
Like, you're forcing people to aim their telescopes at that specific star.
and forcing people to, to store it, for, for no reason, like, you just, you just,
it's so, it's so nonsensical, the, the way, I still, I still love my analogy,
and I haven't heard anybody, even in support of it, uh, to, argue against the
analogy, which I find interesting, Um, and I think it's a perfect, a perfect
example is, it's pooping in the park.
It's taking a public space and wasting resources and making somebody
else have to clean up your shit.
That's, that's what it is in my opinion.
Now, in the context of like filtering, like, if you want to filter your
mempool or your node and you don't want to include it in your, um, Mining
blocks, more power to you, 100%.
In fact, I'm, I'll be, when I turn the miners on for the winter, um, I'll be
pointing it at ocean, uh, the ocean pool.
So, uh, but at the same time, I don't think there's a concrete way.
All you can do is disincentivize, and you can't really stop it
because, you know, the whole idea is If mining is decentralized, you
won't really be able to stop it.
If mempool policy is decentralized, you won't really be able to stop it.
And it'll get in, and it's, whatever, they'll pay fees.
Um, and it's not, it's not the end of the world, but, I mean, I'm with you.
I'm a monetary maximalist.
It's a, it's a global decentralized monetary network.
The idea of using it
Another analogy, I like the pooping in the park, but I think it also kind
of obscures the value of it because, you know, a park is just a nice
place to have, it's not a necessity.
Whereas Bitcoin is a necessity, like sound money is a does society live or die
kind of thing on a long enough timeline.
And so, It's like, imagine is that you had a machine that could feed, that could, in
some incredibly unique and perfect way, it could feed people who were hungry.
But you have an extremely limited
an extremely limited capacity for people to move to, to operate this machinery.
But it turns out that if you kind of like flip the machine on its side
and run it through like ten times, it would have been for feeding people.
Somehow, you can make a photocopy of your ass.
And you can get a printed picture of your ass.
And then, while people are in line trying to get food, a whole bunch
of people crowd in line so that they can get photocopies of their ass
from the really important machine.
And the ass photocopy is more valuable because it's through
this machine that they can prove.
And then they brag about, this literally took ten times as many
resources to get this picture of my ass.
And then I'm gonna sell it.
I'm gonna sell it because look how, look how I wasted the resources of this
incredible, like, monumental machine that we have created, and everybody in line
waiting to eat is standing there going, Why the fuck am I in line behind this?
Why is this in, why am I waiting to eat because of this dumb piece
of shit photocopying his ass?
And that's essentially what it does, because this is a global bidding war
for space in this, in this machine.
Um, and I think to brag, it's literally, you're taking a dump in a park, and then
you're taking a selfie with it, and then you're being like, look how cool I am.
And somebody else has to come by and clean that up, because you clearly,
not only are you a poor steward, you're an arrogant poor steward.
Of our collective resources.
This is a public good.
I mean, in a, as cleanly as I can say it, go fuck yourself.
Like, there's nothing I can do about it, and you're still gonna go take a picture
of you with a shit, but I'm gonna make, I'm, I will do whatever I can to make
you feel like a piece of shit, because you are worth less than the piece of
shit that you, you, you crapped out in the park, and then took a selfie with.
Yeah, couldn't agree more.
Uh, like, and As you say, there's very little one can do on a technical
level, except, you know Point your, uh, your minors at the ocean or something,
something similar, something at least transparent, but, uh, I would say the
thing we can do is educate people.
Uh, so, and one of the more important things here is to educate people on
why the satoshi is totally different from anything else on the internet.
Because it doesn't live on the internet.
It doesn't exist on the internet, and it exists in people's heads.
At the end of the day, that's what, that's where the Power
of moving the satoshi resides.
So the satoshi is just a measurement stick.
So my analogy is, like, there is no such thing as a rare satoshi.
Just as, like, a centimeter does not become more rare just
because I measure my dick with it.
And that's what these people are doing.
Like, and forcing everyone to look at their dick measurements.
Yeah,
That's about right.
That sounds about right.
Yeah.
So that's,
yeah, no, no, no, no, you're American.
I mean inch.
Do you know, do you know, by the way, why a penis can never
get longer than 12 inches?
I don't know.
Luke apparently does.
It becomes a foot!
Yeah, I've heard this one a few times.
Oh man, that is, that is, that is dad joke, that is dad joke perfected.
You know, the one thing on this particular front that I think, I mean, I agree
about the education is the most important thing here, but what I don't like is
when people on Twitter, and I mean, I've pretty much switched off Twitter
and gone pretty, pretty much, I only scroll Nostr these days, and that's been
much same.
Yeah.
good for my mental health, man, like seriously.
But just to wrap
But we're
maybe we switch over to Nostr for a bit, the thing is when there's some
people in the Twitter space that basically make fun of anyone who It
even advocates for doing stuff like what Ocean is doing, like, it's not
gonna make any difference, and oh, look, filter bros, the fees are low, and it's
like, well, no, but that's, that's not
Okay, still gonna do it.
exactly, and, and, and, uh, like, it's, it's permissionless,
and I mean, I, I love,
can feel good about themselves if they want.
Yeah.
And, and then there's these, there's been these breakdowns, like Bob
Burnett has, has gone and looked at the, the, uh, the fees that he, he
took in from, from comparing like a, an FPS pool, apparently a couple of
fpp s pools, and he didn't name them.
He, he's, he's not naming names and ocean.
And the ocean miners paid out more over that, that period of time.
And it wasn't a short period of time either.
So it's like, there's something, there's something here.
Uh, uh, mining pool transparency.
I, I think that is, is kind of the real.
Get everyone, uh, uh, out into the open, get everything out into the open and,
uh, everything's done in a transparent way, then, then maybe we can all put
cards on the table, and if you wanna go mine your dick butts, like, okay,
fine, I'm not gonna like you, but, but it is the system as it exists, and so,
you know, Marathon can go mine an M.
Uh, and they're allowed to, currently.
I wish it weren't the case, but, uh, since there's basically no alternative than to,
basically a hard fork, as I understand it, uh, we're stuck with the system, so, it's
a hundred percent sure there is even like a hard fork fix because I think it would
just kind of change the methodology.
That would have to be applied in order to get it to work.
Um, but I think in a lot of ways, it's just kind of axiomatic that there's
going to be ways to like, cause anybody who is making a block can construct
the way the transactions go together.
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, uh, I think the, the, um, the last point that I had
on the, on the sort of the, the ordinals topic was that there are like two specific
bugs that are actually being exploited, though, like for, for some of these
things, like it's this, uh, this, uh, um, false if Like this just complete failure
in logic that could just get sewn up and a lot of this stuff can't happen and then
Stamps is exploiting something else like this bare multisig thing and it's so so
Stamps is the worst, because it's explicitly And what's crazy is that they
created it because Like, that was one of the things that, like, really got me.
Is that They were legitimately bragging about the fact that they found something
that is worse, and that was its only value, is that they, it's kind of like,
it's kind of like finding out that if you ate a lot of Taco Bell, it's
a whole lot harder to clean up the poop out of the park, and it's like,
look, I can make diarrhea in the park.
And, and this one's, this one's even more difficult, and now I'm going
to take a selfie with this one.
And, the, the stamps permanently bloat the UTXO set.
Um, and there's not really anything to be done about it, except for, I
mean, I guess, I guess at some point,
I guess they're identifiable.
So maybe you could just prune from your UTA, like manually prune on the
client side, if I'm not mistaken.
Um, but regardless, regardless, it's uh, the interesting thing about the
whole FPPS versus Ocean, um, and I talked with Mechanic a lot about this,
and it's kind of like mind blowing, is the FPPS is them just like basically.
Apparently giving the bare minimum of what they think they'll have to pay
out and that their spread is a lot bigger than they actually say it is.
And ocean, I think it's a misunderstanding as well to just say that, oh, you
use ocean because you want to filter.
No, you use ocean because you want to be able to choose.
It's because you actually want to be able to construct a block template, whereas
you're just doing whatever the mining pool wants to do in the other situation.
Like, Ocean, by the they've set it up now that you can just choose.
You can you can still mine ordinals, and well, ordinals is not the thing,
um, you can mine inscriptions.
And stamps, and you know, whatever.
If you want, they have a filter for you.
Like, they're not even, if you want to use theirs, the default filter, um, or
the default template is with the filter.
But they're not even telling you that you can't.
Or for enforcing it on anybody, they're literally just trying to decentralize
this process, so that people can choose, because they think if people can
choose, most will choose to, shockingly, er, er, most will choose to do the
filters, and the surprising fact of that is that you still end up making
a higher payout with Ocean, because Ocean just isn't trying to screw you.
The, the payouts are just, you know, are just probabilistic, they're based on the
mining itself, and it's, it's more random, but it ends up being significant, like
some of the stats, even for as small as they still are, um, to the point that he
said he was talking to a, and I think he mentioned this in the first roundtable,
maybe, But he was talking to a miner who is using them, a larger miner who
is using them, and he asked, he's like, well, could you share this publicly
or whatever, because they were making a pretty significant percentage above
what they were making with the others.
And he says, uh, would you, you know, be willing to share this out?
And he said, sorry, but no, I don't want to tell other people because
the gap will probably go away.
Like, he says, I'm making more because other people don't
know about this right now.
So, I don't really have any good reason to spread the word on the fact that
I have X percent more by using this.
Um, and, and he, he, he said, you know, for the sake of privacy, I
don't want to tell who that is.
Um, but, that's, that's an in, that's an interesting point.
So, uh, but I'll be turning my minors to him.
I mean, I've set up with Oceanair, whatever, I just, it's just been too
damn hot to run the things in the house.
This is so damn interesting, like, uh, from so many perspectives.
I guess the devil's advocate thing on the stamps would be that
Bitcoin thrives when attacked.
Like, we should attack it from all sorts of vectors and see what happens.
So maybe this is the price we have to pay to get
To get decentralized block templates?
That would be great.
Yeah.
And maybe the trade off is worth only time can tell, you know.
But it's also the thing, one thing that has bothered me when thinking about the
game theory and attack vectors and such, is that you have this, among bitcoiners,
that we're all incentivized to, to, we're not incentivized to be violent, to aggress
against one another, because When you can't know, you cannot know how much,
how many bitcoins another person has.
Like, it's impossible.
Uh, and therefore, attacking that person is always the, the worst choice.
That if you have to choose between that and providing something of value back.
So you extract the bitcoin by providing value back.
So, so that's how it's so beautiful and promotes world peace and stuff.
But it's not true for miners.
Miners actually have an, an incentive to, at least
theoretically, to attack one another.
And this is like, am I getting this wrong?
Is there a game theoretical thing here that I'm missing?
Or are miners incentivized to, you know, covertly attack one another,
uh, blow up, go into someone else's mining facility in a ninja suit and
blow it up, and blame the third miner?
Like, what do you, what's guys take?
I mean, yeah, probably.
Yeah, because miners are in, they are not in competition with, The
network, they are incentivized to protect the network because the
network defends and owns their payout.
Or, you know, creates the rules and the value of how they get compensated.
But they are in competition with each other in a zero sum game.
Where the, the output versus the input is explicitly limited.
And, uh, and is purely competitive.
Which is exactly why You it is, it is critical for the, the ecosystem
or, or the mining, function itself to be as purely open as possible
and as purely probabilistic as possible, that there is no.
You know, MEV Advantage, or out of band, like, gaming of the system that can be
done with how you order transactions, or in reordering transactions that
have already been ordered, etc.
Um, Where you can make more money on, and this is why, you know, expressivity in
bitcoin is actually a potential and pretty significant risk, is that more capital
could be made, um, or a significant portion of the capital could be made
in just altering how transactions get into bitcoin rather than just Just kind
of the very naive assumption of grab the thing with the most fee and stick
it in the top of your block, you know.
Um, and I actually just read a piece called, uh, Stop Calling It MEV by
Matt Corallo, which I think does a good job of, uh, breaking down the
concept, but it is very obscure.
It's still really hard to kind of like pin down exactly what it's meant.
Um, and I think the best thing is just to use Ethereum as a comparison, and one
of the things that got me about Ethereum, I almost, I didn't believe it to the
point, like I thought it was just FUD from Bitcorners that was exaggerated, um,
because, you know, it's easy to just like, make up something that's really bad about
Ethereum because, Ethereum is garbage, um, and it, the whole thing started as
a scam, but I wanted to temper it and be like, no, there's no way this is true.
This is like actually how it works.
But staking is permissioned.
And I don't think people realize that.
Is that the current stakers have to allow you in.
Like, Which is so fundamental, like,
I don't know how they could possibly call that decentralized.
Like, if I am mining my basement, I don't have to get somebody else to
validate that those hashes are real.
You know?
Like, that's one of the most, like, core fundamental pieces of the entire puzzle of
this being a global permissionless system.
But not only do you have to have, like, What is it?
32, 000 is some crazy amount of Ethereum to stake at all, but
you can't just like turn it on.
You have to get all of it, and you just have to assume that all of the other
stakers are going to be, are gonna be like, yeah sure, in a zero sum competitive
environment that they're gonna turn you, they're gonna add you to the mix.
They're gonna dilute their portion of it by adding a new staker, and
that's never gonna go sideways.
That'll never work out!
That'll never go bad!
I just, I couldn't believe it!
I could not believe it!
I still wanna, I still wanna think that I'm wrong.
Nobody's contested me on that.
It sounds like politics, like
Very much
in nations, and it sounds like, at least with a bank, you and the
bank and the government are in a 2 out of 3 multisig situation, right?
Mm hmm.
So if you and the bank decide that the money is yours, then,
well, I guess the government could shut you down anyway, but if
was about to say, it's a, it's a 2 out of 3 with a 1, uh, with a master key.
So, the, the government, there, there is a 2 out of 3 relationship, but there is
also a backdoor key from the government that can just basically nix all of it.
Um, so, it's kind of like a hierarchy of keys, and it's mostly an abstracted two
out of three that doesn't really exist.
Um, but I see what you mean.
I see what you mean.
but it's still better than Ethereum.
That's where I'm going.
But it's still better than Ethereum.
Yeah.
That's funny.
Ethereum is shit cubed.
Yeah.
I still just can't believe, I still just can't get past the 70 percent pre mine.
I just
No, and I can't, I can't believe so many people fucking fell for it and for such
a long time and people still fall for it.
Like they still think there's some value in that.
and you know, like, people in Ethereum are like, nobody cares about that anymore.
And it's like I don't care if nobody cares about that anymore.
Yeah, that's the problem.
understand that doesn't change the reality?
That doesn't change what it means?
That's like saying nobody cares about fiat money.
Well, of course they don't, because they don't fucking understand it.
But it still has consequences, it still means what it means.
You could, like, it's such an appeal to It's like a bandwagon appeal.
It's like, well nobody cares.
It's like, it's like if we all lived in a giant building and the entire floor
was the bottom floor and the foundation was just chock full of termites.
But everything seemed fine, and everybody's going around the building,
it's like, no big deal, and then I'd be like, Dude, this whole thing is literally
gonna collapse, like, this thing is just chopped, like, the, the joists are rotten,
this whole thing is gonna fall, and everybody's gonna die, and you're like,
Well, we took a poll, and nobody cares.
Like, oh, it doesn't fucking mean anything, like, that doesn't change
anything about what I said, how, like, answer the problem, you know, like,
holy crap, like, how stupid is that?
How completely irrelevant could you be?
I don't give a who gives a shit about how many people give a shit about it?
You have a 70 percent pre mine in a system that has now gone proof of stake,
which means they owned the whole thing!
Before anything ever got started, before anybody was ever able to utilize or do
anything with it, there was a private sale of 70 percent of the tokens that are still
in basically the starting crews pockets.
And they remained there and then they moved it to Proof of Stake
where they get to order all of the transactions and build all the blocks
and have say over what the rules are.
What, I don't, if nobody understands that in your Ethereum, that's not a good thing.
That's not a defense of it.
That's just showing how bad it is and how stupid everybody is about what
decentralization means and why any of this exists in the first place.
On top of the fact that, by the way, we made it permissioned, so that
if you don't get our approval, you don't even get to play the game.
Just, holy wow.
It's just absolutely mind boggling sometimes.
Nobody cares.
It's like, what the f
are, are there any shit Bitcoiners left?
I mean, of course there are scammers left that try to do shit coins on Bitcoin
and what, whatever, and the other scams.
But like, the pure shitcoiner, like back in 2017 when I started this token
blah blah blah, does that still happen?
I mean, I very rarely see them anymore.
I see a lot of bots and people with ETH in their Twitter handles and stuff.
But that's mainly, that's mainly bots, I think, like, but, and,
a bunch of ETH devoutists still.
Um, and there's a handful of, uh, uh, explicit coins that, mostly
from, like, some utility mindset, um, failing to recognize, uh, recognize.
These are all monetary instruments and that's the only thing that they can be.
Um, and the idea of a utility token is nonsense and you're not
going to get away with, my single utility is going to outcompete
the base case of money and trust.
Um, because that's, that's not how any of this works, but it's okay.
Um, ignorance is the norm.
no, the utility is in an Excel sheet, like, a spreadsheet.
And you don't need all the other stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
But, uh, Ethereum, um, granted I haven't done like a deep dive.
Like there were times where I tried to spend.
A couple of weeks, like, really digging into and trying to, like, sushi swap
stuff just for the sake of exploring, uh, mostly as shitcoin insider homework,
um, but I haven't done it in a really long time, but it does seem that a lot.
Strong base of the, of the quote unquote community is still there.
External to that, um, I mean, I think, I think we're seeing so much
of the fervor die down because, I mean, at the end of the day, there's
two, there's two major problems.
There's two major problems with the, uh, the, the shitcoin casino world.
Is one, is that the fundamental utility token thesis is self defeating.
So, the over, like, the most Foundational and the most widespread mentality was
diversity, or excuse me, diversify, is that we need to, some of these other
things might have value, or this might have some single utility, and so they
split it up among the most prominent of the cryptos, and they hold bitcoin too.
Whereas the bitcoin philosophy was always, the strongest foundation of the
bitcoin philosophy was bitcoin only, this is changing sound money and it
makes no sense to have anything else.
From just that standpoint, you can deduce that Bitcoin wins, because inevitably,
crypto is spreading itself thin, and Bitcoin is staying, like, there are way,
way, way, way more Bitcoiners who hold no shitcoins, no tokens whatsoever, and
only hold Bitcoin, than there are ETH, Monero, Litecoin, whatever, who hold
only those coins, And don't hold bitcoin.
All of the token holders, like 99 percent of the token holders hold bitcoin.
Whereas the reverse is not true.
And in fact, everybody who is even holding ETH because it's got smart
contracts is also holding Solana.
Which means the economic network effects are inevitably in bitcoin's favor.
And they are still aligned with bitcoin.
Because they are still going to hold Bitcoin because Bitcoin is
going to continue to succeed.
That is the monetary network effects.
That is the, that is the problem of, or of the, the, um, extreme
condition of value being exclusive.
That you cannot hold value in two things at the exact same time.
It is always a trade off of which one is the better hold of value.
Which means that the monetary good that is the best at monetary trust,
is And as a monetary foundation is just going to win and all the other
ones are going to trend towards zero.
Yeah, it's like, utility value is like, uh, holding McDonald's, um,
coupons instead of holding dollars.
Like, that's, and, and pretending that they will be value, more
valuable in the long run.
Speaking
other, the other major disconnect, um, is the fact that, you know, we were
all like smart contracts and we're going to be able to design everything.
We're going to be able to put everything on the blockchain and all this stuff.
And then it turns out that the, like, 90 percent of the value of every bit of
this stuff was just in a shitcoin casino.
was, you know, it's like, they've got like 30 different decentralized
exchanges and what do all of those decentralized exchanges do?
They just trade, they just swap shitcoins, which means that the, of all the utility
tokens, essentially the core underlying utility of all of these things was just
to gamble and trade between them all.
And there has been no other strong, like, genuine market staying
power for any other use case.
like, I mean, you got like NFTs and stuff, and they're like a, they're
like a blip in the pan for like two months, and then they, they trail off,
and nobody really cares about them.
Like, some people spent like millions of dollars on a stupid monkey picture, and
now they're going for like 200 bucks.
You know, I mean, like, talk about like 99.
999 percent collapse in a lot of this stuff.
It exists purely in the hype cycle, and then it falls to the 1000th of a
market that it actually appeared to be, which is the market that it actually is.
Which means that the only thing that keeps up the utility tokens of
the, quote unquote, smart contracts is the hype cycles of the random
chitcoins and utility tokens.
And so if you don't have another massive hype cycle, there's no reason
for You're decentralized swapping all over the place because you
can't swap anything of real value.
You're not swapping, you're not paying for cars, and you're not paying for
like real things in the real world.
You're swapping sushi token for doge token and, and Ethereum and Solana.
SushiSwap sounds like a good name for a swingers club, don't you think?
Eyyyy!
That's not a bad idea.
I think you're on to something.
Is that?
Is that one of your pastimes?
If it was, it would probably be kept a secret.
I would talk about it less, not more.
One of the funny things about, about, kind of talking about Shitcoins,
generally, ETH, all this stuff, ugh, it feels weird to even say it, it's like,
you go down the rabbit hole and you go all the way maxi and everything, and
it's just like, you stop thinking about this stuff after a certain point, and I
mean, it, like, I'm remembering my game.
Journey down the rabbit hole and how I became fully convinced and I mean,
like, I went from watching the Sailor series and on Breedlove and like,
like that got me that convinced me about Bitcoin, but I still had my
portfolio of shitcoins for a while.
I was only acquiring Bitcoin, but I still I still I just couldn't get over
little things like the proof of stake thing or mining or whatever it is.
I just couldn't get over diversification as we say.
It's a hard process I think actually going down the rabbit hole and completely
avoiding all of the crypto stuff.
But I think one thing to remember is it's still super important.
Across the world there are tons of people, there's way more
people who think about crypto.
And, and think it's just a thing to invest in and, and don't even give it
a second thought, then, then there are
just another thing in the stock market, basically.
exactly, exactly, and, and, and so, I mean, I, I think educating
people is still really important and, and, uh, and so, I mean,
We'll still have a few cycles, I think.
yeah, yeah, well, it's,
cycles.
it's tough to, it's tough to, to go there, but I think, I think we need to,
we need to, to, Bitcoin maxis need to, to be able to go there and say, okay, Yeah,
this is why this is actually different.
The mechanism of just sort of ignoring it all, like completely walling off from
the crypto ecosystem, that's good in one sense, and being like totally toxic
and not letting any of that creep into Bitcoin, of course, but it also does
create this echo chamber where maybe the voice of Bitcoin doesn't actually make
it out into the wider consciousness.
And, uh, yeah.
I think this is something that Bitcoin is going to need to improve on as we go to
reach more people in a more timely manner.
No, I totally agree.
It comes off more, and I think it's used like that in the community.
Like, you know, as much as, like, I would never talk to people in
the crypto space to the degree that I've had this conversation here.
I've been very Very mean, you know, in the, in the sense of if I was talking to
somebody who was highly involved in it, um, but the arguments are, like, I think
just presenting the argument, it comes off as way, way too defensive to, and
I think we've gone through this era of thinking that because we think something
is A scam or nonsense that there's been this whole thing of like, don't
platform these people and like, don't, and I'm just like, stop caring so much.
Stop caring so much.
And I've gotten to the point where I just, I just don't, you know, like I'll give my
opinion and I, you know, I won't, uh, hold back, but I also have no problem talking
to somebody in crypto, or going on their show, or going, if I got invited to a
crypto conference, I'd be pretty stoked.
I'd be like, well, here's an audience that actually really,
really needs to hear this, you know?
Um.
I think I have absolutely nothing against that, and I also have no bad blood.
I, I, as much as I will, I will say ETH is an absolute scam, and it is nonsense,
and there are huge problems that are way more fundamental than whether or not
your layer 2 rollups are working or not.
I just, like, I don't, I don't care about your layer 2 if your layer 1 is dogshit.
But, that aside, is, like, I'm not, like, I held shitcoins, you know, I traded, I
traded shitcoins for, like, a long time, I was, god, I was, I was certain I was gonna
make more bitcoin, uh, in the 2017, like, hype cycle, like, the real hype cycle
for this, and it was wild, I actually had a shitcoin play that went So well.
So well.
For a span.
And then I watched it die.
And I learned my lesson, and I lost my bitcoin.
And I realized, I identified the excuses I was giving myself for, I cannot
believe I didn't take out my principal.
I cannot believe I didn't tell you.
God bless, it's so awful.
But, you know, hindsight.
Um, hindsight's 25.
Nah, 20, 2010.
That's not 2020.
It's like, it's way better than that.
Uh, but, uh, I, um, How could I possibly fault somebody else I did it?
You know what I mean?
And I think part of it's, you know, wanting to judge yourself.
It's like, I wanna be mad at me from 2017, but I learned, like,
a lot of really great lessons.
And I don't want to be overly defensive, or like, I just don't care anymore.
And I also, as much as I'll explain to people who need to hear it,
or that I think need to hear it,
I also find that just with, most people learn through time, and
most people learn the hard way.
And it's just like, alright, you know, we'll really learn it if we all learn
it the hard way, so I'll just leave the hard way on the table, and I won't,
and if you're just gonna get mad at me because I told you not to do it, be my
guest, be my guest, and I'll just keep putting out episodes, and if you ever
want to come back and, you know, maybe, maybe you'll just be butthurt forever,
and You know, you always just permanently lose money, but that's up to you.
Do you want to learn?
Do you want to take a lesson from it and actually change something?
Or do you want to just write a book out about how everybody else
is wrong and, you know, and just be infinitely butthurt about it?
And convince that the only reason that you didn't succeed, or that your
shitcoin didn't succeed, is because everybody else doesn't understand it,
and the whole world is wrong, not me.
Not me.
the fact that Nostr exists now is, is a very good thing from a
perspective that few understand.
And this is that the, all of these young 180 IQ programmers
who, who sit in their basements and, and worry about things like.
rollups not working on layer 2 on some, they can now develop Nostr
things instead of spending their time and energy on fucking shitcoin stuff.
Because there's so many, you know the
media shitcoins were there?
How many?
Yeah, I don't know, but there's a Steam was one, right?
Like, yeah, yeah, it's awful.
And I think that had like a double token, so you had to have one token
to get the other or something.
It's really
like that, and I think, was that the one that had the hostile takeover from Tron?
From Justin Son?
Was that
I don't remember, I, I,
and he like bought up, like, more than half of it, and then
basically just like dominated the whole thing, which was hilarious.
don't quan,
Don't go on that.
It was, it was Justin Son tron.
It was Justin Son tron.
Uh, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that's, that's who it was.
I think it was Steemit.
I'll have to look that up.
but, but, but you know the type, right, this, this, uh, super nerd that is
extremely intelligent in one specific field, usually programming, and doesn't
care about networking, it doesn't care about economics, and, uh, there's a lot
of those, there were a lot of those that, that fell for the ether thing, and, and
started, like, Going deep into, oh, this is a challenge, I need to program this
stuff, not realizing that it's a castle made of sand, that it's built on nothing,
it's a giant nothing burger, and what they're serving with the nothing burger
is code salad, you know, it's nothing.
goat salad,
, uh, it is truly the impossible burger of Bitcoin steak.
Impossible Whopper, yes.
But yeah, I, uh, and I, I agree with Luke on that, is that it was a, it was a
dumb strategy, and it, and it, it makes Bitcoiners look weak to just, it makes it
look like they care too much about shit coins as opposed to not at all, you know.
It's like, it, it literally treats, treats them like they're a threat, you
know, is to be like, you don't, don't you ever talk to them, and don't you
ever do the, just like, I can't believe you're a shit corner, you're banished
forever, and all this stuff, and it's just like, why do you care so much, why
do you care so much, just stop caring.
Like, everything's going great in Bitcoin.
I've been zapping people on Nostr ten times a day.
Uh, I got ten different lightning wallets that all do different things.
Bolt12 just got implemented, like, officially.
So now we got subscriptions, pay as you go, we got offers and stuff built in.
You can have a permanent, like, quote unquote, address or, or, A permanent
invoice that other people can use to make invoices to pay you so that
you can just post it, like, like a bitcoin address, you can now have a
quote unquote lightning address that's non custodial, um, like, and that's
just, and that's just on lightning, and lightning's been killing it, like
I use it It's my main mode of pay.
I, I do so many different transactions.
I've been on a Bitcoin standard for a couple of years now where
I guess slowly transitioning to a everything comes in in Bitcoin.
And then, you know, I use the dollar as my main payment network.
Um, and things are going good.
Bitcoin's up, you know, all time highs, pretty much chilling,
chilling around 60, 000.
No big deal.
58K gain for life.
no, it's great.
Just a final point on the giving a platform to shitcoiners and stuff.
The thing I think we shouldn't stop doing, though, is calling out
bullshit and being toxic, like,
Oh yeah.
That's
point out when someone else is giving a platform to an obvious scammer,
pointing out when Uh, when there's a manufactured debate about something
that shouldn't be a debate at all.
Like, it's like what public service news media outlets do all the time.
They create a debate about something that is missing the underlying problem.
And it's not addressing the interesting stuff, but they're Making it seem
like this arbitrary bullshit is, is what we ought to be talking about.
Like, ironically enough, that's what we spent some part of this
conversation talking about.
You know, shitcoins on bitcoin and, and, uh, ordinals on stamps and shitcoins.
But that whole debate is a nothing burger in itself.
It's manufactured.
And it's that expression, uh, don't ever wrestle with a pig because you
both get dirty and the pig likes it.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
We're wrestling with pigs.
So like, what I do mostly is just ignore chitcoiners
Mm
and point out, and like, try to educate and try to stay toxic.
But without calling out names.
I don't think you should, like Give people free promotion by engaging
in debates if, if you can avoid it.
But you can attack, what you can attack though is the bad ideas, and you can
point out how bad the bad ideas are.
Yeah.
If, if you debate, is, debate from the, the, the principle, debate
from the foundation, like, cause that's the only, otherwise you're
arguing within their framing.
Argue within the Bitcoin frame.
Like, like, don't give them the assumption that their, their foundation is accurate.
Argue the foundation or you're not actually arguing the principle.
This is what I see with economics all the time.
It's, you know, they'll argue about, like, aggregate demand and GDP when,
like, if you actually have an Austrian foundation, you're like, GDP is bullshit.
Like, it's like, it, like, no.
Like, your ag, your metric, your, the statistic you are
using Doesn't even apply.
So I don't really care what GDP is different now than, like GDP is just going
to go up if you print a ton of money and the economy doesn't collapse, like that's
it, like you, like GDP is a far better measure of just like the amount of money
that's been flooded in the economy, and the only time that it actually goes down
is when it's so bad and you've created such a terrible credit crisis that it
has to unravel and you literally have to delete trillions of dollars through
a default, through a credit crisis.
So it's, it's whether, it's whether or not it's either going up because you
printed a whole lot of money or it's going down because you caused a credit crisis.
That's it.
That's what GDP measures.
So, if you are arguing in the frame of GDP as a measure of like the health of
the economy, you've already lost, because you're not actually arguing the point,
um, and in kind of a similar vein is, you know, uh, and I completely agree that I
think a lot of people get confused with
engaging and quote unquote being polite or being like just talking to them without
being like you're a heaven idiot is like not being solid about your point.
It's just like somehow this is like pulling punches or something.
Is it you're, you're giving them something when there's nothing about,
I think people conflate being nice.
With lying.
I think, I think a lot of people do that.
Is that the way to be nice is to just bullshit somebody.
Is to just be like, oh yeah, no, your project's great, and I'm being nice, and
I'm being polite, everything's great.
The theorem's gonna go awesome, man, I swear.
It's like, no, just tell them the truth.
That's the only way to be nice anyway.
You don't have to pull your punches in what you think or your argument.
To not just attack them as a person, or whatever, and your argument is a thousand
times stronger if you manage to avoid that anyway, because you just stay on point.
Just stay on point.
Just argue.
If you want to debate with somebody, just argue the point.
Don't accept their frame, and don't call them a piece of trash,
just because they made a point.
A mistake.
You did too.
You held shitcoins.
You know you did.
know you did it.
Ten dollars.
That's my, my track record of
I held so many shitcoins for a little bit there.
anyway, like,
embarrassing.
politeness is at the very core of why wokeism is a thing, I think.
Because it comes from a place of trying to be polite to one another.
And this over politeness and confusing, as you say, confusing being nice with lying.
Just making stuff up.
yeah, and
It's like one of those things that insecure guys think that they
have to lie about what they like to women to make women like them.
yeah,
it's like, it's like, oh I love Taylor Swift.
It's like, I love Taylor Swift too.
And it's like, you're manipulating them.
Like, you're not being nice, you're lying to them to get them to like you.
That's what a creep does.
If you don't like Taylor Swift, be like, why do you like Taylor Swift?
She's awful.
And it's actually a much more interesting conversation too.
And if she can't handle it because she's a delicate little nothing, you don't,
why would you want to be with that woman?
Like, just, just go off, like, value yourself and be honest.
Like you're doing the same thing that, it's just, it's just a mess, like we
literally have this weird culture that has slowly grown up in the last 30 years
where living a permanent life of white lies is somehow being nice to people, or
good, or something, like stop putting a mask on, man up, pull your britches up,
and just, just tell people what you think, actually like the things that you like.
And stop making shit up because you want somebody else's approval.
I don't like Taylor Swift.
That's not true.
There's a couple, there's a couple songs.
There's a couple songs that are kind of like, they, they hit.
I find her fascinating, uh, let's just say that.
She didn't write any of that stuff anyway.
So it's not, it's not Taylor Swift, it's just, it's just whoever the
songwriter is that she purchased it from.
Heh heh heh.
Guy, this has been an awesome conversation, I wish we could go on for
two more hours, but unfortunately we're a bit tight on time here, so I think we're
gonna wrap it up here soon, or if not now.
It's like, well, I mean, thanks again on the audio book.
It's, it should be out by the time that this episode comes out.
So make sure everyone that you check out the audio version of Bitcoin,
the Universal Clown World, read by the one and only guys one, uh, and
you can change the speed if you want.
Uh, uh,
to get it slow, so if somebody, I do actually try to get it like, slow
and steady because I know there are like, non native English speakers
who listen to it, and I don't want them to have to manually slow it
down, and I know everybody goes on 1.
5, 2x anyway, um, so, so definitely do speed it up if
I noticed, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
Like, uh, I really, uh, really like that.
That's clever.
Appreciate that rather than saying it's like, oh, he talks really slow, like he's
No, no, no, no, no.
It's, it's perfectly read.
So, so, and check out all the other stuff.
Check out Bitcoin Audible, and where else would you like to send our listeners?
Uh, just, you can find me on Nostr.
Um, that's where I do most of my stuff.
And on Keet, if you join any of the Keet rooms, I'm in like 90.
Um, now, it's like, really retarded, so, uh, you, there's no way you don't
bump into me on Keet if you just start exploring, and I spend, that's where I
spend two most maximum amounts of time, is hanging out on Nostr, and uh, uh,
hanging out, like, all my work stuff is in Keet, so I'm, I'm there in those
groups quite a bit, back and forth, Uh, and you can DM me on Twitter, I still
answer my DMs, like I don't post, uh, like I don't do comments or whatever, I'll
just like post episode stuff, typically on Twitter and content, but I can still
be reached there, and it is still one of my biggest networks for access to other
people, so feel free to DM me, I might be slow about getting back and I apologize,
um, but otherwise check out the show.
Um, uh, Bitcoin Audible, AI Unchained, if you're interested in
all the AI stuff, I really go down that rabbit hole pretty serious.
Um, and also, it's connection to the open source world of, uh, AI specifically,
and how it's connected to Bitcoin.
And then also, the Pear Report, which is all about the PearStack, which
is what Keat and, well, it's the PearStack and a little bit Nostr.
Like, it's got like a, it's got like a foot in the Nostr door, too, because
I think these are Deeply related, and I think they, they have a lot, they're
going to have a lot to do with each other as things, uh, move forward.
That's super good to hear because Yeah, we talked to Paolo and uh, uh, Matias about,
about Keith and one question was like, what's the connection to Nostr and it
seems like a no brainer that the two would work together, but uh, yeah, let's see.
Interested
you, I'll tell you my, my easy framing on this is that Nostr actually doesn't
have anything to do with relays.
Relays are just the default lowest hanging fruit for how to get
information from one user to another.
There's no reason why it can't be Nostrs and pairs.
Like, like it can't be, like notes, the notes and the other stuff is a generic
signing and publishing protocol with keys.
And like that you can basically deliver anything over the internet that you want.
Relays are the simple means, the simplest tool for getting
signed message from A to B.
But you can do that over the pair stack too, without changing
anything else about Nostr.
The whole protocol can work exactly the same, and rather than using a
relay address, you can use a pair.
Address, and you can do this across peers.
So there is not, I think they are separate layers.
In a general sense, Noster is a signing, authentication and basically a, a
directory of people and their keys and built with like a social media system.
And the pair stack is a communication standard.
It is more about, are we going to use relays, are we going to use
the pair stack, are we going to use TCPIP and do a web server?
Like, it's in that stack of the stuff.
But the rest of Nostr is actually not part of that.
The rest of Nostr is on top.
So that's just my, my reasoning for why I think these are not really competing
with each other and that they are both going to be a very important part of
the, of the new stack, if you will.
That's your two sats.
That's my two, that's just my two sats.
So, anyway, anywhere you want to send our, uh, um, like, or
was that the end, the answer
was, that was, I think we got the whole list.
I think we got the whole list.
I think we got it.
Yeah.
Check out those shows.
AI Unchained, Pear Report.
Bitcoinaudible.
Check out all the things, do all the things.
Guy, thanks so much for this, it's been awesome to chat with you, uh, yeah.
It's been a long time coming, we'll have to do this more often, so.
For sure, man.
Good to officially meet you, I guess.
Since, since I didn't know.
I didn't even realize.
It's
Yeah, I know, hey.
Yeah, likewise, Guy, likewise.
So hey, this has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Thank you very much for listening.
Take it easy.