Welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Academy. This is the last episode of our series on Bitcoin Independence Reimagined, my second book about Bitcoin.
And in this episode, we'll wrap the whole thing up and talk about the book as a whole and how this experience has been for me and Luke.
I'm Knut Svanon, by the way, and with me, as always, is Luke DeWolf. Good morning, Luke.
Good morning, Knut. Happy to be here. And yep, capping off Independence Reimagined. Looking forward to summarizing everything and what we have coming up next.
yes what did you think about this book luke i mean i've forced you to read it a couple of times now
once in the uh i think you read it before we met though if i remember correctly and uh of course we
re-edited the book together uh and you helped me out a lot with that so so you've read it a couple
of times now like what are your thoughts about this book yeah overall i think it's stronger than
sovereignty through mathematics in terms of the ideas. I think sovereignty through mathematics,
of course, had some major things that kind of kicked, started you and all the ideas that go
into it. But of course, this has the one-shot principle and just a lot of, you didn't hold back
at all in this book. It's a little more toxic for sure. Lots of idea embryos, I think we said,
things that come up later in the future books, everything divided by 21 million, and then
especially the inverse of Clown World. Yeah, very, very much still a good readable book. A few things
that are a little like snapshot in timey, but yeah, overall, definitely still great to read.
And I mean, now we have the entire book out on Noster for free. So it's great. More information
going more places. I think that's the whole idea. So and actually, this means sovereignty through
mathematics and independence reimagined are both available now for free and if you want to support
us you can you can buy the the physical books or whatever but the information is there read it
share it it's great i mean we would do the academy even if we didn't record it i think because we
have so much fun just talking about these ideas and uh yeah i'm i'm very proud of the book i i
think it's one of the more based ones it's like like you say it's not holding back it's kind of
toxic unapologetically austrian and uh yeah the the there are the similarities to to the price of
tomorrow is are are also a thing to mention here there i i am very happy that uh those two books
are alike because i really like the price of tomorrow and and no wonder jeff and i befriended
one another after after having like re-examined this and how how much we we thunk alike back in
back in 2019 or 2020 this is from 2020 sorry no it's great and uh so now i think we'll just go
through the uh we've got the table of contents up here and we'll just go through each chapter and
give a give a quick recap so we we start off with the fiction and reality chapter what's that about
well we actually we start earlier than that we start with the foreword because that's the thing
we never read on the show.
And the foreword to this book is written by
none other than Mr. Cat,
also known as Hadlonaut
and also known as Magnus
these days. He doxed himself
and he's now putting out
a lot of good Norwegian content.
So if you speak
Norwegian or Swedish, you can listen
to our three-hour
conversation on the
Granatprat
Magnus'
Norwegian pod.
I did this like last week or something, and we had a very good conversation, as we always do.
He's a dear friend, and the foreword is great still.
But as you say, the first chapter is fiction and reality.
It talks a lot about the word intersubjectivity, for instance, which is a thing that one of our enemies, Yuval Noah Harari, talks about a lot.
one of his
better ideas
I think is the
emphasis on
intersubjectivity I think intersubjectivity
is what separates
humans from
the
animal kingdom some would say
purposeful action is the deeper thing
and yeah some would agree with that but
intersubjectivity
I mean nation states
money religions all of
these things are really collective figments of our imagination that unlock ways of treating
one another that may unlock new things for humanity.
And that's a very interesting topic.
Very good.
And yeah, it's definitely interesting to think about the different kinds of realities that we have.
And I think this goes back to a little bit of that everything is subjective, value is subjective, all of this.
Important concepts to think about.
I don't think I have a whole ton to add here, though.
No.
So the next chapter we have is cooperation and coercion.
And I think this one has some of the more based content get started here.
Yeah, this is basically backtracking to Bastiat versus Marx, right?
And catalactic versus biological competition, which is a reoccurring theme in all my books.
How humans have two basic means of resolving conflict.
One is communication.
The other is violence.
and some people have a hard time distinguishing between the two
because they think taxes and inflation are non-violent
which they are not
there are veiled threats of violence everywhere
in left-wing schemes and even right-wing schemes by the way
All politics has a part of every political decision is always violent, since they all have to be funded by stolen goods.
Yes, and well, I saw a good Michael Malice quote or tweet or something like this that was like, anarchy is not chaos, it is order through cooperation.
And it's great. It's great to kind of understand that framing, right? That the whole point of aiming for no state, no monopoly on violence is not to have a world that is completely chaotic. It's that we build the order around us in an organic way through everyone deciding to cooperate together.
So it's not order as in everything is the same, right? But you get this organic, fractal-ish even type of order that emerges naturally and is going to be much more, ironically, much more diverse in terms of the actual implementation and I think flourishing and fruitful.
Like anything that tries to force itself on, like the forced diversity, right?
I think you would get diversity through anarchy much better than having it forced.
You know what I mean?
Absolutely.
And especially diversity of ideas rather than superficial traits like skin color or sex or sexual preference or anything like that.
But also, like, the communication way is the civilized way.
the coercion way is the barbaric way
and like this is a
sort of a battle cry for people to
understand that
and yeah
very good next one up is
why collectivists win
so what was that about Knut?
yeah it's
it's
in the same vein as Hoppe's
Democracy the God that Failed
daring to point out the
flaws of democracy
and this specific chapter my take on that is slightly different the the basic idea that i
try to convey in this chapter is that uh democracies favor collectivism simply because
of the fact that collectivists naturally form larger groups than individualists do
because individualists care more about the ideas than belonging to the certain a certain group
while collectivists care less about ideas and more about belonging to a certain group.
So the more freedom-minded people are, the more fractioned they will be as political parties,
and the smaller the political parties will be.
Which you can clearly see in all democracies.
It's always, at least in Europe, you often have a big blob of left-wingery on one side,
maybe left-wingers and commies and greens,
And then on the other side, you have liberals and conservatives and Christian Democrats and, you know, national right-wing parties and even more nationalistic right-wing parties.
It's fragmented.
And then libertarians and anarcho-capitalist parties, whatever that means.
The point is, the more freedom-oriented one side of the aisle is, the more fragmented it will be.
and the more collectivistic minded people will all flock to the bigger party.
Therefore, democracies inherently favor collectivism, which is super dangerous, of course.
Yeah, this was a fantastic point.
Very good chapter, very good idea to grok for sure,
because, yeah, it really shows how absurd democracy is.
And again, you go back to the Churchill quote, right?
Like it's the worst system except for all the others, something like that.
That have been tried, yeah.
Yeah, and I think it holds true, right?
It's definitely, it's enabled the flourishing of the 20th century, the early 21st century.
And I know how you're going to push back on that.
We can't know how it would have been if we did something else.
But counterfactuals are dumb, so stop.
preemptively
but no no
it definitely shows that
pretty much the
these two party systems just going
back and forth the uniparty basically
it's you can't actually
you don't get with democracy what it advertises
and so
coming back down to the
whole
banding together out of cooperation
and using systems that take the power out of
the collectivists basically
the ones who want to coerce you
these two chapters worked very well together
actually like one after the other
it's very good
ideas building on each other
the coercion is bad and the collectivists
want to coerce and so it's
very very good ideas to
grok definitely
yeah and democracy
and democratic parties are very
good at taking credit for
stuff that they didn't necessarily
do they claim that
we have all this flourishing and this
beautiful civilization where everything gets cheaper because of them but it's in reality it's
more like despite of them and yeah i i highly recommend democracy the god that failed and every
other hopper book for that matter uh he's much better at explaining these things and why monarchies
uh perhaps actually were better than democracies it's just that we we have a hard time seeing that
because we're we're told that democracy is the end all be all in schools and stuff let's see if
our friend prince philip can get the monarchy going in serbia again yes uh yeah
keep up good fight yeah yes yes exactly uh the next one is a tale of two richards that's uh
richard simmons and richard the lionheart right of course it is no it's actually richard nixon
and Richard Cantillon, who lived 300 years before Nixon.
And it's bashing Nixon maybe a bit too hard here
because I say that everything is his fault, basically,
when it more the fault of the decision he was sort of forced to make because the money printing started before him but nixon is the president that finally uh severed the the connection between the the us dollar and gold in 1971 effectively meaning that
the the federal reserve in the u.s can print money and buy stuff from other countries with it
which is just fucking amazing when you think about it that the whole fucking world oh i'm
swearing too much the whole damn world uh fell for it for so long and are still still falling
for it for to this day they can print oil and make everyone else pay for it it's it's truly
regarded yeah definitely and i mean it's it's a it's it's still a very good illustrative chapter
and i think the framing completely works if anyone isn't aware before reading this what
the Cantillon effect is and what the fuck happened in 1971.
Yeah, this is a very good primer.
And I mean, I think you have to go back to basically the Fed,
the creation of the Fed to get to the origins of what Nixon was forced to do.
But, you know, he otherwise was a pretty swell guy, though,
as far as I understand.
I mean, he did a bunch of spying and he killed a whole bunch of Vietnamese.
And so those things were both good.
and his right hand man was one of the worst
mass murderers in history
yeah I was being very sarcastic
anyone listening
so but
I think it is completely
unfair to say that he
kicked
off the money printing
because that's not true
but he did facilitate
the graphs all going
insane all at the same time
which is anyone who
doesn't see that anymore and gets it pointed out to them is blind yeah and uh some would even say
that the starting point was for the bank of england in 1911 right like uh uh if i'm now now
anyway so that's the cantillon effect it effectively funnels wealth from the poor and the middle
classes into the hands of the elites because it favors people who own assets at the expense
of people who don't.
So it's taken from the poor and given to the rich.
And it's awful.
And funnily enough, those who claim to be caring for the poor are usually the ones that want
more of the Cantillon effect and they want countries to spend more and save less.
anyway we go to the next chapter which also ties in neatly poverty and prosperity which is basically
about how you can't fight poverty by hindering prosperity there are they are two sides of the
same coin the default mode of a human being born into reality is poverty and we can only get out
of that by becoming more prosperous so punishing people for being prosperous is counterproductive
to say the least don't you agree luke yes definitely i mean the this is kind of the
the steven pinker thing is where i go here like how how things are actually good right like a
deceptively good because the the whole point is that that we've we've eradicated almost completely
eradicated all of these uh uh the source of of abject poverty like that's gone down and down and
down technological advancement so we are doing it but we have to we have to go even further with it
right that's that's how we get the world out of like it's it's it's it's what you said earlier
it's despite you know democracy and the cantillon effect and everything and it's almost it's almost
like marvelously mind-boggling that we actually we actually are capable of the world improving
despite all these things pushing back against it basically right yeah everyone underestimates the
beautiful power of the free market it's so strong and it's so powerful so it's sort of like an
asphalt flower you know blooming through the asphalt of collectivism and authoritarianism
and just not giving a now i'm about to swear again giving a fuck about uh what they're what
they're trying to do about it no but like i think i think the thing there is that another case of
what the leftists get wrong right the the point is not to try to force things to get better through
redistribution right because that's that's their whole thing they see that there is poverty and
inequality so you might you must have to take from the rich people to to uh get to and give it to the
poor people and everything whereas the first of all just not doing that would be better and second
of all, getting rid of the money printing would be even better than that, right?
Get rid of the candlelight effect.
Yes, because that's the bigger villain here in this story.
Like, taxes are bad, but inflation is the real hidden force that funnels everything
into these so-called elites' hands.
And here, once again, I'd like to recommend Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
He's very good at explaining all of this in all his book, and he's got a very good lecture
where he debunks Pinker.
Not the poverty part of Pinker's theories,
but Pinker also says that we now all live in peace.
There are almost no wars.
And Hopper points out, yes, but it's peace under gun threat.
He leaves out the fact that we're all being stolen from at all times.
So I highly recommend that.
Absolutely.
So next up is power to the people.
what was that chapter about
that is about like power to the people
is also a leftist slogan
that should actually be more
like if we all adopt
bitcoin we're all better off
like the thing is we believe
that we live, that the economy is some
type of zero sum game
and that someone
has to lose for someone
other person to gain which is
which is very
wrong
if we had sound money we would see that cooperation benefits everyone because everyone would be better
off if prices were falling all the time and they would be and they already are if you're
denominating bitcoin and you zoom out and your time horizon is is is a bit further into the
future then you can clearly see that your house and your car and everything in your life is dropping
in price every year or at least every five years since Bitcoin's number go up technology
comes in cycles.
But it's definitely trending in that direction.
And that's what the free market is deflationary.
This is one of the Jeff Booth points.
And our monetary system ought to reflect that.
And Bitcoin is the first one that actually represents that.
even stable prices would be stealing since that would require you to print more money and you
wouldn't see that prices actually ought to drop everywhere forever yeah i mean i i think this one
is is of course the the parallels to to the price of tomorrow and and just the thesis that everything
should be dropping i think i think once you get that it's it's one of those bells that can't be
unrung you know it's it's you just you see the world completely differently and that's that's
pretty much it so i'm uh i'm very much uh all for uh aiming for that to to continue so all right
next one is slowly then all at once uh i think i can guess what this one was all about i actually
i remember all of these but you know i'm asking you to explain that yeah was it parker lewis that
uh popularized that term i term i think gradually then suddenly is i think the the way he puts it
but slowly than all at once is another way to say that.
Yes, exactly.
Heinz Ketchup thing.
Yeah.
Look at, you know, Time Chain Calendar or Clark Moody
or any of these sites where you can see the Bitcoin blockchain
and what's going on or the time chain.
You can see that more than,
or almost 97% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist
have already been mined.
So the thesis is that everyone underestimates
the upcoming sat squeeze.
No one, since humanity is so bad at understanding exponentials, everyone underestimates how rare these things really are and how rare they will be into the future.
We actually started to cover that a little bit in the previous episode on laws and effects, this sort of glossary of this and that, when it came up with basically the Metcalfe's law and how networks grow.
And this ties into the power law idea.
So let's actually take a second on this. And this is basically why I think it's wrong. And I think why you think it's wrong and etc, etc. The thing is, the growth by power law appears to be mimicking the growth of networks, right? The growth of any kind of essentially biological network follows one of these so called power laws. It's just a function. It's nothing unique to Bitcoin. But anyway,
There's a great Veritasium video about that, by the way. It was pretty recent. So if you want to know about the power law.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And well, so the thing it just the power law ignores, it's entirely observational. It doesn't take into account anything about the properties of Bitcoin at all. It's literally just looking at charts, right? And so the thing that that gets wrong is the sat squeeze part. And I mean, we might be here in the very end of 2025 thinking, hey, we haven't had a blow off top this cycle, blah, blah, blah.
and and i mean it it doesn't mean that this thing is going to pop off uh like uh on on clockwork
you know what i mean the the four-year cycle i'm pretty i'm pretty thinking that that's not really
real anymore it's it's really just a large coincidence that we had the having every time
and that coincidence that coincides with a new u.s president and blah blah blah uh but i don't
think the four-year cycle is a real thing ultimately but we we keep on just having these
periods of time where where everything stays the same and then suddenly there's the blow-off top
you know what i mean and uh our god candle is waiting our omega candle is waiting you know
yes as our friend and guitarist samson likes to say omega is coming so uh the the power law
is probably wrong, but wrong directionally,
in the opposite direction of how people think it is wrong,
because they think the price movements will be smaller
than what the Prower law predicts,
but they might actually be way bigger.
I certainly think it will be, eventually.
We'll see how long.
Again, slowly than all at once,
we don't know when suddenly will happen.
No, and this is also foreshadowing a later chapter, like the always up point and the one shot principle, because the inevitable conclusion is at the top of one of these cycles, we go into hyperbiconization.
like it doesn't stop like there is a final cycle where the ngu doesn't stop it ngu number go up
morphs into number go absolutely bonkers and all fiat dies uh so ngab and and i'm looking forward
to that a lot absolutely i am as well the next one is violence and silence so what was that about
Yes, this chapter was about politics, like on both sides of the political aisle, wanting to silence one another more and more.
And also how these CBDC-like tendencies come creeping in when banks ask you what you need your money for.
And it's always, you know, disguised with a help the children sticker.
and there's more and more of that
and in parallel we develop more and more freedom technologies
such as Noster meanwhile
but the latest one I've seen now is
if we tie this to current events
is the 16 year age limit
or you need to be 16 years to use social media in Australia
and you have this slimy Australian politician
saying this on social media,
which is sort of like a toast to your man on alcohol
or doing a line of coke to celebrate your war on drugs Except he doing it publicly so everyone can see the hypocrisy It not about saving the fucking children
It's about them gaining more and more control
and this financial surveillance everywhere
where all your transactions are tracked.
I mean, every time you use a debit or credit card,
you are being watched by the bank.
So Bitcoin is the...
This is, it's all, like, a lot of this book is about these two, these dichotomies, like
poverty and prosperity, fiction and reality, cooperation and coercion.
It's about dualities, and all of them are basically the which way Western man meme, where
one of the roads leads to a dystopian dark castle, and the other one leads to flowers
and rainbows and stuff.
So, and this chapter is about that, too.
We can either go the CBDC route and use more and more fiat and get more and more surveyed, or we can go the other way.
Yeah, and well, I think the Australia example is quite in the news right now, of course.
And the EU is looking like their watered down chat control is basically that they would put age verification on all social media and supposedly even also on these chat apps as well.
And the age verification isn't actually the issue from as I see it.
It's that you have to put your ID to all of your social media accounts, basically.
So it gets rid of real anonymity, because even if you are anonymous to the world,
someone in the back office there somewhere can say,
oh, hey, this NIMH is actually this and that person sometime, right?
Even if they say they're not storing it, I don't believe that for a second.
No, it's super dangerous.
you're like the the people you want to be the reason you would want to be anonymous in the first
place are these institutions like those are the ones that you don't want to know who you are because
like it this will kill whistleblowing for instance like if there's if there's a higher risk that you
will be financially punished for saying this or that then that thing will happen you will change
your behavior it's it's terrorism literally like you're scaring people into behaviors that they
would otherwise not have adopted uh it's and it's super dangerous so and the only way out is
all the freedom tools and just stop caring what they what they tell you yes absolutely a funny
side to this though is when twitter uh basically started to release the locations of accounts and
this might be slightly controversial here, but I actually liked them doing that because the thing
was, it was supposed to reveal all of these accounts that are pretending to be American or
whatever, but they're actually from India, Nigeria, something like this. So there is a point to
transparency, but the thing is, there's a limit to it as well. Like there's, I think there's
absolutely nothing wrong with the social media platform saying, here is where this person is
coming from. And country is a big thing as well. There were some people who were very much up in
arms about that revealing the location of someone could put them at risk and all this.
It's a trade-off, but I think that was actually a good move because it reveals all of the people
that are trying to scam everyone else, right? No, and first and foremost, it was the decision
of that company in this case x and this is the key point uh as long as it's done voluntarily i mean
not your not your social media platform not your rules that's how it should work not your keys not
your coins not your property not your free speech laws like you uh whoever owns the platform
it can and should dictate the rules on that platform and if you let the free market do its
thing, then there will be a market, there will be demand for a social media platform that does not
dox your identity or location and lets you say whatever the F you want. So, yeah.
All good. So the next one is mainstream mediocrity. What was that about?
Yeah, this is another chapter bashing left-wing ideologies. It's about how you can't,
It sort of plays into the poverty and prosperity thing.
Yeah, like the mainstream, the middle of the bell curve people,
the ones that AI will replace,
that's the most dangerous thing.
Because if you give in to all these conformist tendencies
of left-wing politics,
what you end up with is everyone being mediocre everywhere.
and
what you want in society
is excellence
and you want remarkable
people to be able to change
the world because they are the ones that do
they are the ones in this famous
Steve Jobs speech
and if you put a dampener
on that you never get anywhere
so
another chapter about how
regarded
left-heartedness is
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, for all the people who are mad about Elon, like there are some tweets going around that he's going to be the primary shareholder of, I think it's $3 trillion companies here shortly.
Maybe that's, oh, maybe it's that XAI is also getting the trillion dollar valuation here shortly, something like that.
So it's Tesla, SpaceX and XAI separately, which, yeah, it's and people are up in arms about that, that there shouldn't be trillionaires.
You know what I mean? And it's well, first of all, he's only a trillionaire because of the inflation.
Like he would have been a billionaire 20 years ago. He would have been a millionaire only 100 years ago.
You know what I mean? But the the but then the other thing to it is that he's providing immense value to the world.
And so what of it? Like, it's not like it's not like him having the shares in that company makes what that company does less valuable to the world. Right.
No, and he has the monetary power to resist political interventionism.
And that's a good thing for the world.
Sure, he has made most of his money because of the Cantillon effect and because of artificial interventionisms in the markets, such as electric car subsidies, for instance.
Elon made a ton of money out of that.
But I find him as a good litmus test.
People's reaction to Elon is always reverse of what they should have been.
Whenever Elon does something bad, everyone cheers for him, like the electric cars thing.
And whenever he does something good, the people are upset with him, like the doge thing.
But right now, what he's doing with X, it's just great.
Because you know what the difference between the EU and X really is?
x is voluntary the eu is not and people seem to forget that uh yeah i'd much prefer a trillionaire
to take care of things than any politician because at least the trillionaire has something to show for
himself uh the politician does not all they did was win a popularity contest and if we're talking
eu bureaucrats they didn't even do that very well put all right the next one is protection from what
what was that about knut yeah this is also about uh how like politicians always wrap things in
that you need to be protected from this and that and you need social security
banks need to be protected from bailouts there are so many problems in society that stem from this
and stem from uh the the urge for there to be a free lunch and the urge for everything to be
safe and
what comes to mind is that
meme of the
zoo tiger who's bleak
and grey and gets his three
free meals a day and is
totally depressed and then you have the
roaring lion on the savannah
that thrives
despite him not being
fed by anyone but having to take care
of his own life completely
I don't think any
human being
can be happy in a total dependency situation.
Of course, there are differences between people
and some people crave leadership more than others.
And there's nothing wrong with leadership or hierarchies
as long as they're voluntary and consensual.
But the extent to which governments suppress people
who would really want to be free
rather than run in their little rat races,
it's just enormous.
And I think we'd all be better off if we all stopped caring so much about what they think about us and took matters into our own hands more.
Yep, absolutely.
Well, and I think the whole thing there is that it's, again, these systems that have good intentions, but just completely have the opposite effect.
Like if people needed to save for their own retirement instead of relying on the government, they would do so, right?
And yeah, taking out the guardrails on the economy might have resulted in some boom and busts actually happening, but that clears out all of the bad behavior and everything would come to eventually to a shelling point of reasonableness.
The booming and busting is made worse by the Keynesian economics, not better.
So it's, yeah, all good.
and it's all predictable if you know your first principles like it's all predictable right okay
the next one is the the one-shot principle and and the always up point but the the one-shot
principle is the i think the thrust of this one here yes this is the most famous quote from this
book absolute mathematical scarcity in a sufficiently distributed decentralized system
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.
I think I got it now.
I had a hard time memorizing it for a while,
but it's by far the most famous quote from the book.
And it sort of summarizes
why shit coins are shit and why Bitcoin only.
Either this works or it doesn't.
Either we have a finite number on the internet
that we can all agree is money or we don't.
Yeah, and it also highlights the point of that
we really do only get one try, right?
Like if we do get Bitcoin into a place
where it no longer functions as money,
that's the end.
We lost this one.
And that's why all of the kind of other current things,
not to make this too into the weeds of what's going on
on Twitter and in Bitcoin politics and all this,
But it's very, very much a difficult thing to see lots of kind of shitcoinery behavior coming onto Bitcoin and financial institutions kind of moving their way in there.
The whole idea of anti-fragility, I think, is misunderstood in the Bitcoin community.
The anti-fragility isn't in that the system exists and it's always going to be resilient to everything.
it's that the individuals that are a part of the network have to be vigilant to threats to the
network to be able to deal with them and there are large proportions of the the network users that
that seem to think that that is not the case or that for example that just because something is
the way it is now that we just have to live with it right like it's not the case that we that every
type of Bitcoin transaction that is currently valid must be valid going into the future,
right? The network can make a decision to say that this type of thing is being abused,
and we should not let that happen anymore. That is valid. And it might be necessary in order to
save the network. And I mean, in taking some things to the natural conclusion, right? I think
it could be entirely possible that Bitcoin will be forced to do some kind of fork again
in order to save it. And it might even be the case that the real Bitcoin, the good Bitcoin,
ends up being the smaller part of that fork for some period of time especially of all the money is in the other one But that one will die if it the one that full of shit coins and gets financially manipulated by everything And the other one could keep on
chugging along. That's also a how Bitcoin dies scenario. I hate to be a downer, but it's also
like that's what the one shot principle says to me is that there's a lot of optimism there,
but there's also this kernel of, yeah, if we screw this up, that's it.
We're done. No more chances.
But that's also why I don't think we can screw it up.
Because I think most of the big money that is in Bitcoin now
is totally aware of this.
Because you wouldn't invest that enormous amount in it
if you weren't at least aware of some of the threats
and thought its principles stayed what they are.
And of course you care about it.
And the thing is, it's a very robust system.
And just as you say, it's robust because of us, not only the code.
It's robust because of the Bitcoiners and what we choose to do with it.
Theoretically, it can only change for the better
since you need a super majority to change it at all.
And I don't believe that a fork would ever...
Because of this, I don't think that the sound Bitcoin
would ever be on a minority fork.
I'm very optimistic that we will fix it eventually,
even if we're forced to go along with a fork
that we don't 100% agree with
because we would rather see something else.
I can only speak for myself, but I think you agree with me with this, that I'm not one to rage quit.
I still think that things are fixable, even if they don't get fixed at the exact right moment where we want them to be fixed.
Sometimes you might have to wait a little longer and for things to get a little shittier before, you know, the things are darkest just before the dawn type of thing.
and I think Bitcoin survives all the attacks.
I wouldn't be bullish on Bitcoin if I didn't.
So, yeah, I'm not too worried.
Yeah, good summary.
I don't have a ton to add to that other than I like your optimism
and I am at least trying to be less pessimistic generally.
Yeah, hope is a rational choice as we wrote in the additional chapter to Praxeology.
There we are.
Very good.
Well, and we'll get there eventually here.
So the last canonical chapter of the book is the secular individual.
What is that about, Knut?
Yeah, it's basically about the separation of money and state and what that actually means.
It's akin to the separation of church and state back in the day, but on a much, much bigger scale.
And this chapter goes into how that actually means separating the individual from state.
Like if you separate money from state, you basically separate the state.
Like you remove the appendix that wasn't necessary in the first place and you give power back to the people.
Like for real.
Not like the fantasy of giving power to the people through a democracy, but you actually give them power through having a type of money that goes up in value over time and therefore can buy you more and more stuff.
It's pretty simple.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think this was a very good chapter kind of contrasting the, well, I assume this was intentional, that the secular individual is alluding to the sovereign individual.
There's something to this, right? That the idea of secularity is something that's pushed in the mainstream. Again, one of these dichotomies, it's pushed, but if they didn't push it, you would probably land on it, right?
And I think we had some discussion about the role of religion in the world.
You know what I mean?
I think that's all very...
It's something that I know you've moderated on a little bit.
It's something that I've kind of gone back and forth about a little bit.
But yeah, very good chapter.
Interesting one.
And a very good Academy episode.
So go back two episodes and watch that if you want.
Because we had a good discussion there.
And also, yeah, The Sovereign Individual had an effect on this book because I read The Sovereign Individual around this time.
And I also read Human Action for the first time around this time, somewhere in between Sovereignty and this book.
And I remember a podcast with Gigi where he had this green costume on.
And in his background, there was The Human Action and The Sovereign Individual as the two books he recommended to everyone in the world at the time.
and I had just read them
and I can totally agree
that those two are some of the
two of the best books I've ever read
it was a long time ago now
I read The Sovereign Individual
but I should reread it
I thought it was excellent
Very good, great recommendation
and then finally we wrapped up
with laws and effects
and the reason I don't really call this
like a canonical chapter exactly
is that it's not really
it's not an essay at all
It's just a collection of glossary terms, essentially.
But there's some interesting nuggets in there.
And this is, of course, the previous episode.
So we just recorded this.
Yeah, what was this about, Knut?
Yes, my question is, are we going to make this into an actual glossary of concepts needed to understand Bitcoin?
I mean, there's a lot of good stuff in there.
I think it's quite a simple idea and just explain, you know, Cantillon effect and stock to flow and all of these other Metcalf's law and all of these other things that have some role in your understanding of Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Well, I think we pointed to the Bitcoin handbook as being a close one here.
field manual is often a term for this type of book, like a short thing that just describes
concepts and doesn't go too deep.
No, exactly.
A field manual for Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Anil's book is great.
It basically is that.
So, yeah.
But maybe there'll be more of that in the future.
Who knows?
Always good to have more options.
Yes.
with that do you have any final words about independence reimagined
no i mean uh go subscribe to us on fountain.fm if you want and you can get the um
shows and academy episodes one day early and some other perks um also like if you want to
support this project there's our geyser fund geyser.fund slash project slash infinity
and yeah
we'll see you at the conferences and everything
we bring books as
often as we can
usually hard covers because we think
they're more beautiful
I enjoyed writing this book, I've enjoyed
writing all of the books I've written
and especially
Clown World since we wrote it together
it was a very very good experience
not as lonely as writing the other ones
for sure but
we'll do more stuff
like this in the future then the next thing coming is of course uh bitcoin everything divided by 21
million which is by far my most famous book uh the book was written after the meme uh but uh
it's and it's got its ups and downs but it's definitely a book that it will be very fun to
dissect because it goes a bit deeper than these first two very good yes absolutely looking forward
to that. So we're going to take a couple of months
actually just because there's some travel and the Christmas holiday time
before we kick that off again. But we're
aiming for February of 2026 to get that started.
And we should be able to cover both everything divided by 21 million and
the inverse of clown world in the calendar year 2026.
That's if we don't have to split the episodes up too much because
the chapters get a lot longer.
Yeah, I think we have to split
the chapters in Clown World.
And yeah, I'm looking forward to that one
a lot too. But 26
will be an interesting year for us, for sure.
We have a lot of things
coming down the line.
So like and follow and subscribe
and brush your damn teeth.
Please. Perfect.
And before we go, we'll just mention
our lovely sponsors
here that we are very happy
to have helped support us along this journey with the Bitcoin Infinity Academy. First up
is the Plan B Network. The best way you can get involved with them is to go to planb.network or
planb.academy and go join one of their two courses. The business school and the development
school are both starting up in February and these are going to be excellent. You can use code
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choice for you. And you can earn the opportunity to go to the prestigious summer school in Lugano.
There's only 21 places, I do believe. Knut?
Oh, maybe more this summer, actually. I think they're increasing it to 42, the
answer to life universe and everything. So because they are mashing these two courses together. So I
think there will be more students this summer and that is great i will be in logano a whole bunch of
times next year i have all sorts of things planned there and i'm looking forward to seeing you all
there i love logano and i love the plan b network the next next thing on the agenda there is of
course the plan b forum in san salvador at the end of january so looking forward to that too
and Bitcoin
El Inverso del Mundo Payaso
will be out
to that and I hope I can get some copies
to San Salvador
the Spanish translation of the Inverse of Clown World
will be published
very soon
potentially when this episode
is out actually
and then of course we also have
Bitbox so check out the Bitbox
02 Nova edition
go to bitbox.swiss
slash infinity for all the details
and to get a discount.
Bitcoin-only firmware, of course.
It's the easiest to use hardware wallet
that I've come across in terms of the interface.
And it's fantastic to give to your friends and family
to get them involved.
And so you still have a chance to get their Christmas bundle.
I believe I did this last year.
I don't have any new friends
to give hardware wallets to this year,
but I gave them to the friends
who were Bitcoin curious last year.
So give that a try.
and spread Bitcoin self-custody to more people.
The more coins we get into self-custody,
the less the exchanges can do shady things to them.
So do that.
Go to bitbox.swiss slash infinity.
Yeah, and make sure you get the Bitcoin-only firmware.
That's the one we're endorsing.
We don't endorse anything but that.
Of course not.
Yes, so with that,
I thank you very much for doing this series with me, Luke.
It's been an absolute pleasure,
and I'm looking forward a lot to doing the next one with you in February.
So till then, Merry goddamn Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
Happy mid-winter blot thing, whatever.
Yeah, mid-winter blot.
But yeah, definitely pour out a horn of mead to Odin would be my recommendation.
That's the only way to keep the wild hunt away in the shortest night of the year.
Yes, and of course, have a drink to Särimnir, that pig that they slaughter and resurrect every evening.
Yeah.
Maybe we'll do a Norse mythology podcast, Knut.
Ja, det är en skitbra idé.
This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Academy
and this has been a very silly ending to the course.
I love it.
Yes.
Thank you very much for listening.
Brush your teeth, spadoinkl, and out.
Excelsior.
Thank you.