Colin and I are sending a letter to every congressional representative and every senator with this report and a cover letter.
And the cover letter is basically like, look, one in seven Americans owns this stuff.
And that's the headline.
One in seven Americans hold this stuff.
They're in every district.
They're in every congressional district.
They are in every party.
They are part of every political ideology, like kind of like we're everywhere.
We are everywhere and we are many in number.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow clubs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is eight six zero nine one five and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up.
And today that guest is Troy Cross.
Troy is a professor of philosophy at Reed College and a very vocal, fud busting Bitcoin.
He recently published a report on Bitcoin adoption in the United States, which has some really interesting findings.
And we dig into these in our conversation.
We also get into Bitcoin as a political talking point and why it is in the best interest of both progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans and everyone else in between to support Bitcoin.
More broadly, we talk about the shifting public perception of Bitcoin and of Bitcoiners.
And Troy helps to separate some of the fact from the fiction there.
I have wanted to talk with Troy for quite a while, so it was great to get him on the show.
And I think you're going to love this episode.
Before we dive into me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast, wherever you're listening or watching and check out my sponsor, Bitbox, in the show notes.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Troy Cross.
I lurked on Bitcoin Twitter for a while, just kind of, you know, not really posting, just lurking around in the shadows, seeing what other people post.
And I think you were probably the first person I saw who really was like attacking the whole Bitcoin burns the planet thing from this, from the angle of an environmentalist.
I think, you know, Margot Pejas was another person who was around the same time, maybe starting to do that too.
But I remember seeing that and just thinking, oh, this, this is great.
Like we're getting them from both sides now.
Like we can have the people who are like, no, we should drill as much, you know, and extract as much oil from the ground as possible.
We've also got folks who are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum who are making an argument still for Bitcoin, but from a completely different lens, it's going to appeal to new people.
And I was just thinking like, wow, this is just one of those examples like Bitcoin can appeal to everyone's sensibilities, no matter what they are.
And everything is good for Bitcoin.
It's kind of just beautiful.
Yeah, I, as you say, when I came on the scene with Margot, the narratives that we were peddling were already out there to be fair.
They're already in Lin's work on energy, Lin Alden, and they were already in Nick Carter, Nick Carter's papers on energy.
Nick was doing tremendous work on Bitcoin energy.
I think, I think nobody moved the needle like Nick did.
And, and actually before him, you know, back way, way back in 2013 and 14, whatever,
Hass McCook was thinking about this stuff in pretty much the same way I do now.
I think Hass got to the core of it, that Bitcoin mining is a special consumer of energy, has special properties, and that we haven't yet appreciated how those special properties of Bitcoin dovetail with a revolution in energy towards intermittent sources.
So, yeah, I think, I think, you know, what Margot and I brought was that we were just ideologically in a different place.
We had a lot of recycled arguments that we refined and presented in our own way, but those were already there, you know.
And since we came along, other people have taken up the torch.
I mean, most notably Daniel Batten, Daniel Batten, that guy is sort of super human ability to crank out material.
And I don't know if you've noticed this, but I have been saying less as Daniel has been saying more.
I feel like he's, he's hitting it so hard on the energy front that it takes some of the burden off, actually.
Pushing that end and Daniel was like a green piece activist.
And while our takes are not exactly the same, and I don't always agree with what he says, we are broadly in alignment.
And yeah, it's weird, you know, you, you described coming across my thing as like a new thing for a lot of people that was Daniel once he took up the torch.
Yeah, even dealing with Greenpeace USA, I used to, I used to respond to every single one of their tweets on Twitter and then same, you know, we would ratio them to oblivion.
And eventually, you know, eventually Daniel came along and he was a reliable, a reliable debunker of their stuff.
And, you know, and then Daniel himself has kind of started this organization and kind of handing off because he's not a scientist.
Kind of handing off the scientific work, the modeling work that he's doing on Bitcoin's energy use to other folks.
Margo is, you know, writing a dissertation on Bitcoin's energy use, like in a formal academic setting at Georgia Tech.
Like so much has happened in the last two and a half years, both with me personally, but with the broader narrative.
You know, in that time we haven't talked. Like, so much has changed the, the, the, the state of play with respect to energy use and Bitcoin.
And yet, having said all that, even though we've lived like lifetimes in the last two years in terms of where the narrative has gone.
Most people are still clueless, like absolutely clueless. They don't understand that even why Bitcoin uses energy or that it has value,
or that it uses energy in any different way than other data centers.
You know, they still hear the word mining and they think it's like coal mining or something.
So I have these, I've, I'm at a place now where I'm shocked continually to run into people who are not, they're not where the discourse was, you know, even in 2017.
Like, you can listen to Andreas Santanopoulos and on energy and he's like, like, I just want to send people back, you know, six, seven years to, to see where, where the narrative is at.
But that's, that's where the educational task is. Like there's the, the frontier of discovery where you're trying to figure out cool new stuff that Bitcoin mining can do in the energy world.
And then there's, and I just had a conversation this morning with a geothermalist like on that front, it was like, oh man, this is awesome.
There's still more stuff you don't know about Bitcoin mining that could play into really, really interesting energy development.
But, but the vast majority of the work is actually on the education side. People just need like one pagers, they need like sound bites, they need a paragraph, they need a 20 minute conversation they can understand.
And even people who, you know, are in DC and on the hill and have been in this issue for a long time.
They still don't understand the basics of Bitcoin's energies. So, yeah, the educational need and the sort of frontier of discovery are radically different things.
And I find myself caught, you know, between them as an, as an intellectual, I want to, I want to be where the action is.
I want to be out there on the edge of discovery. But as a member of the, of the state, the polis that's making decisions, I see that the real need is just on the basics and the educational.
They don't need a, they don't need experts in energy. Like honestly, a Reddit thread from 2014 would suit them just fine in terms of what they actually need.
Yeah, it's such an interesting point because I think it's so easy to get into this kind of this bubble of, you know, the Bitcoin echo chamber where it's like, oh, okay, yeah, we've put this to bed, right?
Everybody gets this. Like this is self evident now at this point. But then you take one small step outside of that and it's like, oh, no, this is not self evident at all.
In fact, things that we thought were put to bed a long time ago are very much still what people have in their mind as the only thing they know about Bitcoin.
And that's not just in the energy front, but on the, it's used by criminals, you know, it's, it's, you know, gambling, it's money laundering, it's a Ponzi scheme, whatever.
Like you still see these things constantly. And then it's like, okay, to your point. Yeah, it may be the deep dive.
Like you don't even need to talk to these people about energy because first they don't even know what you're talking about in the first place.
They don't even know what what Bitcoin actually is. They only know the few headlines that they've read that stuck with them for however many years that was first imprinted on them.
And that's what they've been running with. And they haven't really thought about it at all since then until it comes up again.
And they say, well, here's what I know about that. It's what's been, you know, stuck in my brain for however many years.
And it's, it's, it's kind of wild. And I think the political or should I say the fact that Bitcoin has become a little bit more political, this election cycle is bringing that realization to the forefront for a lot more people,
realizing that, okay, now as this becomes a more quote, mainstream talking point, it's very obvious that the mainstream has no idea what they're talking about.
And that kind of presents just well, challenges, but also opportunities, right? Because if somebody doesn't know much about Bitcoin, wow, there's a great opportunity to educate them.
But how you do that, who it comes from, what way it's presented, I think is so key. Because otherwise people just people are ready to shut down if information's coming from someone they perceive as an enemy or as a, you know, the other,
the other team, which is a sad state of affairs, but it's also the reality. So I don't know.
Yeah, I think the mental shortcut for people, and we need these mental shortcuts to live in a world that is too big for any one person to understand.
The mental shortcut for people is do people on my team like it or dislike it. That's the ultimate shortcut.
And they try to figure that out, not by what you're saying, but who you are.
Let me check this person's alliances. Are they shady, questionable? If they are, then I'll dismiss everything they're saying.
And that's a terrible way to approach a new technology, you know, just the worst.
Because you're going to get a simplistic take, whether it's positive or negative, you could potentially be missing out on a basic technology that serves humans well into the future.
It, yeah, it's fun. It's, it's weird, you encounter this again and again and again, and you realize like, there's actually something here bigger than Bitcoin.
It's how we know things, how we approach the world and learn from it. And this, this pattern isn't, isn't just there for, for Bitcoin.
It's there for lots of things in our lives. And we, we can't all go down all the rabbit holes.
There are too many rabbit holes. They're too deep. We have to trust people. And the, the institutions of knowledge used to play this role of telling you what's down the rabbit holes.
So you didn't have to go down all of them. But with the democratization of information flow through the internet, those, we've got a lot of separate rabbit hole explorers coming up and telling us what they've seen.
And a lot of what's, what they've seen is that the institutions are not really reliable, or they're as polarized and poisoned as the rest of us.
They themselves use shortcuts. Like we were seeing the dirty work that probably was always there in the institutions, but it wasn't in our face.
And consequently, and also there've just been big betrayals of trust. Those institutions have lost epistemic currency.
So we're kind of a drift. And given the heated nature of political identity right now, that's like the, that's our substitute for good person, bad person, whatever, religious friend, religious foe,
that, that allows us to like make a worldview in a, in a soup of different competing stories about what the world is.
And so that's where we are, like as a, as a, as a species, as a people. And that's new, like epistemic territory and Bitcoin is like one manifestation of the potential for dysfunctionality in that system.
That, that I've been dealing with, like on the energy front, you know, fighting FUD or whatever, I've been dealing with a dysfunctional epistemic system.
It's not like people are bad or people should know better. I think that's the wrong way to think about it. It's more like we all rely on a, on a system to know the world.
And Bitcoin is a failing of that system for most people. You can see other failings too, like, like nuclear energy, for instance, is a good example of the failure of that, that system to detect the truth.
You know, it's like lags by whatever, 50 years for what it should, should be because the issue got politicized and, and then people substituted heuristics for reasoning.
Oh, nuclear is like nuclear weapons. That's bad. It's going to lead to the end of the world or, or there have been some accidents in nuclear and therefore it's a bad technology.
Like those kinds of arguments that prevented human beings from really an amazing, just an amazing way we could have improved our lives.
It's hard to think about the counterfactual, right? Like how things be different if we just kind of kept building in the 80s and 90s? Where would we be right now? You know, so you have those, that's it.
That's another like manifestation, but there are many, but the big, the big issue is how we know about the world. And I'm, you know, I'm like fighting on this front.
But as you say, it is really hard to change the public discourse as an individual. I think we actually have like all of those people I listed and a bunch more people besides, you know, people who, who helped us out,
like Nick Morley and Sean Connell, like Peter McCormick, you know, the army of podcasters, like the army of people who, who, who descended on the Greenpeace artist to celebrate his work, right?
Like this crowd action at Suzy Ward at Forbes, like the, the, the, this community has actually shifted the narrative somewhat. I think we maybe overestimate how much we've shifted, but it's different from what it was three years ago.
Very different. And like, so we've kind of done it, but it's been an incredible, herculean effort to get it this far. And, and as you, as you say, still people are clueless and still you see stories.
You see stories almost daily, filled with three year old misinformation, as if treating it as if it's fact, the academic literature is still mired in mistakes.
And that's a, that's a system failure. After a while, you're like, you step back and say, hold on, like what, you're just like a soldier out there on the front lines, debunking, and then you step back and say, how did this happen? And why is it continuing?
It must it be this way? Is it like this for other things? Am I the kind of person who for other issues is equally uninformed yet confident, confidently wrong?
Do I have those blind spots myself? And, and do do others? You know, you, I'm a philosopher. So I, I back up to those kinds of questions.
And that's actually a perfect segue, because I would like, I think a lot of folks know you, but on the off chance that they don't, can you just tell us who are you? How did you get here today?
And, and, you know, you mentioned epistemics. And this is something that perhaps it's a word that some folks may not be familiar with. So perhaps we can, we can weave that in because, you know, the idea of how do we know things is quite a profound question.
I think one you spend a lot of time thinking about.
Yeah, well, I'll keep this brief.
Professionally, I'm an academic philosopher. I'm right now in my office at Reed College. This is my chalkboard behind me. This is my extended brain, where I do my thinking.
And I guess my areas of specialty within philosophy are metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics is the study of reality or fundamental reality.
And, and epistemology is the study of knowledge. What is knowledge? And how much knowledge do we have? And what is rationality? What is right thinking?
That's my kind of professional identity, I guess, in terms of how I came to be in this weird role that I'm in, or the multiple roles I'm in.
I was teaching at a pretty swanky place in 2007, that 2000 to 2007 kind of 2008 era. And a lot of my students were going into banking.
My own background was I grew up in the Midwest and I grew up poor, very poor.
So I'd never heard of like, actually the world of elite education or the world of finance. Those were both completely off my radar.
I didn't know what Wall Street was, and then what the stock market was.
It wasn't part of my life and it wasn't part of anybody, any life that I knew about.
But here I was teaching at this fancy place and all my students were going into finance.
Regardless of what they came in as, like they could come in as an artist or a human rights activist or, you know, a musician, it didn't matter.
I left many of them headed to the big banks or consulting firms in New York.
And that was kind of weird. And so I would talk to them like, why are you all like, you could do anything with your life, you're brilliant and you already have money.
Why are you going to Wall Street? And they're like, well, everybody does it, you know, it's like, it's just what you do.
It's like the next gold star. And some students said to me, this was the quote I can't forget.
There's only two ways to get rich in the world. One of them is to build something, you know, like Bill Gates, like make some software that everybody uses and pays you for it.
And the other way is to go to Wall Street.
And, you know, if you don't, if you're not up for like starting your own multi billion dollar company, then you got to go to Wall Street.
It's the only way to get like get rich. And it just, it just struck me that like that can't be fair. Like that can't be right.
That does, I mean, maybe that's right, but that seems really weird that you would be able to generate so much wealth without building anything.
And so that's that started me into my kind of research into the money world. What is money? Where does it come from?
And I got interested in sound money back then because I saw that banks had certain advantages that people don't have.
We have a monopoly in money and those closest to the printer benefit. And I realized my students were just getting close to the printer, essentially.
Of course, I shouldn't say those banks and stuff add no value. They do allocate and capital is an important part of how the system works.
But as a percentage of the economy and as a way to get wealthy, it struck me that something else must be going on.
I think something else is going on. I think they deal themselves various advantages and that became clear in the collapse in 2008.
Yeah, at that point, I had already used E-gold, I think, by that point. Yeah.
And I had tried peer to peer lending. I was like, why don't we just cut out the banks? Why don't we just do this ourselves?
We can do it without them. We just need a platform to connect us, like borrower and lender, and then we can disintermediate the banking industry.
And it was then that I realized I don't have access to the discount window at the Fed. I don't have a Fed master account, all that stuff.
I kind of figured that out and figure out the limitations of my own.
I was looking to lend small amounts of money, but lever up my small amounts of money because I had a good credit score.
I had to lend money to people's home improvement projects or whatever. Those peer to peer lending projects were also cracked down on by the state.
E-gold was seized. So I was completely ready for the Bitcoin message when it dropped, or I should say when I found it, which was 2011.
In 2011, I read an article about Bitcoin my girlfriend gave to me, and I was like, oh, this is like E-gold, except they can't seize it.
And it also promises like peer to peer lending to disintermediate this banking industry, disrupt the monopoly and money and eliminate the cantilean effect.
That's an amazing project that somebody would figure out a way to do this without a centralized third party through open source software and a community of geeks who are building it out because they share the vision
and also because they could spin up value out of nothing.
So yeah, I caught, I mean, there's nothing unique in this story except that I saw the need for it before it existed.
So I never had these questions about like, why is it valuable? Those questions never occurred to me.
The questions that did occur to me were like, how could it be attacked? And I spent a lot of those that early time thinking about whether it would survive.
And I have to say I was pretty pessimistic. I was not optimistic. I would be absolutely shocked that it lasted.
I worked out various attack scenarios on Bitcoin. I thought it would be supremely easy for the traditional finance and government world to attack Bitcoin in those early days.
One of the exercises I did was just comparing like the bonuses from senior people at Goldman Sachs to the cost of a 51% attack.
Like, how long could you keep Bitcoin, like how long could you mine empty blocks if you devoted one senior VP bonus at Goldman to this task?
And, you know, I don't remember what it was, but it was like a significant amount of time that you could 51% attack Bitcoin with just one bonus.
And I was like, something is incongruous here. You're telling me this industry that is super powerful, the most powerful industry in the world, and governments, which also have, you know, controlled violence.
And they're also the most, yeah, most powerful ruthless force on the planet. We're going to disintermediate all that with code.
I mean, cool idea, cool idea, bro. But, you know, there is an attack vector that only requires money and the asymmetry between the money that is incentivized by mining here and then the amount of money they have is insane.
And it would be incredibly irrational of them to let themselves get disintermediated in full plain view and not attack it. Like, why wouldn't they just attack it?
So I was convinced that would happen. I'm still amazed that it didn't happen.
Well, do you think that part of that is, because I agree, and I think as people go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it's like there's the first part of, okay, you get it. You get like, wow, this is, once you come to the realization like this is an incredible idea.
Like, wow, I cannot believe this exists. This is going to change everything. But then shortly after that, you say, oh, but wait, this is too good of an idea. They're never, you know, they quote, are never going to let this happen.
They will never let it happen.
But do you think it's the fact that it was kind of that sly, roundabout way that Hayek talks about where it was just kind of this little project, just this magic internet money, nerds playing with it.
And maybe they just kind of underestimated it. Like, the banker, you know, many of these bankers who are now offering these Bitcoin ETFs to their clients, you know, now they are actually benefiting from it.
They're probably in their best interest that they didn't try to stop stomp it out. But I don't think they were thinking about that at the time. They were probably just thinking, I don't care, this is some cute little thing.
If it gets too big, then we'll deal with it. I'm sure maybe the governments were thinking that too. I don't know. Like, because it is shocking that we actually are here right now.
Yeah. I think about bike racing. I used to race bikes. And you have somebody break away from the group. And the group generally just lets like a solo rider go because they're not really a threat.
They're so much slower in the wind than the big group that's rotating. And you can break away dramatically as an individual. You can just like stand up and crank out 1200 watts and jump ahead of the field.
Or you can kind of just sneak off the front, you know, in full view of everybody, but just not looking strong. And they'll let you go. And then sometimes those brakes stick.
And cycling is full of like people doing that. And then people bridging up to them and then them getting pulled back. And a lot of the game is about not being perceived as a threat, you know, by the group.
If you're perceived as a threat of the group at the early stages, you're super vulnerable and they'll just catch you. And Bitcoin just snuck off the front of the peloton.
And they just were laughing. They were still laughing at us. Oh, what is this curiosity? That's hilarious. Magic Internet money, you know. We were at the time, I think, trying to be taken more seriously.
But the reality is, is good that we weren't, you know, it's weird. You try to do stuff on behalf of Bitcoin because you like the movement. You never know whether what you're doing is actually going to help it or going to hurt it.
You know, like I'm getting on the energy stuff. It's like, okay, what's the end game? Mining is going to be fine, regardless of how much they try to ban it. They really can't impact mining at all by trying to ban it.
So if you're, you know, from the perspective of a mining company, you know, Marathon or Riot or CleanSpark, it matters a lot whether their operations get shut down or whether they get a 30% tax imposed on them or whatever.
These fights matter. From the perspective of the Bitcoin network, 40% of the hash rate is in the US. The actual threat to Bitcoin is getting more than 50% of the hash rate in the US and well known by the government.
Like, you know, registered 50% plus of hash rate. So the people trying to ban Bitcoin and mining in the US or make it impossible, they don't realize it, but they're helping Bitcoin.
They're pushing it farther from the only, you know, the more legitimate threat. The people trying to help Bitcoin mining in the US.
And I'll include Trump for saying, you know, he wants all the Bitcoin remaining Bitcoin to be mined in the US, all the remaining Bitcoin.
That's an attack on Bitcoin, sir. That is not helping Bitcoin. You know, it's the people who are trying to help it, maybe hurting it, the people who are trying to hurt it, maybe helping it in those early days.
And Satoshi was very smart about this, right? Satoshi said that they shouldn't fund WikiLeaks in the early days for exactly this reason, because it would draw the wrong kind of attention.
And they would get taken more seriously if they're funding actual, you know, actual cyberpunk dissemination of information that the government doesn't want to disseminate.
So Satoshi was so smart and on top of this. But yeah, ultimately we made it through that period in the sly roundabout way. And a lot of that came at our own expense socially.
Like we're still dealing with like a lot of the mockery and FUD that actually benefited us, without which we might have been squashed.
I think, you know, you got to look at people now, they're like, the attack vectors are different. They're not going to try to 51% attack it.
You know, they're going to try to like make it a part of the system and co-opt it is the closest you can come to it, to a successful attack.
Maybe down the line, fork the chain into, you know, OFAC compliant, non OFAC compliant, like those are the kind of attack vectors that like bring it in.
But at that time, the attack factor could have been more straight ahead stomp on it, just like stay ahead of the hash rate and keep screwing with it.
There were technical things that could have been done. And they weren't.
So we're in a different era now. And we got here through, you know, through, we got here through losing the public discourse, which is just really cool.
And maybe, you know, it's comfort now, like, like this current, you know, the current election cycle, I mean, who knows what will happen.
But in some ways, like Bitcoin, Bitcoin's going to be fine. And in some ways, the person who is touting themselves as the friend of Bitcoin, you know, in the short, in the short term, that's going to pump like if Trump gets elected,
the number is going to go up. Because he's very, he's explicitly called himself the crypto president, and he spoke at the conference and everything.
In the long run, Bitcoin may be more international, it may be more decentralized, it may be more resistance money for longer.
If the US government is less friendly to it, more suspicious of it, you know what I mean? So it's an ongoing thing where it's, we have to think, we have to think long term and not just short term about Bitcoin's trajectory to know,
like, how to advance its ultimate, its ultimate mission.
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So thank you.
Well, and let me ask you, what do you think the ultimate mission of Bitcoin is? I'm gonna have philosopher myself. Yeah. Yeah. What is that? What does that look like?
I mean, obviously, that's made up by us. Protocol itself is just code. It doesn't have a T los. It doesn't have a mission. It doesn't have an essence. It's whatever we want it to be. You know, it's like, it's just like a natural. It's like a force of nature, part of nature.
But I have things I want out of Bitcoin that are like what I see as its core mission. And I will consider Bitcoin to be a success if it does those things and I will consider it to be a failure if it doesn't do those things.
And I mean, I think it's permissionless censorship resistant money and also a store of value. I think if we if it fails to store value because we raise the cap above 21 million, that's a failure of Bitcoin on one of its core dimensions that I consider to be valuable.
But even more so, if it's if it's a gated system of value transfer where you own Bitcoin, but you actually own IOUs from Coinbase or BlackRock. And that's the only way that Bitcoin is really owned.
And, and payments all go between really accounts at at those institutions, just swapping IOUs, where the underlying layer is is only used by large institutions, which are themselves fully regulated.
I think, you know, even even in that case where if number goes up, and the 21 million cap remains, but that's that's the utility of the network. I think that's a failure of Bitcoin's potential.
And that's I would agree with that wholeheartedly. One thing I want to push back on you on a little bit, as you said, if you know if Trump gets elected, you know, number will go up.
I would say I'm not so sure which election results would, let's say pump our Bitcoin bags more. Because ultimately, like one of the ways I, I think many others like to simplify Bitcoin, you know, it's, it's a hedge against inflation, right.
But that that gets kind of twisted because people look at short term price movements of Bitcoin and short term price movements, which are, you know, ultimately expressions of underlying monetary debasement, right.
So maybe a different way of saying is it's a, it's a measure of monetary debasement, like it's a ruler that is held up, not just the United States, but the entire world.
And whatever its fiat price is an expression of how much that, you know, it's a how much is the money getting debased, the fiat getting debased, and at the same time, how much is the network growing.
Because obviously, you know, it's not existing in a vacuum where there's a limited number of users, the number is and should always go up.
But I think if there's, I mean, you and you've probably, probably heard or seen me say this ad nauseam, but the, you know, there is no red, there is no blue, there is the state and there is you.
You can also substitute the Fed for the state or whatever your central bank is.
But I think that both Trump and Kamala would print a lot of money.
Like I think that that printing money seems to be have pretty much bipartisan support.
And even if Kamala comes in with a very anti crypto stance, I don't see that really hurting Bitcoin that much in the long run, because everything that I've seen in terms of proposals are incredibly inflationary from a monetary perspective.
There's, you know, it's going to be more deficit spending. So I think that Trump would certainly has so far come out and made himself, you know, the of the two candidates now officially left since RFK has put his, you know, stood behind Trump.
He's obviously the more pro Bitcoin, but let's say pro crypto one pro crypto would probably be more accurate, given everything he said, he's not explicitly pro Bitcoin.
But I don't know. I mean, do you see that much of a material difference in the long run in, okay, so there's the NGU side, right, which yay number go up is great, and that certainly is a great meme and it brings in a lot of people.
But there's also the FGU side, right, the freedom go up Bitcoin as resistance money.
And I guess in order to be resistance money, you know, it has to have something to resist. And if the, as you said, there's a lot of, let's say, industry capture by the state because the state says with open arms, yes, come and just register all your minors and you know, we recommend that you keep Bitcoin in your ETF because it's
you know, fully backed and insured, maybe that's more of a long term risk to Bitcoin than somebody who has just continues to toe that same line of being, you know, an Elizabeth Warren follower and being very anti Bitcoin.
I don't know. I don't know. I guess there's the short term and there's the long term, right, but maybe that's a maybe that's a good segue a little bit.
I don't know. Did you watch the debate last night? I couldn't take it. I drank. I drank a lot of Miller lights during it to make it palatable. You know, shockingly, Bitcoin did not come up.
I was relieved to hear that. Yeah, I was relieved to hear that because it's like I'm okay with it not being part of that conversation. Yes.
How are you looking at the like this this election because you're you are. Is it fair to say you would classify yourself as a quote progressive? Is that a fair I don't want to put words in your mouth or I don't anymore.
No, okay, I think I would have said that, you know, five years ago.
Sure.
But I and I don't really think I've changed.
Yeah, politically, I think again, people go with heuristics to identify people politically. And I don't feel like those heuristics apply to me.
So I, yeah, I have voted mostly Democrat. I have voted for the Green Party once I voted for Ralph Nader. That was the vote I felt sort of best about at the time.
I at one point called myself a Green Libertarian.
I like I think markets work. I like markets. I've always liked markets.
The, the limitation of markets is sometimes they, they, they don't work. They fail. And externalities are an obvious case of that.
And if you, if you don't have the right legal structure, you can profit, but cause others harm without paying the price for that harm.
And so, and, and tort law doesn't always work to solve that. And so you need a government, I think, to internalize negative externalities so that the market market can function properly.
That's my starting point is like government as in is allowing markets to do what they do, which is kind of discover value and promote all parties to a voluntary trade.
I differ with, you know, hardcore libertarians in that I think that there's a lot of intervention required in order for markets to function the way they should.
And I'm aware also that that government interference with markets creates its own set of problems.
But yeah, anyway, you can see that that doesn't exactly fit the progressive definition, but it has had me aligned with Democrats for much of my voting life.
So yeah, anyway, I resist the characterization of progressive and, yeah, I think that well, a lot of things have become attached to that label recently that I don't embrace at all.
You know, but anyway, yeah, but go ahead. Sorry.
No, I appreciate I was I was hoping you would reject the characterization. I was I was just laying a slight a slight trap for you, which you definitely avoided.
But no, I asked because I find the politicization of Bitcoin to be just kind of funny almost because when I look at Bitcoin, I see many aspects of it that can be construed as conservative, right?
I see many that can be taken as progressive. And this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where in my mind, no matter what side of this, you know, in our in the USA, this it's a duopoly whatever side whatever team you're playing for, whatever your personal beliefs are,
you should be able to look at Bitcoin and see a mirror, right, and see those reflected back at you. It's progressive in the sense that we're talking about dismantling existing power structures about breaking down established norms that it is fundamentally what Bitcoin is a departure from that.
On the conservative side, we're talking about a return to sound money, a return to something that is in many ways traditional.
And so when people try to say that, oh, you know, if you're a quote, progressive, and and you, you know, like Bitcoin, well, that's just that's ridiculous. But again, I think that these labels are these labels are just meant to kind of divide us.
I find them kind of kind of silly. And I don't know, I agree.
I think the labels are a shortcut to actually thinking about real situations and problems, right? People are not.
Yeah, some of this comes from my background as a philosopher. I'm suspicious of any overarching, all, you know, all encompassing philosophy of everything.
Those things never work. The way that human life, we encounter human life is is more nuanced than that. Life is full of paradoxes.
Reality is full of moral paradoxes and sort of political paradoxes and wisdom is like navigating through those paradoxes in a way that is hard to codify.
I say this as a professional codifier, like people think there's some kind of simple set of rules that you can refer to, to solve human problems.
There isn't. There are overarching principles. Those principles actually conflict in certain cases.
And then you do your best to be pragmatic and humane and rely on your sense of decency, your conscience, your relationships, your tradition, your knowledge of what people have done to navigate that rather than like, you know, consult the rulebook.
And I think when you do try to live in a strictly ideological rule governed way, it's when you end up with like really horrific human tragedies, you know, that's China under Mao.
Like that's, you know, you try to simplify life into rules and that's, that's, you know, a particular set of rules, but it's honestly you're going to get a weird perverted society.
If you try to follow any simple set of rules. So I, I, I, I, yeah, I'm all I think articulating principles and values and where you stand is great.
But it's a shortcut to think about real problems and it's something really laudable about the American governmental system that we have this, you know, we have these conflicting interests conflicting values conflicting philosophies, and we work things out
pragmatically through dialogue and debate. And we do not dehumanize each other in the process, but realize we're aiming at a common goal. And so I, you know, while I am, while I've characterized my own like set of values as like being very, I guess,
very eccentric, but, but with an under a different sort of understanding what that requires of freedom centric but also also a more left wing understanding what freedom requires, or what makes freedom possible right.
Those are my principles, but pragmatically I look more like us. I mean, in reality, I look more like a centrist, you know, because I'm willing to deal because I realized we live in the real world.
And we have to deal with each other. So, you know, I, I think there's my political philosophy, but there's the political reality and I should say, I know some stuff and I've been talking to politicians.
Which I'm not going to convey here. But you know, people are are are willing to compromise and move and make things happen. And regardless of who wins this election.
The question is going to be sort of like where what are people willing to compromise about and where do they draw the line in the sand. And what are the core values that cannot be compromised without compromising the essence of the mission of Bitcoin and
what is a reasonable compromise like that's going to be a live debate, I think, no matter who gets elected. In terms of like the, the number going up, NGU, I think it'll go up regardless. I agree with everything you said.
I think in the short term, it will go up more with a Trump victory, because then we'll have live, you know, reserve talk. And we know that the banks will probably be able to custody Bitcoin. We'll get somebody different, different at the SEC and
SEB 121 will go away. And once the banks custody Bitcoin, they will be fighting for Bitcoin instead of against it because they will profit on custodying it. And that will push the number way up. And there will be an international signal sent to the rest of the world like,
maybe you should stockpile some Bitcoin, you know, maybe your institutions should do what our institutions are doing. That I don't think that happens under Kamala Harris. So I think in the short term, you get an explosion of explosion in the Bitcoin price.
I don't even want to speculate about what it would be, but I think it would be a very big spike. And you would have a mania, probably a mania in the market that I don't predict under Harris. But under Harris, you know, like you said, you get, you get even more inflationary policy.
You know, you maybe have a threat of a wealth tax. And that cuts in the other direction. But ultimately, I agree, it's kind of, it's kind of a wash there. They're both, nobody is proposing fiscal responsibility. That's not on the table. That's not in the cards.
And they're not doing that for a reason. It's not like their personality or something. That's because they can't. Because there isn't any way to do it. So in some ways, the election doesn't matter. All that matters is macro. All that matters is the debt, which means that they can't raise interest rates too much.
So the interest rates will stay low, and then the spending. So the cap on interest rates from the debt and then the spending that they both promise, and Harris even more so, that's ultimately going to dictate the value of Bitcoin.
So yeah, I don't, I don't disagree with any of that characterization. I think for freedom go up, I would say a big question mark on both of them. Neither of them has really, you know, made me comfortable that we're not going to get capture or an attempt at regulatory capture.
I think Trump has said things that are more promising, like at the Bitcoin conference, you know, the right to run a node yourself. Like I think he said that self custody. So that's better.
But I, I didn't hear what I didn't hear was what I have heard from RFK, actually, which is a philosophical statement of why Bitcoin matters that ties it to freedom. I haven't heard that from Trump. He still seems to think of it like, you know, this thing we play with or this industry like any other industry, and he's going to make us happy like he's going to make the other industries
happy, we're giving money. Harris just hasn't said anything at all.
But but RFK actually articulated a value proposition that was linked to the freedom that Bitcoin enables, like our freedom of speech is no more valuable than our freedom to transact.
You know, it depends on it without the ability to transact your freedom of speech means nothing like that to me says, okay, when you're when you're cooking up a regulatory scheme, freedom is going to be part of the it's going to be on the list of non negotiables for for RFK.
Of course, he's in some way involved with the Trump campaign now. I don't know in what capacity or whether it's on the, the crypto angle but with with with Harris I have no we have no such assurance with Trump we have no such assurance so I don't think, and it seems to me honestly
the easiest kind of compromise. You have enemies of Bitcoin on Capitol Hill, who who hate it for a lot of reasons environmental is one. But I think the real reason that they hate it is that it's a threat to sanctions, and it allows crime to happen in their minds.
So, you've got Wall Street people who want NG you, and you have DC people who want to have more control over monetary flows going to North Korea, Iran, Russia.
The easy compromise that suggests itself is, is that is that we throw up barriers to using Bitcoin non custodially.
And we force people into these channels, then, you know, Washington gets what it wants. Not really because they can't really stop the flows to North Korea, whatever, but they can say they did or they can minimize it.
They want which is number goes up so I think that's the default. The freedom goes up contingent. Where are they as a political constituency, like, who funds the freedom go up, like where are they in the room like a look at the look at the meetings that
have happened on the Democratic side the round tables and stuff. Who in that room is representing freedom go up, like nobody. And who in the room with Trump is representing freedom go up. I mean, I don't know, I assume David Bailey would would represent that point of view, but what where's the money coming from to the
Trump campaign. Does it represent freedom go up. I don't know. That's why I have a, like, I think number go up under both of them. Yes, under Trump a lot right away under under Harris, maybe more eventually freedom go up.
So, I think that's a question mark for both of them in my mind. We have to be vigilant basically, we have to. I mean, ultimately comes down to work on the on the protocol itself, the layer twos privacy self custody education, like the basic
educational pleb led project. That's who it's on to keep the FGU more Bitcoin podcast is what I'm here. No, I think that's a solid analysis and just speaking of analysis, you put out a pretty incredible report that you actually you did a great deep dive with on
Peter McCormick's what Bitcoin did may what Bitcoin did rest in peace. But that is that is out there. And so I wanted to talk about it a little bit also happily direct folks to that episode because I think you guys did a wonderful deep dive with it.
But can, can you talk about that a little bit because I think generally people have this idea, at least within the Bitcoin space and it seems that outside of it to because we see the Bitcoin becoming a, you know, a bit of a political talking point
in that the Overton window is shifted. You've now got Kamala Harris having you know crypto roundtables. You've got Donald Trump speaking at the Bitcoin convention. This is this is out there now in that mainstream political public discourse not not as much as
something like abortion or or gun rights or whatever but but it's out there right. And I think that that the share of mind space that it takes up will probably grow. But I think at least a lot of folks on the left may have the idea that Bitcoin is just some you
libertarian wet dream or for far right people for conservatives. But the research that you recently did showed quite the opposite of that. And I found it very heartening research. Can can you talk about that a little bit and just kind of why you decided to to undertake this project and then what kind of the
the the eye openers were for you. Sure. Well, the Nakamoto project is a nonprofit that I started with a friend of mine Colin Brown, and basically to educate people about Bitcoin who don't know anything about it. We're at the very, very first step of their journey.
And that's where we saw a gap in the mighty Bitcoin media machine. Bitcoin companies advertised to Bitcoiners Bitcoin podcasts are are generally directed to Bitcoiners. I listened to Bitcoin podcasts.
But but if we want to cross the chasm of adoption and go from an early adopter to early majority, we have to communicate to people who are not already in the fold.
And so we started this organization to figure out how to do that. And as a first step, we wanted to do some empirical research on who owns Bitcoin and why ownership isn't, you know, the be all and end all of adoption.
We want adoption to be much more rich and life encompassing than just ownership. But it's a step and it's an indicator. And so another friend of ours who joined the project, Andrew Perkins, designed a study.
He's the chair of the marketing department at Washington State University. And Andy designed designed a study to use a framework called moral foundations, which is, which is really an attempt to categorize your most basic motivations.
And and basic demographics to say who owns Bitcoin and why. And we didn't really answer the question of why people own Bitcoin in the survey. But we did really get interesting answers to who owns Bitcoin.
And it was 3500 people in the US, a pretty representative sample of the United States adult age population.
So I think it's a high quality result.
And the bottom line, if I can give you the bottom line, bottom line is that Bitcoin ownership skews young and male. But otherwise, it's pretty much nondescript owning Bitcoin says almost nothing about you.
Or other things about you say almost nothing about whether you own Bitcoin, you know, like whether you're, you're highly educated or not very well educated, whether you're rich or poor, where you live in the country, how much financial education you have,
your race, your religiosity.
None of these things mattered very much. Sometimes we found statistical significance, but a very, very small level of correlation.
So, like, for instance, on race, there's a slight correlation with being non white for owning Bitcoin, you're slightly more likely not to be white. And that is statistically significant.
But it is just extremely small. You know, it's an extremely small difference. And we found other differences like that were extremely small. But other things didn't matter at all.
And I think the most surprising was, was political orientation.
You know, people divide up politically, they, they, you know, segment themselves politically into tribes. And we thought, given the discourse in the media, in politics, and in Bitcoin itself, that Bitcoiners would Bitcoin owners would be
more right leaning and or libertarian. And we fully expected to find that. We did not, we found nothing really.
Politically, Bitcoiners looked just like non Bitcoiners. They were slightly more likely to be radical, you know, either very liberal or very conservative on a liberal to conservative scale.
They were slightly more, more likely to be radical than, than the general population of non owners. But still, mostly they were politically moderate. And with these smaller conservative and liberal wings.
And, and, and looking zooming into the data even more, among very liberal people, they were that group, the very liberals had the highest percentage of Bitcoin ownership of any other any political identity we tested, which was really weird.
And that was also statistically significant, but small effect, right? It was not a large effect, but just surprising that. Yeah, it's surprising that it happened at all.
Scroll down, if you can scroll down from there, that's, that's the overall distribution oranges Bitcoin owners, a gray is, is non owners and you see that it's like a basically a normal distribution.
And there is kind of wild, like it is wild.
And again, like this one here is a similar story. It's, it's okay. This is what you said about the very liberal or very conservative, slightly more likely.
But overall, it's not like you see this skewing towards, you know, towards very conservative.
Kind of a little bit. I mean, the very liberal outpaces actually that, which is fascinating.
Yeah. And we did a 10 point scale thing too. And it shows something similar that the wings are a little bit hot. That one seems to lean more right in the center just like barely.
So the, the two of them, it's just kind of a wash.
It's a, it's not what we expected.
And maybe I should explain these two, some people are gonna be listening, they're not going to see these graphs.
But statistically, here's, here's basically what, what we're seeing. The United States as a whole is politically moderate.
That itself was kind of news to me. I actually didn't realize how moderate the US is.
I mean, I'm always hearing from people who have very strong political opinions in one direction or the other.
Once you realize that all of America is very moderate, then you can see how, how like very liberal that category, 21.9% most 22% of them own Bitcoin.
And that is the most, that's the highest percentage of ownership of anything like new neutral is 14.3%. Very conservative is 17.8%. Okay.
That makes it look like most Bitcoiners are very liberal if you just looked at that chart. But what you're not seeing is that there are very few very liberals in America.
And therefore, even though a higher percentage of very liberal people own Bitcoin, still most people own Bitcoin are not very liberal. They're moderate.
Right. So that's like a base rate. The base rate of political alignment is moderate in the US. I think that's very easy to misunderstand statistically.
Because the, the, the, each of the extremes are always the loudest, right? They're always the ones who are also perhaps trying to other eyes the most fervently, you know, they're, they're trying to, you know, they're really pushing their end of the extreme.
And trying to make you think that anybody who is not on that extreme is just the absolute worst person you could imagine and should be, you know, thrown down into a burning pit.
Like it is, you would think that it's, it is much more extreme, but they're, they just, they're so loud. Like most, most of the neutral people are just kind of going about their lives and not spending as much time screaming about how much they hate the other side.
America is moderate and, and Bitcoin is moderate. And Bitcoin is slightly less moderate than America, but it's still moderate.
That's, that's kind of the bottom line. I mean, honestly, if you're a politician and you want to get votes, I mean, you see the, you see the difficulty here of why, the way politicians go to the extreme during the primaries, and then they tack back to the middle, and then they get, they get pegged with the stuff that they said in the primaries.
You know, you see the job of a politician just in this graph, you're going for those people who consider themselves neutral. That's by far the largest group. You want their vote. That's, that's how you win.
But you only get nominated if you please the people on the extreme.
So I think something similar is true for, for Bitcoin. It's like you only, the, the, the ideological Bitcoiners are the gatekeepers to Bitcoin venues, right? They, they, they guard for, for ideological impurity and they'll punish impurity when they find it.
But the people you're trying to reach are ideologically neutral. I mean, that's the bulk of people or on the other side, right? So that's the, that's the danger is that the media machine within Bitcoin could play the same role that the primaries play for politicians.
And that's why we get people who, you know, don't reflect that they don't reflect where Americans are on issues because they had to run this gauntlet of ideological purity first.
The same, same concern holds for Bitcoin actually.
I mean, I should clarify, I should clarify too, like this is just Bitcoin ownership. A lot of people made this point when it came to this study, like this doesn't mean this is not a survey of people who run their own nodes, people who, you know, can, can throw down with, you know,
Jameson Lopp about security practices or whatever. This is not, there is no test beyond just ownership. And I think what this shows honestly is, is pretty limited. I wish it showed more, but it's, it's pretty limited.
It, it means that a bunch of people went on Coinbase and bought like 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin. You know what I mean? At some point. And it means that people of all stripes did that. I shouldn't say at some point.
We also asked whether people did own Bitcoin, but no longer do. And so we found like basically one in seven Americans owns Bitcoin. And there are more people who used to own Bitcoin, but don't any longer.
And we also asked them like why they sold, you know, why, why they no longer own Bitcoin if they don't. And, and most people said, well, I don't know, what would you expect people to say about why they did own it, but no longer do.
Boy, well, first of all, I'm kind of shocked that one in seven Americans owns Bitcoin.
Yeah, we should stop right there.
Yeah, because when you, when you, when you, when you talk to folks, and I'm just talking about like in, let's say, I can call it in the, in the fiat world, right? It does not feel like one in seven people you talk to owns Bitcoin.
But maybe that's maybe that is because I guess a lot of people did just go on Coinbase maybe once or twice or a few times. Maybe they're DCing on Coinbase.
And they forgot they said it. And it's just, it's not, it hasn't been something they didn't go down the rabbit hole super deep. But they do in fact own it. They did, they did purchase it at some point.
But did that number like one in seven, does that feel high to you too, just from personal experience out there in the world? Or does that, I mean, I don't know, it's thrown me for a loop a little bit. Like I believe it.
But it does, but I have to say that all of the crypto surveys that I also looked at, they all had similar numbers. Nobody was like lower than us. So I feel like that's pretty solid.
And there are two ways that that number can be off that people have raised in objections to me. One is, one is that people can be unwilling to admit that they hold Bitcoin on a survey, like the hardcore privacy types who are like, I'm not telling you whether I
own Bitcoin.
The other way, and some people have said that's why you're not getting the libertarian crowd, because only 3% of only 3% of people identified as libertarian in this survey.
They're like, well, the libertarians aren't going to tell you about their Bitcoin. Yeah, in the other, the other way, which this could be off is that people say that they have Bitcoin when they have some cryptocurrency, like they're like, I've got Bitcoin, it's called Solana.
It's doge. Yeah, I've got some Bitcoin doge. Yeah, I find that probably both of those things are right. Both of those things happen. I don't know how much, you know, it's an imperfect measurement. But yeah, actually, right now we are calling and I are
sending a letter to every congressional representative and every senator with this report and a cover letter and a cover letter is basically like, look, one in seven Americans owns this stuff.
And that's the headline. It's, it's, it's one in seven Americans hold this stuff. They're in every district. They're in every congressional district. They are in every party. They are part of every political ideology like kind of like we're everywhere.
We are everywhere and we are many in number and, and, and they, they don't fit any particular niche except they're young and they tend to be men. So, you know, if you look at Congress, they're very old on average, average agent Congress is very high.
And I think some of the story with the disconnect with Congress is just that they have a younger constituency than themselves. That constituency has a sizable amount of buy in the one in seven is really much higher for, you know, for younger males, it's more like
four in 10, you know, it's 40% for some of those age groups. And, and it's, you know, slightly higher among non white Americans. So it's like young, younger people and younger males especially are into this thing in a big way and you don't know about it because
there's a demographic that's not into it. But apart from age and gender, they're, we're everywhere. And, and we vote. And we, we want you to be educated about this phenomenon and we want you to be fair minded and open to its potential.
And so, yeah, we have bags, we want you, we don't want you to, to sink or try to sink. Right. So, I think that's the message to lawmakers and that's going to what we're sending out we're summarizing some of the other studies to in our letter like hey it's not just our study, but it's these other studies
that you've also found, they've also found that Bitcoin is pretty much non partisan that that that ownership cuts across the political divides. And yeah, we didn't send out a partisan letter at all, it's just like hey and we're not a political organization, we just
we have a politically interesting result. We're talking about, you know, a large constituency that is not being served well by by political leadership in which they should know about, they should know that it exists.
Yeah, yeah, in terms of like, what do they do they, to what extent to the own Bitcoin how much to the own. We don't know, but they, they do own it and they own it. They haven't forgotten about it because they said they own it on a survey.
Right.
Yeah, in terms of why people no longer own it, who did. Most common reason was that they needed money. They sold it because they had an expense that came up like a medical expense or housing or whatever. So, I was like, oh yeah, I get that I've done that.
And it's liquid, right. They were able to sell it and and to get the the fee that they needed. Well, I think this is incredible because, like this is this beautiful game theory of Bitcoin right if we're looking at this through the lens of
a politician, and they receive this report of yours.
To me, I'd be looking at this saying, whether I'm Democrat or Republican. Okay, folks on both sides of the aisle, both those that would already vote for me and those that, you know, would maybe would not usually vote for me.
They like this thing.
If I am against this thing. Okay, maybe I don't care about alienating folks on the other color team. But I don't want to alienate my base. I definitely don't want to get rid of my base right and if I'm against this thing, I am certainly alienating some of my base.
But if I'm for this thing, not only am I keeping my base happy, but I'm potentially reaching across the aisle to be able to pull other folks into my color team from the other color team, you know, and that to me is really powerful because they're, I'm trying to think of
something else that kind of bridges that partisan gap. And I don't know, maybe maybe you have a better answer to this, but I struggle to think of anything that that really does that that reaches across the aisle like that where being for this thing will generate
you support from both sides. The out being against it will alienate both your base. I mean, that's a pretty unique situation.
Nobody really hates Bitcoin enough to vote on it. But people do love it enough to vote on it. You know, as you say, you find, I mean, the entire situation is created by certain key players.
I think Elizabeth Warren is the obvious name that comes that comes to mind. Once she made it her, her cause to to raise an anti crypto army.
That was just an unforced error where she alienates all of the progressives liberals, Democrats that would otherwise be inclined to support her needlessly alienates them. I don't think she gains a following because of that.
It's not like the six and seven people who don't own it, like care about it enough to want like, I mean, you've got like the what is it they are but coin subreddit. Like you've got that those types, the extra freeze types. I mean, it's a handful of people who care
enough enough about hating it in order to want to like punish it or eliminate most people just don't have an opinion one way or the other. So yeah, major unforced error on her part in corresponding to that, and a huge opportunity on the part of Republicans to steal those Democrats by addressing
the issue that matters to them. And independence, right really going for that middle ground that might otherwise trend towards towards, you know, your opponent, you can snag them. It is really unusual and it's all created by the
unforced error. Like you see a neutral technology that people are really into and nobody really hates. And you decide to take on that technology and stop it. That is a, I mean, it could potentially cost the entire election.
It could potentially change the course of US history. Right. That that that decision. I don't know that it that it will. The analysis that would that would support that claim would require that we we analyze the relative importance of factors and voting.
And, you know, we would we would establish not that just that one in seven people own it, but that they're going to vote in alignment with it, that they perceive Democrats as being hostile to it. And there are studies done on this sort of thing.
And, you know, most of the studies show that people do care about it that they think it's an important issue, the Blockchain Association did a study on swing states. But it's hard to quantify like the number of votes that might come that way.
Very hard to quantify that and that's not something we tried to do. And we're not making any claims along those lines. But I'm sure I saw one estimate, I saw one estimate one paper of like 1% of current Democrats are voting for Trump because of this issue.
Well, that's that's actually a really large number, right? 1% of all Democrats that would otherwise Democrats or independents who would otherwise vote for Harris are supporting Trump for this reason.
I don't know if that's pretty big. Yeah, I don't know if that's a good number, but it's a big number. Right now, it's looking close.
Harris got a boost from the debate. But, you know, who knows where we'll be election day, it could come down to just counties, you know, it could come down to just a handful of votes in one swing state.
And do you really want to risk it all to fight this thing which is not even bad. It's like, you know what I mean, it's a figment of your own imagination that it's a harm.
So, I think that message has been received already in the Democratic Party, I think they are aware of that. And there's been notable silence from Elizabeth Warren on this stuff she hasn't opened her mouth.
And I think that's not an accident. They continue to do what they do in secret, but she has no longer vocally dressing down crypto people and, you know, you know, like what she was she was grandstanding before.
And I haven't seen any of that. I haven't seen any of that. So I think I think the message has been received.
I mean, let's hope so because I mean, you know, hope so in the sense that I hope that more people do receive this message because, you know, like, I want more people to know about Bitcoin and not have their heads filled with outright lies and propaganda about how this thing is the devil.
Like, because I think, like most Bitcoiners, I this makes me very excited about the future. And this disintermediation of money that we're seeing in the separation of money and state this potential for it at least is such a powerful thing that everybody except
the authoritarians should love. Like, unless you're an authoritarian, you should find something you can love about Bitcoin. If you're an authoritarian, if you're a dictator, okay, yeah, I can see why you would maybe not be super excited about Bitcoin.
That's, you know, if you're a central banker, I could see why you wouldn't be super excited about that. But bar excluding those people, just about everyone else, you should be able to find something you like here.
Like, nobody, nobody wants to have their the ability for their money to be cut off to be cut off from their bank. Nobody wants to be, you know, financially censored. Nobody wants to save in a money that is losing purchasing power every single year where everything keeps getting more expensive.
Like, those are things that have that's not a partisan thing. That's just a fact. People don't want those things. They want to be able to save in a money that grows in purchasing power. And they want to be able to use that money for whatever they deem is best for them.
Like, and so one would hope that one would hope this does not become needlessly partisan, because Bitcoin owners themselves is that your study has shown are not partisan. Like, you know, Bitcoin's for anyone who's willing to learn, right, maybe not for everyone, but it's for anyone who's willing to learn.
And that's a beautiful thing.
Yeah, that's all very well said. And it's good to kind of tick through those properties that make Bitcoin valuable.
I think that's another another place we've received pushback on this study is like, okay, maybe people across the political spectrum own Bitcoin, but they shouldn't if they were rational. It's weird. You get it.
I get a lot of arguments that people who do own it, you know, yeah, maybe they do own it, but they shouldn't. They're stupid. They're not being consistent. And I think it's worth saying what the limitations are on rational Bitcoin ownership.
What I think the rational limitations are you said, authoritarians, maybe and central bankers. And I think that's right. And I would, I would clarify it a little bit more by saying,
Yeah, I think if you want to deny people the ability to store wealth in a non debasable way, then Bitcoin is incompatible with your philosophy. Also, if you want to deny people the ability to send each other value in a permissionless and censorship resistant way,
then Bitcoin is also incompatible with your philosophy. And some people may own Bitcoin and hold those those philosophies. That's quite possible. But I don't think if you pulled Americans on like, do you think that people should not be able to people should
not be able to hold their money in a way that someone else cannot debase or that some, you know, that cannot base. I don't, that's kind of double negative. But do you think that people should be able to save in a, in a currency of their own choice,
that doesn't lose value? I don't think you'll have a lot of people who say no, I don't think that people should be able to do that. And I also don't think this one's trickier, but you know, people should be able to pay other people, whoever they like,
in a way, in a way that's not intermediated by an authority. I mean, that's just cash. That's like a poll on whether you think cash is okay. And I imagine pretty much everybody except a few control freaks are going to say,
Yes, you ought to be able to do that with your money. So whereas I think the political spectrum. Americans are all over the map and there's a sizable number of people who are far right and a sizable number of people on the far left,
and most of us in the middle, that's, that's different from the freedom spectrum, where there's one place on the spectrum where you really shouldn't own Bitcoin, according to your philosophy. And that's a hardcore, you know, that's a hardcore,
you shouldn't be able to save money in a way that I can't debase or someone can't debase, and you shouldn't be able to send money to who you want to even central bankers. I think that Bitcoin doesn't eliminate the ability to print money.
You can still as a government require the tax to be paid in a currency that you create. Why not keep doing that. You're going to put a check on that with Bitcoin because it gives you an alternative, similar to gold, but more functional in gold.
The existence of gold doesn't threaten, you know, the ability to print money. And I think neither does Bitcoin. It's just a cap on how much value is going to flow into that printed money, because there's giving people an option, right.
So I think even, I think there's even a version of MMT that's compatible with being supportive of Bitcoin, where you just you don't tax people for, for the purpose of funding the government, you print, and then you tax to control inflation.
But there's also this other thing, which is Bitcoin, and people can save in that if they like, you know, that reduces the effectiveness of your MMT, but you're still an MMT, right. So I think even MMT, as far as I understand it, is compatible with, with, with, with thinking Bitcoin should be allowed, right, on that front.
And, and, you know, and on the payments front, yeah, basically it's only control freaks who think the Treasury needs to have the ability to stop any payment arbitrarily, right. That's, that's the only true point where you hit a philosophical bedrock, and you'd say,
No, Bitcoin isn't for you, sorry, you know, but any, anything short of that, I feel like it's noise, honestly, it's noise, it's like, that's our political theater, it's throwing throwing up distractions from the core and the essence of what this technology is.
That's us succumbing to this heuristic way of thinking where we have to fit Bitcoin into a political lens. It's, it's both bigger and smaller than that. It's, it's, you know, it's smaller in that it doesn't encompass everything in life.
And it's bigger in the sense that it is not bound by those, by those categories.
That's really beautifully said. I want to be conscious of your, your time here. Do you still have a couple of minutes left?
Yeah, sure.
Okay. Because I really appreciate it. I think that's a really good appeal. And if by some miracle, there's some politicians who end up listening to this later or see a clip of it on on X or maybe if they're even slinking around on Noster and see it, I hope they pay attention to that.
Because one thing that is interesting to me is I find, or maybe it's just my perception, but I should say my perception is that not just in America, but all over the world, there seems to be a growing disconnect between what the political class puts forward as policy and what the majority of people actually want.
You look at the censorship that's happening of X in Brazil, you look at censorship, financial or speech censorship anywhere in the world.
There's no one in the citizenry that wants that. They don't want that. The only people that want that are the people that are controlling it, right?
And so whenever I see these things proposed, and it's particularly troubling if you see these things in America, I find that to be just such an indictment of our modern democratic institutions failing to do what they're supposed to.
Excuse me, had a frog get caught in my throat there.
But do you think, how do I put this? It seems that many self-proclaimed democratic leaders around the world are looking off an awful lot like authoritarians.
And does Bitcoin end up becoming an actual lifeline for these people? Do freedom of speech technologies like Noster end up becoming a lifeline for these people?
Do they desire freedom enough to go out and find these solutions that do exist, but sometimes don't get found until they experience the pain of having their rights stripped away from them?
It's the idea of how many people get smart by choice and find their way to Bitcoin. Not that they really desperately need it at the moment, but they realize what the power of it and they might need it later.
Or do the majority of people in this world end up finding Bitcoin and finding other freedom technologies because their governments push things too far, strip away too many rights, and they are forced to scramble and try to find a lifeline?
Yeah, such a good question. I think Bitcoin is so unique among freedom technologies because it doesn't rely on the desire for freedom. It relies on greed.
And so it bootstraps greed into freedom. And Andrew Bailey, who I know you interviewed recently, he's got such a wonderful lecture on this and how basically Satoshi solved the problem of how to bootstrap freedom technologies,
which are always going to lag in their ease of use compared to a centralized product like Facebook or Apple or whatever. Whatever those corporations are going to give us.
They're going to send, they're going to have teams working on the colors of the fonts and, you know, reverse engineering our brains to make things frictionless for us. And freedom technologies don't have the resources to throw at that, you know, at that interface in the way that then they never will in the way that
they do because. So how do you get people to use it, this janky stuff and build on it. You give them a financial incentive. And Bitcoin is here today and successful because of that financial incentive.
And when it comes to Nostra, I wonder whether it can follow in Bitcoin's foot footprints, because it doesn't have that paired greed element, like not intrinsically, it kind of does because it can piggyback on Bitcoin's properties in some ways.
It can use Bitcoin to make make transactions possible that weren't it can, you know, it can, you can do things with Bitcoin that you that are actually financially valuable to people.
So it's not just a pure freedom technology and has this financial thing tied into it because of Bitcoin. But I think the success of Nostra is is dicier than Bitcoin's because it's not as simple how you get people on board as it is with Bitcoin.
Like you say, you're going to get people on board with Nostra when you have crackdowns on alternatives. And, you know, they'll come to it of necessity and that does happen for Bitcoin as well.
I think, I think it was Jameson Lapu posted the other day something about how there was this spike that we all thought was due to Cyprus currency collapse back in the day, but it was actually when Cesaris like orange pilling his Silicon Valley friends, we know now, you know,
that that captures something we thought people were being driven to Bitcoin out of necessity in that instance and they weren't it was or that was minor. It was really capital looking for a good home.
And of course, people are using Bitcoin for resistance for freedom in places where the money has been failing and we have lots of instances that from Venezuela and from Turkey and from Lebanon and, you know, many, many others, Ukraine.
But it hasn't just been driven by the need for freedom money. It has been driven by greed and the need for freedom money and those two kind of working symbiotically.
And I guess, I guess both the biggest hope for Bitcoin and also the biggest fear is whether that alliance of greed and freedom will remain intact.
We have benefited to this point of, you know, the OGs and Silicon Valley and Wall Street have had their interest aligned with the people fighting for freedom in under dictatorships and under, you know, abusive central banking relationships.
And my hope is that that alignment continues so that we aren't we aren't fractured into two communities, an NGO community and an FG community, because then Bitcoin's kind of like on its own as a, yeah, then it's in the same boat as other freedom technologies.
I think that the greed element has been fantastic for Bitcoin. It has drawn so many brilliant minds into the community. It is driven people to build on top of the basic Bitcoin protocol to maintain the code to advance it.
Without that, it is, it's a heart much more difficult struggle. I hope also that my hope also for Nostar is the same, that it finds ways to tap into other motivations than freedom, probably through the tools that it uniquely enables.
Right. Because I think, yeah, I think the people who are suffering under oppression need help. It can't just be them trying to carry carrying the torch of this technology. It won't be as effective as if, you know, we have a global movement, which, which is aligned with them.
Yeah, it's so funny in Bitcoin, you do have the greed, like side of things, the freedom side of things and sometimes it's the contrast is really stark. Like you're at the Bitcoin conference in Miami or or whatever and it's in this like, it feels like a multi level marketing thing, you know, it's like
bright lights and people are pumped about getting rich and it's cheesy from my perspective. I'm like, this is not my thing. You have the, you have the Oslo Freedom Forum, and you see what what Bitcoin is actually doing in resisting
governmental overreach, authoritarian control, and how it's, you know, helping organizations and individuals in a fight for, for human freedom. And you know, these are the same thing. This is the same. This is the same technology from two different angles.
And, and you remind yourself at the, at the Bitcoin conference. And I don't mean to broad brush that whole conference, of course, the, the HRF has a presence there as well. But, you know, the, the, the more cheesy greedy elements of that conference, you have to remind yourself
like, that's what bootstrapped this technology into existence. That's what's making the freedom technology possible and working. Right. That's quite a, I think that's hard for people to understand and grasp. I think they we've been talking about
misperceptions of Bitcoin, you know, you look at Bitcoin from the outside, you hear some bad things about it from whatever politicians or journalists who see an opportunity here to to grandstand or whatever it's just fear it takes on a life of its own.
And then you encounter like this kind of greedy, sort of newly wealthy subculture. Also, you perceive that subculture as politically not aligned with you, you perceive them as, well, sort of in this case, accurately young and male when you're maybe not.
And you're like, that's just gross. It's just not my, my bag. It's not who I am. It's not for me. And, and that, that's the branding that is totally understandable. But also, if we want this technology to be ubiquitous, we have to get beyond the limitations of that perception
or get beyond that perception. Right. And I think back to the Nakamoto project, you know, our goal is to kind of how to break through to the next wave of adoptees, where they are, how do we translate this technology in a way that makes sense to them as something, you know, useful, good,
freedom promoting for people like them, as well as the people they, they think it's for.
I think that's a worthy endeavor, because again, you know, we want as many people as possible to adopt Bitcoin, because it is genuinely an amazing technology that is the power to lift up this world if people are willing to, to study it, to look into it, to, to take a little bit of their scarce time
and devote it to studying the scarce asset. But I love the work that you guys are doing. I'll link, I'll link this in the show notes as well, so people can dive in there a little bit deeper, and if they want to support it.
I have one more, or two more extremely short questions for you. The first one is, you're trapped in an elevator with Elizabeth Warren. You have, you have 30 seconds to try and convince her that Bitcoin is in fact good.
What do you say to old Liz? Man, I'm not even sure that conversation is worth it. I don't know that there's anything that can be said in 30 seconds. I mean, with Elizabeth Warren, honestly, what I would like if I had some time with her is, I'd like to invite a longer
conversation that goes to her core reasons for opposing Bitcoin, and, and to see if we can get to the bottom of why, why she is opposed to it. And, and so my 30 seconds would be, my 30 seconds with Elizabeth Warren would be,
I applaud your attempts to rein in the banks. And as a Bitcoiner, that's how I came to Bitcoin. I was a supporter of Elizabeth Warren, didn't financially support her, but she was definitely towards the top of people that I, that I
I, I, I endorsed. And, and it was because she recognized that, that, that the money system was being abused. Bitcoin represents an alternative to that system that is fair and open and available to everybody.
And, and yet she opposes it. She seems to have taken her opposition to the banks and realizing that that was an impossible fight actually joined up with the banks to fight Bitcoin. And I want to understand why she made that turn.
And whether we can work together on, on whether we can work together on, on satisfying her core values that drove her to her battle against banking abuses in the first place, and, and whether whether her oppositions to Bitcoin really are philosophically
bedrock and deep, or whether they rest on misunderstandings. That would be my invitation. That's going to be a much longer conversation.
That's fair. Well, if one of her interns listens to this somehow, you know, open door to you. Last question, totally unrelated. What are you reading right now, if anything that you would recommend?
Oh, that's a great question. Right now. Yes, I've set aside my many books that I've started and not finished. And I'm teaching. And I'm the thing I read, you know, over the last few days was the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know, the first recorded human epic.
And it's an amazing work. I think everybody should read it. Some of what's cool about it is it just, it's, you know, 5000 year old tale that is fundamentally still speaks to it still speaks to our lives today.
It tells you that, you know, although human culture changes a tremendous amount that even at the dawn of agricultural living humans fundamental motivations are are the same.
But also because the Epic of Gilgamesh was written on these clay tablets, which were before, which were also record used to record payments, ledgers.
So we have the original like ledger technology, which is also the original technology for storing human human stories and narratives. And this is a leave with an unpopular take maybe.
I think that Bitcoin's time chain will store more than payments information for the same reason that that clay records the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Clay is holds up pretty well through fire, through through time, those tablets remain and we keep discovering more clay tablets from the Epic of Gilgamesh in different versions of it. There's thousands and thousands of tablets throughout the ancient Near East in different languages.
But human beings throughout history have always chosen a medium that is the most indestructible, the most resistant to degradation to record what matters most to them.
And I think that Bitcoin block space ultimately is valuable, not just because it records who has what Bitcoin, but people will want to write stuff to it, like that matters the most to them.
Because that's what humans do. I mean, a lot of a lot of this course I'm teaching Humanities 110 is leaders recording their deeds, like, like on the side of a canyon wall, they like carving here all the enemies I've crushed here all the people who rebelled against me
Here's how I became King. Here's why the gods love me. Right. And they often erase their predecessors who they fight with or disagree with, right? Erase the history of others, record your own history is a basic human urge.
I think that Bitcoin represents an anti memory hole technology and indestructible time stamped way to record your vision of the world, whatever you think is most important as a legacy to send to all other humans forever.
I think there will be a bidding war for that block space and more stuff will get in there than transactions, like basically no matter what, because it is monumental architecture. Bitcoin is monumental architecture, as well as being money.
Yeah, how about that?
I love it. And I mean, I'm of the opinion that value is subjective. And so if you want to, if you find something valuable, and you want to record it on the Bitcoin time chain, by all means, you're free to value that higher than a transaction. Exactly.
Go ahead and enter the market with the bid.
And we've now come full circle to markets and subjectivity, and that's a perfect place to end it. Troy, thank you so much. Where do you want to send folks? I'll make sure to link everything in the show notes. But what's the website for the Nakamoto project?
It's Nakamotoproject.org. But the place to go is like my Twitter account, which is at thetrocro. That's kind of where I do my thinking aloud. It's really nice to meet you, Walker. I mean, we've met before at conferences, but we've never had a conversation.
This feels official now. It feels more official. Thanks so much for indulging me.
Oh, thank you. Thank you for indulging me. You know, Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So you shared your scarce time on another fucking Bitcoin podcast, and I'm very grateful for that. But thank you so much. This was a treat.
Love picking your brain. And I look forward to doing it again soon.
Likewise. Thank you so much.
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