All votes within the existing system are really a vote to who gets more of the theft that comes from you.
It's just theater. It's complete theater.
Now let's go back to 5,000 years of human history.
All of those people before us were always tricked.
What's to make you think that you're not being?
If we're responsible for the world we create
and we're living mostly in a fiat world that we know is extractive, then who do we have to blame?
There is no they. Governments that we say are stealing our power
could only steal our power if we gave it to them through doing that.
We have to be smarter to be able to play a different game.
So how do you fight that power?
You have to intentionally move your time and energy to the system you want to thrive.
And it doesn't have to be the entire world doing it.
It has to be a vigilant number of people that are providing hope.
So imagine being stuck in fear and then changing to hope.
True with abundance.
We've never lived in a world where 8 billion people were in service of 8 billion people
and prices fell forever.
And it would be really hard if you didn't have the mental lattice
for what that world would look like and who would if you'd never seen it before
and no history book ever showed it before.
Who would have that mental lattice?
It would really be hard to describe that to people who don't feel like they're experiencing it
from the other system.
The light bulb goes on is, and once you're measuring from that system
and you are if Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure,
what I'm talking about is inevitable.
No matter what, it doesn't matter if the existing system prints 2 trillion dollars,
8 trillion dollars, 50 trillion dollars.
It's just different pieces of paper.
And Bitcoin measured against a piece of paper will look like it's going up.
But all prices relative to Bitcoin are actually going down and will forever.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up.
And today it is my pleasure to welcome back onto the Bitcoin podcast, none other than Jeff Booth.
Jeff was one of my first interviews on this show and he is generally one of my favorite people in the Bitcoin space.
He always provides an incredible amount of perspective, optimism and signal.
And he does just that today.
We dig into a lot in this episode, so I'll keep this intro short and sweet.
And just remind you to go to FETI.XYZ and set up your own federation.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast,
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Jeff Booth.
Jeff Booth, welcome back onto the Bitcoin podcast.
It's a pleasure to have you back on here.
Awesome to be here.
Good to see you, Walker.
You know, Jeff, I always love picking your brain because I think you're one of the most reasoned and logical voices that we have in the
community, but the Bitcoin community.
And as we were talking before the show here, sometimes you may be accused of repeating certain messages,
you know, marginal cost of production, dropping to zero, things like this.
But I think it's important to repeat those messages because clearly for the vast majority of the population,
even for many Bitcoiners, they haven't internalized a lot of these things.
So I think a good place to start for us today is to kind of talk about the current system
and the system that is to come and why it is so dang difficult for not just, you know, people that are still, quote, you know, in the
matrix or who have not adopted a personal Bitcoin standard, but even for Bitcoiners to change that world view that they have to
start looking at this new system to start measuring with this new measuring stick that we have, which is Bitcoin.
Do you want to kind of dive into that a little bit?
Yeah, it's a big topic.
Yeah, and I obviously try different ways, but let's kind of put some first principles together and then we'll build on those.
So we know that the free market, the natural state of the free market is deflation.
We know that in a free market, prices tend to fall to the marginal cost of production.
So just from those two statements, if those are true, it's also true that we've never lived in a global free market for any length of time.
As a derivative, we've always lived in a control system and that control system that was through broken money kept on getting worse and worse
until a time where it would convince people to go to war, first split the country, then convince people to go to war, to reset currency, to then start again.
5,000 years of human history proved to us that we've never had a truly global free market for any length of time.
And another first principle is free markets are far more productive because there's more shots on net.
And so when the US, the entire constitution and everything around the US was around creating a free market to get out of the trap of Britain
and to give individual rights and freedoms to people.
And the constitution was a document to protect those rights, which created one of the superpower out of those rights because it was more productive.
People moved from all over the world to the US to take advantage of that, more productive.
And then it too got captured over time.
And the capture over time, because it happens so slowly, people don't notice it's happening.
So the constitution or Magna Carta, before that, any time you introduced individual rights and freedoms,
the economy was more productive and it created a trend for people moving there to take advantage of that and you saw more opportunities and we are a part of that.
So you could see individual times throughout history that it was more free or more free in a certain market.
And the abundance that was created out of that and then over time that abundance would get captured by the state.
And it would trend towards something else, more controlled.
And then it would be and then it would trend towards capitulating on itself and going to war to try to reset the currencies.
And then you'd promise not to do it again and it would start again.
So that's an entire history through the monetary lens of us and saying, really, in 5,000 years of human history, we've never had a globally free market for any length of time.
And so that's a fact.
And so out of that fact or out of that first principle, then we've always must have lived in a control system.
And that control system would have to capture our attention more and more of it, capture more of our individual rights and freedoms to be able to gain control over us and convince us that it was okay to go to war and create in the name of freedom.
So if you look at those two patterns, those are both true, both statements are true.
We've never seen it. No history book has ever seen it.
No economic system has ever seen it.
No political system has never seen it.
And then we have a new protocol bounded by energy, open decentralized and secure protocol bounded by energy Bitcoin, which imposes the free market, which for the first time in history, you couldn't cheat that.
So it imposes all prices relative to Bitcoin falling forever to the marginal cost production.
And every new person that's moving their time into that system is adding their intelligence ideas, acceleration to the free market, which is prices in Bitcoin will tend towards the marginal cost production or prices forever will fall against Bitcoin.
That's what it would look like.
And I say, if it stays decentralized and secure.
So now, if these things, if those things are true, we've never had it.
Then then it's also true that we've always measured a system by the system.
And we're inside that system, measuring the system.
And it's also true that we couldn't measure Bitcoin because there's because there's nothing to measure it against yet.
Or there's you can measure other things against it, prices falling and you'd see all prices fall, energy prices fall, house prices fall, all prices fall according to Bitcoin, which you would expect to happen.
But now go back to if in 5000 years we've never had a currency that's that has resisted that manipulation.
Then we must be one of the one of the things all of us must be part of the equation that allows the centralization.
We must be because there are lots of smart people in 5000 years of human history that knew the same things we're talking about now.
And all currencies have always been centralized.
That's kind of a I think that's a bit of a I would hope eye opening moment for a lot of people realizing that despite the best efforts of people far more brilliant than than us throughout history.
And there have been a lot of them that still the status quo did not meaningfully change.
There wasn't really a departure from that status quo.
It may have looked a little bit different.
It may have had a different color paint on it, but it was ultimately still the same thing.
And we didn't get away from it.
And so if that's true and it is true, right, we know it's true, then then you'd have to have a really high bar on the attacks that we're going to come into Bitcoin,
like a staggeringly high bar on what it would likely be centralized and what would happen to be able to centralize it because most people fall into the trap throughout history of pricing in whatever currency they're in and allowing that centralization,
essentially making trade offs, short term trade offs versus long term.
And if we've never gotten out of it before, what's to think that we would this time?
So that's the high bar that I think of Bitcoin.
And so Bitcoin layer one being decentralized and secure for now 15 years and getting more secure, more decentralized.
I'm not saying that there aren't still some risks there.
I'm not saying mining pools.
And but what I can see, what I can see is I think enough people understand what this means for humanity.
And what they're doing is constantly looking for vigilant, looking for risks and rectifying and becoming that's kind of in Bitcoin maxi terms.
That's what you're doing.
Right. You're vigilant for attack vectors and you're constantly looking for attack vectors.
Because once you know, once you're out of this crazy matrix and you know, you also know what the high importance of decentralizing security for humankind going forward.
You know, you know why that's such important concept.
So so I think that Bitcoin layer one, I see very little risk in in layer one because of what I just said.
But probably two, three years ago, I said, OK, if I knew if I knew everything I know and there's lots of smart people around, they must know everything too.
And and and you lost layer one, you couldn't you couldn't choke off layer one.
You couldn't stop it kept on going.
How would you stop Bitcoin at layer two and then use layer two to attack layer one?
And I think we're really early in the path of that that actually happening.
And why would that happen if you just tie the 5000 years?
Because most people are pricing in US dollars.
They're pricing Bitcoin in US dollars.
They're pricing all their assets in US dollars and that and and and these these two systems are incongruent together.
One is the free market prices fall forever.
One is prices rise forever.
They're completely incompatible.
And when somebody says they're compatible, they're not.
They're only compatible if you subsume the base layer and you can fractionalize it to make prices go up.
That makes sense.
I think it does.
And, you know, because I want to get into very much so the kind of the risks associated with layer two on Bitcoin and beyond layer two, but everything that's not layer one, I want to dive in.
In fact, I think that's that's a really important thing for people to understand, understand both the risks, but also the massive opportunity that we have because there's a lot of incredible technology being built right now.
But maybe it would be helpful to just for for folks, let's say they have somehow have not heard you speak before, have not have not listened or read your book.
Do not understand what is so broken with this current system, because I think that it's it's difficult for people, especially in, let's say, the so called Western or developed world to sometimes understand why the heck these psychopathic Bitcoiners seem to care so much about this magic internet money and why they think things are so bad.
Because, you know, my house is getting is growing in value, quote, it's, it's, you know, because we have a broken measuring stick, but, you know, my stocks are up.
Things are things are OK.
Why? Yeah, there's some people in other parts of the world struggling.
But, you know, really, I don't see anything too bad.
Can you can you talk a little bit just before we get in the other layers of Bitcoin and what's what's happening there?
Just this idea that I think it's very difficult to understand is the idea of deflation that you've something you've talked about in your book, The Price of Tomorrow, which was a light bulb moment for me and many other Bitcoiners, I think, is that technology is naturally deflationary.
Everything should be getting cheaper.
But it's not.
And somehow we've been conditioned to expect that actually the natural state is that everything just gets a little bit more expensive every year by, quote, 2% or whatever the CPI is.
Or, you know, can you talk a little bit about maybe why people are so willing to accept that as the norm?
Is it just because we've been conditioned for so long?
I mean, is that just purely what it is?
Your mental model and most people's mental model of how the world works is based on the flawed assumption that prices go up and they don't have the you could say you don't have the the the architecture in your brain.
To you until you hear it multiple times to hang this idea off of the prices should fall.
So you can hear you can hear the words.
The free market is deflationary.
And then you could go right back to the world you live in and you go and and then you could be and then you might not be able to see that the world you're living in prices going up has to be based on theft then.
That and you might not see it you can't connect the dots because it's so hard until you realize the depth of what I said when when I said the free market is deflationary.
The natural state of the free market and why is that so?
It's really easy.
You only use things that give you more value.
And every entrepreneur globally is competing to try to give you more value and not just every entrepreneur every person who is working for an entrepreneur.
Every team is trying to compete to give you more value on a global competitive level.
So the only reason that couldn't reach you in giving you more value is something stopping it from giving you more value.
And what's stopping it from giving you more value is massive monetary printing to extract that wealth that should flow you to to you in the form of lower prices.
And by the way, let's just stay on that for a second.
So if that's true and then you walk you start a business tomorrow and if you don't automate your business and remove labor with AI and machines, then no one uses your business and your business fails.
And so so you're you're forced to you have to be more competitive is ruthless to be more competitive.
And then the output of that is people win because prices fall if we lived in that world.
Then then today and you can't know this exact number because it's unknowable from the existing system.
But I would project that the natural rate of deflation in the market today is about 5%.
So every year you would get richer by 5%, even if you did nothing.
But the next year because more people would join that more competition, the next year would be 7.5%.
The next year would be 15%.
You get richer by 15% a year or 30% a year as as technology, AI, automation, robots do more of the work and allow prices to fall faster.
Every every day, every year, you're getting richer and as 8 billion people move because today we have a system that we're
really you have 500 million winners or really a small fraction of 500 million winners.
So like eight people with most with 50% of the wealth of the world.
And then you have another balance with which are the 1%ers.
And then you have the rest of 500 million who are extracting from 7.5 billion people.
The 7.5 billion people, they cannot think like we're thinking right now to be able to contribute to a world that's getting better and better.
They're stuck as slaves in an operating system scared to death.
How do I make enough money to pay my bill, which perperch perpetuates the slavery further and further and further and they're getting further and further away.
And they're wondering how do I keep up?
So you're they're so driven away from a productive society.
They're they're they're they're stuck in that loop.
And so I have massive empathy for why many of those people can't see what I'm talking about because they're so far away from from what's happening.
It would be easy to believe somebody else can solve their problem.
So so you have to look at what both systems are doing.
And so what we just what we just described is we've never lived in a world where eight billion people were in service of eight billion people and prices fell forever.
And it would be really hard if you didn't have the mental lattice for what that world would look like and who would if you'd never seen it before.
No history book ever showed it before.
Who would have that mental lattice?
It would really be hard to describe that to people who aren't don't feel like they're experiencing it from the other system.
And and so that's why that's why even in my book that you could read it today.
People are one of the things that makes me probably most proud about that book is people read it over and over and over again.
And then the light bulb goes on.
The light bulb goes on is and once you're measuring from that system and you are if Bitcoin stayed decentralized and secure.
What I'm talking about is inevitable.
No matter what, it doesn't matter if the existing system prints two trillion dollars, eight trillion dollars, fifty trillion dollars.
It's just different pieces of paper.
And and Bitcoin measured against a piece of paper will look like it's going up.
But all prices relative to Bitcoin are actually going down.
And will forever.
Including the price of fiat money, which is I think again, it's why people fail to flip it.
And money create and or marginal cost of production.
What's the marginal cost of production of a fiat unit?
Zero. It's worth zero.
It's a piece of paper.
It's just a piece of paper describing what you believe it and your value.
And most people are pricing the world from something that has no value over time.
It's going to zero against Bitcoin.
Anyways, I think that this is such an important point and what you mentioned about, you know, the vast, the overwhelming majority of the world.
Not having the architecture yet to be able to understand this.
And and then you can empathize and sympathize with those people to realize, well, this is why they are always looking for political solutions to problems.
Always assuming that, well, if we just get the right person in office next time,
they've promised that they're going to do X, Y, Z.
But ultimately, their promise is that what's underlying the promise is the same guarantee, which is that the money supply will be expanded.
And that expansion of the money supply is a blunt instrument.
It's so important to to re and like put an exclamation point on what you just said.
Right. Voting for somebody within the existing system.
I'm not saying you shouldn't vote to and somebody that might say Bitcoin versus somebody who's going to try to make it harder is probably
more more worth your vote.
But all votes within the existing system are are really a vote to who gets more of the theft that comes from you.
It's just theater. It's complete theater and all of the theft.
And but but now let's go back to five thousand years of human history.
All of those people before us were always tricked.
What's to make you think that you're you're not being right?
And and so you have to be really critical thinking in what's in what's happening here.
If this if this change and when I looked at Bitcoin specifically and when I tried to kill Bitcoin specifically and I went
out when I tried to attack it, all of these lenses for how it would be attacked.
I've thought through at deep, deep level because because what what what's kind of the five thousand years of human history and even today,
you look around at people predicting the future.
Most people don't predict the future.
They predict the present forward.
Right. They can't and and then they get on TV again.
They make keep making the same mistake over and over and over again.
And then they say the same thing and they make a new new prediction and they're still on TV and people follow them.
All it's crazy.
Like if if you if you look at it, it's almost like a inverse bias.
If you're more wrong more often, you get you get if you're but really strong in your beliefs and being wrong.
You're constantly in the media.
It's hard to predict the future and what it has in store for you.
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There's no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
Plus, when you go to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get five percent off, but you also help support this fucking podcast.
So thank you.
We'll call it the Peter Schiff paradox, maybe something like that.
No, I think that's a it's a really important point.
I mean, it's like it goes back was it Einstein who said, you know, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
That's essentially what we have when you're operating within the current system, when you're still trying to affect change.
You know, I think I believe it was you and maybe in our last talk, where you said, you know, you can't change a system from within the system.
You know, and you can't measure it either.
Measure it either.
And then you have to come to the terms that what I said before about the five thousand years.
All of that was from within the system, thinking that there's a change from within the system and they constantly get captured in the same thing.
So what makes us any smarter this time?
We have to be to to be smarter to be able to play a different game.
We have to think at that abstract level.
What is the game that's being played and what and how would it be concentrated?
What would that look like over time?
If most people are unlikely unlikely to see it.
And we have to assume most people are unlikely to see it because because that's been our human history.
So I think that's actually a good jumping off point because you you use this phrase a lot, this caveat, you know, as long as Bitcoin stays
decentralized and secure before.
And I think it's an important caveat to make.
And folks who have listened to you before will probably be familiar with this caveat.
Maybe this is a good place to kind of explain a little bit.
What what you like genuinely mean by that?
What is that actual threat vector?
And then you mentioned earlier saying that at the layer one.
That threat has been fairly minimized and the longer Bitcoin continues to exist.
The I would assume the more that threat is minimized, correct me if I'm wrong.
But then where does that threat start to materialize?
Does it materialize at these other layers that are going to be necessary for more and more people for Bitcoin to scale?
Because we know it scales only at a limited amount on that base layer.
And that's part of what keeps it decentralized and secure.
Yeah. Yeah, the design elements of Bitcoin and you know this really well, the design space of this to to to to create decentralized and security.
It's such a unique. It's a once in a lifetime discovery that I don't think can be discovered again once you've once you've discovered it.
And now now the way that Satoshi did that through proof of work and through kind of in mind and mining himself and creating more and more and and how it emerged.
And it was unseen by the governments till too late to be able to really to to be able to really stop it.
It provided an opportunity for that to achieve escape velocity.
And and well, in the highest level, why do I believe it'll stay decentralized and secure?
Because there's too many people today that know its importance to stay decentralized and secure.
You being one of them, GGB and one of them, Linold and Preston Pish,
like name all of the people like Matt O'Dell name all of these incredible minds that and and I'm not like I could just list names for that.
And then all of the entrepreneurs that are that are different ways to make sure and constantly vigilant against the attacks.
Right. So ocean protocol and mining, right, their ocean and in my trying to create something else just in case, right, that that that mining pools get co opted.
So lots of different different people constantly watching this and the attack vectors that that could could look.
But but something I thought about years ago is is if Bitcoin wasn't a medium of exchange, it would fail as a store of value.
And and not not might fail as a store of value would fail as a store of value.
Right. Gold has failed as a store of value largely.
Why? Because it's not a medium of exchange and by and by controlling the rails on top of the medium of exchange on top of the story value,
you can obfuscate because most people don't count the gold.
They're constantly they're operating in a different level layer and then every time that the gold gets sent, then the gold gets centralized.
Right. And no matter what throughout history, it always gets reset or taken from you and reset throughout history.
So we know it's failed as a store of value.
And why is it failed as a store of value?
It's failed as store of value because it couldn't be a medium of exchange.
It wasn't native to that.
So what would you expect to happen if if you knew this and you also knew there are people that know everything we do about
Bitcoin and like and think about kind of the deep state or or and these giant pockets of money that's coming from stealing from you.
With how are we going to stop this?
You would have to stop it at a later to you would have to you would have to say Bitcoin is a store of value.
And you would have to and you would have to say we're going to move the US dollar on top of on top of it and then fractionalize it.
And then at some point because people wouldn't see the risk in it and Bitcoin measured in US dollars would keep going up in value as more people raced in.
And all of the people making their assumption in US dollars would be cheering that.
Right. Yes, more and more people driving this.
And then and then they would they would dismiss the risk of holding self custody.
They would go into the ETFs.
More people would do that.
They would they would you'd build an entire derivatives instrument machine on top of fracture financialization of Bitcoin on top of that,
which would further move it away from self custody and move and and then then later one would be attacked long time later through that through that centralizing function.
And and why and why.
And this is why that if you go and go back to the 5000 years because we're we're so used to pricing things in the US dollar and we think prices go up.
So it would be perfectly natural to measure Bitcoin going up in US dollars.
Which which most people would fall into the trap of it would be it would be unnatural to price things in Bitcoin going down.
This idea that people say Bitcoin and you know the number go up is that is that a very powerful meme.
But it's ultimately number go down.
It's deflation versus fiat, which is inherently number go up technology.
It's it's inflation.
Yeah. So that's it.
And so if you measure now, if these systems are incompatible together and you're measuring this the incompatibly through the US dollar,
what you're actually saying is I'm trading Bitcoin for a US dollar or I'm thinking in that trade and you're making the US dollar strong or you're allowing this attack vector to to become more prevalent because because of those actions.
So Bitcoin has to be used as a as a medium of exchange to for it to to achieve.
Now, remember, there's two different versions of a world, many different versions of the world. I'm talking about the one that I see the one that I see in Bitcoin,
eight billion people in service of eight billion people and and all of the productive capacity, not misaligned capital, not bullshit, not made up money that influences some monopolies that extract value,
not an extractive system. I am talking about eight billion people in service of eight billion people that we can't even see today.
For that to happen, Bitcoin needs to be used as a medium of exchange and it needs to be native inside, not other tokens and other things that will be captured.
It needs to be and and now if you pull on that thread, we know Bitcoin on layer one can't be used by eight billion people.
So and I want to just say something quickly on that.
It's the irony in talking to people who say it's there's no utility in Bitcoin.
When the utility is the entire global wealth of of a system change.
It's it's it's staggering.
There's never been a bigger utility by having decentralized and secure.
You remove money from the state.
And you allow the free market to work.
There is no bigger.
There is never been a bigger utility.
And and and so and then what comes on top of that as a protocol,
you're you're early in a cycle of coming a building on top of that that turns it into a money that's native to the protocol.
And yet on the utility point, that's always one of the biggest giveaways that somebody has really not thought very hard about this at all.
It's just like, OK, like the biggest red flag you could possibly say in Bitcoin has no utility.
It's just like, I almost I almost pity pity those who say that because you just you truly you don't understand the change that's happening.
And more fundamentally, I don't think you even understand money at all.
But that's, you know, again, where many of us, we all are, I guess, products of the system that has been indoctrinating us for five thousand years.
And you and I were both and we have to remember any one of us as Bitcoiners, too.
We were once those who didn't understand this.
And and so we've all you just it's a journey to be able to get there.
And that journey goes deeper and deeper.
And and something that's this deep that touches all of humanity obviously touches everything else.
It has to.
It's the center of money is global trade and all businesses and all political systems.
And it's a center for everything we do.
We trade with each other to try to get more value around the world.
So so obviously something that impacts that has to impact everything we do.
And this change to this change in an operating system from one that was extractive from us to one that was cooperative,
that was gave back to us would be really difficult to see, especially if you're measuring from the system.
I'm just what I guess what I'm arguing is is everyone measuring US Bitcoin in price of US dollar
or whatever current or whatever piece of paper they want to measure Bitcoin by.
They're reinforcing the trade.
And I think that's a really important point for folks to grok.
Because we now see in the United States as an example, this idea of the Bitcoin strategic reserve being thrown out there.
You know, we we see now politicians, which was inevitable, but starting to realize,
I can't just ignore this Internet corner of magic Internet money weirdos any longer,
turns out their purchasing power is growing exponentially, turns out their cultural power is also growing,
their economic power is growing, their political power is growing.
I need to pay attention to this.
And now you're seeing a lot of this.
I'll call it pandering because I think innately that's what politicians need to do.
You know, talk is cheap.
So you may as well, you know, say whatever is going to get you elected.
But we see now this this idea of this Bitcoin strategic reserve type thing being floated.
And you also see it seems there's been a bit of a shift of late that I've sensed where there seems to be much more political
acceptance of private stablecoins.
And to me, it seems almost it's quite interesting.
And it seems that in many ways, if a private stablecoin, OK, it's not issued by the state,
but it's it's a US dollar instrument and it is surveilled, controlled and basically it's supporting the current Fiat standard.
Is that just a CBDC by another name that's not as explicitly issued by the central bank, but is a de facto CBDC?
Yes, that's actually why this whole thing turns into an Orwellian control system way faster than people realize that are that are pricing in a US dollar.
Because because and again, this is going way back.
But but all of the things that are being played out today,
you could easily predict if you I called you a couple weeks ago, kind of talking about this.
And but you could easily predict all of the things that are playing out if you had to control layer two.
Like what would you do?
You would make it you would make it store value.
You would accept it.
You would make ETFs.
OK, you would you would make a whole bunch of things.
OK, there.
And and then you would and you would need tether or stable coins to purchase your debt.
And as Bitcoin grew, you would have this natural buyer of more and more treasuries so that people could interact in there.
So it would fund that and it would fund the capture of this of this as well.
If most people use that because what is it?
What is a stable coin?
What it's something that's guaranteed if Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure to lose lose value against Bitcoin at the same rate as the US dollar.
It's guaranteed to.
So why would you use that?
Right?
It's that you have a guaranteed loss against Bitcoin.
But if you if you think if you're trading the stability, which most people will do around the world, because they think US dollar is so much better than their currency.
So they'll naturally do it and you'll have all of these people around the world believing that, yes, I finally can use this other thing that is also funding the centralization of everything we're talking about.
And it's a it's a total net.
So so what we're talking about will happen, not might happen will happen naturally.
So if you if you realize that all of these things would happen for sure.
And you realize that for Bitcoin to be a used as a medium of exchange natively, not on not on a stable coin or store some some other instrument of VC instrument and around some other token.
Then then you had to you had to build the same type of.
Safety in the layer two and layer three that exists in or in different types of extending the capability of Bitcoin out into different layers to allow it to be used as a as a transaction medium and medium of exchange around the world.
And you had to and you had to know that these that the momentum from history and the momentum from most people in the world would be moving the other way because they would want Bitcoin to go up in price relative to US dollars.
So they would just be feeding the exact same narrative that would make the centralization of it happen.
And I think that's kind of a perfect transition to talk a little bit about these other layers because again, depending on how deep you've gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you may fully understand the the the power of Bitcoin as a layer one base money.
You may not have gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to see all the incredible development that is happening on top of layer one on layer two and so on.
And some of that development, I know you are particularly tuned into this through ego death.
You guys are investing in companies that are doing this that are trying to build these solutions.
One of those companies is FETI, which is building federated E-cash on top of lightning on top of Bitcoin.
And they just launched officially global, you can go to FETI.XYZ, you can download this from the app store, you can play with this.
This is a really powerful thing that I want to I want to dig into deeply with you because FETI also went open source.
That was part of the announcement that FETI was going open source.
And that is a really powerful thing. It's also somewhat a non standard thing to do when you spend years building out this technology stack, spending all this time and money building a product.
And then deciding, you know, we're going to completely open source this and make it available to anyone who wants to use it.
And maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
Why FETI is so important as we are in this period where you have correctly identified that there is centralization risks happening.
And I would say perpetuation fiat perpetuation risks happening because we are still so many of us are still operating within this fiat system and perhaps unintentionally perpetuating it by our actions.
So why is FETI so important and why is it so important right now?
Yeah, and it's not just FETI.
But so, so, E-cash, FETI, all of developers and lightning, especially self custodial lightning that's creating all of these things, NOSTER, all of the developers and people working on these, all of the projects won't be successful.
But the explosion of opportunities and what's happening at the protocol level is these things are interoperable with each other, which makes other things more successful in time.
And it increases the acceleration of what's happening in the line of human freedom, hope and abundance.
So all of this and we're really early in that all coming together and FETI is one of the pieces that helps that come together.
So how I would look at lightning first or lightning and liquid, bucket lightning liquid in the same bucket.
And I would look at that as and potentially arc if when arc comes out in any sort of way that doesn't require soft work.
I would look at those as an interoperability layer like a highway system.
And so if Bitcoin couldn't be used by 8 billion people, you needed an interoperability highway system that connected to people's cities.
And so Bitcoin prices, more and more people use it, the fees will go up on Bitcoin layer one.
And those fees going up makes it not being able to use for cups of coffee because the fees are too high.
So then lightning fills that void and allows it to move to maybe with further work on billions.
Maybe hundreds, millions, maybe billions, but allows it to be a super highway network.
The way the lightning was first seen though, I think many people thought each bit coin had to run their own lightning node.
And by doing so, then you had liquidity problems inside those nodes.
And it would be an analogy I often use is instead of building a super highway network, you would build all back lane one way roads.
And you can imagine the traffic accidents and what that would look like and the congestion if your super highway looked like that.
And so if you saw lightning liquid that works as that intercompatibility layer, then you'd see FETI as the Fedes or Fedement or Cashew as the cities where you could extend that for almost no fees.
So fees would be higher on base lane and then they would move higher on lightning and then it would push up to almost negligible or negligible fees in Fedement or Cashew.
Where you have complete privacy of transactions, complete privacy of communications inside a network that is completely immune from what's happening in the world.
And let's imagine you were in North Korea and you had no money and somebody who was in the Guardians of FETI wanted to set up Guardians outside of North Korea and those Guardians couldn't be found.
Then you would have money constantly. No communication could be packed. It would be completely private.
You'd have money that would be circular money that people could send you all day long.
No one could stop that or know that it's even happening.
And if you wanted to delete it off your phone and then put it back on, all of your money would be there still.
So to be able to do that, to be able to create that kind of third rail or third layer, you could call it as second and a half layer or whatever,
then what are the trade-offs of that? The trade-offs with FETI specifically are the Guardians that would, it works like multi-sig.
So the Guardians at the bottom of the multi-sig, people would run software on different computers and they would set up the rules for the interoperability of eCash on top of Bitcoin.
And so the rules may be one Bitcoin in, one Bitcoin out, and those Guardians would set up all the transactions.
The Guardians couldn't see any of the transactions on top. You can't see anything that's happening on top or any of the communications,
but they would set up the rules by which Federation runs by.
So what is the risk to that? The risk is what if the Guardians conspired against you and fractionalized your Bitcoin and you didn't know?
So how would you solve that risk if you were a FETI and what FETI is going to do is essentially, and what I think is going to happen naturally in the free market?
Tons of these are going to get set up. And then what you'll do is you'll create a bank run on your Federation to make sure they're fully reserved.
And you could do that at bank run by pressing that fast and move all your money from one to another.
And so you might be in five different federations and constantly create different bank runs to make sure that they're fully reserved.
But that seems like a pretty good trade-off of risk to be able to put all the control in your hands,
to be able to allow you to operate safely, privately.
In a world that's becoming more centralized and more controlled and all communication channels are being monitored,
you need something outside of that. You need something that's outside of that that creates circular economies that cannot be infiltrated.
I think that this is such a powerful, powerful piece of technology.
And you had a really great quote. I think you posted it on Nostra.
I'll read it just because I've read it a few times and I think it's just quite spot-on.
And you said, in a world where dictators use money and data as a weapon against free speech and individual rights and freedoms,
and the surveillance state is emerging everywhere,
this freedom and privacy protocol on top of Bitcoin is a critical path to bringing Bitcoin to billions of people.
And I think that's incredibly succinctly put.
And people tend to think, you know, there's the old trope, you know, why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?
And for anyone who wants to take, like, a real deep dive into FETI, I did a conversation with Obi, the CEO.
You can go and listen to that. I did another one with Callie on a cashew and eCash if you want to dive deep into that.
And these are really, these are incredible protocols, the idea of near perfect privacy, right?
Like, truly, nobody can see and it's a black box of sorts.
And that is incredibly powerful. But I have to also wonder, many governments around the world are not going to like that.
Because it's not just a black box for your money, that's actually a black box for your communication, too.
Your communications within your Federation are equally private. It's data going through that Federation.
So, I mean, how do you look at those risks? And is that why it's so important that we, you know, bring awareness to this technology now that this is out there just to try and scale it up as much as possible?
I've been on a weekly call with Obi for the last two and a half years on what would come, what would the risk be, what would happen,
and then how do we build this in a way that is in line with the principles of Bitcoin and in line with the human freedom abundance, the vision that I talk about?
How do you not get captured if this is this powerful technology? And what do you have to do to be?
And so why this has been built in an enterprise-grade way and why we delayed launch is to be able to create it in that way.
And recently, you probably saw it on Nostar, there was, and something we hadn't even expected, some of the Guardians that set up their first Federations actually mentioned Feddy in the website that they would have filled out the DNS.
Right? And that would be like, nobody looks for like, it's shutting down the DNS at the DNS level is like deep state operation.
So, so a couple of the Guardians were turned off because the DNS was shut off of those, which means, which means, by the way, that's, that's awfully flattering to have such a young company
that is so important to try to stop. But, and so that's resolved. That's, you can move DNS, eventually you're going to be able to tie it into Nostar.
So this is built in a way that's completely anti-fragile. So you could today, now, if you had technical chops, you could go and set up your own Federation today.
With five of your friends. And you could run a family Federation, you could run, you could set up tons of these Federations for different, different, different people.
And that can happen right now. And it's so hard to find the Guardians, just like it's so hard to find the nodes in Bitcoin.
And that's what keeps it. So by having more of these Federations and having more nodes and everything else, it almost becomes uns, not almost, it becomes unstoppable.
So then where is the risk? That's why FETI went open source is because the risk is in the company or the people that are doing it.
And you had to put in what they, what they did is put, if FETI ever gets stops as a company, this code is immediately open source, completely open source.
So that, so that it created a way to negotiate with doing the right thing in a way that couldn't be stopped.
Like a dead man switch of sorts.
I think that that's really important because again, depending on where you live in the world, depending on how much you pay attention, depending on how much you use various social media platforms or protocols,
you may have a varying opinion of what you believe the current state of the censorship industrial complex is.
If you live in an authoritarian country, where if you live in North Korea, well, my God, it's so intense that you don't even have to worry about it because you can't even get internet.
So, but if you live in a place like China, you have a different level of that, right?
You have a different level of surveillance. You have the Great Firewall, which protects you from so many dangerous things that might be out there on the old worldwide web.
If you live in America right now, if you live in Canada, if you live in Europe, it's getting to be an interesting case with how they're treating various forms of speech as very jailable offenses.
But the, again, the so-called developed world, the Western world still enjoys at least a modicum of free expression, free speech.
You know, America, I would say very much so, as through all its faults, it is still somewhat of a bastion of free speech.
Now, we've also seen, you peek behind the curtain, you see some things like the, happened when the Twitter files, you see that there are a lot, there's a lot more censorship going on, there's a lot more suppression of information than most people realize.
And so much of that censorship also inevitably gets tied back to censoring you from the financial system as well.
Because money is that ultimate, it's the, you need freedom to use money if you want to have the freedom to exercise your speech, right?
This seems like a great workaround for that. And again, you correctly mentioned there's trade-offs, right? Yeah, it's not base-chain Bitcoin.
But it's not trying to be, it's trying to provide something else, right? It's trying to provide that privacy that layer one Bitcoin cannot provide, because it's a transparent protocol.
Let's play on this too. Let's tie it into some of the other altcoins.
Okay.
And most of the altcoins and most of the idea behind some of the altcoins were really poorly thought out in something.
But let's look at some of the ones that still people use today and why they would use them in Monero or something that would be private, would be an important use case.
And a lot of people that would care about that would probably agree with me that Bitcoin would have been captured at layer two and three because it's open network.
And you had to have something outside of the control because as a control structure got worse and worse, it would, and everybody centralized against it. Of course, everyone centralizing against it would attack it, right?
And so they see themselves in another coin that couldn't be decentralized and secure.
And, and might, and, or even if you went Bitcoin cash as example, it was from big blocks and I'm completely against. But if you, if you said, if you steelman the other argument and they said, you have to use it as a currency, otherwise it'll get controlled.
You could see some people inside that thinking that has to happen and it does have to have to happen.
I think they were just misguided in how it would happen. It would happen in layers on top of a protocol that was decentralized and secure.
So what we're seeing right now in lightning and what we're seeing in FETI is offering the different critical pieces of the infrastructure that are required to keep it decentralized and secure on a base that's decentralized and secure and bounded by energy.
And so, but, but if you just kind of look back over the history and all the fights Bitcoin, everything else, you could see some of the thoughts on some of the other things were true.
We're still needed until they weren't when you had something native to Bitcoin that was on top of it that it could, it could get, it could extend the decentralization of security of Bitcoin into a whole bunch of different, different areas.
So that's what's happening now.
It's very exciting that that's happening. And again, I want to drive home your point there, which is that it's the idea of trying to build a castle on quicksand or build it on, you know, brand it, right?
You, if you want to build something that's going to last and not just be a nice little experiment for a few people, it needs to be built on a rock solid foundation.
That is why you cannot sacrifice decentralization or security to your, to your point at the base layer.
Because if you don't have the base layer that is decentralized and secure and is just completely, you know, as close as one can get to unstoppable, then anything else that you're any other cool little whoopsie do is that you're doing on top of that don't really matter.
That's it's performative, right? It's performative.
And so we have that base layer now, we have that decentralized and secure base layer.
We actually have that here too, and we now have the other layer. These are all, these are all live.
These are all, we have all the technology right now that to be able to explode this in, in a medium of exchange, in a private secure way, in a, it's all the technologies there already at a protocol layer.
And so actually, just a question based on that, because that's, I think something that people miss when people, let's say in the larger crypto space that are proposing all these neat little experiments that they have on, on Solana or on Ethereum, all these, you know, various,
these cool little things they show off at their dev conferences and then that people go on CNBC VC funds to pump their new allocation to Solana or whatever.
So much is already built on Bitcoin and Bitcoin layers and is live. And I think that somehow gets lost.
And maybe it's a good thing that some of it gets lost because some things like, like FETI, like E-cash more, more broadly as well.
Those are such powerful pieces of technology.
And you do want to make sure they can get off the ground a little bit and get in use so that this, these layers of this protocol become like the Hydra.
You know, so if you chop off one head, two more grown its place and it keeps on expanding.
But you see this from a different lens because you are actively an investor in this space.
You're, you know, one of the good VCs, you guys are funding open source Bitcoin development.
Why do you think that there's, again, is this just a people aren't paying attention or is it that they don't want to pay attention to all the things that are being built?
So one of the key pieces is protocols don't come along very often and they come in layers and people can't see.
So people that the initial layer only does one thing, wants that thing to do everything else.
So they try to congest the initial layer with other things.
So all of the Bitcoin improvement protocols you could put into that bucket.
I need it to do this too, to be able to do my thing.
So you, so you, so you have that and it's resisted.
It's resisted all of these.
It needed the 2017 fork, right, to be able to resist it.
But it's resisted all of these changes to be able that would have centralized it.
And so, so what, but then if people can't do the thing they want to, if they're just getting rich by holding a Bitcoin and, but they want to, they want to do something,
then I'm going to create something else, a token that's going to do something else and convince everybody, my tokens, the Bitcoin and, and you could easily in a world that's moving from a system that's of total abuse and extraction and these people are getting rich.
If you had a new one, of course the market would look like that, right?
And then, and most people wouldn't understand the protocol because they never see protocols.
They only protocols come around so rarely.
They would think it's a technology and it would be super easy to conflate people thinking technology that this new block chains better.
But it's a protocol.
It's a protocol that's bounded by energy and it doesn't care what you think of it.
Tick tock next block is bounded by energy.
So if you want to print more pieces of paper, if you want to expand your government about against it, it doesn't care.
It just keeps on going.
And now, because that's so strong and so like it built on bedrock, then other layers are being built on top of it that are utilizing extending its decentralization and security out to more and more use cases on top of it without needs for other tokens, without need for somebody else on a control structure on top of it.
And so how does, if you just specifically say, how does FETI achieve that? It's actually the same thing that kind of many people in Bitcoin first saw, or half any being one of them, thinking about eCash as Bitcoin banks, right?
And you could go back to the, there'd be need to be banking on top of this that fully reserved Bitcoin to be able to extend this.
And if you, and so he put a post on the message board back 14 years ago about this.
So he obviously saw it as a protocol.
He saw what you would need to do.
And the end some of this technology that is now emerging is just unified with what's happening there.
And so you resolve that risk, or you resolve that paradox of not being able to scale by decentralizing and scaling to putting you in control, like putting you in control, you walk or running your own federation.
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't cheat people, right?
And so you put together five different walkers and say, this is this federation, people are pretty sure you don't cheat them.
They might even, if you're really close friends or your family, you're probably not going to cheat them.
And so you secure yourself by either doing it yourself or doing it through somebody that you really trust the same way as you do with multi-sig today.
This is such an interesting point because I think that when a lot of folks maybe struggle to wrap their heads around FETI, it's always, well, what if they rug you?
What if they rug you?
And good, it's a good thing that people are asking that question, right?
And you already previously just, they should, that's the first question you should ask, right?
And you already discussed, okay, you could have sweeps, you could have auto sweeps even, where every whatever X days, I want to auto sweep, I want to cause a bank run, these X days to make sure they're fully reserved.
But what I think people are missing a little bit is we've been so indoctrinated with these massive, bloated, centralized control structures that we assume that that's what it's going to look like with that these federations are going to be the same thing.
That they're going to be these massive, huge, you know, bloated structures that they can rug so much Bitcoin from people when in reality, this is a return to a more localism type of thinking, a return to true, not decentralization as a buzzword that's used to sell another VC token.
True decentralization, localism, communities, families, small organizations, but they're all interoperable with each other.
Yeah, I wouldn't even know, right?
The rails on and off this, I use FETI as my primary wallet now.
And the rails on and off this when I'm not inside a federation, making payments in a federation to other members in that federation, I'm using lightning as a interoperability, that highway network.
And I wouldn't know, like it works so seamless seamlessly.
And it does exactly what you just said.
So now you have thousands and then millions of these, millions.
And that becomes that when you said the Hydra, right?
Try to, if there were one or two or three of them, they would be stopped.
If there's millions of them, just like if there were one or two or three nodes in Bitcoin, it would be stopped.
If there's hundreds of thousands or 50,000 of them or 10,000 or millions of them, they can't be stopped.
And every time you try to stop one, 10 more grow up in its place.
Why? Because the transactions cost almost nothing on them.
They're so private, it's a 100x system change.
It's 100x advantage to the system you're in today.
And as more and more people start to realize that, and they're going to be forced to realize it because they're inside this thing, this creeping authoritarian socialism state that they don't know is actually stealing their power and energy.
More and more are going to move over and it's unstoppable.
And I think it's important to point out that this isn't just like a 100x improvement.
If we just look at like transaction costs, which are essentially like near free there, infinitesimal within a federation, right?
But the privacy and unsensorability within these federations, I think, is like it's hard to even quantify that because that's not something we have at all in the current system.
If you're using the US dollar rails in any digital way, if you're using US dollars in cash or any fiat currency in cash, yes, you do have some semblance of privacy, right?
I can hand you five dollars or what you use up there, loonies, is that what you call them?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, we can do that in a very private way.
If nobody's watching, nobody knows that that five dollars has changed hands.
But if you're using digital rails for any fiat system, you are being surveilled from start to finish.
And there is no semblance of custody there as well.
Not even that there's a trade off of custody.
You don't own that.
The dollars in your bank aren't yours.
And then you go to the bank and ask for $1,000 in cash and you have an entire laundry list of questions asking why.
If you have to ask those questions, it's not your money, right?
It's their lending.
That money is their money, right?
You shouldn't have to ask those questions on your money.
And so we're going to return to a world, but it's going to be really chaotic.
Because most people are measuring what's happening through that same system that's extracting from them.
And I want to ask you a little bit.
Just kind of, it's so hard to conceptualize what this starts to look like, right?
What the, I agree there's going to be a massive period of chaos, which may be very uncomfortable, will be uncomfortable.
But as, I mean, when I think of federations, kind of the first thing I thought of was like,
oh, this is like an even more decentralized free banking era type of thing,
but with actual, you know, more verifiability in your reserves, right?
But it's optionality for people ultimately.
And optionality means greater freedom.
Like that is literally the freedom to choose where you want to deposit your, you know,
the scarcest asset humanity has ever discovered and be able to use it in a private and, you know, a really convenient way.
But what, what is your vision for the future look like?
What, what does this actually, what is the world on not just a sound money standard look like?
Because we could have a world that has that, but where there is still complete and perhaps more strengthened US dollar hegemony.
Because we've, we've missed the medium of exchange part and we've just focused on the store value.
What does it look like in your view?
Yeah, that's actually why I'm, these things are incompatible over the long time together.
So in one system, Bitcoin, if it stays decentralized and secure, then all prices fall relative to it.
To stay decentralized and secure, it requires being a medium of exchange.
These are the tool, these are the tools, these are the early indication tools or protocols
that are going to ensure that it remains decentralized and secure and ensure that it moves into a medium of exchange.
Without them, it would be highly likely that it would get captured.
Because, because through the, essentially what all you would do is US dollar to gold, US dollar to petrodollar system, US dollar to Bitcoin,
nothing would have changed.
Right, and that, and, and, and, and I would, I would say the vast majority of even Bitcoiners today,
because the Bitcoiners are such a deep hole, are still measuring Bitcoin and price in the US dollar.
And so I saw one of the questions that will help people understand what I'm talking about here.
And we'll try to, to kind of look at it from both systems and the question, but it had something about the financialization.
Right, something and help them to understand pricing in Bitcoin.
And so over the last 30 years, everything you've ever known, and most people have made all of their money,
not really made money, the entire wealth of the world is an artificial construct of extracting from some people, giving it to the other,
through an instrument of financialization.
And then through that financialization of a lens, then it would look like houses have gone way up in price.
Because they could, they would be, they would act as a store of value, because cash couldn't act as a store of value,
because it was an inferior store of value.
So you'd have to find other stores of value.
The stores of value became houses, the stores of value became stocks.
And you start getting higher and higher bid prices on all of these stores of value that reinforce,
instead of a house being a utility, where you raise your family,
it becomes a store of value.
And then everybody races into the store of value, because if they're not in the store of value and only in cash, they're getting destroyed.
So everybody goes and makes the same trade, pushing it up higher and higher and higher,
further away from its utility value as a store of value.
And then, and then enter Bitcoin and enter Bitcoin is repricing all of those to their utility value.
And, and, and, and, and, or the marginal cost of production, everything on the planet.
So if you measured both those, this house I've said that before was $1.4 million four years ago.
Now it's $2.1 million Canadian pieces of paper in Bitcoin.
It was 300 Bitcoin four years ago.
Now it's 22 Bitcoin in four years.
This house will be two Bitcoin.
And so, and all Bitcoiners are facing the same choice.
When do I want to buy this asset?
Because a lot of Bitcoiners want to buy a house because they've been so locked out of the housing market because everybody's racing into it,
leveraged against it.
And so they're, so they're can't wait to spend their Bitcoin on a house.
And everybody is able to make that choice whenever they want, but it's going to keep happening.
Right.
In 10 years, this house might be point one of a Bitcoin.
And, and so if I had a whole bunch of Bitcoin,
as that as Bitcoin is repricing this into the house to its utility value,
I can make a choice anytime to be able to use my Bitcoin to be able to price my price my house.
If I price it today, what I'm really paying for is a way overpriced house.
Because because people see it as a store of value,
and it's a really bad store of value compared to Bitcoin.
Really bad store of value.
Now, if you want a house because you because your family and your neighborhood and everything else,
you should do that.
You should do whatever you want to it, your choice.
But it but if you're in the store of value that everyone else is in because it's the only game in town,
there's a new game in town.
I think that that is a really it's a difficult it's a tough pill to swallow.
It's going to be for a lot of people.
But I think it's a very good one to swallow.
Because that's what your house should be, right?
Like it should be where you should be buying it because you say, well, I want to live here with my family.
I want to raise my kids here.
I want to make memories here.
I want I want this because of the utility that I get out of it.
How does this look different?
Yeah, they look like a neighborhood of young families that was a community.
Houses don't look like that anymore because all over the world,
in other currencies that are debasing just as fast or faster,
they're trying to get into your your store as a value to.
So this is how so you have a global phenomenon bidding up houses far beyond on the utility value as a store value.
And all of the debt underlying that that is contingent.
It's a contingent liability against the entire system.
So it has to keep going higher because you're having to debate.
Because if that debt became due, if you didn't inflate that debt away,
it's over the whole thing, the whole thing crumbles.
And so those assets are are a core part.
And so as so as commercial real estate and all of these things are interlocked into
inefficient stores of values, really terrible stores of value, but they were the best thing.
They were the best stores of value for the last 30, 40 years.
So everyone rushes into that trade thinking that I have to have a house to protect my wealth.
Well, and the sad thing is too, that if you look at like the compound annual growth rate of the money supply,
depending on what you look at, like, but even just in the U.S.,
you're looking at like high 6% close to 7% for the CAGR of the money supply,
which is also over a longer period about what the housing market increased by.
It's about what the S&P increases by.
It's about what everything that is supposed to be a benchmark or a good place to store your value increases by.
But that means it's not increasing, you're just treading water.
Worse, it only captures half the equation.
The other half of the equation that's stolen from you naturally is the actual deflation rate that should be in a house.
The actual deflation rate of all the materials and all of the other things that as efficiency.
Think about what a lumber mill looks like today versus what it looked like 100 years ago.
Think about what any mining looks like.
It's all automated, completely almost automated.
And these things are highly efficient operations that would mean all of the different products relative to the house
should be far cheaper, not just neutral.
So prices should have fallen in all of it.
And I think that is perhaps one of the most difficult things for folks to understand,
even if they may understand that,
ah, okay, inflation is this bad thing and I'm feeling poorer because my purchasing power is dropping because of inflation.
They're not actually seeing the extent of the rot that is there.
They're not actually seeing the extent of the theft, which is you're not stealing, as you said, you're not stealing from the baseline.
You're stealing from negative.
You're stealing from deflation and then making up for it and then some.
Right now, if you so.
And as a result of that, you have to make bad investments.
Right. So you have to misallocate capital faster.
Why government expands as a result, you have to constantly misallocate capital faster and constantly create next waves of hype
to be able to create more misallocation of capital, to be able to to drive this instability in the system,
to ever increasing, which is a centralization of a function.
Most people, even if you said today,
people measuring the CPI and they're cheering because CPI is starting to come down or not coming down quite fast enough.
And then there's going to be lower interest rates.
So they're more liquidity.
They're actually cheering.
The market is cheering.
You're going to have to debase currencies more.
Pump my bags, right?
You know, it's wild.
It's wild.
And they're they're all measuring from zero inflation instead of an implied productivity rate in an economy,
which should be negative.
It's it's it is kind of crazy that, like, I feel like a lot of people also get to perhaps this nihilistic point where it's like,
yes, screw it, print the money, pump my bags, like I hold enough assets, they're all they're all going to just go up like gangbusters.
And when you when you start easing like crazy and getting that printer humming again.
But what a sad state of affairs that that's where we've gotten to where it's like, well, yeah, even for people like a lot of Bitcoiners,
we're like, well, yeah, I know it's theft.
I know that inflation is is theft.
But, you know, at least that theft is pumping my bags to and like, I get it, you know, you're in the system, play the system for what it is.
But I just I think it's it's kind of sad at a certain point.
So it isn't then you could say the positive side.
All of these individual actions in this, when somebody is going to sell their Bitcoin for for US dollars and then make that trade is just going to create more hardcore
Bitcoiners and more people who understand this.
If you think about all of the positive in this network and all of the people, even through these conversations that you get a nuance that's a little deeper,
takes you somewhere deeper.
And then once you're into that, you can't unsee it and you start to apply your.
So you said something about the VC ego death capital and we said one of the good guys in that in in this.
Well, we started ego death capital because I saw this future.
And then how do you accelerate this future with with the best entrepreneurs and I and and I wouldn't have seen what was possible before.
I just kind of I needed to put my time into this to and and help this ecosystem thrive.
And I wouldn't have I wouldn't have seen all of what's happening.
I wouldn't have been able to work with these brilliant minds in creating this unless I did.
So so I'm so much the richer for it.
I can't believe it.
And and and when you see that and then other people are joining their voices and and and so that that's accelerating as we start to understand.
And once we understand kind of what this looks like at a deeper level, it touches everything else.
More people start to understand what it's and they move their time to it too.
So you could be you could get sad about the state of what the world looks like or you could get massively optimistic about what it's going to look like from what everybody's doing.
And and I should clarify, I am massively optimistic.
I know, I know, you know, I and and actually I have a it's a good spot for a question that we got on on Noster,
which I thought was a good one.
Somebody was wondering what tangible tips do you have for transitioning your mindset to view the world outside of the current system to,
you know, the person said, I've come to understand the need for this, but I have a hard time executing in the real world.
Then they're almost there.
So then then whoever wrote that and you can reach out directly to me and I'm happy to kind of pull aside
this conversation around tangible tips.
But once you can hold two opposing thoughts in your mind and understand what what the what the base reality of the one thought kind of the money printer
and what the world is going to turn into on under that.
And you could say this day is decentralized and secure.
And what does this do?
Then you start to say, then you start to make choices about which system do you want to give more energy to?
And as you start to realize, I said it early in our conversation, why in 5000 years of human history,
we're always deceived and that what we make, we make the system the entire world is out of our thoughts and actions.
It doesn't just happen to us, we are part of the thing that makes that informs the world.
So if we're part of the thing that always has concentrated this before, then what I would argue is these two systems,
the one that's that you're measuring from tip most people are measuring from is is really strong and it's hold over you without you knowing it.
But the question that that person just asked is I now start to see them.
Once you start to see them and you can hold both thoughts in your head, now you can move intentionally some more action into the new system.
And that and that might be if you're spending if you just understand it now and you hold Bitcoin and self custody and you're just it depends where you are on on on the paradigm.
But you'll you might want to run a node.
That might be your next step.
You might want to go to some meetups and meet other people that you might want to meet some of the developers that are working in this in the system.
And as you connect with those people, you're going to see opportunities everywhere because the world's full of massive problems as we transition,
which creates opportunities for those that are leading the transition.
So so there's just so much abundance.
Once you start to unlock what this new world is actually emerging and what what that looks like,
that you'll probably want to spend more time.
And the question is, how do I start?
What's an open decentralized permissionless protocol?
You just go, you just start.
And that might seem super simple, but it is that simple.
You just you could write an article, you could share on Nostar, you could you could do what Walker is doing, you create a podcast.
There's nothing stopping you from doing whatever you could create a business that brings value to tens of people or a billion dollars.
You could start your own fediment to help other people understand FETI.
You could do all sorts of things.
The key is just starting.
I think that that is is such good advice.
And this it answers one of the other questions that somebody had as well, which was for plebs who aren't engineers or entrepreneurs.
What how can you get involved in this?
And that's the answer is just just start and you may not think you're an entrepreneur also.
But perhaps you are if you're willing to take on some risk and to try new things.
If there's one thing I've learned about about Bitcoiners, it's that in person, especially when you get around Bitcoiners,
like it is really a it's an inspiring thing.
And you never know what might come out of it.
You never know what conversation might spark something.
But you but you know, it is worthwhile to go and to meet people in person, you know, and remain anonymous, do whatever you want there.
Respect your own privacy, reveal what you want.
But it really does make a difference to meet folks in person.
There's I tend to think there isn't anybody I meet who doesn't have a superpower at something that they're they're so exceptional part of.
It might be a narrow thing that they're so great at that I'm not great at.
And I look at that and go, wow, if I only had that little bit of that.
And I try to incorporate all the people I meet and think, wow, what those things.
Are the things that are valued in the market today?
Why wouldn't they be valued in the market tomorrow?
So if you're if you're thinking about the thing that you're really great at and you can provide value to somebody else or create,
whether it's creating your own company or provide value of doing the thing you're really great at within another company that's creating value for others,
then go make those relationships or go start that company because and and learn what it takes and kind of it.
It's a great way to iterate.
But all of these skill sets are broadly needed as we reconstruct on top of Bitcoin, too.
And you know, at the very least, go start a podcast because we we need we need to have a critical overwhelming mass of Bitcoin podcast to get just completely
just completely flood out all of the fiat finance podcasts that are out there.
So until we can do that, until we can 51 percent attack, we're not there yet.
Yeah, look at you, Walker, and just think about the things you've learned just by writing by doing the podcast and and like how how much more at the front edge of learning this
are because you get to interview all of the things that are and it's just like in some ways, you almost do it for free because not for anything else,
just because it's so valuable in your own learning.
And it's true, like I'm grateful to have a wonderful sponsor in in Bitbox, who is an open source, everything company.
And that's great.
But I was doing this for free and I would continue to do it for free, independent of that, because you're exactly right.
This is I mean, nothing can get you inspired about the future, like talking to the people who are helping to build it.
And and to realize that maybe you can have some small part in that, even if it's just helping to spread that message.
And to anyone listening, you may think like, oh, I don't have that many followers on, you know, on Noster or on Twitter or anything yet.
But that's OK, because even if the message that you're helping spread reaches a few more people who need to hear it, even if it just reaches within your own circles in your personal life,
that's a really powerful thing.
But it's start, it has to start with you taking some sort of action.
And you know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, like it's true.
You just have to start.
Yeah.
At least that's my own recommendation or or what you could say, feeling of what I've got from it by do by putting all of my energy in it, removing my energy from the existing system and moving my energy to this.
It's just been a mere reflection of abundance.
It's just all it's it's just all is flooding.
I can't believe I get to do what I get to do with the people I get to do do it with.
It's just so unreal.
And I wouldn't have known that before I took the step.
It's a beautiful thing.
And you know, Jeff, I want to be want to be conscious of your time here.
Do you have time for one more question?
OK, because I I realized we didn't get a chance to talk about Noster and I would be remiss if I didn't if I didn't at least talk about it a little bit with you because you have been somebody who has been active on Noster from very early on.
You clearly saw the potential in this.
I've noticed you're you're still somewhat active on Twitter, but it's it's it's toned down.
I haven't been shifting much more your energy.
It's been months right since you posted.
I haven't posted on Twitter in probably three months, four months.
Yeah.
So so for folks, because I still see when when I post about Noster on Twitter, I still see a lot of people at Bitcoiners, too, who by all rights, should be some of the first to get why Noster is such an important
protocol for free and open communication.
There still seems to be a piece missing.
Do you think that this is just a matter of not filling and not, you know, meeting their specific needs that they have yet?
Do you think that what is the next wave of adoption look like for Noster?
Is it by force because of, you know, do people get smart by force because of censorship, because of crackdowns and centralized platforms?
Or is it because of all the things that are being built out in the ecosystem within Noster because that interoperability?
Okay, a combination.
So Noster, FETI, E-cash, Lightning, all of these things come together to create something different than you can even imagine today.
So much more valuable.
And so when you're competing, let's just say Noster as a Twitter clone where it started.
So you have an advantage that nobody can shut you off.
You have a early network and you'd have to be pretty visionary to be able to go spend all your time there, even to the developers and going to build there to see what that was.
And then to move all of your time there when everybody else is on a different platform, you wouldn't get the same feedback.
So it would be less valuable even though, so you would have to value the ability not to get shut off way higher than the utility value of all your network.
Right?
So what did I have to do by leaving Twitter? I gave up 370,000 people that followed all my stuff and retweeted and said,
see ya, I'm spending all my time here now because I wanted to give my energy to the world I want to see emerge.
Now I don't judge anybody for not wanting to do that at their time, but what you're going to find is more and more people are going to make that choice.
Either by force or by, not by force, but by realizing the risks of centralization and what's happening and that Elon isn't a god.
And they're going to start to move their time over to something that's like this.
Or by all of the development that's happening that's going to provide like 10 or 100x better value than Twitter can provide.
Because open protocols win, because all of the development is interchangeable with it.
And so the jigsaw piece of puzzles that other people build on and extend the functionality.
And so we're really early in that happening.
And I said this a long time ago, I think, really early.
I hacked Twitter when it was early.
I said this in my book.
I wrote a blog post that said why every CEO must be on Twitter.
And then I was on the front page of Twitter for two months along with 10 other CEOs, including Bill Gates and others.
And I was the only name that didn't belong on that list because they needed people to reference the platform.
And those things are the things that grew Twitter.
And then more people there, more conversations there.
Everybody wanted to be there and everybody raced in.
So by being early and doing that, you provide tons of people social proof that you're one of the people other people should follow.
And so that just kept on growing on Twitter, even if I did nothing.
Like if you looked at the number of tweets I actually put out over the years versus what most people put out.
Versus the follower ratio, it's a staggering follower to tweet ratio.
Which either means one of two things. I hacked it or the content was valuable.
Maybe a little bit of both.
So what does that mean on Nostra?
Early on, if you provide value, you can create an incredible outsized return because people will follow you.
And then as more people join the network, they'll look to people who are providing value.
And they'll move more and more to you and you'll have something that...
But because it's a protocol level, no one can ever take those followers away from you.
No one can ever take your content away from you.
The clients are competing for you.
So all of the protocol development and all of the client development is in service of you.
And you're really be a really good steward, be really helpful, be help other people.
And you'll build a really big audience in this network.
And as you can already see it in Nostra today, if you go here versus a year ago,
where we are, you can see how much more...
Before you had to go back and forth to Twitter to see what was going on.
Now you don't.
It's true and the pace of development on Nostra has just been insane.
Not just from a usability of Twitter clones perspective, which is also true.
But from a building out all sorts of different things, like Pablo building out Wikipedia
and highlighter and these things that are just truly amazing, like these incredible tools.
And they just didn't exist a year ago and now they're there and people are using them.
And they're very useful and they're easy to use and getting easier to use.
And it's amazing to kind of watch this happen in real time.
And I feel very privileged to be a small part in this growing network.
But it's a good place to be.
You're the Nostra.
Well, this is true.
Not a small part.
We're all the Nostra though.
But it's cool to watch this emerge and all the people that you've been building with
kind of emerge with it.
It's awesome.
Yeah, it was a very surreal moment when all of a sudden I created a mid-journey, create me a purple ostrich.
I actually asked it to give me an ostrich with three heads because I wanted to have a hydra type visualization of an ostrich.
Mid-journey screwed up, it just gave me one head.
But I was like, well, this one looks pretty good.
I guess I'll use this.
Then all of a sudden you see Jack tweeting this out and it's like, oh, wow, okay.
I guess this is just, we're going with this now.
It's a purple ostrich.
It's awesome.
Because JB55, Will Kasserin, the Domus creator, wrote a GPT bot within Nostra that I asked to write me a joke about Nostra.
It was a terrible joke.
What do you call a nosy ostrich and ostrich?
And like, it's just funny.
Like, things just happen and then all of a sudden they stick.
And then all of a sudden you've got a bunch of people using it and building incredible stuff on it.
And I'm grateful to developers who have shifted their time and attention to Nostra because that's what makes it better.
Totally.
It's incredible.
But Nostra is a good note to end on.
Last question.
This is a completely non-secretary.
But are you reading anything right now or perhaps working on your next book?
I know you probably get that a lot.
Yeah, I just started writing on a new book.
Did you really?
Yeah.
And there's going to be some coming out.
I'm helping with kind of behind scenes some of their coming out.
But it's just, this is such a deep journey and where this goes and the new system change and what this means.
And what I find one of the biggest blocks for most people is whatever their baggage they're holding from the existing system,
they're attaching that to what this new system looks like.
So, anyways, I'm going to write a book that goes really deep on where we're going in the future
based on this being decentralized, secure, and how it gets there.
Wow, I'm excited.
Is it a, do you view it as a continuation of the price of tomorrow or a completely different kind of paradigm you turn operate under?
So, if I'm being honest on the price of tomorrow, I don't know if you even know this.
I never read any Austrian economics before about reading the price of tomorrow.
I didn't, a lot of the stuff that people talk about, you could see through different lenses through history.
I just came to the same conclusion just through this same free market and the technology lens in a different way.
And then just realized how fast technology was going to move in the future and how bad and how critical it was.
We had decentralized and secure money or protocol so that prices could fall and we could achieve human abundance out of the free market.
So, but you remember in the book, I explained a lot about the problem.
I explained what would happen us versus them as this.
So you could look at it today and it's just, it's been perfect at describing how the systems would emerge and as they fought against each other.
But I only put Bitcoin in as a paragraph at the end because I felt it was two things.
I wasn't sure yet on Bitcoin.
I had, at that time, I had some Bitcoin but I was doing it buying a lot more during writing the book because I was more sure.
But I still thought it had a 5% probability of failure in time.
And then, and so I wanted people to understand the problem so they could understand the solution.
And then I went from that time and you can probably see even my transition through a podcast over years and my writing over years.
I've gotten way, way deeper under what this means, like way deeper what this means and why I think it will stay decentralized and secure.
But actually what it requires to stay decentralized and secure and what that looks like.
And so it's probably a part two of, so I effectively left the book at the problem statement and a tiny little bit about what the future could look like.
And now I want to dig into what the future does look like or is imposed by the new rules of the new operating system.
It sounds like it'll be a message of hope then.
Very much so.
It's a message for, you can keep coming back to this in each of us.
If we're responsible for the world we create and we're living mostly in a fiat world that we know is extractive, then who do we have to blame?
Well, ourselves.
Only ourselves.
And there is no one else.
There is no they, right?
There is no, the governments that we say are stealing our power could only steal our power if we gave it to them through doing that.
And then inside there you could find a whole bunch of allies that hated governments so much that we're doing the same thing that would love you.
And make you feel really great by making that system stronger over you.
That extracts from you.
And that would be what it would be normal.
That would be a total normal reaction from all the population.
It would be normal for you.
It would be normal for me.
So how do you fight that power if we make this, you have to intentionally move your time and energy to the system you want to thrive?
And it doesn't have to be the entire world doing it.
It has to be a vigilant number of people that are building, that are providing hope.
So imagine being stuck in fear and then changing to hope, truth, abundance.
So you know this, right?
You know what it looks like in this, but most people don't.
But as you move more and more of your time into the system, you see it more and more.
And then you're helping the other entrepreneurs.
If you're spending in Bitcoin, you can always buy more Bitcoin right after spending, but you're helping accelerate the ecosystem.
So I'd say, if we truly are responsible for the world we see, how could we blame anybody else if we're mostly pricing in a US dollar?
And reinforcing a system of extraction from us?
How could we possibly blame someone else?
It's us.
That's, I hope that that statement causes some introspection on behalf of anyone listening to this.
Because it is, ultimately, we are the only ones responsible for our own decisions.
And we can make whatever excuses we want, but if our decisions and our actions
propagate the very thing that we are supposedly trying to get around and create a new system around,
that is parallel to this and different and divergent and gives us a different future.
But if we're not actually walking the walk and we're just talking the talk,
well, we've only got ourselves to blame when things don't turn out the way we like.
Yeah.
And then you could do that in one of two ways.
You could yell at everyone else who's not doing it.
You could find, you could understand you were a hypocrite one day and that you moved your time.
And you made the same change.
And then you could, from there, you could either say all of those stupid people that are over there,
and you could push them away further.
Or you could realize you were one of them two days ago, two years ago,
and you could realize everybody needs to make this choice.
And how would they make that choice?
They'd probably make that choice by seeing this as a hopeful, truthful, abundant community.
They'd probably make, you don't move from fear to more fear.
You move from fear to hope.
And so, and when I say that, I'm not judging anybody who wants to do whatever they want to do.
Like all the ideas, all of these ideas, they're really good.
I'm just saying for me, that's why I talk kind of in this way.
I know for, I know fully well, I didn't know this five years ago, at least at this level.
And I know what it took, and unwiring all of this, to be able to come to where I wanted to put my energy.
And that was, it takes time.
It takes time as you build a new mental model of where the future is going.
Well, I think that's a fantastically hopeful,
and compassionate note to end on.
Jeff, is there anywhere you want to send people?
For this find out.
I always say this on podcasts, so forgive me if you've heard a whole bunch of them.
Jeffbooth.ca.
And I only say that is because if I'm on a social network, most, I'm not on any social networks anymore.
I think I'm still on LinkedIn, but I don't spend any time on it.
And I think I still have my Twitter account, but I don't spend any time on it.
But there will not, unless the social network is on my website,
which my pub key is on my website, it's not me.
And there's so many scammers, I will never ask you for money.
So if you see a Jeffbooth impersonators on some social network asking you for money, it's not me.
You mean that wasn't you I sent my to Bitcoin to expecting there?
Oh, darn, okay.
Well, there's somebody verified as me on Instagram.
Oh, God.
It's outrageous.
It proves why it also proves why the cryptography is so important in the new social graph that was being built and the privacy of that.
So actually, if you extend that to FETI, like I'm going to create my own federation myself for close group of friends that you'll know for sure.
Maybe I mean, if there's a spot in that federation, that sounds like a federation.
I'd want to be.
Well, well, Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your scarce time.
This was enlightening as always and looking forward to the next time we get the chance to do this, hopefully in the flesh.
Until then, thanks so much and keep encouraging people because I think you bring a lot of inspiration and optimism to folks.
And we need more of that in this world.
Right back at you, my friend.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast.
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