If I didn't know who I'd be, how would I feel about Bitcoin?
I could wake up tomorrow to be Michael Saylor.
I could wake up to be a Venezuelan farmer.
I could be a dissident journalist in Russia.
I could be Julian Assange recently out of prison.
Who might I be?
And asking the question that way and then say, well, if I didn't know who I'd be, would
I still want Bitcoin to be in the world?
And we think that framing things that way yields both a neutral, evaluative framework,
but then also ultimately a positive answer to the question that because we'd be risk
averse when reasoning that way, you don't want to be stuck as one of the 2 billion people
living under crushing inflation or even hyperinflation, or the three or four billion people who live
under the boot of authoritarian rule, or the many millions who have for no fault of their
own been excluded from electronic banking systems and so on.
So once you see that you could have been those people and that Bitcoin can help on at least
some margins for some of them, you're going to want that to be in the world as an available
opt-in system.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow pubs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 849073 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else
comes up.
Today, that guest is Andrew Bailey.
He's a professor of philosophy and he's also a Bitcoiner.
Andrew, together with fellow philosophy professors Bradley Rettler and Craig Wormke, just published
an excellent book called Resistance Money, a philosophical case for Bitcoin.
Resistance Money examines Bitcoin's monetary policy, censorship, resistance, privacy, inclusion
and energy use to develop a comprehensive and measured case that Bitcoin is a net benefit
to the world, despite its imperfections.
Andrew and I go deep into how he as a philosopher thinks about Bitcoin and money more generally.
We also talk about money in relation to culture, technology and law and talk at length about
the subjectivity of value.
I truly enjoyed this conversation.
It is fascinating to pick the mind of a philosopher and I'm confident you're going to enjoy it
as well.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin Podcast wherever you happen
to be watching or listening and give this show a five star rating or don't Bitcoin does
not care but I sure would appreciate it.
If you'd rather watch this show than listen, head to the show notes for links to watch
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Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking
Bitcoin podcast, hit me up on social media or through the website, BitcoinPodcast.net.
But further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Andrew Bailey.
Okay, now, now we are good.
We're good for real.
Now, this is the real thing.
Life is happening.
There were gladiator references before.
We all put them in because people need to remind her to watch gladiator.
Well, hey, thank you for joining.
I'm glad to be here with you.
Me too, man.
You know, I, well, first of all, I've been digging in.
I have not finished it yet.
I will confess, but I have been loving it so far, your book, Resistance Money, with your
two co-authors.
And I, when I saw it come out, because I know you guys have been working for some time,
I was like, I need to talk to, I need to talk to Andrew.
And this seemed like the perfect time to do so.
But thank you so much.
Yeah.
And you've honored us by buying it and reading it.
You know, buying is good enough, but actually this is a book that's meant to be read.
We don't want just this to collect dust on shelves.
No, it's not.
We did put a lot of heart into this.
No dust has been collected so far.
It's still brand new, which is always nice.
It's satisfying to start to page through a new book where you're like, ah, you know,
and usually I, I don't know if this is like a good or a people frown on this or not, but
I will often kind of make my own little notes in books.
Oh yeah, you got to.
Make it yours.
But this one, I'm like, boy, it seems so nice as it is.
It almost feels disrespectful to make my, to make my little notes in there, but I might
just have to order a second copy so then I can completely kind of destroy one and then
keep one that's very pristine.
Uh, we'll, we'll see, we'll see what happens.
But so far so good.
Well, thank you.
You honor us with your attention and time.
That's very kind of you.
Thank you.
Attention and time are pretty.
They're scary.
Pretty wild things.
Yeah.
You know, precious.
I'm, I'm a recent father and I'm realizing more and more, like I thought I had an appreciation
for time and for attention and I'm realizing more and more that, uh, it was much more of
a kind of theoretical, uh, appreciation for it.
It was a little bit more nebulous before and that now that I have a young son, he's six
months old, I'm realizing, oh wow, this has a whole new meaning for me because I find
that my time and attention have become so much more valuable to me because any time and
attention that I'm spending, you know, or we spend time, we give attention, right?
It's also interesting the words we use to describe these things.
You know, it's spending time, which I always find fascinating, but any, any time that I'm
doing that's not with him is like, okay, I want to make sure that's, that's valuable
time.
Really, really valuable.
It's not just my own, my own time now that I'm potentially spending, it's, I'm spending
time away from him.
And so I find that fatherhood is a, a really kind of paradigm shifting force in that it
forces you to think so much harder about these things.
And I find that like in a very good way, like I'm, I'm really enjoying fatherhood and it's
making me be, you know, more, more, more present in this infinite now in which we inhabit.
Good job, Daddy.
I hope so anyway.
I think fatherhood is not unique in that respect.
It's whenever you find something worthwhile to do with your time, then you feel the opportunity
cost of frittering it away somewhere else.
And fatherhood is a great way to spend time, but there are other good ways too.
Yeah.
And if you find yourself, like the time is easy to, to lose and to fritter, maybe it's
you actually don't feel the opportunity cost because there isn't one.
There's nothing better to do.
And that's something worth changing.
You know, perhaps that's the, the general, well, I shouldn't say general, the fairly
widespread pseudo nihilistic malaise that seems to be spreading over many people and
just kind of this feeling of disgruntlement or whatever it may be with, with the way things
are.
But I find that there's kind of two ways that people tend to approach, like the idea that
or the realization I should say that, well, the world's kind of fucked up.
And there are some people that say, wow, the world is, is kind of fucked up.
Well, what am I going to do?
You know, I guess I can just kind of complain about the world being fucked up.
And then there are the other sorts of people who say, oh, the world's kind of fucked up.
We should do something about that.
And then go about and, and, and find that purpose.
And I think that that's what you're, and you're exactly right.
When you have anything that is, has meaning to you, you appreciate the opportunity cost
of not doing that thing.
And whether that, I shouldn't totally single out, you know, fatherhood there because
there's motherhood too, for example.
Dear, yeah.
Oh, that, that's right.
Motherhood.
And the one who, the one who did the, the, you know, lion share of the work, I should
give her more credit.
Yeah.
God bless Carla too.
She is, yeah, she is a rock star.
It's amazing to see somebody just kind of step into it and seem like it was so natural, not
that it's not difficult, but that she makes it look easy, which is just a really impressive
feat.
And right now she's, she's soundly, soundly sleeping.
And so is baby.
So there you go.
Wonderful, wonderful thing.
They're both getting a little extra shut eye.
So really the, you know, I mean, even if they were awake though, Andrew, I want you to know
that I'd be very happy to be here and find this is time well spent.
So well, thank you.
They just happen to be.
Let's make sure you don't revise that judgment by the end.
I don't think that I will.
You know, Andrew, I'd love to start out, and this is a question that I kind of ask everybody
that you can take in any way you want, but just to, to get us a little warmed up here
and give people a sense of you.
And it's who are you and how did you get here today?
Well, Walker, like you, I'm a father, but before I was a father, I was a teacher and
that was really one of the things that gave meaning to my life and that I poured a lot
of my energy into.
And it was in my teaching first that I got to be serious about Bitcoin.
And that's why I'm here with you because of that interest and connection to Bitcoin.
My students were approaching graduation and I work at Yale and US college, which is a
startup college jointly founded by Yale University for the US and the National University of
Singapore.
And our first graduating class was graduating set to graduate in 2017.
So they come in in 2013 and they're starting to grow up and approaching graduation.
And thinking about money and career and coming up with difficult existential questions, because
these were thoughtful students often having to do with things like how much is enough?
What is the role money should play in my own life?
What is going on with the money out there?
By the way, I don't even understand how it gets made.
And what inflation is, so there's abstract questions that kind of impinge on practical
questions to both personal psychology and personal ethics.
So in response to that, I just did what any teacher would do is like, okay, we're going
to have a class about this.
I can't be your career coach.
I can't be your therapist.
That's not my job.
But we can read some books and papers together and talk about it and think through this together.
So I started to teach pretty regularly this interdisciplinary class on money, which drew
from psychology and economics and philosophy and really tried to think about both the personal
ethics and the psychology and then these broad abstract questions about money.
And I was already into Bitcoin, sort of a side hobby, a bit of enthusiasm, speculative
bet, just this weird little internet play thing.
But of course I had to do a week on Bitcoin in that class.
And then the next time I did it, maybe it was a week and a half, who can say?
And now I teach full classes on Bitcoin and eventually pivoted to Bitcoin as a research
topic as well to write about and think about much more seriously.
But I think that it's this many people, myself included, maybe guilty of doing a lot of academic
bashing in the sense that you have this.
Bash away.
I'm a fiat academic.
I know these guys.
Are you a fiat academic anymore?
Or are you of a new class of Bitcoin academics?
Because you just said you're teaching Bitcoin in a university.
In my book, that makes you a Bitcoin academic now.
I think fiat academic is maybe a nebulous phrase because it's used by people for whom
fiat just means bad.
So I hope I'm not a bad academic.
But I have the traditional credentials.
I teach a university that is accredited and live and move in that world where I don't
want to tear down the existing institutions.
They're precious to me.
I instead want to reform them from within.
So if you think of that division between the Puritans and the Separatists, where the Puritans
tried to purify the Church of England from within and the Separatists were like, if this
s, we're moving to the United States or wasn't the United States, we're moving to the new
colonies.
I'm more of a Puritan when it comes to institutions like academia.
And many Bitcoiners are Separatists.
They want to tear it down or at any rate, exit and separate.
Maybe that's the way to draw the line.
I still think there's something valuable here.
Life of the mind, reading books together, thinking carefully about stuff, despite the ways that
academia is just incredibly disturbingly messed up.
Yeah.
We can definitely agree on the messed up nature of academia.
And I think that there's also, you almost need parallel movements in some ways to enact
or have the best chance at enacting real change.
So you almost need that reform from within and that separation, building the parallel
system without.
Ultimately, I think that that's going to give you, especially if both of those, both of
those, you know, schools of thought, let's say, have the same ultimate goal.
In this case, the advancement of Bitcoin, because we believe it is a net benefit for
humanity, then that's actually a pretty powerful thing to be able to have those working in
parallel.
And I would rather have both going at the same time than just one or the other, you know,
than have it be so binary in that way.
Competition is good for institutions.
When people can exit, that's a powerful check on the authority of a legacy institution,
not just the Church of England, but also the Bank of England, for example.
And of course, with the name like Andrew Bailey, it's probably often difficult for you to
pop up in Google search, given you share the name with the Bank of England lead.
I'm blessedly anonymous in that respect, unless you had something like Bitcoin to my name.
Then I'm sure it comes up pretty quickly.
Now, you know, I'm curious, Andrew, how was the reception from your students?
Because you are a, if you had to put yourself in a discipline, you are a professor of philosophy.
That's right.
Correct.
So what was the reception from your students when you first started raising Bitcoin?
Because these are not, you know, computer scientists, they're not economists per se.
Perhaps some of them are actually studying that.
And they, you know, maybe you do have a smattering of that in there.
But I would assume that a lot of them are philosophy students.
That's one of their, you know, their main interest or perhaps not correct me if I'm
wrong.
But what was the reception like when you started bringing in, you know, a week of Bitcoin and
then, okay, a little bit more than a week and then teaching whole classes on Bitcoin.
How did you find your students kind of reacting to that?
I teach largely within a PPE program, which stands for philosophy, politics and economics.
Okay.
And one of the things that we always said we wanted students to do was to integrate these
things to pull together the philosophy and the economics and the political science.
But that was always hard.
And yet we found it easier, I did at least in the classroom when it came to Bitcoin,
because Bitcoin is a natural site where one needs all of those tools and more to understand
what's going on.
So students who are really serious about the PPE mission instantly saw it and they saw
it faster than the, than did, I'll be clear here at the faculty, the old people around
them.
So it was never a tough sell convincing students to care about Bitcoin and about other topics
in crypto.
I'll say this, that I have taught other topics in crypto.
And the reason for that is that these kids are trading shitcoins on the side anyways.
They're going to do this.
And so why not think alongside them while they do it, give them the tools to grow in
their understanding of what, what these little tokens are they're playing around with and
why this particular one is destined to fail and so on.
So it was never hard convincing the young people in my life that this stuff mattered,
that it was interesting.
And for many of them, it started out with simple self-interest and the degenerate gambling
impulse, but they sort of knew that there's something more there too that they wanted
to understand.
So having someone nearby to help was always welcome in my experience.
How did you approach the topic of, of, of, of shitcoins, of, of, you know, the degenerate
gambling side of things from a philosophical lens?
What I'm actually quite curious, what, because you also touch on, you know, some of the,
you compare in your, in your book with Brad and, and Craig, you compare Bitcoin to, of
course, the compare and contrast the traditional, you know, monetary systems also to gold, but
then do some other comparing and contrasting as well.
But how did you approach the altcoin space in your classes?
I'm not a trader or investor.
I don't give trading or investment advice, not to my friends, not to my students.
But one exercise we did, this was with a small tutorial.
So this wasn't a full seminar.
It was just three or four students.
We would meet weekly and discuss this.
We set a benchmark portfolio before they did any trading or any even paper trading.
At all on the benchmark portfolio was just Bitcoin, buy and hold Bitcoin.
And then the thought is, can you beat this by doing your swing trades, making 10 trades
a day?
And the answer was basically no, not on paper and not not on paper either.
So that was one illuminating exercise that I've repeated since then.
It's just, okay, you think you're up, but remember the benchmark, the benchmark is just
buying the index of risk in the entire space, which is just Bitcoin, not Bitcoin and Ether,
not Bitcoin and something else, but it's just Bitcoin.
That is the, that measures appetite for crypto at all.
Okay, so that's the baseline.
Can you beat it?
Chances are not.
So there's something to be learned there as well.
Second, there's a couple of papers from cryptoskeptics that I found helpful.
Maybe the best is this piece called Crypto Cloud Land by Edmund Schuster.
He's an attorney who teaches at London School of Economics.
And he basically goes through and shows that smart contracts can't do any of the things
that people say they can do because they require connections to real world stuff, which connections
must either be fake or they're sustained by legal institutions.
So for example, you have an NFT that represents a claim on a piece of land.
Well, how does that work exactly that the possessor of the NFT has legal ownership?
Well, it goes through courts and through a registry or a ledger of parcels of land and
some centralized database and some Shire in England or in the United States or in Singapore.
So what have you done here exactly?
Not much as it turns out, either technically or legally.
And thinking through that argument has helped us to see just as we go piece by piece, one
by one, there's a zillion tokens, but we just take a couple of case studies and see that
anything that claims connection to the real world at all is likely either failure or already
failed and its ambitions or maybe just downright fraud or just relies on legal structures and
reproduces them.
And you should just use the regular legal structures because actually those are better
for things like that.
And that was instructive too to see that despite the fancy white papers, despite the claims
to innovation, to the usefulness of blockchain, not Bitcoin, none of this turns out to be
true.
At least none of this that we've looked at so far.
So that establishes a kind of baseline skepticism for the claims of a lot of these altcoin projects.
I love that way of approaching it and also the very simple idea of, okay, you want to
trade, let's trade either on paper or in real life, but benchmark it against the thing,
not against dollars, not looking at how much the dollars are going up and dollar values
going up in your portfolio, but against Bitcoin.
Because that's really, that's your opportunity cost, right?
If you are trading altcoins, okay, fine, but the opportunity cost is you could have just
bought and held Bitcoin.
How did you actually measure up against that?
And I think that the vast majority of people, like there are very few people who are actually
successful traders.
If they are being honest and benchmarking against Bitcoin, they are few and far between.
And that's maybe a tough pill to swallow for some folks who think, no, I swear I'm a good
trader and look at the dollars going up.
But it's like, yeah, but you were kind of just shuffling papers around that you could
have just sat there, held Bitcoin, done something else productive with your life and probably
ended up better in the long run anyway.
And imagine what else you may have accomplished instead of sitting there staring at the one
minute charts of a bunch of altcoins with various animal names.
It's so sad.
It is sad.
It is.
Walker, you are content creator, so you probably spent a lot more time on things like TikTok
than I do.
So you may know this better than I do, but when I look at crypto or Bitcoin related topics
there, it is really sad to me because I see people whose brains are addled by the one
minute charts.
They're chasing these green and red candles.
And part of me wanted to save them.
I no longer think that I can.
I can speak into the lives of the young people who are with me.
I can tend my garden, the people that are entrusted to my care, the 18 students in a room with
me at a time.
But these people in TikTok who are chasing green candles on the one minute charts, they
need to touch the burner before they learn.
They may need to touch it 10 or 15 times before they learn.
I can actually very happily say that I have never downloaded TikTok, luckily.
Impressive.
Yeah.
I just, I did not feel much of a desire to.
And also I was lucky that when Carl and I were producing content, which was going on
TikTok, she was doing all of that.
So she took the eyeball strain and the excess dopamine hits on my behalf, which I'm very
grateful for.
Just a slide aside there, but I'm pretty.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
No, I think it's true.
I think that pain is a great teacher in general.
Sometimes it's the only teacher.
That's the sad truth.
My father-in-law, who he escaped, defected from communism.
He always says, you know, we get smart by force, not by choice, except in very rare cases.
And I've found that to be very true.
You need some sort of a forcing function.
And that forcing function is usually pain, hardship, some sort of difficulty that comes
along that makes you reevaluate, that makes you say, hold on, I need to figure this out.
Either this doesn't make sense or I don't want this bad thing to happen to me again
or whatever it may be.
But what is that pain point?
I think for a lot of people with that's how they end up stumbling into Bitcoin.
Some just by curiosity and right place, right time have found it without maybe having too
much pain.
But you could probably find some sort of painful forcing function somewhere in their lives.
Maybe they're, you know, they were cipherpunks and they were on that mailing list because
they felt the pain of impending government censorship, control, authoritarianism in the
digital space.
So you could probably make the argument that when you find Bitcoin, there is some sort
of pain that you are running away from or trying to learn from, but then you find something
to run toward.
And I think that that's the, that's also the interesting thing I find about Bitcoiners
is that they have something to run toward back to what we were saying earlier about, you
know, some people just, the world is messed up.
I'm going to run away from it, but what can I do versus, you know, running away versus
running toward having a destination or at least a journey, a path in mind.
And I think that that's what Bitcoin provides for a lot of people.
But I am the conviction that the world is messed up is actually an improvement over
a nearby alternative, which is total nealism giving up and not caring.
And the, these one can slip into the other.
That is pure negativity and this deep conviction that things are messed up without an alternative
will lead you quite naturally into nealism, simply not caring at all and finding nothing
to be valuable or disvaluable, a kind of flat line, bored and disaffected approach to reality.
That might be even more sad.
So I think as long as you're still in the disgruntled side and you're riled up about
things that are bad, you're actually closer to truth than another nearby error, which
is just total nealism.
And it's a great point, at least if you're running away from something you are moving,
you know, in a-
You don't care.
You give a damn.
Some people don't.
Right.
You think something is valuable.
That's good.
That's a good start.
Now find out what it is.
And find it fast because otherwise you may slip into that nealism, which is I think very
seductive for some people because perhaps it's easier.
It's easier to not care, maybe.
Maybe so.
Yeah.
Maybe not for everyone.
I think that you and I and most of the big winners I meet are people that care a great
deal and couldn't imagine not caring deeply about these things that we were fighting for
and speaking about and trying to educate about.
And I think maybe one of the reasons that it's so difficult for people to, even though
they're running away from something, I see all the time on Twitter, on X, all these videos
of like the-
I don't know why.
I think it's in their car when they're filming this too.
I'm convinced that that's a sigh-out when everybody's filming the prices of things or
they're looking at inflation and everyone's always in their car.
I don't know if it just happens that way because they just got out of the grocery store
or something or what it is or if it's a sigh-out, but that's a different topic.
But again, complaining and bemoaning the issues that we see, which Bitcoiners very clearly
go, ah, well, that's because the money is broken.
We've created too much money.
But money is really difficult for people to wrap their heads around.
And the idea of, okay, what is money at all?
We ask a lot of times, what is money?
I also noticed we never ask how is money.
And I wonder if money is sad because of that.
Nobody's ever asking how money is doing.
But it's beside the point.
I'm curious-
It sounds like a Ted Lasso joke.
It might be.
Maybe next season.
But from your perspective as an educator, as a philosopher, what is it about money that
makes it so difficult for people to wrap their heads around?
I think maybe the first thing to notice is that money has power over us because money
represents the desire and the satisfaction of all desires that can be purchased.
So think about something that's for sale, where you can get it for money.
You can get books, you can get musical instruments like the guitars behind me, you can get fancy
neon signs behind Walker.
I'm looking at my books right here.
Many things can be gotten with money that you might want.
Maybe not love, but some surrogates or substitutes for it.
Sure.
Money represents everything that we want, so no wonder that it would have power over
us.
But things that have power with us are often mysterious to us too.
We fail to actually have purchase on them to really understand.
We're so concerned about what they can do for us and what they represent, which is everything
that we desire, that seeing it for what it is, thinking carefully about its role in your
life and where it comes from, what it's for, this can be quite difficult.
So think about the parable of fish in water.
Of course, water is very important to fish.
Can fish see the water or think about it clearly?
Not so well.
So also money.
It's all around us and it's deeply important to us.
And in that sense, it's salient, but in another sense, its nature is not salient.
It's kind of invisible or transparent to us.
You have to actually look carefully to see it and to notice that, yes, this does have
a tug on my heart.
Yes, I do think about money a lot.
Yes, the prices are seeming to go up quite a bit on the things that I want more of.
What's going on here?
So there's abstract stuff going on, like prices, and then there's more concrete, direct and
immediate things around hearts too.
And these aren't always obvious unless you actually look at them, look for them.
Yeah, I think it's quite a...
It's a very, dare I say, life-changing experience, at least it was for me when I started actually
thinking hard about money and all of the assumptions that I didn't realize I'd made, or even just
the assumptions or the fact that I hadn't actually thought about it at a really deep
level, kind of until Bitcoin, until going down this rabbit hole and then necessarily
starting to explore all the tangential rabbit holes and asking those questions about what
is this?
Why do we do this this way?
Why is the US monetary system the way that it is?
Why are a few people in charge of this?
How do they make those decisions?
How do they know that those decisions are right?
What happens when they're wrong?
Are there consequences?
Why are we watching this guy, Chairman Powell, and seeing whether he twitches or not, and
deciding whether to buy or sell securities on the basis of how annoyed he is or is not
with questions?
What a strange thing, and yet we accept it.
Every few months he gets out on stage and people will monitor his twitches and whether
he smirks or not in response to a question.
Very curious.
It's kind of insane.
And yet we accept it.
We accept it.
It's just how it works.
What was it that there used to be this before things were digitized?
I'm forgetting what it was, it was either a briefcase or a folder test, but people would
look at the Federal Reserve Chairman how thick basically his stack of papers was.
You know what I'm talking about?
With Volcker as well as with Greenspan, so do this.
And that was supposed to be the index for hikes or cuts, three quarters from now.
Which again is just insane.
It's this weird tea leaf reading exercise.
But ultimately I think the realization that I started to come to is that when you're younger
it's often, I think there's a couple of phases of being younger.
There's the phase of being younger where you're like, ah, the adults in the room know what
they're doing.
But then there's the other phase of being younger where you're like, the adults in the
room have no fucking clue.
And then I think sometimes you oscillate back and forth between those things, then you kind
of become an adult.
Holy shit, I'm the adult who doesn't know what's happening.
Hold on, hold on.
Nobody really has any idea, like the full scope of what's going on.
Then you realize you've got just these few guys as you said in a room and they're making
decisions that literally affect, in the case of the Federal Reserve, that affect the entire
world because the US does not exist in a vacuum, not by a long shot.
My mortgage here in Singapore, it's a variable rate mortgage, started to click upwards, my
monthly payment because of something happening in the United States, which is wild.
But there it is.
And we accept this.
As you said, this is something that we just say, well, what else can you possibly do?
I guess it just has to be this small group of people who are just people also.
They're not somehow special.
They're not all seeing and all knowing.
They are just as fallible as the rest of us.
Some of them are more fallible.
Christine Lagarde convicted criminal, for example.
Yes.
Or the non-convicted criminals, I believe it was Robert Kaplan and Eric Rosengren and
maybe one other Fed president who were literally caught insider trading on the most material
non-public information you could imagine, which is monetary policy.
And they both, of course, just resigned, just bowed out.
And don't worry, they implemented stronger ethics rules after that.
But of course, if ethics rules...
Very good.
Yes, yes.
But if ethics rules worked, they would have worked.
So that's kind of just, again, madness to me.
But do you think that part of the reason that besides the technical aspects of Bitcoin,
which can be very daunting perhaps for many people, because I think that's how a lot of
people approach it.
They approach it from this technical lens or try to, even if they are not technical people.
And so they're thinking about the blockchain and the cryptography and all these things
which are, of course...
In the white paper.
Right.
Which are, of course, yes, you should do and you should think about those things and
you should read the white paper.
But in your book, Resistance Money, you guys are taking a little bit of a different approach
to thinking about this.
And you do touch on some of the technical aspects as well, just as kind of a need to
know.
But what is...
How does a philosopher think about something like Bitcoin?
One big question about Bitcoin is not what it is or what it does, but whether it's good,
whether we should want to have this thing in our world, whether it makes our world better.
And that's not a question about descriptive reality or facts.
It's a normative question.
It's about what should be.
And that falls within the philosophical field we sometimes call ethics or value theory.
So one of the most important questions that you can ask and an implicit question that's
behind many questions, many discussions about Bitcoin is just whether this thing is any good.
And that is a philosophical question, at least in part.
One of the problems with asking that question and trying to answer it is that we're beset
on all side with our biases.
And maybe Bitcoin has two ones that are particularly salient to highlight.
First, it's extremely politicized.
It's labeled as right wing, red state.
Like it or not, in the United States, that's a label it has.
Elsewhere in the world, politicized in different ways.
But let's just take that as an example.
So we approach it using tribal markers rather than thinking about it more directly.
And second, it's money, it's monetized, which means that you're either long or short.
If you're long, then you're going to want to pump it.
If you're short, you're going to want to dump it.
And if you're short reputationally, which is one thing we point out, then if you said
bad things about it before and claimed it will die and 10 years later it's not dead,
you're going to be very salty indeed.
You're reputationally short.
And so you have an incentive to double down on your bad predictions and to continue to
say things that now you know to be false about Bitcoin.
And of course, if you bought Bitcoin 10 years ago and held onto it and it pumped and your
very, your portfolio is pumped up and happy, you'll want it to pump more.
And so you'll say some more positive things about Bitcoin just as you did 10 years ago.
So these are biases that really make it hard to answer that question.
Is it good?
Because we replace that question with a question, is it good for me?
And that really isn't a very ethically interesting question.
Is it good for me in terms of public policy or whether we should want this thing to be
there in general, not just for one particular person?
So that's one of the big questions of the book is to try to get an ethical framework
that helps us approach that big question in a more neutral way that can bypass those biases,
which we think afflict both proponents and opponents of Bitcoin.
So the question we use to do that is to ask, well, if I didn't know who I'd be, how would
I feel about Bitcoin?
I could wake up tomorrow to be Michael Saylor.
I could wake up to be a Venezuelan farmer.
I could be a dissident journalist in Russia.
I could be Julian Assange recently out of prison.
That's right, fist pump for Julian.
Who might I be?
And asking the question that way.
And so I don't know who I'll be and then say, well, if I didn't know who I'd be, would
I still want Bitcoin to be in the world?
And we think that framing things that way yields both a neutral evaluative framework,
but then also ultimately a positive answer to the question that because we'd be risk
averse when reasoning that way, you don't want to be stuck as one of the 2 billion people
living under crushing inflation or even hyperinflation or the three or 4 billion people who live under
the boot of authoritarian rule or the many millions who have for no fault of their own
been excluded from electronic banking systems and so on.
So once you see that you could have been those people and that Bitcoin can help on at least
some margins for some of them, you're going to want that to be in the world as an available
opt-in system.
So then the sum of the argument is that we look at these various dimensions, privacy,
monetary policy, financial inclusion, censorship resistance, and even energy use and externalities.
We think the ultimate effect of all that weight evidence will be on the plus side of things,
yielding a positive answer to that question.
So that's what the philosophy does.
It helps us pull everything together and think about this in a kind of serious way rather
than just the easy obvious selfish way, which is, did I have some and did it pump or was
I short and did it dump, which is what you see in the headlines and the op-ed columns
in New York Times.
It's salty assholes who are reputationally short like Paul Krugman and then the occasional
pumper.
We just think it's so much more interesting than that and we can be so much more serious
if we try.
Philosophers love to ask questions and one question you should probably ask yourself
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I love the framing of that in the book.
Because it's ultimately a very, it's a simple but it's an incredibly deep question.
Would you rather live in a world with or without Bitcoin?
But without the first part of that saying if you didn't know who you were, who you were
going to be, because that's kind of, I think that's a really important clarifier there.
Because if you don't say that, then people can say, well, you know, I could, you know,
they might just say I could, you know, take it or leave it.
Doesn't really matter.
But because ultimately a lot of people, certainly probably the first tranche of people to read
your book will be, I would assume, educated Westerners who have some level of financial
privilege, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they may not be rich, they may
not even be wealthy.
But if they are an educated person living in the so-called developed world, they have
an amount of financial privilege that puts them automatically above billions of people
in this world.
And this is just a fact.
And it always brings me back to that Gladstein's article from several years ago, Check Your
Financial Privilege, you know, that later kind of spun into a book.
And I've reread that one several times.
And you guys talk about some of the stories that he shared in his book there, you know,
Roya Maboub, and using Bitcoin to pay other women who had no access whatsoever to the
financial institutions and the rails that we take for granted in the Western world, or
that men take for granted in different parts of the world but are not available to women,
or not available to journalists.
And again, it was amazing.
It was kind of surreal seeing, I saw Stella Asange posted, you know, the WikiLeaks video
yesterday of Julian out in the sunlight walking into a plane.
And it was a little while before, you know, it was later at night.
And I was just like, oh my gosh, this is actually.
It happened.
I found it very moving.
And just seeing him walk onto the plane and thinking, my God, he's been in the sun before
in a tiny little box, but he's never actually had a walk even of 10 meters like this in
12 years.
Like, what does it feel?
It must be amazing to be Julian Asange right now.
My hope for him is that he's got thousands of Bitcoin stashed away and he'll go spend
time with his family for a while, stay out of trouble, and then maybe secretly get back
in trouble.
But don't tell us about it.
Do it in Dresden in next time.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it's insane that his children have only known him in prison.
Yes.
That genuinely like breaks my heart to hear.
And I mean, honestly, I have so much respect for for Stella Asange as well.
Just I mean, that takes a lot of a lot of courage and a lot of commitment to go through
and be by Julian's side through all of this.
And I would also say I really hope I hope he has some Bitcoin stashed away and I hope
that he hires a really excellent security team because now it's like now that he's free,
it's like I worry about his safety.
But that he is he is truly a prime example of somebody who needs Bitcoin.
If you woke up tomorrow and you were Julian Assange, would you want Bitcoin to exist or
not?
I think for anybody being honest, that's a pretty easy answer.
Right.
He'll have trouble getting access to banks for the rest of his life.
He will be an underbanked individual.
I'm quite sure of that, I don't know any details about his personal life, other than the salacious
stuff, quite public stuff.
But I can just predict he'll have he'll be underbanked for the rest of his life.
That man needs Bitcoin.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's something something Julian said this was in a 2014 interview.
He actually gave the interview as a hologram.
I'm forgetting which he was maybe in Ecuador's embassy at this time.
That's right.
If memory serves me right.
Yes.
But he talked about Bitcoin breaking Orwell's dictum by providing proof of publication.
And I found that to be quite fascinating and Orwell's dictum being and I'm paraphrasing
here so I may butcher it a little bit, but he who controls the present controls the future
controls the present controls the present controls the past, I may be mixing that up.
But the idea that you can rewrite history if you are in control.
And clearly people have tried to do that with Julian.
And his whole thing was exposing what the true history actually was.
And for doing that, he has had his life completely upended in such a horrific way that we are
lucky that we should never have to imagine that let alone let alone live it.
But I find that to be a very I'm curious from you from from a philosopher's take again.
And I'm going to lean on this from a philosopher's take because I find it wonderful to be talking
with you.
Just dudes who think about stuff Walker your philosophy and that respect.
Okay, so is that is that your your quick and dirty explanation of like of what a philosopher
is?
Just so you you just think I'm a parapathetic philosopher in particular, which means paraphatetic
is Greek for walking.
Okay, Aristotle was known as the parapathetic philosophy.
He would walk around in circles in the academy and give his lectures pacing and thinking
Socrates as well.
It's thinking students, right?
That's right.
They're wandering around the Piraeus and the marketplace and Athens.
That's really what philosophy is.
It's trying to think carefully and clearly about things, especially about things that
matter that are abstract that we don't often think about, but that are always present.
Things like what is good, what is right, what really exists and so on.
But it's just focusing on them and really really trying to get clear about it.
Ultimately that thinking takes the form of asking a lot of questions.
Does it not?
Why would you say that, Walker?
There we go.
I say that because I'm not going to be a jackass.
I know.
I respond to a question with a question.
No, no.
Exactly.
I think it begins with questions.
It doesn't have to end with questions.
So there are answers?
If it sometimes, yeah.
What is the question that or the questions that you continue to think about that you
haven't found answers for yet that let's say are there some that keep you up at night
or either for good or bad reasons that because you worry or because there are questions that
you have hope that there are very good answers for potentially?
I'll give a Bitcoin example where I found some resolution, but I'm not totally easy
about it.
The environment stuff bugged me and it bugged me deeply.
I'm not inclined to deny the existence of deleterious human-caused climate change.
I know some Bitcoiners are, bless them, but I'm not really able to do that.
So I have to care about things like carbon emissions.
That literally did keep me awake for a long time as Bitcoin continued to grow.
It caused me to learn a lot.
I was the lead author for the chapters on energy and the environment.
So I really had to take point on that for our little co-authoring team and really get
deep and think about that.
It just bugged me.
That's why I did it is because it bugged me and my mind wouldn't let me rest until I
found something satisfactory.
Now, what we have there in the book as it stands, some of it will stand the test of
time.
Some of the facts that we claim will probably change over time and the book will be obsolete
in that respect in five years.
So that's the place in which there's some instability in my own thinking here.
So the view I came to in the end is still broadly pro-Bitcoin with some qualifications.
But I'd be open to changing that.
So for example, here's a generalization that we rely on is that the economics of Bitcoin
push Bitcoin miners to the edges of energy markets, both in space and time.
True.
Bitcoin mining is a low margin industry.
So profits are low.
They're pushed to the margins.
They need low-cost energy.
Now as a matter of fact, the lowest cost energy we have right now is low-carbon energy.
It's green and sustainable.
It is on the edges of the grid.
For example, a hydrodam that's far from any large city and not yet being needed to power
lights for people living nearby.
That's energy that's close to zero on the margin.
That's where the Bitcoin miners would go.
But that's a contingent fact that could change.
So that's the sort of thing that I can't give this as the fud buster for all time because
the facts there could change.
So it still bugs me.
And I have to keep on reading about this and learning more about energy grids and getting
the group chat with Troy Cross and see what he's been working on and blah, blah, blah.
It's one of those questions that it's a Bitcoin question in particular that's still stuck
in my mind.
So that is part philosophy, part science.
It's sort of where they meet thinking normatively what should be the case and then trying to
use empirical facts about how the world actually is that science tells us and try to put these
together.
This is also an area because again, whatever, and I had Daniel Batten on this show a while
back.
He's terrific.
He really is.
And the work that he's doing for anybody that doesn't know, you should check out this
episode and follow Daniel and look at all the incredible research that he's put together.
But the idea of mining Bitcoin with methane that is literally coming out of heaps of trash
and turning that into electricity instead of just lighting it on fire or worse, letting
it just vent into the air is just incredible.
I mean, literally trash to treasure.
It's somehow really poetic that you're able to do that and with it, mine the hardest money
that humanity has discovered out of literal heaps of trash.
That's pretty amazing.
That gives me a lot of hope.
And whatever you think about whether climate change is, manmade climate change is real
or whether you think that that is a hoax, I think that just about everyone should be
able to agree that methane is bad and you do not want that.
You do not want to be breathing that if you don't think it's bad, please go stand in a
landfill and take a few deep breaths and see how you feel after doing that for a while.
And that's what I love about that side of things is you can, it seems that with Bitcoin
enables these really crazy ideas that almost seem fictional, but they're they're real.
And they're but they're so crazy that they just kind of like that seems like somebody
made that up.
What do you mean you can, there's stuff coming out of a landfill that you can turn into electricity
and then create money out of like, what do you mean?
That sounds nuts, but it's real.
That's right.
Bitcoin has a lot of these little counterintuitive corners that you can reason your way towards
and then see why it's still true despite being counterintuitive.
And that's always attractive to philosophers.
We like weird counterintuitive ideas that you have to work to get.
It's like a little treat at the end of some work, then, oh, okay, all of a sudden the
light bulb moment comes on and that's your treat that you you realize that proof of work
can't be cheated or, you know, one of these, there's lots of little tiny insights like
that that make up Bitcoin.
And they're delightful, but you have to work to get there for each of them, I think.
Speaking of kind of counterintuitive things, you know, we're, okay, you're talking about
proof of work and talking about the very real costs that are associated with creating, well,
I should say the Bitcoins are already created.
We're just unlocking them, right?
The 21 million is already there.
It's just a matter of unlocking them, but it's real energy in resistance money.
I'll plug it again in this lovely book.
There we go.
Twins, love it.
But there was one part that jumped out at me a little bit because I found it interesting
and perhaps a little counterintuitive and something that many folks may push back on
is that the idea that Bitcoin is actually a fictional, it's fictional, it's a fictional
substance.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit and kind of the idea there?
There are a couple of arguments we give for this conclusion.
And maybe the first thing to do is to give those style of arguments with the dollar before
we move to the case of Bitcoin because we think it applies to both.
So think about a $10 bill in your fanny pack.
It represents 10 somethings.
But how many bills do you have?
Just one, in fact.
There's one banknote in your fanny pack, the $10 bill, but you possess 10 of something
when you possess that $10 note.
So what are the 10 things?
It's not like the 10 parts of the $10 bill or anything like that.
It's 10 abstract things.
Dollars are abstract, in fact.
And the same abstract things that are dollars can be represented by numbers in your bank
balance when you pull it up on your app, can be represented by a ledger in a commercial
bank or a central bank, or can be represented by dollar bills or $10 bills or $100 bills.
So there's this abstract, let's call it a substance, and by abstract, I mean that it
doesn't exist in space.
You can't find it anywhere.
It's maybe we could use the word an idea, more like a number than a book.
So a book, it makes sound.
You can kiss it.
You can do lots of things with concrete material objects.
You can't do that with numbers.
You can't do that with an abstract substance like the dollar itself.
So we think that the dollar is an abstract substance.
Now what kind of abstract substance is it?
Is it like a number that was just sort of there waiting to be discovered?
Numbers are like that, in my view.
You don't have to have this view, but this is my own view, is that we learned things
about the numbers, and the numbers already existed.
Two was already the number that come, the whole number that comes after one before we discovered
that that was true.
And various truths of arithmetic and mathematics were true before we discovered them, before
we discovered the proofs for them.
But you know, Bitcoin wasn't like that, and the dollar's not like that either.
We made it up.
So if you want a meme for this, it's source, I made it up.
The big glowing blue guy made it up.
So it's abstract, yes, it doesn't exist in space, and yet we invented it.
We made it.
So what's a category for the things that don't exist in space, but they have some kind of
purchase and reality, and we made them up?
Well we call those creatures a fiction.
So think about literary characters, or events in novels, or the novels themselves.
Human beings created those, yes.
But the novel isn't this book, a tome.
The novel is the sequence of words that are reproduced in this tome, and in this tome,
and in this tome.
It can be reproduced in many different tomes, the same novel.
Similarly, so that is, it's abstract, and yet is made up.
It was created by human beings.
So that's really what we mean when we say that Bitcoin is an abstract substance.
There's a bit more going on, but that is maybe the easiest way to see it, and that it's not
particularly hostile to, or friendly to Bitcoin to conceive it in this way.
Bitcoin in this way is just like the dollar.
Now the dollar, unlike gold, is an abstract substance.
So maybe that's one way, another contrast to see is that some money is not made up.
Now the fact that gold, or when it does serve as money is money, does depend on us.
But the gold's existence itself does not.
Gold predated human beings, and would likely postate human beings.
We didn't make it up.
But we did make up the dollar.
We also, with the help of our computers that coordinate our minds, we made up Bitcoin as
well.
What do you think?
Do you buy it, or are you suspicious?
Does this seem like FUD?
What do you think?
No, no, no.
I didn't take it to be FUD at all, but I was asking myself as an amateur philosopher,
what would others think of this?
How could this be interpreted as FUD?
Because you guys very early on say that you're going to make some arguments in this book,
or some propositions that may be somehow negatively regarded by Bitcoiners.
My Bitcoiners themselves.
Sorry.
No, but I found that interesting, and I'm always a fan of calling something out yourself
at the beginning, taking away a little bit of the power.
Can you talk about, and no need to spoil the whole book, but just at a higher level, what
are some of those things that you think that Bitcoiners will really disagree with in your
book?
And is that because there's something that Bitcoiners are getting wrong, or is this just
a matter of opinion for some of these things?
Here is one thing that some Bitcoiners expect, and indeed are confident about, that we neither
expect nor are confident, and maybe even we're confident it won't happen, which is hyper
Bitcoinization.
And let's define that as Bitcoin becoming a dominant currency in the world, such that
an appreciable fraction, maybe even the majority of goods are not just traded in Bitcoin, but
where prices are denominated in Bitcoin.
So for example, if oil prices were standardly quoted in SATs, and that was just the way
it was done, that would be one important element of hyper Bitcoinization.
Now, we don't think this is either likely to happen, nor do we think it's important
that it happen for Bitcoin to be good for the world.
And I think some Bitcoiners think one or both of those things.
We think that it's destined to occur, and that it's actually quite important for Bitcoin
that it occur, that there be a kind of the bubble keep on expanding.
And if you don't like the bubble image, the waves keep on coming in until they've engulfed
every other money in the world.
So that's one, maybe two points that closely related, that we disagree with many Bitcoiners
about, as for why, well, on the normative point, whether you need hyper Bitcoinization
for Bitcoin to do any good, well, we think Bitcoin is doing good now without hyper Bitcoinization.
So we don't need to project fantasies or models or hopes or dreams or ambitions or expectations
about the future to actually assess Bitcoin and figure out if it's good or bad.
Let's look to the present and past to do that instead.
And second, Bitcoin is no longer young.
Bitcoin is 15 years old now.
And of course, it's had a remarkable march, a run, series of waves or bubbles, whatever
it is, it's been a remarkable 15 years.
And yet I don't think that the evidence we have thus far gives us strong evidence of
incoming hyper Bitcoinization.
What would that evidence actually have to look like?
What would evidence of future hype per Bitcoinization be?
Hard to say, but I would think that it would include Bitcoin being used as a unit of account
on at least some markets for core input goods like oil to date haven't seen.
Now let me give one natural reply that some Bitcoiners would give them.
Let me give my reply to that.
And then at Walker, I want to hear what you think.
The natural reply to that for Bitcoiners is to cite this little chart of the stages of
monetization where something begins as a store of value and then begins as a collectible
and then a long-term store of value, then a short-term store of value, then a media
exchange, and ultimately a unit of account, maybe some other functions as well.
I see no empirical evidence that this is actually how monetization happens.
I've tried to find the origins of this chart.
I've looked up things in Munger and in the other Austrian economists.
I've tried to track down some kind of basis for this.
To me, it looks like pure fantasy.
It looks like somebody just thought about it really hard.
And then source, I made it up.
Now that's perfectly good as a theory and that's what philosophers do more or less
all the time.
Source, I made it up.
But this is the kind of theory that we should test against history before we have any confidence
of, especially if we're using it to predict the future.
What I would want is evidence of many monies that have undergone this stages of monetization.
There's something like 150 monies existing and widely used today.
Well, maybe we could find a chart that showed that at least 50 of them had this, obviously
that didn't happen.
So where are we getting this chart and how is it informing ideas about future hyperbic
colonization and the stages that we're in as we climb that curve towards it?
To me, this is not look empirically well founded.
Now if some blessed listener has discovered the truth here and wants me to read something,
tag me on Twitter, I'll read it because I've got a B in my bonnet now and I've been thinking
about writing a paper about this.
So I'd like to dig in deeper if there are other sources I should be reading.
I think that it's a really fascinating question, can you find a lot of empirical evidence for
this?
I think about this aspect a lot because you see people on the, let's say the anti-Bitcoin
side, you see the fiat maximalists talking about the various reasons why Bitcoin is not
money or will never be money or maybe it's sort of like a money substitute, but it's
not really money because nobody, you're not paying your taxes in it or one of those arguments.
Brother.
Yeah, I know.
That Dick Cuckerson guy, I don't know if you've seen him, but he's a real jackass.
Oh, I love his work.
Yeah, boy.
That's a topic for a different day.
So I do think about this a lot though and I used to be of the sort of black and white
opinion that just exactly what you just described, the yes, money goes through these if we're
going to break them down to just the three stages, you know, you had the collectible
phase, but really it's the store of value and then medium exchange and then unit of
account.
Right.
And now I have a little bit more of a nuanced view, which is that these state, you can't
really say that this is the progression because this progression actually happens differently
for different people all around the world at the same time.
So there are people who started using Bitcoin as a medium exchange before it was a either
a unit of account or a store of value for them.
There are people who only have used Bitcoin as a store of value and may never progress
who literally say, I will never sell my Bitcoin or will never spend my Bitcoin, whether or
not that's accurate, it's be seen.
But for them, if they are being honest, then they will literally never transition to using
it as a medium exchange.
They're just going to presumably skip straight to unit of account because if they're just
holding it forever, then it's the, that's how they're denominating their wealth.
So then we've just completely cut out the medium exchange part.
So because these things can happen for different people at the same time in different ways,
I find it difficult to say that this is the way it must happen.
This is the way, you know, this is the way that it is because for some people it isn't.
It's completely different.
And so yes, we, you know, it's very often tempting and I myself, I'm guilty of this
to make these simplifications or these generalizations.
And I think a lot of times we, I perhaps even you do make these simplifications in order
to try and explain Bitcoin to those who aren't there yet to try because I think a lot of
the things that Bitcoiners may say like on, you know, on Twitter, for example, when, you
know, engaging in a Twitter debate with some fiat economist or gold bug, they're meant,
you know, they're, they're, they're truncated versions of that person's actual thoughts
and they lack a lot of the nuance because.
Well, one would hope that 260 characters is truncated and that there's more going on
than just 260 characters.
Yes.
Exactly.
And indeed it is.
Indeed it is.
But that's a, there's, I think there's always a lot of deeper nuance for people than, than
they make readily apparent.
And at least I hope there is.
I know that there is for me.
I'm also guilty of often trying to make light or satirize things in lieu of providing an
actual argument, but I find that that's somehow more effective in certain contexts.
But that just.
Context call for different things.
Yeah.
The Bible says answer a cool, answer a fool according to his folly.
And then the next verse is answer not a fool according to his folly.
Depends.
Depends on the fool.
Right.
Sometimes you got to take them on their own ground.
Sometimes you wrestle with a pig and get dirty.
Sometimes you decline.
You know, this is a slight, a slight departure, but I think again in the same vein here, because
we're talking about how ultimately like, how are you using Bitcoin?
Well, it depends on what you value, right?
It depends on your, your subjective experience, your subjective needs, wants your subjective
values.
I think that a lot of people, you know, we, this term intrinsic value is, is thrown around
a lot.
Intrinsic value.
And I put the question to you again, as a, as a philosopher, does intrinsic value exist?
Is all value subjective?
Because I don't, or I should say, does intrinsic value exist?
Or is all value subjective?
Because I don't know if there's, I think it's perhaps one or the other there, but then I
guess if all value is subjective, then somebody could subjectively say that I believe that
there is intrinsic value.
So perhaps I'll leave this to the, the philosopher, but what are your thoughts on that?
Intrinsic value, subjectivity of value, can both coexist?
Or how do you think about that?
I think there's a useful distinction to make at the get-go that people like Von Mises didn't
always make, which is between economic value and moral value.
My own view is that in the case of moral value, there are examples of intrinsic value defined
here as something that is worth pursuing for its own sake.
So think of things that are pursuit, worth pursuing for the sake of something else.
Money is an example.
Why do you want money?
Well, for the sake of something else, it's for what it can buy you.
But there are some things that are worth pursuing for their own sake.
They are valuable in themselves, for example, friendship.
Pleasure as well.
It feels good, not because of what you can trade it for that you get something else,
but it's good in itself.
Beauty, love, many good things have intrinsic value in that moral sense.
They're morally valuable and worth pursuing for their own sake, not merely as tools to
acquire or get at other values.
So in the moral case, I do agree that there are intrinsic things with intrinsic value.
In the economic case, there are, let's say, three different senses of intrinsic value.
I'm sorry, I'm making distinctions, but this is what you get when you ask a philosopher.
And one problem here is that there's price theorists who talk about this, and then there's
people in finance who talk about it.
And they differ in how they use these terms about intrinsic value.
In finance, intrinsic value often means something like cash flow.
So the intrinsic value of a security is the net present value of its future discounted
cash flows in expectation.
And when they're talking about whether price exceeds intrinsic value, when they're talking
about fundamentals, that's what they're talking about.
Now when the Austrian economists say there's no intrinsic value in economics, they are
not saying there's no cash flow.
Obviously, some assets have cash flow.
You own a home and you rent it.
That's cash flow.
You have a security that's got a coupon on it.
That's cash flow, a bond with some interest owed to the possessor or the owner of the bond.
So that kind of intrinsic value does exist.
Here's another sense of intrinsic value, something that is valuable in the economic sense regardless
of what anybody thinks.
So independent of human minds, independent of what we want, what we desire, independent
of, and here, let's use the special term, independent of demand.
Now the old labor theory of value suggested that yes, there are things that have value
even if they're not demanded.
What makes them valuable is the work, the input cost to produce them.
So this was an ingredient in many of Marx's most important arguments and also some of
Adam Smith's.
So the idea that some things are valuable because of the input cost to create them.
Now the marginalist revolution, which predates the Austrians, but the Austrians piggybacked
on this, said, no, that's ridiculous, absolutely absurd to think that something has economic
value just because it was expensive to produce.
My boogers are very expensive to produce.
They're also scarce.
And on the margin, they actually get more and more costly to produce because I would
have to do more and more milk drinking and get lots of dust in my environment to create
more mucus.
Very expensive, difficult to produce.
That doesn't mean that they have economic value because that only looks the supply side
of things.
What about demand?
Now demand is plainly subjective.
It's what people want and whether they want it hard enough to give up something of value
for it.
So it's the marginalists who shifted, so called the marginalist revolution in the history
of economics basically created price theory as we know it and said, nonsense, this is
horseshit to only look at supply, you've got to look at demand as well.
And it's where supply and demand intersect that we get an equilibrium market price.
So that is what the Austrians often mean when you interpret them charitably, when they say
that value is subjective, that you only have a market price because somebody wants something
and somebody wanting something depends on what's going on in their head and their heart.
It's subjective in that sense.
It depends on human minds.
So if that's what we mean by subjective, then economic value, that is market price, is indeed
subjective.
And that's basically unquestionable in terms of economics as we know it now.
Nobody who knows anything about price theory should question that.
Now here's a little trick that I learned just last week.
This is from Josh Hendrickson, who is a Bitcoin or an economist.
He's the chair of the economics department at the University of Mississippi.
He pointed out in his newsletter last week that supply is actually demand.
So it's subjectivity on the other side as well.
And here's how it goes.
When you are bidding for a car, the BMW dealership, let's say you bid a dollar for the car and
they say, no.
What informs that decision?
It's the demand on their side.
They would rather have the car than your dollar.
They are the other bidder.
They're basically bidding for the car to keep it, to do nothing.
That's the other option for them.
That's actually demand.
They demand the car more than they demand your dollar when you offer them only a dollar.
And when you offer them $100,000, then it tips over and they would rather have the $100,000
in the car.
That is demand.
They're demanding your dollars over the car or the car over your dollars.
So in fact, when we have a supply demand chart, it's a demand demand chart.
And so in this way, economic value is subjective through and through, not just on half.
Half of the chart, but the whole of the chart.
Despite that though, I think there are things that are morally valuable, valuable in themselves.
And sometimes we confuse these things and that frustrates me enormously, perhaps you
can tell.
I think friendship is good in itself, not merely as a tool for something else.
And in fact, it's also valuable even if you think it isn't.
So you can be wrong about what you value there.
So that's another kind of objectivity that we have in the moral case that we don't have
in the economic case.
Okay, rant over.
No, I always say this is a safe space for rants.
And there are several things that went unpack there and I'm going to try and organize them
in the best way that I can.
So perhaps I can start at the end, which is kind of...
Very good place to start.
Yeah, it is, from a moral perspective.
So does that mean if there are things that have intrinsic value from a...
When looking through the lens of morality, does that mean that morality is objective?
Does that mean that you can define good and bad in an objective way?
I think so.
That's my view.
Now, this is a controversial view in ethics, but I think some things are valuable and worth
pursuing regardless of anybody's opinion on the matter.
So someone thinks that murder is valuable.
They're simply wrong.
And they're wrong in a very dangerous way, but they are no less wrong than someone who
thinks that the earth doesn't exert gravitational pull on us.
It's a kind of delusion.
Now, moral facts are different than empirical facts or scientific facts, but I still think
that there are moral facts that don't depend on us for their truth.
So in that sense, I do believe in objective morality.
Again, a controversial view, but that happens to be my own view in metaethics.
And I would agree that murder is wrong, but perhaps to tease that a little bit more, what
if you murder because the person that you are murdering killed your family?
Is that still wrong for you to kill them?
I would think of the question there is not whether murder is wrong, but rather whether
killing is wrong.
So think of murder as a special class of killing.
And then you're pointing out maybe there are kinds of killing that aren't murder.
They might be just killings.
And that's a substantive question of moral, of normative ethics, of morality.
And I think that the thing to do there is not to say, oh, it's all subjective.
It depends on or it's up to you to just decide what you're saying.
No, instead, the thing to do is to exchange reasons and to think, OK, so what are some
reasons for thinking that there are some just and non-immoral, that is moral, killings,
and some reasons to think that no, all killings are wrong?
Weigh these against each other.
Think about various possible scenarios, war, self-defense, retribution, and so on.
And really try to think clear about them.
What are the salient differences between them?
Do we think that killing in war is permissible, but killing in self-defense is not because
there's an authority who authorizes war, whereas in self-defense, not?
Or maybe you think it's good in both cases or morally permissible.
But of course, these are difficult questions.
That's just substantive ethics.
Trying to, with fear and trembling, work out what we're supposed to do, what is right
and wrong.
But I do think that there are reasons we can give foreign against these things.
And that's what we should be doing, and we call that ethics.
Yeah.
No, it's...
And I was not trying to have a gotcha or anything, because I'm quite sure that you've
spent more countless hours pondering these questions than I have, and I'm pretty sure
it's not even close.
Although I have spent a fair amount, but I'm quite certain it's not even close.
We have an asymmetry there.
But I was just...
I was curious about that, because I think it's an interesting argument.
If I'm summarizing correctly, also, your point regarding, let's say, economic value and its
subjectivity is that, yes, economic value is, in fact, subjective.
And that idea of the demand curve is also quite fascinating.
I hadn't thought of it from that perspective, and I think it would probably break Paul Krugman's
brain as it might make his models a little bit too messy.
His nice charted view of the world wouldn't work exactly.
He was once a brilliant economist and a great essayist.
He's got these classic essays in the 70s.
They're so elegant, and he was so smart.
And then he was given $400,000 a year to do nothing except write New York Times columns,
and something broke.
But I just got to give credit where it's due.
He was once top of his game.
There's a reason that he got to where he is, but something went wrong with him.
Credit where it's due, but I agree with you now about where he is now.
Perhaps something that happened in 1971.
I don't know if we can trace it all back to it with a nice clean reductionist argument.
I think it was in the late 90s for him after Fax Machine Business.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
I think he was broken from 1998 onwards.
You know, it's funny.
People change, right?
And this is an example also of, I think, perhaps money changing people.
There's the meme in Bitcoin.
You don't change Bitcoin.
Bitcoin changes you, but in another sense, money in general changes people or changes
how they behave.
It changes societies.
It changes cultures.
And I had a question for you that is something I've been asking around about and pondering
a lot myself and have some thoughts on myself, but I would love your opinion on it.
So let's say, imagine a nice metaphysical stream flowing in one direction.
And I'm curious, you know, you have things that are upstream and things that are downstream,
affecting the downstream, right?
If you had to place these things in order, what order would you place them in in terms
of what's starting with upstream and moving downstream?
And these things are culture, technology, money, and law.
Now, there's a cop out here, which is to say, oh, they're all mutually influencing
a little, perhaps a little, a little, a little edit.
That's right.
Yeah.
But you, you don't want the cop out.
You want an opinionated answer, this linear.
Perhaps if it, or perhaps some things can run alongside each other or change positions.
But do you think that there's a general flow to these things?
Or if you had to say, what's the closest flow you could imagine?
Or maybe there's just two of these things.
Maybe, maybe some of them are not, not linear, like, like I'm trying to suggest, but I would,
you can cop out if you want, of course, but I would try to answer honestly.
Okay.
I think the order and in particular, the placement of law might differ across different social
political systems.
So for something that's more autocracy, where there's a small group of people ruling everybody
else, law might be more upstream.
Whereas something that's more democratic, where more people have a voice and some say
in the rules that govern their lives, law will be further downstream of the others.
So it's hard to universally place law in that for me, because I think, I think the variable
there is the, the farther away you get from hardcore authoritarianism, the further downstream
law becomes.
So maybe for a deeply authoritarian place, law is actually at top.
It's the rulers with law and the force of law that determine many of the things and the
consequences that follow even for culture over long periods of time.
Over short periods of time, law can't shift culture, but over long periods, certainly
the Soviet Union might be a great example of where that does and does not happen.
You know, some bits of Russian culture broken, some bits broken by communist rule, that is.
But some actually preserved despite the 70 odd, 50 odd year attempt to break them.
So that's for me, maybe the harder thing to determine is where law goes and maybe the
controlling variable is just how authoritarian or autocratic a regime is.
So let's say that it is not.
Let's say it's the good case.
Culture, technology, money, law.
For what it's worth, that's where I would place them as well.
But I, I was, I just made it up.
No, no, no, no.
Source.
So exactly.
I've just been thinking about it, but because I, and I also, the law part is an interesting
one for me because as you said, depending on the nature of the regime and also, you
know, we're, we necessarily must think about regimes.
We can't take this question in a vacuum because it's not meant to be taken in a vacuum.
It's meant to be like from a practical or as practical as you can get sense, you know,
where do these things fit?
And I think in America, like America is a nice example to use because it is a, you know,
for all of its faults, it is still, has had the most remarkable rise of any nation state
in history and as an, you know, biased, of course, but, but really, I mean, it is a meteoric
rise that for all of its faults has lifted the vast majority of the world out of abject
poverty.
That does not mean that we have also not kept much of the world in abject poverty with the
policies that we choose to pursue, the wars that we choose to fight forever.
But I think that it's the, you know, America is great because of the people, not because
of the politicians.
And that's where I think culture, that's why culture is such an important thing and culture
driving technology in many ways.
Technology of course, that, that one, the jump from technology to money, that one's, that's
an easier one to make, right?
Because we money just is a technology.
Exactly.
It's a social technology.
So I just think of that as it's contained within the Venn diagram.
So it's downstream.
Exactly.
And then, but then law is an interesting one because I also think a lot about like, what
is the, the purpose of law?
And my somewhat reductionist view, which is fairly informed by Bastia is that the purpose
of law is the protection of private property.
And then the ideal purpose of a state is the organization for the collective defense of
that private property from plunders and the perversion of the law by the state happens
when those who are supposed to protect private property from plunder become the plunders
themselves.
And so a related question is, what do you think is the purpose of the state?
Because we talk about the separation of money and state a lot within the Bitcoin space.
And that sounds like a very radical thing.
And I think it's important to define what the state is and what its purpose is.
So again, to the philosopher, I would ask, why does the state exist?
What is the state's purpose?
I go back just a second.
And then I want to address that.
Absolutely.
I was puzzling again about the place of law.
And I thought of this other historical example.
Think about racial integration policy in the United States post 1954, so a Brown v. Board
of Education, schools by law are mandated to be integrated white and black.
This had already happened in some places, but then it became a nationwide policy and
took effect and most dramatically in the South, think of Alabama and so on.
Now this was a case of law imposing a result.
But years later, we can see downstream cultural effects.
That was 70 years ago this year.
And people grew up with white and black classmates and learned to accept it.
And that changed how they felt, whether they're white or black, about the other having grown
up with them in a classroom.
So there's maybe a pretty potent and important case of law being upstream of culture.
The one thing I would just to apologies for the interruption, but the one thing I would
ask based on that is, okay, I can see the flow that you're making there, but can we
also not argue that the culture of the lawmakers, those making the law of the pushes they were
getting had changed to such a degree where, you know, so there is a cyclical nature to
this, right?
And so it's, you know, it's a time.
Time is a flat circle in this case.
And you know, where does it begin and end?
But you know,
Well, in this case, it might be a cultural shift in some parts of the United States
that led to shifts in the composition of the Supreme Court that eventually percolated into
law, case law in this case, which then percolated into eventually dramatic cultural changes
in the American South.
So it's still culture, but just not local culture that was the relevant variable there.
But apologies for the interruption.
Oh, no, I wanted to go back.
Let's go back to the state.
I'm sort of suspicious of the idea that we can answer what is the state for because there
isn't this thing that is the state.
Now famously, people like Bostoyat said, yes, there's this thing, the state, and here's
what it is for to protect private property.
And the American vision is slightly more capacious, depending on how you think of things, but
it nonetheless accepts this monistic view that there is this thing, the state, and here's
what it's for.
So it's laid out in the Declaration of Independence that governments are instituted among men
to secure these rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government,
the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So that's the preamble.
That's what governments or states are for.
I think different states are for different things.
And some of them are their purpose is not to protect against plunder.
Their purpose is something else, maybe including that or not.
So I don't think we can actually extract normative or moral conclusions about what the state
ought to be from this grand statement about what the state is for, because people have
come together for different reasons and started to use a monopoly on violence for different
things to coordinate behavior in various ways.
So I think we can say abstractly, the state is an institution for the coordination of
violence to enforce rules and in particular monopoly on violence.
That is the thing that unites all states.
But what are the rules that they coordinate to enforce using violence?
It depends, brah.
And we can't just extract a judgment that, oh, this rule is good or this rule is bad
from some view that we had about the purpose of states.
So unfortunately, political philosophy is a little harder than the American founders
suggested it was or Thomas Jefferson did in the preamble or Friedrich Paseat in the
law.
And so I've criticized the arm of the law, but let me also add something nice about
it.
I read that book first when I was 15.
It was absolutely formative for me.
And it's just this, it's so short and so elegant and so neatly argued that even if you disagree
with it, I still think you have to grapple with its argument.
For those who haven't read it, one of the fundamental moves is to say, well, here's
some things that you cannot do as an individual.
You can't take someone else's stuff in particular.
Okay.
So why is it okay if two of us do it together?
That's not okay.
Then why is it okay if 10 of us do it together?
Just get together and take Walker's stuff.
Not cool.
And yet that appears to be what states are up to.
So what gives?
Now Bastiat's conclusion is in the libertarian side of things or classical liberal or maybe
even anarcho-capitalist if you took it consistently and seriously.
But even if you disagree with that conclusion, I still think you have to grapple with that
opening question, which is why is it okay for a couple of people to do what is not okay
for one individual to do?
Great question and unlocks many deeper and other interesting questions in political philosophy.
It really does.
And I've been debating reading the book out loud on this show because it is so short and
sweet and well formulated.
And it is very elegant.
Yeah.
I've gone through it a number of times now and it still makes me think and makes me ask
questions, which is what a good book should do, right?
That's right.
Well, he was an economist and a philosopher.
These days that combination is rare.
The fields have separated and economists no longer read the history of economics or philosophy
and philosophers hold economics in total contempt.
These are generalizations, but someone like Bastiat was both.
So was Karl Marx.
So was Adam Smith.
Three very different dudes.
I happen to disagree more deeply with one of them than with the other two.
But what I admire about the three jointly is that they were both deeply committed to
the task of philosophy and of the social science side of things, the economics side.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe you sell yourself short a little bit because you clearly do have a ground
grasp of economics as maybe...
I've had to fight for this.
Yeah.
Maybe there's a renaissance of economic philosophers coming back.
The economists who write about Bitcoin the most, who are Will Luther and Josh Hendrickson,
they both write kind of like philosophers.
And though, of course, they have models and equations and fancy stuff that economists have
in their papers, they also attack problems and questions that are deeply philosophically
interesting and often write about them with great clarity and power and just straight
up philosophical abstract argumentation.
So for example, Will has a paper, is Bitcoin intrinsically valuable?
Like, okay.
Yes.
That's a philosophical question.
He uses some tools of economics to answer it and then they're off to the races.
So I have hope for these guys that they can unite the clans and I like co-authoring with
them and we're all fellows with the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
So that's one way that I have connections to these guys in their work.
And I may just say I'd love the work that the Bitcoin Policy Institute is doing.
David and Grant are great.
They brought together this really cool band of quite serious people who are really lovely
too.
I just love working with them.
You know, I've found that the many Bitcoiners who I've had the pleasure and the privilege
of meeting in person, I have had trouble finding ones that I do not like and do not enjoy spending
time with.
There seems to be perhaps it's just a...
Blessed life.
Yeah, it's really quite miraculous.
And another thing I enjoy about Bitcoiners is that despite some of the...
If you're looking from the outside in, you may see a lot of supposed toxicity.
That's not what I see when I look from the inside out.
It's certainly not what I see when people get offline and are in person at conferences.
I see a lot of camaraderie even though there may be fierce disagreements.
And I think that's powerful because I think within any...
I don't know if you want to call it a movement that seems to...
Like too much of a loaded term, but perhaps that's what it is.
A movement.
Well, when it comes to Stephen Lukka, it is a movement.
In particular, it's a movement movement.
I want to make sure I mentioned him because he mentioned me when he was on there with
you.
I...
Shout out to Stephen.
Shout out to Steve.
He's just a great guy and always inspires me to live up to my name of Walker as well.
Anytime I see Stephen post about walking, I'm like, damn, I have not walked enough today.
Got some steps, did.
I'm sitting right now.
If I could, I would probably try and record these walking because I know it...
Well, it helps everybody think.
It certainly helps me think.
But I think that gets perhaps a little bit distracting.
But I'm going to figure it out somehow.
I need to get some gimbal stabilization maybe so it seems like I'm staying still.
I'm not sure.
And for me, I like the wired connection.
The rock solid wired connection, not move between Wi-Fi access points.
Yeah.
Anyways, yes, shout out to Stephen if you're listening.
Dude, dude's rock.
Just especially dudes with vibes.
That's right.
He's a vibe connoisseur.
That he is.
Andrew, I want to be conscious of your scarce time here because Bitcoin is very scarce.
Bitcoin podcasts are abundant and you've decided to share your scarce time on one of the many
abundant Bitcoin podcasts.
So I want to thank you for that.
Actually, I disagree with that, Walker.
This is not a Bitcoin podcast.
It is the Bitcoin podcast.
Let's be clear about this.
He said the thing.
Yes.
No, but you're absolutely right.
But I do have live, if it's all right, one more question and then one, just a final question
and to just plug the book once more if that sounds good to you.
Okay.
So the last question, and perhaps I shouldn't have saved this for last, but it feels appropriate
with the discussion of time.
But the old saying, time is money.
I think everybody's heard that saying, right?
I'm thinking about this and I feel that it's perhaps more appropriate to say money is time
because time's not money in the sense that if time was money, you could buy more of it
or exchange things for more time.
You can't do that.
And they're similar in the case of, let's say, a good money, a sound money.
Bitcoin, for example, Bitcoin and time are both absolutely scarce, right?
But unlike our time on this earth, Bitcoin is noably scarce, whereas our time is not.
We are all born with some amount of time.
We do not know just how scarce that time is.
We could, you know, you know, memento more.
Remember that you will die.
We could die today.
We could die 50 years from now.
We don't know.
Bitcoin, we know.
But I'm really just curious, how do you think about Bitcoin and time or perhaps a different
question, maybe more personal, is how has Bitcoin changed the way you think about time?
And is time money?
Is money time?
All of the above discuss.
There's a marvelous little piece of Singlish, which is the local dialect of English here
in Singapore.
It's this word, chim.
It means something is too deep for our current mode to discuss.
It's just too much.
It's kind of like saying above my pay grade or not now, dude, it's too much.
So I just got to say to chima.
Okay.
It's to chima.
We'll have to, you know, I got to tap out on this one.
We'll have to save it for another time then is what I'm hearing there.
Another time.
Yes.
Which will also be now, but it'll be now at whatever this time is.
Unfortunately, it is always now.
That's the weird thing.
Or perhaps, or perhaps fortunately.
I think we're done here.
I think that's perfect.
Okay.
The last thing I'll ask, and this one's an easy one.
Besides your book, Resistance Money, and shout out to you and your co-authors for writing
it and having it published by a, I was going to say reputable, but by something that will
lend credence to it in other circles, which I think is important.
Besides Resistance Money, what is a book that you recommend everyone read?
And then what are you reading right now?
I have very idiosyncratic tastes in fiction.
A book that I'm reading right now is Miracles by C.S. Lewis.
I've read it many times and it's up on my Kindle right now.
So when I next go to bed and open my Kindle for a few pages, that's what it'll be.
It's this little piece of sort of pop philosophy, but quite deep to try to think about whether
miracles are possible.
That's the first thing that came to mind.
I won't give book recommendations, though.
Nobody ever likes the books that I recommend, so I stop recommending books.
There's this, one of my old mentors in grad school said this, you know what?
If you just keep on reading the books you need to find, they'll find you.
The more important thing is just to read.
It's not to read some list that Lex Friedman said was good or that some old professor said
was good or that some middle-aged professor said was good.
The important thing is just to read and the books you need will find you.
So I don't give book recommendations.
You know, answered...
Except for this one.
Yeah.
Except for this one.
Answered like a philosopher.
This is good and I recommend that folks read it.
And I think it's very...it's a book for anyone, much like Bitcoin is for anyone.
It's approachable to anyone.
You can start from no knowledge of Bitcoin and quite quickly gain some knowledge and
start asking the right questions.
And I think that that's, again, as philosophers, which the three of you are, I have to assume
that was one of your goals, was just to at least make people start to ask questions and
challenge their assumptions.
And I think that this will do a very good job of that.
Is it still number one in philosophy on Amazon?
It was earlier today.
And yes, I've been checking every day.
I don't blame you.
I mean, that's an amazing...
We're pretty excited about it.
Yeah.
I'd say that's quite a feat.
That's really incredible.
Well, for people who want to find you, they can just search resistance money on Amazon.
They can find it.
Where else should they go?
And I'll drop all these links in the show notes for people who want to grab them.
You can get a free PDF of chapter one at the book website, which is resistance.money.
And if you want more, you can buy the book.
And if you want even more still, you can scroll down and find the Twitter handles of
the authors.
And if you want yet more besides, we've written, I don't know, 20 plus articles about Bitcoin
and such.
You can find those on that website as well.
Well, fantastic.
I want to thank the three of you for writing this because I think we need always more books
about Bitcoin.
We need more podcasts.
And more podcasts.
Of course, always more podcasts and more books.
But it's just...
If you think about the tiny little area that Bitcoin feels very big, the Bitcoin community
feels very big when you're in it.
But when you look at it from a global perspective, it's still very small.
And we need to have as much information and as much content created and disseminated as
possible to seep into as many areas of the public consciousness as we possibly can.
So thank you, all three of you for writing it.
And thank you for your time today.
I have truly enjoyed this.
Same walker.
A pleasure.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast.
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head to bitcoinpodcast.net.
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You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker.
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Walker America.
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and at Walker America on rumble.
Bitcoin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.