I think there's a way in which the control offered by CBDCs is so egregious that there's
no way to sugarcoat it for populations like people do not trust it and they're not going
to trust it.
That said, most money, the vast majority of money that people transact with is already
digital and it is already fully account based.
And so I think what CBDCs have done is in a way kind of exposed or begun exposing the
extent to which the legacy financial system is already a system of control.
And I think people feel kind of trapped, honestly.
It's like the lobster that's been in the boiling water that's slowly being turned up
hotter and hotter.
Like they don't know what to do about that.
The great thing about technological innovation like Bitcoin is that regardless of what people
are able to do about their local politicians or central banks, they can opt in and use Bitcoin.
That is now available to 8 billion people and that's going to change the world.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 866-119 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 Natalie Smolensky.
Natalie is an anthropologist executive director of the Texas Bitcoin Foundation and a senior
fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
She is also one of the people I look to the most for nuanced, thoughtful, and objective
takes on Bitcoin and the chaos in the world around us to help me make sense of it all.
We got into a lot of topics today including Bitcoin as a cultural movement, modern information
overload, the tension between the state and individual rights, decentralization versus
centralization, the constitution, free speech and censorship, peer-to-peer communication
as a fundamental right, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, partisanship, the potential
for individuals to affect change through using technology and a whole lot more.
We also discussed the Satoshi Papers, a scholarly effort by the Texas Bitcoin Foundation to
reflect on the political economy in a Bitcoin world.
And if you'd like to donate to the Texas Bitcoin Foundation to support all the incredible
work they're doing, you can find the link in the show notes.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin Podcast wherever you're watching
or listening.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Natalie Smolensky.
Natalie, welcome.
Thanks for coming on the Bitcoin Podcast.
It's a pleasure to have you here.
Yeah, great to be here.
Thank you, Walker.
I got to see you at a Bitcoin or wedding this last weekend, and it's always interesting
coming back to, let's say, Normie Land after that.
You're around Bitcoin or so much, sometimes you forget that a lot of them, vast majority
of the population does not quote, get it yet.
And so we saw some worlds colliding there at the wedding itself.
You have this Bitcoin contingent and then the old friends contingent.
I don't know.
It's always a kind of surreal experience.
Yeah.
No, definitely.
And that's one of the wonderful things about the Bitcoin movement is that it straddles
all kinds of communities, whatever your cultural background, political beliefs, area of study,
let's say, focus, professional industry, like there's a part of the Bitcoin value proposition
that's compelling for you.
Well, it's a beautiful thing, really, because I'm certainly not the first nor will I be
the last person to say this, but the idea of Bitcoin being a mirror and really reflecting
some of your own worldview back at you.
And I think that's a really powerful thing because if you're, let's say, a political
conservative, you can find a lot of conservative principles upheld in Bitcoin.
You know, with this return to sound money, right?
This is more of a limited government type mentality of separation of money in state,
but by the same token, if you're progressive, okay, well, this is literally the separation
of money in state.
There's nothing more progressive possibly that there could be than that.
And so I find that kind of beautiful.
And as you said, it brings together quite a diverse crew of people, which I think is
ultimately Bitcoin's strength, right?
It's Bitcoin doesn't care who you are.
You just have to find your way to it.
But still we're at, I think, as I don't know if you checked out that study that Troy Cross
did about just what is the makeup of Bitcoiners in America look like.
And as a result of that, he asked them around 7% of Americans own Bitcoin, probably some
margin of error there, but that was both higher than I thought it would be, but also that's
a still a tiny minority.
We're still early, quote.
Yeah, definitely.
No, this is, we're basically witnessing the monetization of a new, not just asset, but
category of asset in real time.
And so, I mean, if you think about how long it took for a commodity like gold to become
monetized, I mean, that goes into like the dawn of human prehistory.
And so, it's extremely early, but the adoption is also happening much, much more quickly
than other commodities in human history.
And you do have kind of a ready example of that even in just like ETF inflows as a Bitcoin
proxy.
Obviously, I would recommend people hold real Bitcoin, but for those that have money locked
away in a 401k that hopefully the government won't decide to dip into later for whatever
reason or change the rules about, that's a nice way to get exposure to Bitcoin.
But those inflows have just been like historically massive.
Clearly, I mean, the speed at which BlackRock changed its tune and Larry Fink changed his
tune specifically about Bitcoin, the mind it boggles.
It's incredible to kind of see that shift.
And again, we're 15 years in, I've only been around for a few of those years so far since
like 2020.
But even in that time, you've seen the narrative shift, the Overton window shift.
It feels like when you have a presidential or multiple presidential candidates, I should
say, talking favorably about Bitcoin, that's kind of a big moment.
It feels like, and I know you're quite a student of history.
And I mean, does this mark sort of the beginning?
Is this like the, are we already in the Bitcoin era?
I guess is the question.
Did that start when Satoshi released the white paper and just that era is slowly building?
Or are we seeing ourselves transition to this era now where Bitcoin becomes this household
name that even if you don't own any, you certainly know about it.
You can't ignore it.
It's in the news every day.
It's something that's just part of the common vernacular.
Yeah.
No, I think it's fair to say we are in the Bitcoin era.
Future historians are going to need to date that era from some point.
And the release of the white paper seems like as good a point as any.
And there are massive capital pools across the world that are looking for a way to just
preserve value in the face of rampant devaluation of fiat currencies.
And so, I mean, they're literally looking at fiat as a melting iceberg and they need
somewhere to park their capital.
And there's only so much real estate in the world.
There's only so much, let's say, productive industry, only so many bonds that can be invested
in.
And so, Bitcoin is kind of ideally suited to function as a store of value in an extremely
volatile historical moment.
Volatile is a nice word for this present moment.
Yeah.
I go back and forth on this because I think it's very tempting.
And this is me speaking personally, it's very tempting for myself to say, wow, what an insane
time we live in everything.
It seems like everything, everywhere, all at once is happening.
But then I have to think, well, is that also just my and all of our collective exposure
to 24, 7, 365 instantaneous news at our fingertips?
Because history always been this chaotic, but of course, you weren't aware of what was
happening on the other side of the planet because you were barely aware of what was
happening in the next village over.
Right.
No, I mean, with the acceleration of information and communication, you have acceleration of
transformation and change.
You know, not just in formal institutions, like governing institutions, economic institutions,
but also in things like social norms.
And so the transformation of culture is happening at an accelerated pace.
And there's no way to put that genie back in the bottle.
I mean, we're living through what the French philosopher Paul Varelio called the information
bomb.
And that's a violent event.
It's fundamentally disruptive for human civilization.
And so the question for us is actually, you know, the British philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead wrote in his essay on symbolism in 1927 that the civilization that innovates
fundamentally disruptive technologies does not survive that innovation.
So that technology in effect destroys the civilization that invented it.
And so the question for us now is, can we survive the destructive implications of the
information technologies that we've invented?
And perhaps at that time, given that there was less, let's say, for lack of a better
word, like globalism.
You know, in the 1920s, his perception of what civilization meant may have been more
geographically isolated versus now we are completely connected.
There is access to this information everywhere.
It's like this is the global civilization and are we going to eat ourselves from the
inside out essentially, which is sometimes it feels like that.
I sure hope not.
I'm curious because you've talked at, I think, great length and tweeted or posted.
I'm not sure what Elon calls it now, honestly.
I'm just going to keep calling it tweeted though, because it feels right.
But you know, like in the same vein as this information bomb, this information overload,
when there is so much information available, that is one thing that is very overwhelming,
of course, for the individual.
But then at the same time, you have companies and nation states that have made it their mission
to digest, collect and interpret as much of that information about individuals as they
possibly can.
And you know, you had a great tweet.
Maybe it was a couple of weeks ago, but it stuck with me.
It was some of the effect of like, without anonymity, everything becomes either crime
or pre-crime.
And I thought this was really interesting.
And I wonder if you could kind of expand on that a little bit, because I don't think that
most people are cognizant of the fact that there is a very slippery slope towards absolute
complete totalitarian surveillance at a level that is was never before possible during other
totalitarian regimes, because the information wasn't there.
It wasn't digitized.
It wasn't immediately available.
There wasn't a metadata footprint tied to everything.
Yeah.
No.
I mean, so the first reaction of many when faced with significant and potentially existential
problems is control.
So control is the easiest thing to default to.
It's the easiest thing to assume.
It's very easy to get widespread support for it, because it seems so intuitive.
Well, the reason bad things are happening is because the right people don't have enough
control over what is happening.
This is part of our human mode of reasoning.
Some philosophers have called it the natural attitude.
Just the day to day, we're just going through the world attitude.
We tend to personify cause and effect.
So if bad things happen, we look for someone, person generally, or a group of people to
be responsible for it.
We have a really hard time with complexity, with especially counterintuitive or nuanced
causal mechanisms.
And so the first step again when facing an existential crisis tends to be some form of
argument for more authority, more control.
It can feel fundamentally disempowering for people to hear that the thing that threatens
them is scaled so far beyond anybody's ability to control that perhaps more like going down
the social stack to more fundamental modes of relating is in fact where we have to begin.
So things like individual relationships, the family, the school, friendship, the things
that we choose to do together with our pack, startups, companies, projects that operate
at a small scale, it's scaling that kind of cooperation that is in fact how we avoid
the existential collapse that the information bomb threatens us with.
But when you have institutions like state, which regardless of scale, one of the characteristics
of the state is that it has the power to indict.
So the functioning of the law and the courts is the functioning of the apparatus at the
state.
And so all of the information that it can collect, it will collect.
And it won't necessarily use it, at least not immediately, but it will hold it in reserve.
And so the more information becomes public and available to the state, the bigger their
arsenal for potentially coming after anyone for any reason.
There's a fantastic lecture.
It's available online from the late 90s actually.
A law professor can't remember which university he was giving this lecture to a law class.
And basically it was an argument about why you should never talk to the police, ever,
under any circumstances, ever.
And there are several reasons for that.
One is because in the vast arsenal of law, let's just say federal laws, there are over
10,000 federal laws that you could potentially have broken.
All of us likely can be accused of breaking one of those laws or more of those laws.
And so not making yourself a target is the key way that you actually prevent that mechanism
of indictment from functioning.
And so the problem with information that's public is everything you say can even will
be used against you.
And that is literally the Miranda warning that is read to people placed under arrest.
And so we have this Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
And that protection can be summed up in the fact that you cannot be compelled to speak
to the state.
You cannot be compelled to produce information for the state.
But if everything's public, then that information is already being produced by you and about
you.
And so it all goes into the pre-crime database that can then be leveraged at any time by
any representative of the state.
That's very dangerous.
I mean, it's kind of terrifying because it seems that the genie doesn't go back in the
bottle.
No.
I mean, it's already out there.
We're already past that.
It's not like we can all of a sudden, oh, let me pull in all of the things I've said, all
the data that's out there on me.
So I mean, is there a solution to this for the individual to protect themselves from
the state, or is this just sort of a situation where the only way is to kind of hope that
you have enough laws in place that the state will respect for long enough that you won't
get completely skewered by them for a meme you posted, for example, depending on where
we're at in this cycle?
The solution is in the constitutional limits to the power of the state.
So we already have a solution.
It's the Constitution of the United States of America.
The problem is that nobody respects the Constitution anymore.
It's literally become almost an irrelevant document in large part as a result of the
assumptions that those inhabiting the three branches of government have brought to their
role in stewarding that Constitution.
So huge part of the problem is the legislature.
Is the American legislature has in effect engaged in a kind of game of political optics
for centuries now, but it particularly accelerated in the 20th century and then in the second
half of the 20th century, their legislators treated constitutional rights as things that
they could sort of carve up into hyper-specific statutory claims and then pass legislation
that in effect overrode the Bill of Rights.
So the right to financial privacy act of 1978 is like this excellent case in point because
it was originally devised by a couple of congressmen who were outraged by the third party doctrine
in which the Supreme Court in 1976 argued that if you're using a third party to convey
or custody information about yourself, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That third party is not obligated at all under the Constitution to protect your information,
which in an information economy as you can imagine and effect it away with the Fourth
Amendment.
So there were a few congressmen who were like, set about this, they created this right to
financial privacy act, which was an attempt to declare and statute something that was
already in the Constitution.
But of course, as they began elaborating the legislation, nobody wants to ever be seen
as soft on crime or creating loopholes.
And so they ended up carving out 20 substantial exceptions to the right to financial privacy
that in effect enshrined in statute the complete lack of financial privacy for Americans.
So this law ended up just like fully doing the opposite of what it set out to do.
And it's just one example.
We have a Constitution, but those who have been charged with protecting and preserving
the Constitution have not done so, so it does not operate.
It's, I'm chuckling to myself not because of this is a good situation, but more so because
it seems like every government law that really gets it in there, sticks it to the people,
it's named just the exact opposite of whatever it does.
And it's just, it's like they keep doing it over and over again.
And at this point, it's just almost funny.
It's like, okay, what does the law really do?
Well, let me just take the inverse of whatever the name of the law is.
And that should give me a pretty clear path to determining what the actual function of
that law is in reality.
Yeah.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, it's literally just like upside down world.
I don't know.
It feels strange that we're at this place, but you know, the Constitution is an incredible
document and I think what always amazes me is the foresight that the founding fathers
had.
They clearly realized that there were going to be people who would be in positions of
power that would try to encroach on the rights of the people and to go against the will of
the masses and do things that would be allegedly for the greater good or whatever other slogan
you want to do.
But as you said, we're at this place now where it seems like there's always a quote
crisis or a set of bad actors that are used as an excuse to strip away the supposedly
unalienable rights of the American people.
Right.
And America is still, I think, for all of its flaws, still one of the better places in
the world that you could be.
Like it's still a wonderful country, but it's sad because if America starts to go down
this path of stripping away the things that make America America, which is a strong Constitution
that protects the rights of individuals, well, then that's a slippery slope for the rest
of the world, which is already treading on thin ice.
And it just, it makes you worry a little bit that, you know, does, does anything stop
this is the only defense against this, perhaps then not at all at the, you know, we have the
Constitution, but clearly it's being disregarded in all sorts of rights and clever lawyers
of the state can always figure out ways to say that, well, with this, you know, this
new technology, we actually can do unlawful search and seizure because, you know, this
founding fathers, you know, they didn't really specify this because of course it was 1776.
They had no idea this would exist.
But is the, you know, the only protection against that just to arm yourself with information
and with technologies that then protect those rights because nobody's going to protect them
for you.
Right.
So, so this is, this is why the second amendment is so very important.
I mean, the second amendment is a, is a bedrock of liberty for the American people.
And, you know, traditionally it's been interpreted as the right to bear, you know, kinetic offensive
weapons, but in a information economy and in a, in a globalized world, I mean that the
right to bear arms also means things like end to end encryption.
So the ability to, to quote unquote go dark as some of its opponents in, in the state
like to say that, you know, going dark is the base state of affairs.
Like that's the state not having visibility into your light was just the default before
the information bomb.
And so, you know, what, what the state has been trying to do is change the default.
You are always on display.
You're always on stage.
You're always being watched.
And the exception is when you get a moment of privacy and, you know, that, that sounds
kind of criminal.
Why would you want that?
And so it's the second amendment interpreted for a digital world that ends up being the
bullwork of protection of individual rights.
And like with all rights, they only matter if you exercise them.
So they have to be exercised by the people.
And a civil society that is fully aware of and exercising its rights does end up pushing
back against the state.
The state is always testing to see what it can get away with, how it can change the Overton
window, how it can frame you up to use its language, to use its priorities, its point
of view.
So you just have to, as a private citizen, you have to reject it entirely.
No, we don't trust you as a rule, not as individual people.
You may be a fine person.
It doesn't, it doesn't matter.
The power you exercise, the office you inhabit is on loan from me.
You report to me.
I'm your boss.
And so there is a, there is a model of power in which it's the individual that is upstream
from the state, not downstream from the state.
And so that, through the use of things like peer-to-peer technologies and to end encryption,
censorship-resistant technologies, that is how we exercise our second amendment in a
digital age.
I think that's, it's quite interesting too that the United States, the state literally
did try to classify end to an encryption as arms.
Like that, that was the whole, it was Adam Back, right, who wore a, or printed t-shirts
with, I'm forgetting what encryption algorithm on them, but you know, to basically protest
against the export of arms that they were saying was happening if you were, you know,
making these encryption technologies available.
I believe it was Adam Back.
I could be mistaken on that.
But I think your point is a good one, and especially important about the, like, these
things don't matter unless you use them.
It gets all well and good if, you know, they exist and you have them.
But if you're not actively practicing and using them, well, then the point is kind of
moot, right?
None of this matters unless you use the technologies available to you.
Like, that is the key point, right?
And what I worry about is, you know, this is like, you know, the cypherpunks wrote code,
that's, you know, cypherpunks write code, it's what they do.
And so many of these incredible technologies have been available for a while, but if they're
not accessible to the layman, to the normie, whatever you want to call them, they're not
going to be widely used.
Does it require critical mass of some sort of critical mass of use for this to be an
effective bulwark against the state's encroachment?
Or is even a small pocket of people resisting through the use of these technologies enough?
Like, is there, does there have to be, is there like a watershed moment where?
Is enough people use it, where the state is effectively neutered?
Or does even a little bit help?
Yeah.
I mean, like, like so many things, the answer to that question depends on what you're trying
to achieve, at what scale and on what timeline.
You know, the, the institutions of what we would call Enlightenment era liberalism, you
know, were the fruits of thousands of years of human political contestation and thinking
together and adversarily across, you know, more than a continent of geographical spread.
And so, from my point of view, the most, the most important thing is that the tradition
of individual liberty, the commitment to individual liberty stays alive, you know, and we may
be living through an era where, you know, there's a kind of dark ages in that respect.
And, you know, popular consensus moves against it.
The exercise of state power and capital moves against it.
And so it may be up to a small group of committed people to keep the practice alive and build
bottom up the, the commitment to using these technologies such that at some point in the
future, they achieve some kind of critical mass to break through, you know, at some scale,
maybe it may be of a thousand people, maybe a 5,000 people, maybe of a million people,
like we can't really predict in advance how these breakthroughs happen, but it is absolutely
the case that a single principled and determined individual can change the course of history.
And so, you know, it's not over.
We got to keep going.
You gave a really incredible keynote at the Bitcoin Policy Summit.
I think that was, was that earlier this year?
Yeah, that was 2024 in April.
Wow.
Yeah.
I don't know why that, that feel, it feels like a long time ago.
I don't know, time is moving in a strange fashion these days.
But it was, it was really outstanding.
And I was telling you before this, that I've watched it several times over because it's
a, and I'll link it in the show notes, it's a really outstanding and succinct breakdown
of kind of what's at stake and the power that you have as individuals and the overreach
of the state and the point that it's at.
But one of the things you said in there was peer to peer is a human right.
Can you talk about that a little bit and just maybe the broader thesis of that keynote and
maybe just even how you came to deliver that?
Because I thought it was, it was not very long, but it was extremely dense and very powerful.
That's right.
Right.
So rights are irreducible.
The thing that differentiates a right from an achievement, let's say, or a privilege
is that it cannot be taken in any meaningful sense.
The subject of the right is always able to exercise it.
What does that mean also from an economic standpoint?
It means rights are not subject to the law of scarcity.
So my right to freely transact with you is not contingent in any way on me having achieved
some level of material comfort or political status or economic power.
So rights are not contingent on your having achieved any level of economic means or social
status or political privilege.
They are a function of your being a person in the world.
So your exercise of agency, which includes the ability to talk to someone or to yourself
in your internal dialogue or to keep your own counsel, to follow the dictates of your
own conscience, none of that is contingent upon anyone else or anything else.
And that's why it can be meaningfully called a right.
And so when I say peer to peer as a right, I mean, all that means is that nobody can
give me permission to communicate with or interface with anyone else.
That is a sovereign prerogative of me as a human in this world.
And so the third party doctrine is, from my point of view, the most insidious attempt
to systematically undermine human rights that I can identify in the last 100 years.
It is truly toxic and inimical to all forms of human organization.
And that's why we have to insist that intermediary less communication, peer to peer communication
transaction is a right.
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It's kind of funny because you seem to see some of the, some people crying democracy
as an excuse to strip away the rights of individuals that, you know, such and such is required in
order to preserve democracy or so and so is a danger to democracy.
So thus they must be de-platformed, de-banked, whatever it may be.
Is this just always the way of things where those in power are going to try to use whatever
means and whatever, you know, the guys of hate speech, misinformation, disinformation
being used as basically a tool to say, hey, we need to censor everyone.
Is this just always the way of things?
Or are we in this unique time because of again, this information bomb because we, we have
the, while we have more power as individuals because of technology, the state has those
same powers and a lot more resources at its disposal, the resources that were not earned
but taken, of course.
But like, is this a unique moment or is this just the same cycle that repeats again and
again, but with kind of different pieces on the chessboard at this point, different capabilities?
Yeah.
Well, authoritarian attempts to control speech and expression are as old as time itself.
They're nothing new.
The difference now is in the capacity, the technological capacity of the authoritarians.
So they have means at their disposal that they didn't have even, you know, a generation
ago.
And so this, this is why the, the contest in power between the state and civil society
is so important for the preservation of liberty.
It literally creates, you know, what Achimoglu back when he believed in liberty, called the
narrow corridor of liberty.
And that was an extremely important contribution to the, to the literature of political economy.
But you know, just to use him as an example, that's not what the Nobel committee decided
to reward.
They instead read his work, his other work on institutions very politically.
And in effect, through their politicized reading of Achimoglu and his contributors, you know,
have argued that institutions fail when a certain level of inequality exists in a society.
And so this is the problem is, is that, you know, authoritarians will always use, you
know, some public emergency, whether that is terrorism or wealth inequality or, you know,
war or whatever, to manufacture consent for submission.
And it just has to be, you just have to have enough people in that society who have a principled
commitment to the priority of liberty over the demands of the state.
That's a really nice, it's a really nice turn of phrase.
That's, you know, I hope that we still do.
And my feeling is I don't have, I don't have, I guess, data to back this up, but anecdotally
it feels like more and more people are, quote, waking up are becoming aware that perhaps
the designs of the state are not, in fact, in their best interests as individuals, in
their families, best interests in their communities, best interests, they're real, and I think
for a lot of people that was, that was COVID and all of the reactions to that, that was
kind of a, a wake up call that, hold on, maybe the state, you know, is in fact just made
up of people that are completely fallible, just like I am.
And maybe they make really dumb decisions sometimes or worse, maybe it's not incompetence,
maybe it is malice, but let's, you know, not explain with, with malice what can be attributed
to incompetence.
I go back and forth on that one quite a lot these days, but it does give me hope that
more people are becoming aware that they are going to make their opinions known and that
they are going to voice their dissatisfaction, where I think at least speaking from an American
perspective, we may often get into trouble is we're tricked by the false dichotomy of
two party politics.
We're tricked by the, the red and blue teams against each other.
And so people will often excuse the behaviors of their own team that if they were being
enacted by the other team, they would in no way excuse, but it's kind of like a, well,
you know, we've got to let this go.
We don't want to speak badly about our team.
And I wonder if, if you've just thought about, is that kind of duopoly that Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola,
democracy, you know, pick one, they're totally different.
I'm a Coke guy myself.
I just think it's better, but that's beside the point.
But does that in a way give us a false sense of security that there is meaningful change
that can happen politically when in fact a lot of that change needs to be done in parallel
by individuals, as you said, making the conscious decision to use technology available to them,
to make their voices heard, to use technologies like Bitcoin that allow them to have a money
that is outside of the system.
Are a lot of people getting tricked?
Are they falling into an idea that they can save the system from within the system?
If that makes sense?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
That's what party politics or partisanship to use, perhaps slightly older term.
That's what it comes down to.
I mean, it's a, it's often leveraging cosmetic differences to create a division such that,
you know, certain forms of organizing, coming to consensus become effectively impossible.
And so, you know, divide and conquer.
It's the age old strategy.
And people conquer themselves.
I mean, people cell phone.
Most human tragedy, in fact, I would suggest is fully avoidable.
It's just a result of, you know, bad thinking, bad incentives, situations that were not prevented.
And then by the time, you know, people decided to do something about it, all of the options
on the table were terrible.
So of course, you're going to have tragedy under those conditions.
So I mean, Adam Smith wrote about this, wrote about the dangers of partisanship.
The founding fathers wrote about it.
In fact, one of the reasons that George Washington decided to not run for a third term is because
he, he felt that he wouldn't get a single vote from the anti federalist side.
That was kind of the partisan divide that was prevalent in his day.
And so, you know, that is also data, though, about what can and cannot be done at a certain
scale.
And so if you can't come to consensus at the level of, you know, 330 million people,
which is the size of America, then you got to get smaller.
What is the scale at which you can come to consensus?
And that is effectively the scale at which you can govern to the extent that you can.
So build from there.
Is that scale like Dunbar's number?
Realistically, or can we get a little bit bigger than that?
I mean, because I completely agree with you.
And I think it's this idea of we have kind of two trends happening in parallel right
now on the side of the, the massive, uh, megalithic state.
You have a trend toward more centralization, more control, uh, broader reach, more encroachment
into every aspect of every little part of your life that there possibly can be.
And then I see another parallel trend, which is at an individual level, a decisive movement
towards more localism, towards community building, whether those communities be physical, uh,
in the real world, location based or completely geographically distributed online.
And I just wonder if, if, if there is again, a too much, if there's too much inertia on
the part of centralization for a decentralized movement to break that apart, uh, simply because
by its nature, a decentralized movement is going to be less organized.
It's going to have less resources pooled.
They may have more resources in total, but in terms of the amount that is directed towards
a single objective, they're much more smaller.
They're in pockets.
And, or do those, can those parallel systems just coexist and eventually the state just
kind of implodes through its own ineptitude?
Well, I mean, yeah, institutions function at the level they can, right?
So, um, you know, if, if we're talking about a government, for example, there's a huge difference,
say a mechanism of decision making that is, that has to do with voting that is electoral,
you know, whether for representatives or particular policies, save you a referendum
or ballot initiatives, um, and there's a huge difference between that and say deliberation.
Um, the, the idea behind representative government was that, um, deliberation on policy cannot
possibly happen at the scale of the population itself, even in, you know, the colonial era.
I mean, there were just too many people in Boston.
Um, and so we were going to, uh, elect representatives who would deliberate on our behalf with representatives
of, you know, other people, other geographic locations.
Um, but that deliberative body was assumed to be small enough that it could, um, affect
meaningful debate, um, dissension and ultimately result in a more just process or a more representative
process, let's say, of making laws.
Um, the challenge that we've seen with representative government is that it's very easily captured
by powerful interests who, you know, then make it crystal clear that the interests that
are to be represented are not the interests of the people who have hold the electoral
lever to put the representative in power, um, you know, procedurally, but that meaningfully
the representative will be negotiating for advocating for the interests of, you know,
its big donors or, um, political patrons or, uh, foreign governments, you know, as the
case may be.
And so, um, in effect, what we're seeing at various scales, um, of American government
is that representation is no longer functioning.
Um, the legislatures are not serving as deliberative bodies.
Instead, there have been, there has been such high degree of capture by, um, by interests
and then the incentives, you know, for the representatives themselves to continue in
their positions of power.
So they circle the wagons, they pull up the ladder, um, and in effect, most policy is
decided by a very small number of people, um, you know, in, in, without deliberation
or, you know, with very minimal deliberation and then forced on the people through, uh,
almost kind of a hostage taking type of scenario where, like, uh, you know, everything gets
bundled into bigger and bigger omnibus bills.
And so the question for the, uh, legislative body, um, becomes, do you want the government
to keep functioning?
Yes or no?
Um, and that's just like the nuclear option.
Like every, every decision is the nuclear option and there's no specificity whatsoever
about the, the meaningful issues that affect people.
And so, um, that I would suggest is an institutional breakdown.
Like that, that, that is an institution that is no longer functioning.
Um, and the question is, you know, can it be restored to its representative function?
And the answer to that is not clear.
I mean, that's literally what we, the people have to work out.
It reminds me of another thing you said in, in that keynote, which, and paraphrasing here,
but basically that the people who are in power are only there because of the consent of the
governed and we can in fact revoke that consent.
But what does that actually mean in a, in a modern context?
Cause I, I agree with that and it sounds great.
And again, I am all for revoking that consent, but is such a thing actually like a, you know,
a vote of no confidence in the absolute megalith of the state?
Like is something like that even possible?
Does it have to start like, where does that start?
If we are to go about revoking our consent, can such a thing be, be actually done at the
scale that the state is today?
Well, yeah.
I mean, you can't, um, you can't take on like the entire state.
That's a big state.
Yeah.
So the, the question is, where do you start with revoking your consent?
And you always start small.
So what's, what is the, what is the sphere of your most intimate level of consent?
Well, that is the consent to have your communications and transactions monitored by third party.
So that's where we can, we can start revoking consent for that.
Like right now, anyone can do it.
It's a battle.
You have to fight for it, but you can do it.
Um, at the political level, um, there are mechanisms, you know, uh, you can recall politicians,
you can refuse to give them your vote.
Um, so that's, that's pretty meaningful.
Um, you can also, um, work to cut them off, uh, cut the resource base off, um, support
challengers, you can yourself, excuse me, run for office.
Um, which is, you know, what I would suggest that a lot of people can do, especially at
the local level.
I mean, there are, there are tons of local political offices that are just vacant because
nobody runs for them.
Um, and, you know, and so this is the problem is, you know, uh, the, the local levels of
participation have really dropped off.
Um, people, you know, are less invested arguably than any, any other time, you know, over the
past century and like their, their local communities.
Um, and so that's where the power base of a representative democracy actually comes
from.
Um, that's, you know, who elects people to represent them is, is that community.
Um, and so, you know, the answer to, to these questions about consent and participation are
often not very sexy.
I mean, they're like, Hey, um, do you want responsibility?
Like do you want to do a whole bunch of boring stuff like day in and day out and negotiate
with people you may not like and, you know, try to come to consensus on issues that you
disagree with others about, um, but that are actionable at, you know, a small enough level
of social organization.
I mean, that's, that's really what it comes down to.
And then as that kind of participation strengthens, it forms a more and more meaningful bull
arc against the overreach of higher levels of political organization.
I love that.
And I was not trying to have a got you there because I very much agree with, with that sentiment.
And I think that that, that is what actually, I think I hope more people are coming around
to that what you do in your local community, the elected leaders in your local community,
if that's where you're going to spend the rest of your life and raise a family, those
elections matter to you as the individual a lot more than the presidential election does.
And it's very, you know, who your, who your local sheriff is, for example, like that,
that matters at a meaningful level.
And I think people have kind of dismissed that as again, this trend towards more of
a focus on the upper echelons of government has become so, so, you know, come to the forefront.
People have kind of forgotten that these things at a local level really do matter.
And this was also at a state level, kind of the whole point of the United States was to
have like, it was, you know, it's the reason we're not just like the United States, like
there are multiple states.
We're kind of right.
Yeah.
But, but people seem to forget that.
And I think it's, I thank you for that reminder.
And I, I want to, I want to switch gears a little bit here because I could, I could
pick your brain all day long and probably still not even come close to scratching the surface.
But I want to be conscious of your time.
And I want to make sure that we do get to something that you brought up before this,
which was the Satoshi papers that they work on.
Can you, can you give, give us the background on that?
What the kind of goal is, what you're hoping to achieve with that?
Yeah.
So the Satoshi papers is the name of a book that the Texas Bitcoin Foundation is publishing
in partnership with the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
And the purpose of the book was to get together interdisciplinary social scientists.
So historians, philosophers, economists, anthropologists to think through what are the implications
for a denationalized peer to peer global digital currency like Bitcoin.
Like, how does that change the relationship between state and society and between the
individual and society and state?
And so this book is a collection of essays that are, they're scholarly.
So peer reviewed volume.
It is designed to make headway in the academic community, which the social scientific community
has until now been fairly hostile to Bitcoin.
And one of the reasons is because there hasn't been a lot of like good, citable academic work
on Bitcoin.
And that matters because academics are actually very important cultural actors.
There's huge controversy now around the role of the university, the public role of the
university, how universities may or may not have contributed to certain culture wars or
political battles.
And the long and the short of it is that universities do have cultural power.
Scholars do have cultural power.
And so it's important to speak to the masses, but it's also important to speak to the intellectuals.
And that's what this volume is doing.
I love it.
And I mean, I saw that the resistance money crew were some of the contributors to that.
And that's obviously, I think what they've done with the book with the same title is
really outstanding.
Because again, I think there's an easy knee jerk reaction and guilty of my knee jerking
in this case to say, screw these fiat academics and they're just captured and they're run
by this obviously inflated grant money that's ultimately just coming from the printer and
it's all a symptom of this fiat disease.
But that can be true, but it can also be true that there is a lot of great work that has,
can and will come out of academic institutions.
And the more that those institutions are sort of penetrated by this, you know, let's say,
I don't want to say Bitcoin ethos by Bitcoin as just surely existing, I think, and there
being more awareness and more writing and research done about Bitcoin and its effect
on society, I think that ultimately, you know, fix the money, fix the world, right?
To sound very cliched.
So I think it's genuinely a wonderful thing that there are folks such as yourself, such
as the resistance money crew and many others who are focusing on this academic angle because
it does matter.
And I think it was like Rothbard talked about this a lot in Anatomy of the State, which
was that idea that the academics are basically an intellectual bodyguard around the state.
And this goes back long to before religion and state were separate.
That was the church that was the intellectual bodyguard.
And so I mean, is that kind of what you see as the larger goal of this to basically infiltrate
sounds a bit too war, you know, like too much of a war, but is the goal to infiltrate, for
lack of a better word, that intellectual bodyguard and to infuse it with the ethos that kind of
surrounds Bitcoin?
Is that, is that what you kind of see this going toward?
Yeah, I mean, imagine if we had a university system that was a principal guardian of individual
liberties, like, regardless of what else you believe, you can count on the faculty and
governance of universities in the United States of America to always stand on the side of
free expression, free transaction, bottom up organization of human societies.
I mean, that that would be quite powerful.
And so that's, you know, that's the revolution that we're trying to bring about is, you know,
that I think a lot of a lot of people in the academy have been trained in a tradition that
starts out with a liberative or emancipatory desire, but that quickly veers into, you know,
the, well, the, the mechanism of emancipation isn't in fact the state and must always be
the state.
And so capture of the state needs to be our ultimate political objective.
That, that inclination is, you know, is, is toxic, not just to the functioning of our
political institutions, but our culture.
And so that conversation has to begin somewhere.
And I don't necessarily believe that, you know, within my lifetime, there's going to
be huge changes there, because it really takes time to reform institutions, especially, you
know, institutions like the church, I mean, this is the university system is a, it's a
feudal form of social organization.
It literally was a church, a birthed in the institutional structures of the church.
And so it's, it's actually extraordinarily successful and resilient from just a survival
standpoint, but it's extremely conservative.
It's extremely slow moving.
And there has been a consensus now formed in the priests of, you know, of social science
that there are, you know, certain political objectives like wealth, equality, whatever
that may be, that and, you know, climate preservation, you know, these, these issues that require
the direct and very heavy handed intervention of the state.
And so that consensus, you know, needs to be eroded by being challenged by people who,
you know, can't, can't just be brushed off, like kid just be dismissed as propagandists
or, you know, politicians or whatever, you know, there has to actually be scientific
work done.
I have a slightly related question to that just because you mentioned culture.
And this is something I've, I've asked a few people and I'm, I'm still mulling around
the idea myself, but if I were to ask you what is upstream and what is downstream of
what.
Where do you think the following lie, technology, money, culture and law, where would you, how
would you arrange that hierarchy?
Yeah, you know, I think some of those terms are, they shouldn't be imagined as part of
a hierarchy.
They coexist.
So you know, technology is just the solution to a problem that becomes institutionalized.
And that institutionalization can happen materially.
Like you can actually create objects that are material, reproducible, that solve specific
problems.
That is, you know, what we think of when we think of hammers and nails, but it's also
what money is.
Money is a social technology and it's also material technology.
And so it's just a kind of technology.
I mean, it's a subset of it.
So, you know, there's no hierarchical relationship there.
We're just talking about categories.
Law is a type of social technology as well, but it's not the same thing as a norm, right?
And so like, you know, social norms are actually much more fundamental than laws.
Laws are downstream from norms because they're a lot more precise laws are, that is, and
they carry the penalties of social violence if they are very specific types of codified
social violence, if they are violated.
Norms are much more diffuse.
You know, if you do something socially awkward, non-normative, you know, some people may
leave the room, they, you know, may not want to be your friend anymore.
They may be mad at you, but they're not, you know.
You're not necessarily going to go to jail or have your property confiscated or, you
know, be declared an enemy of the state.
And so, you know, one of the symptoms of our current era is that I think more and more
people, at least in the politically active spheres, have been sort of calling to collapse
norms into laws and to, you know, proliferate laws and to suggest that law is in fact the
solution to, you know, the collapse of norms around things like fairness, cooperation,
you know, even etiquette, like what words to use in public, how to speak to other people,
what does respect mean?
I mean, these are things that are highly contingent that differ widely from community to community.
And the attempt to kind of force all of these things into the realm of law is a totalitarian
move for that reason, because it's collapsing the distinction between laws and norms.
That is the best answer that I've heard to that question yet.
So thank you for that.
And I appreciate that you have rejected the premise of separating money and technology,
because I agree with that as well.
So I thank you for that answer.
That was excellent.
I apologize for the slight divergence, but you mentioned culture.
It just, it got in my brain, so I wanted to ask you.
But I do want to get back to the Satoshi papers a little bit, because one of the questions
that you had put as I was reading through the website that might be taken up by this
is what is, it's the very first question, actually, what is an optimal form of government
for whom at what scale, why, and what role does Bitcoin play in that form of government?
And it goes alongside a question I wanted to ask you about just kind of what is, I guess,
what is the optimal or what is the modern role of the state?
What should it be versus kind of what it actually is right now?
Yeah.
So that is not a question that can be answered in any essential or absolute way.
The optimal form of government has to be worked out by the constituents who are self-governing,
who are governing themselves together.
And so it will look very different in a city of Thailand versus Sierra Leone versus Chicago.
And so some of these questions in the Satoshi papers call for papers were not designed to
produce like absolute answers, but to begin to describe methods by which people can approach
those answers together.
And so from my point of view, part of the answer to that question for America is that
we do have a tradition of liberty here.
So different political communities choose to embody different values.
And there are tons of values to choose from, but you can't solve for all of them equally.
And so the question becomes as a community, which of those values are you going to prioritize?
Are you going to put above other values?
And in the United States, I think, you know, liberty was at the very top of that list.
This is a community that is organized around the preservation of individual liberty.
Not everyone's going to like that.
And not everyone's going to agree with that.
And that's great.
There are tons of other jurisdictions that you can choose from with forms of government
that privilege other things.
But here, that's what we're going to commit to as Americans.
And I think it's important to just say that and then see who opts in to the American project
because it's the people who raise their hands who are the people you have to work with.
Like that then becomes your political community, and the question is, what can you do together?
Do you think that Bitcoin is at a fundamental level aligned with the American idea as it
is laid out in the Constitution with regard to individual liberty above all else?
Yes.
Absolutely.
No, I think Bitcoin is fully aligned with that and should be embraced by anyone who
believes in the American project.
It seems, I think, it might have been Alex Gladstein who said it's like the people that
really hate Bitcoin are dictators and authoritarians.
And rightly so.
Like if you're an individual, there's no reason for you to hate Bitcoin.
But I get why you would hate it if you're a dictator.
Yeah.
I think that's kind of, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's absolutely the truth.
And I think it seems to me that Bitcoin can be a great litmus test for, let's say, totalitarian
temptation to use the words of Jean-François Ravel.
It is, again, a mirror.
It's going to show you or how you react to it says a lot about who you are and what you
believe.
And I mean, I'm curious now that Bitcoin is, you know, it's a genie that is out of the
bottle.
It's no one shutting it down.
As long as it remains decentralized and secure, it will continue.
It will, you know, it's just going to tick tock next block, keep on going.
Does this represent just that invention of Bitcoin or discovery, however you'd like to
put it, is that a fundamental change, a fundamental paradigm shift that like it's a zero to one
moment that we cannot go back from?
And that, like, do you think that is the technology that has given us the greatest chance at a
future that preserves individual liberty?
Yeah.
And there's no doubt about it.
So, you know, one of the things that one of my co-authors and I write about in the introduction
to the Satoshi papers is that there are these moments when technological innovation in a
society sediments a new kind of knowledge that becomes a new common sense that people
can't deny anymore.
They can't say they didn't know.
They can't pretend to be naive to it.
And so whether they reject it or not, whether they like it or not, their fundamental presuppositions
have changed.
And so this is what, you know, akin to what like Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift.
But that terminology is overused and not specific enough, I think, necessarily.
The point is that we now know how to create a denationalized censorship resistant peer-to-peer
digital currency.
It's open source.
Code is open source.
Nobody knows how to do it.
It's been sedimented.
The use of the currency and the digital ledger are going through a process of inexorable
exponential adoption.
And so there is no going back.
There is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
And now every government in the world gets to reform itself in light of that knowledge.
This is why we're seeing like CBDCs, you know, for example.
I mean, CBDCs are a direct response to Bitcoin.
Their governments, you know, in effect saying, we're going to produce something that that's
better and then we're going to force people to use it.
We're going to use the power of law to destroy money that is auto-metallic as some economists
have called it.
It's auto-genetic.
It is a rising of its own accord in direct contra-distinction to the chartillist theory
of money.
And so you're literally watching the state try to play its card, the law card, to kill
a form of money that exists without reference to law.
And so that is going to change the common sense of the society.
I mean, it's at a fundamental level, one could make the argument that Bitcoin is anarchy.
And I mean that not in the, of course, the Mad Max version of anarchy that most people
think of when they hear the word, but in the actual meaning of it, which is without Kings
right or without rulers.
Because Bitcoin is literally rules without rulers.
And I'm very grateful that it exists.
And I find it fascinating, as you said, this very obvious reaction to Bitcoin from the
central bankers in the creation of CBDCs and, oh, how can we, won't it be so convenient
for you and look what your benevolent central bankers have done for you?
How kind of us.
But you see also, I think one thing that actually pleasantly surprised me was not just within
the Bitcoin community of people who are hyper focused on these sorts of things, but in a
much, much larger, like the Overton window around CBD, like it's included CBDCs for a
while now actually, like people have been fairly aware of this and very vehemently rejecting
this as like, you know, maybe they don't understand all the technical ins and outs, but they have
this feeling like, Hey, I see what you're doing here and I don't like it one bit.
Was that your, has that been your experience or watching this happen as well?
Like, was it a little bit surprising to see kind of the almost like gut reaction, like
visceral reaction of people really coming out against CBDCs?
You have the E Naira as an example of people just refused to use it, right?
They were just like, no, we're not doing this.
Like, did that surprise you at all?
Or do you think it's just, it's such an obviously totalitarian tool that people just like, they
just sniffed it out.
Yeah.
I think there's a way in which the control offered by CBDCs is so egregious that there's
no way to like sugarcoat it for populations like people, people do not trust it.
And they're not going to trust it.
That said, you know, most money, the vast majority of money that people transact with
is already digital and it is already fully account based.
And so I think, you know, what CBDCs have done is in a way kind of exposed or begun
exposing the extent to which the legacy financial system is already a system of control.
And I think people feel, you know, kind of trapped honestly because they're, you know,
it's like the lobster that's been in the boiling water that's slowly being turned
up hotter and hotter.
Like they don't know what to do about that.
And you know, the great thing about technological innovation like Bitcoin is that, you know,
regardless of what people are able to do about their local politicians or central banks,
they can opt in and use Bitcoin.
That is now available to 8 billion people.
And that's going to change the world.
Amen.
I want to be conscious of your scariest time here.
But I realized I didn't actually get a chance to just ask you who you are and how you got
here today to be as knowledgeable as you are, to be working on all these things.
What was your journey?
So we'll end with the beginning, I guess.
How did you get here to be doing all these things?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I grew up in Texas.
My parents were both software engineers actually.
So, you know, grew up in this kind of ambient environment of technology and industry.
I had very strong scientific inclinations, social scientific inclinations.
So I went to school for anthropology and history and, you know, other disciplines as well.
It's, you know, let's say philosophy, psychology, economics.
So I was interested in becoming a social scientist.
But the American Academy, as we were talking about before, I mean, it's broken.
It's institutionally broken.
It's culturally broken.
It was quite possibly the most toxic social atmosphere I've ever been in.
And it was not organized around the search for truth.
And so I basically ended up deciding that I would have more freedom to actually pursue
the project that I was passionate about outside of the academy.
And so I ended up going into industry, you know, software.
I'm not an engineer, so I went in on the side of sales, business development, services,
worked at a couple of startups.
And one of those startups ended up using Bitcoin to develop, to basically anchor digital claims.
So how do you verify, you know, information on the web?
It's very hard to do, but we developed a way to, in effect, digitally sign claims, anchor
those claims to Bitcoin, and then validate the authenticity of those claims in the future
indefinitely.
So what we call today the verifiable credentials standard was incubated by a startup that I
co-founded.
And that was kind of the beginning of my interest in Bitcoin specifically as a technology for
self sovereignty, so digital self sovereignty in a world where everything is intermediate
and that intermediated by a platform.
How does the individual recuperate any sphere of privacy and autonomy virtually?
Well, Bitcoin ended up being a key part of the answer to that question.
So that company, you know, we built a SaaS product that enabled people to use our technology
very easily, easily issue these verifiable digital claims.
We sold it to governments around the world, universities, including MIT, for example.
So like to this day, if you graduate from MIT, you get a diploma, a digital diploma anchored
to Bitcoin.
My company built that.
And we sold that company in 2020 to an enterprise software company.
So, you know, I've continued my life and industry as I pursued my independent scholarly interests.
I did not know that about the company you co-founded.
So is it similar to an open timestamps type of time stamping on Bitcoin then?
Yeah.
So we actually used open timestamps.
Okay.
And at one point in the early stages of our development, you know, we worked with Peter
Todd on it.
We've worked with a lot of leading lights in open source technology development.
I could probably do a whole episode with you just on that, but we'll have to save that
for a different day.
But Natalie, I really want to thank you for your time.
I very much enjoy following you and listening to you speak because I think that you are
an incredibly reasoned voice in this space who approaches things very objectively and
also appreciates nuance.
So I want to thank you for that.
Where do you want to send people?
If they want to check out, it's satoshipapers.org.
If they want to check out the Satoshi Papers, I'll link your X and your Noster as well,
although I don't know if I've seen you as active on Noster recently, but is there anywhere
else you want to send people?
Yeah.
So, you know, we're getting toward the end of the year and the Texas Bitcoin Foundation,
which is the 501c3 charity that I founded to do the research in the Satoshi Papers.
We are looking for donations, beginning to plan our next year.
We would love it if the community would consider making a contribution.
You can donate in US dollars or Bitcoin at txbitcoinfoundation.org.
You can also just Google Texas Bitcoin Foundation.
It'll come up.
But you know, we truly do this as a labor of love.
You know, we don't get paid.
This is something we're doing for the community and for the world.
And you know, of course, as a charity, every cent you give us, you don't have to give to
the war machine.
So we greatly appreciate it.
I'll link that website in the show notes as well.
So donate to the Texas Bitcoin Foundation and stop funding so much war, I think is a
pretty nice, pretty nice pitch there.
But Natalie, thank you again for your time.
This is really a treat.
And yeah, looking forward to seeing you in person, hopefully again soon.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Walker.
I really appreciate it.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast.
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