Bitstein aka Michael Goldstein, President of the Nakamoto Institute and co-host of Noded Bitcoin Podcast rejoins me on the show to talk about some Bitcoin literature.
Time zone: Friday 15th May 3pm PT, 6pm ET, Saturday 16th 8am AEST. It will be broadcast on YouTube Live at the link below, and on my twitter periscope @stephanlivera.
Bitstein links:
Literature:
- The Cyphernomicon
- Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities
- Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority
- Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks
- Politics vs Technology
Previous episodes:
- SLP111 Bitstein – Satoshi Nakamoto Institute Bitcoin Crash Course
- SLP6 – Fiat Money As ‘Fad Diet’ with Bitstein
Sponsors:
Stephan Livera links:
- Show notes and website
- Follow me on twitter @stephanlivera
- Subscribe to the podcast
- Patreon @stephanlivera
Podcast Transcript:
Stephan Livera:
And let me just introduce my guest, Michael Goldstein. He is the president of the Nakamoto Institute. He’s one of my kind of earliest online Bitcoin friends. So him and Pierre were quite influential in my own thinking about Bitcoin and so he is the president of the Nakamoto Institute and he’s also the cohost of the Noded Bitcoin podcast. So welcome Bitstein
Bitstein:
Hey Stephan, thanks again for having me on.
Stephan Livera:
Of course, man, of course. So look, what are we talking about today? Well, so I think
Bitstein:
We settled on you know, going through some of the literature on the the website. We had done a episode that I hope everyone listened to that was going through the SNI crash course in Bitcoin political economy, which is sort of looking at, you know, the distilled argument from us as to why we think Bitcoin will take over. But that’s just one part of the website. And another important part is the literature section, which is primarily looking at Bitcoin prehistory both literally and you know, more figuratively just sort of a culmination of ideas that led to Bitcoin from the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, cryptography in general, the Austrian economists, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s kinda, you know, as, as it says on there, you know, Bitcoin was not created in a vacuum. It did not just appear out of nowhere. Although it seems like that there, there has been a history of looking into how to create digital cash. And Bitcoin is just the latest and greatest iteration. And the one that I think all of us at this point think is here to stay.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And I think it’s a common thing because if you’re a listener, you might have some friends who say, Oh, but what if Bitcoin is the MySpace? And what if there’s some Facebook? And I think it’s very valuable to then actually look at this website and look at some of the literature and look how far back some of this stuff is. It was literally a multi decade project, right? It was, there were decades of different ideas being thrown at the wall until something stuck.
Bitstein:
Yeah, exactly. Gwern online, Gwern.net has a now rather popular article called Bitcoin is worse, it’s better. And he points out just all the little technological pieces that had to come together for Bitcoin to exist in the first place. You needed the ability to do P2P networks. All you needed hash functions, you needed public key cryptography. You needed all of these things, all at once. And yeah, it takes time to build out all of these things. But now we have it and now it’s here. And even now, I didn’t stop. It’s still going on. So you know, Bitcoin is the Facebook in that analogy, but you know, like Facebook, it’s changing. It’s you know, buying Instagram for a billion dollars or whatever it is. As it gets bigger, it takes on, you know new meaning and new you know, capabilities by virtue of both new technology, but also by virtue of the fact that it just has more liquidity and therefore can be thought of by its users as something greater than it had been in previous times.
Stephan Livera:
Awesome, man. So look let’s get into it. Let’s start with the Cyphernomicon which let me put that up on screen actually. So here we have the Cyphernomicon. So this reads like a Cypherpunks FAQ. How did you get into this one and how did you come across this one?
Bitstein:
Yeah, so that’s sort of what it is. I’ve kind of known about sort of crypto anarchists broadly speaking for a long time. You know Julian Assange had been big in the news. I was aware of Tor and other projects. But there’d always been a sort of a slightly left wing bias to a lot of that stuff. Not in the sense that I was like it was for a good thing, civil liberties and stuff like that. But the sort of, the types of things that it was focused on was that rather than say, you know, as, as a libertarian, I tend to be more focused on things through a property lens. And so I never got super deep into the crypto anarchists that was like a thing. But then, you know, in late 2012 with the advent of things like the, very notorious defense distributed I was introduced to the cypherpunks and crypto anarchists through a new lens of like were making things real in the world.
Bitstein:
And Bitcoin is, is, you know, being able to send gold through the internet, like sending guns through the internet is possible now. And so that, it turns it into it. It turns these ideals into something that’s real and concrete and you can go use it today. And so it was during that period that I was diving into all of this and this is why I created the Nakamoto Institute was like all this information, it needs to be in one place. And that’s what I made. So yeah, the Cyphernomicon it kind of is a cypherpunk FAQ in the sense of so to, to bring this all back, the cypherpunks were an ad hoc group online and in person that started in the early nineties, their first meeting I believe is in maybe September ’92 or so.
Bitstein:
And they were interested in the sort of realpolitik of cryptography. That is to say, now that strong cryptography actually exists, what does that mean for the world? And furthermore given most of them had a rather sort of libertarian or activists or you know, some other ideology that was getting them itching to create something better in the world. It was also a practical matter of what do we need to do to actually roll out these technologies such that you have this ratchet effect on society where cryptography is introduced and you have this sort of new ecology of cryptography and there is no going back. And so they produced technologies such as anonymous remailers and they talked about the possibilities of digital cash and propose certain ideas. Things like BitTorrent came out of it as well as a, as a slew of other technologies that listeners would be you know, interested in at the same time.
Bitstein:
PGP had been rolling out. And that was under heavy scrutiny by the United States government because at the time, the ITAR regulations, which has to do with the international you know, trade of firearms that also applied to cryptography. And so because cryptography was treated as a military grade technology, they were taking up arms, so to speak against Phil Zimmerman for putting out a consumer friendly crypto system. And so that was, that was huge commentary. And so the cypherpunks were actually involved in you know, helping show how impotent certain types of government intervention on the spread of cryptographic tools is. Famously people like Adam Back made a what’s called export a cryptosystem. So he made a Perl script that its first iteration, it was about six lines and it was a complete, you know, RSA implementation.
Bitstein:
And so you could throw that on every email that you have ever. You could put it on T-shirts, you could do all sorts of stuff such that, you know, you have a full fledged cryptosystem that can’t be stopped. You can’t stop every email, you can’t stop you know, every piece of communication that’s a fool’s errand. And so they were sort of, you know, paper jamming in that sense. But even more because it was breaking things free of their, their previous silos within, you know, military offices or whatever. So this is where it came out of, this was this group that was discussing this, and Tim May wrote this as a way to get people to have their entry into this whole thing or perhaps a review because there’s, so much embedded at all of this, so we couldn’t possibly get through this whole thing and, you know, take many episodes to cover it. I think there’s 19 chapters, so to speak. But it covers just about everything and kind of gets people up to speed with the types of discussions and arguments that are being had. So that when people show up they’re not you know, being a total noob.
Bitstein:
Right. And there’s an interesting concept known as Eternal September, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. Can you tell the listeners what is eternal September and perhaps this was this designed to help combat that problem, if you will?
Bitstein:
I suppose so. So he does, he does talk about, you know, the issue with newcomers in there, but eternal September is basically describing you know, new kids would come to college campuses and they’d get access to the internet and you’d be onboarding new people to the internet. But over time the it just never stopped. And the internet just kept growing. And today, you know, the internet is nothing like what it was in the usenet days and things, things have changed in terms of like how would you onboard someone to the internet. So likewise here, you know, more and more people will coming online, the cypherpunks mailing list was merely a mailing list. So, and anyone could sign up, anyone could you know be sending messages. And so you had an issue of, you know, if you have new people on, how do you kinda, you know, smack them into shape to be a productive part of the discussion as opposed to a guy that’s just showing up. And you know, the example he says, like someone just saying like, ah, clipper sucks. You know, that’s not going to help the discussion as much as you know. Hey guys, I’ve been thinking about how cryptography affects this partial of social life.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah.So it’s sort of teaching towards what will be productive as opposed to saying things that are perhaps banal or just kind of everyone already agrees with that. And obviously things like clipper at the time were a focus in the community because like this was a common technology.
Bitstein:
Just so people know, cause Clipper is a very important concept when looking into the cypherpunks, the clipper ship was a secure chip embedded chip that was being pushed by the NSA to be used for telecommunications in the United States following a proposal by a ambitious Senator by the name of Joe Biden. So keep that in mind in the current political landscape that you know, certain people don’t want you to be able to communicate securely. And they’re allowed to you know, just run for precedent staff. I mean, I suppose everyone is allowed to, but just keep that in mind. If you were planning on going to the voting booth, which you know, we can discuss that another time, but anyway, so that, yeah the clipper chip. And I apologize. What was the other part of the question?
Stephan Livera:
Oh, no, I was just talking about how.You know, freshness matters and it’s about being productive and also we should note that. I mean, someone today could say, Oh, but look, the government’s now are continually encroaching on people’s privacy and they are continually surveilling more and more, and yet it’s not like that’s a new thing. Right. That was something that was happening in the nineties then as well.
Bitstein:
Yeah. These things are always happening. I would say that cryptography is very much an arms race in a sense. It really is you know, military grade technology. But that’s a good thing. And I do actually want, you know, individual citizens to have access to the tools needed to keep themselves safe. But in that sense, like, yeah, it really is. Like that in governments have an interest in keeping citizens from access to things, certain things. And so they’re going to deploy the tools they have to encroach on that ability. And other people like the cypherpunks can attempt to deploy technology that goes the other way.
Stephan Livera:
Yep. And there’s also this very famous saying ‘cypherpunks write code’. What’s that about?
Bitstein:
Yeah. So cypherpunks write code is a phrase that came out to sort of embody a, almost an ethos in the community. It’s not, you know Tim May says, it’s not really meant to be an imperative. It’s not saying like, you know, you’re not a cypherpunk if you don’t write code. There’s people who, you know, contribute very good ideas without necessarily writing a single line of code. But the idea is more about what the code represents, which is if you sit around bickering all the time and just complaining you’re not necessarily making any real change in society. However, if you actually write a piece of code that changes how people can interact online, then you have made a true difference, you know, so Satoshi wrote a piece of code, it changed everything and now we have Bitcoin. That wouldn’t have happened if Satoshi was just on a mailing list. You know, complaining about something. It took actual action. And so likewise, I mean, I think it could also be said that, you know, basically don’t complain, even even a non programmer, you know, come at us with thoughtful criticism.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And I think even on the list at that time, there were people who weren’t coders, but rather they were privacy activists and they were people trying to promote privacy. And that’s still a contribution. It’s just that you have to be mindful of what sort of contribution you’re making and try to be productive. I guess it’s the, constructive as well, try to be constructive.
Bitstein:
A division of labor. So yeah, something I really like about Tim May in particular and rereading this with a lot of these things. I’m glad that we did this. So, you know, the website has been up since 2013 and most of what we’re discussing has been up since near the beginning. So it’s been quite awhile since I’ve done like a really good, you know, look at these, these articles. So it was really nice to revisit them. Something that I really like about Tim May is he’s very matter of fact, he holds no punches. And he’s just, he’s about as much of a real talker as it can get when it comes to these issues. And so he’s not afraid to talk about the dark as well as the light, you know, get into the ugly mess. He’s not going to pretend like crypto does not create opportunities for bad people, but because he’s a principled libertarian you know, it’s important that individuals also be able to do this do these things as well. Just like, you know, you wouldn’t stop using cars because you know, some robbers used a getaway car.
Stephan Livera:
Right, right. And I think it’s also interesting just looking back, obviously this list is back in the 90’s and here we are today in may 2020. This mailing list was, you know, it was unmoderated and raw. And we contrast that with the online world today where if you think the wrong thoughts, you get unpersoned or canceled it off the platform. Well what’s your take on that distinction and the way these different platforms,
Bitstein:
Right? Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s definitely different today. And you know, unfortunately, I don’t remember if Tim May said anything about the modern internet culture and how he felt about the way that people have sort of allowed themselves to be corralled onto Facebook and Twitter, et cetera. But yeah, so the cypherpunks was completely unmoderated the only that, there was a couple places where I think there’s like, if there was some extreme spam, like pure, like gibberish stuff coming through you know, they would put a stop to it. But besides, it’s like very, very light moderation like that by John Gilmore and Eric Hughes. It was the whole thing was a free for all. And I think that’s interesting. I think it gives, I think it makes sense when you realize that the cypherpunks had a certain ideology about them typically speaking that tended towards being able to handle that kind of inflow of information.
Bitstein:
An important concept that is mentioned a number of times in this economic, is the concept of locality and then locality. It’s basically a sort of localism of governance. So locality is saying, well, who’s best to handle private keys? Is it the government or is it the individual? And locality would say, well, who better to know how that private key out to be used than the individual that actually represents? And because of that, what they argue is that there is a stronger tendency towards self-responsibility as opposed to what we see today on Twitter platforms where or you know, Twitter and similar platforms where someone says something that’s perhaps unsavory or perceived by another individual as being a sort of false or misleading information. And they have to sit and appeal to a higher authority, namely ultimately Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey to come in and make a decision on these on how it ought to be.
Bitstein:
Whereas with a more local and individual perspective that takes on self-responsibility, well, you’re going to gain the knowledge of, you know, how to scan the headlines or the subject lines of emails that come, come in and say like, okay, I actually, this one sounds interesting. This is from someone I like. You’d be building your own personal tools out as to how to identify things out of the you know, mess of the internet as opposed to just hoping that, you know, Mark keeps your feed in your timeline, you know, clean and tidy.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And I think part of it is taking on responsibility for your own curation of your own feed. If somebody is saying something that you find offensive and you don’t want to see it. It’s on you to block or mute or whatever rather than this kind of expectation nowadays where it’s like, no, the platform must protect me by banning that kind of speech that I disagree with as opposed to each person just taking it on themselves. So I think that’s an interesting focus there. And just this general idea of localism that it’s not like localism is a new thing, right? It’s not like, I mean Tim May was a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist. Right. And he was promoting that idea. And also I think another interesting idea is this idea of the cypherpunks there was no, I guess here’s the question. Were they a formal group? Were there any dues? Were there any elections or official rules?
Bitstein:
No. Had none of that. It was all ad hoc. They did have some in person meetings that lasted a few years and those had some really notable people showing up just as the mailing list to head. Some people, especially in hindsight came to be rather prominent, including people as notable as Julian Assange. And others. But you know, in person, yes, they would meet up in Palo Alto, but basically the Bay area I think it was at, you know, the space office space that John Gilmore had. John Gilmore went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And yeah, so it was, it was, it was not formal at all. It was completely ad hoc. And it was, it was sort of meant to be this, this big mess. And that sort of had its own thing.
Bitstein:
It allowed the discussions to emerge to see kind of where things would go. It was a very neat experiment. And I do think it lasted for quite a while. I know the quality did descend into madness after a while, but you know, in the big heyday it’s a very interesting set of stuff and people can actually go read the entire archives of the mailing list on if you go to cryptoanarchy.wiki they have a link, I forget what the subdomain is for the it might even just be Cypherpunk dash mailing list, dash mailing, dash list, dot crypto, cryptoanarchy.wiki or whatever. But that’s put together by I believe Tom Busby and it does a great job of, he did a great job of collecting everything and putting everything in there by author by thread, by everything. So it’s a really nice interface for working with tons of emails over the years. But yeah, no, it was totally a free for all, minus extremely small bits of moderation for those who like actually ran the mailing machines.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. And I think that’s a really good spot to move on to the next article, which is crypto anarchy and virtual communities. So, let me just put that up on screen for the YouTube viewers. So, I think this article is really cool because it’s sort of you can see that it influenced a lot of other perhaps influenced a lot of other thoughts that people like the thinkers of people like David Friedman, a well known anarcho-capitalist, and you know, his son who is Patri Friedman, who is working on things like see steading and I think even books like the sovereign individual arguably kind of drawing from this kind thought as well. So Michael, tell us what’s going on in this, in this article. Crypto anarchy and virtual communities?
Bitstein:
Yeah. Well, first off also say, you know, people like David Friedman were also they were contributing to this. I think even in that very essay what’s the thing inside the machine? Yeah, the Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman is a reference which was published in the 70’s. So that had, you know these things play along with each other and these people were, you know, David Friedman I’m sure was having discussions with them. You can find some great essays by Friedman on the website as well. So yeah, Tim May wrote this in 1994 and it’s actually like a shorter version of a very long article that I haven’t seen online before. So I haven’t published it myself, but you can find it. In a, you know, published copyrighted book called True Names by Vernor Vinge.
Bitstein:
There’s a specific print of it that has a bunch of essays as well. And there was a essay by Tim May called True Nyms and crypto anarchy that has the even longer version of this. And I think it really sums up crypto anarchy in just a really solid fashion that kind of pulls in a lot of different threads of thought. So with this specifically, yeah. Like we start to think about what crypto anarchy means and it’s basically, it just, you know, it’s what we mean by anarcho-capitalism or something that it’s just rules without rulers. Is one way to be thinking of it. And crypto anarchy is sort of the colonization of cyberspace along those lines where you can use cryptography to set up, you know, communities and contractual obligations towards one another that are bound by cryptography between the parties themselves, without involving third parties. And in fact prohibiting third parties from being able to you know, affect the quality or outcome of those relationships.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. And so he’s speaking about this idea of crypto anarchy as the cyber spatial realization of, you know, anarcho-capitalism. So we’re not talking about the bomb throwing anarchists here. We’re talking more about you know and interestingly enough in this text, I believe a nice, a different phrasing or different term he used was this idea of cyber liberty. But I think in the end he went with the idea of crypto anarchy just because it just had a certain ring to it and certain punchy sound to it. Yeah, right. Exactly. and when we’re talking this idea of crypto anarchy, there’s also some of this discussion around the use of digital pseudonyms and you know, bringing that to the Bitcoin world today, there are a few people in the Bitcoin world, some of them are Bitcoin and lightning developers who operate purely under pseudonym.
Bitstein:
Yes. so this is a topic that comes up a lot. In fact, like I said the book that the longer essay is part of this called True Names by Vernor Vinge. And that’s an essay that’s looking into the nature. I mean, I’m sorry short story is looking into the nature of so-called true names versus pseudo names or pseudonyms. So it’s like you have the name that’s on your government ID, but then you also have names that people might call you online. So for instance, Bitstein, that’s not like a super pseudonymous anonymous. People know who Bitstein is, but that’s a different name than what is literally on my driver’s license. And what I would deal with the legal name. Not yet at least. We’ll see how, how high Bitcoin has to go before maybe I give in but anyway, like I do have to use that specific name regardless of how much I like it or not.
Bitstein:
I happen to like it a lot. But like whenever I go to a government facility I need to be using that name and associating with it. Whereas pseudonyms are chosen for particular, you know, subcultures and sub communities. You know, maybe you have a name that’s just for one person you talk to or maybe you have one particular group that you’re in that you use a different name for. And it’s a way to, you know, kind of have just a local identity among those people where you’re trying to carry a reputation there without worrying about the connection to the outside reputation. You know, when I, when I show up at a, you know, woodworkers, you know, community or something, they don’t necessarily care about my reputation among, you know, like you know, pet bird enthusiasts or something they care about.
Bitstein:
What is this reputation for woodworking? It’s like, well, as an individual I carry that under, you know, this name. So they’re very useful for that. Now this does bother some people because it also allows an intellectual freedom of sorts because there are ideas that people might not be interested in sharing out of the real name because of the negative implications it could carry not only because it’s wrong, but also perhaps it’s right either way it stands athwart a particular, you know set of power that does not want these sorts of ideas to be around. And so you have people you know who take on these because they want to be able to shield their, sort of true name from whatever happens with that. You know, that’s not to say that there aren’t nefarious individuals doing that. Of course there are. But it doesn’t change the fact that, you know, some people, if they want that intellectual freedom freedom, which I think anyone who lives in a, you know, or desires to live in a free society like that understands the importance of property rights and stuff like that should be eager to have that capability so that you can you know, actually be able to progress in intellectual thought rather than be stuck with whatever you’re handed.
Stephan Livera:
And also within this article there’s discussion about the use of strong crypto and virtual communities. So how do you think strong crypto did? I mean, there’s different ways to think about that because, you know, there’s PGP and we’ve got a lot of end to end encrypted chat applications. How do you view that in terms of today, in 2020?
Bitstein:
Yeah, so this is an interesting discussion because if you look at some of the later chapters in the, he also talks about, you know, where do we currently stand, what are the future prospects, et cetera, et cetera. And the discussion of being sort of bearish on crypto has also been around since as long as one can remember. So this is not a new discussion by any means and it’s very enlightening to kind of see Tim May’s perspective on that. So I recommend people read this stuff. I tend to be in many ways bullish. And that’s not to say that I don’t have my concerns about the state of things. You know, just yesterday there was the a bill passed the Senate. We’ll see if the amended version passes in the house. But it would allow the FBI to search browser history without a warrant.
Bitstein:
Which, you know, sort of has some not so good implications about just why is the government getting off my grits trying to see what I’m reading on the internet. Because, you know, perhaps you read things because you you know, have, have bad ideas. Maybe you’re just researching. Like, it’s just, it’s uncomfortable to even have that situation where a third party is trying to know everything about every thought that you’re having, which just kinda encapsulated in a browser history. Just look at your Google searches and you kinda get a sense of who our person is. The, cypherpunk mentality I think would be, okay, well what do I do to get around this? I make VPNs, I try to understand Tor. I try to, you know, make, make these things even better than what they are. I avoid using certain services that are known to do heavy logging of everything that you do on it and opt for, you know, ones that don’t leave as much of a paper trail, et cetera, et cetera.
Bitstein:
That would be sort of the proactive position. This is all being said. So given that there are negative things going on in the world, there’s always that arms race. We live in, I think the greatest time to be alive in human history. And that is 2020 where we have Bitcoin and Bitcoin is on the precipice of becoming a global reserve currency over the next, you know, anywhere from, you know, three months to 50 years. So because of that, I think that, you know, strong crypto actually is getting wide deployment. There’s an interesting argument among cryptographers they sort of get, they get a little bit hurt because crypto now no longer means cryptography in general discourse. It means cryptocurrency. And while you know, Bitcoiners, especially people listening to this podcast kind of cringe whenever that I hear crypto for all the correct reasons.
Bitstein:
I do like when you, when you do remember that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that actually is in many ways very fitting because Bitcoin is, it’s just like the coolest and most exciting example of applied cryptography I’ve ever seen and that I could imagine. And so because of that, we get to exist in this world where we have that opportunity. So there are certain fronts in which things, you know can get tougher. I know you live in Australia and Australia has been you know, they’re especially notable for their dislike of cryptography in the hands of the individual. But regardless of that, Bitcoin still exists and that will have an asymmetric effect on these ongoing crypto Wars. So, you know, PGP is something that has not quite had public the uptake that people want. But you’re right, we have end to end encrypted apps.
Bitstein:
Even those that I’m sure we can find plenty of paranoid people who have pointed out major and concerning flaws in those tools. So it’s not like those are solved. But it’s also become quite ubiquitous in the sense of there’s been, you know, TV shows showing people using signal as a chat app for the purposes of wanting a private conversation. So that’s something that’s like in the public consciousness of an option that is available. We also have you know, ubiquitous SSL at this point and now there’s been some, you know, hacks of SSL before. But just generally speaking, the fact that all these internet websites you go to, you expect them now to have HTTPS. You expect it to be a secure channel between you and the server. That’s, that’s incredible. And that’s, that’s everywhere. And so, you know, this is something that Tim May talks about in the Cyphernomicon is the more that you sort of jammed the normal signals with cryptography, like regular society also relies on cryptography to function, which, you know, people say, Oh well Bitcoin if strong cryptography, if public key cryptography goes down, what are you going to do? Like, you know, let’s say that P equals NP. Well Bitcoin is not the only thing that is at stake there. So everyone is sort of slowly becoming more and more reliant on these tools. And now, you know, if you go on github, you’ll find endless projects that kind of take cryptography as a total given. It’s a complete like non event to be using crypto in whatever project you’re working on. So in that sense, it really is very ubiquitous and out there it’s just like I said, there’s always going to be a constant arm trace and sometimes it will seem bleak.
Bitstein:
But Bitcoin I think is the, that’s the best chance regardless. So we can get into that later. With regards to this, I think, this essay is really about, you know, talking about virtual communities and how that relates to crypto anarchy and what he means by virtual community is not, you know, necessarily that it’s digital per se. You know, that’s, that’s how we think of it is just like, Oh, it’s online. yeah, it’s all just fake. But like, you know, even when people say virtual reality, like in a sense I think of Facebook itself as virtual reality, even without Oculus because it creates this, you know, different perception of what’s going on based on how people put in, inputs and timelines, you know, like people can put up pictures of themselves that only have the good times in life.
Bitstein:
And so the virtual reality is you put on your Oculus thing and well, you only see positivity cause everyone’s, you know, all these people are taking trips and going to restaurants or at least they had been prior to you know, a couple of months ago. But the point is, is virtual is more than that. It’s, it’s what he’s saying is that there is a, a separation between the geography and the community itself. So communities need not any longer be based on who your neighbor is exclusively. They too can be a part of a community, a, but there’s also communities online, there’s communities not even just online, but just more ideas based. So he gives examples like boy Scouts. Was an example where it’s just like you have all these people who come together, you know, and they’re spread out across the globe and they’re all identifying with some, you know, scouting message and that’s a whole community.
Bitstein:
You can have that thing around just about anything. Like I said, word working, you know exotic birds cryptocurrencies, you name it. And you can also have this in the sense of people basing around different ideologies which can in turn end up in physical location much the way that a lot of people try to move to New Hampshire to create a, a sort of free state as part of the free state project. So, you know, these, these things, they, bleed in to both the digital and the physical world. The point is, think of where the attention of the individual is lying. They’re no longer focused as much on the state as the source and wellspring of all, you know, civic engagement. They can also be focused on bottom up organizations of their own design based around their own ideals.
Bitstein:
And that takes away the sort of power of the state as a God and more into say like a service. And you know in many, if not most instances, you know, a large, you know, gang and criminal operation. But that sort of, it’s just kind of revealing what it is as opposed to like looking at it as, you know, nationalism as viewing the state as the wellspring or you know, some nationalists might disagree with that, but just as an example there are a handful of people who’ve looked at it from the perspective of the state as the wellspring. And that was probably a lot of civic engagement in the 20th century was from that. And now we’re moving on to different stuff. Prior to the 20th century, a lot of civic engagement I guess was more locally based, but now it’s not necessarily local. I don’t know how many people I know who don’t even know their neighbors names, but they’re involved on Facebook groups and you know, sort of Twitter spheres or other online communities. Totally, regardless of even who their neighbors are at all.
Stephan Livera:
Yep. And another interesting theme from this one is regulatory arbitrage. It’s this idea that people might set up the company or their software in some other jurisdiction and then run it from there. And that being way that people can sort of get around different legal roadblocks. I suppose on the, on the flip side of that though, perhaps governments can try to use that too. So a quick example might be some governments it might be against their own constitution or rules to spy on their own citizens, but then they’ll sort of outsource that to some other governments spying department to do that, to do their own dirty work. But I think on net, this is an interesting trend also, and it’s sort of aligned with the sovereign individual idea that people can, can go where they get the best deal. Whether that is physically or whether that is virtually.
Bitstein:
Yeah. And with the government thing, I think, you know, it is good to think of the government as just other individuals. I like to tell people that, you know, we live in a world of anarchy. We never get out of anarchy. And so the state that is just a formation that was able to arise, given a particular set of people and technology and ideals, et cetera, et cetera. But it itself is within a world of anarchy. And so, yeah, like, you know, they’re acting individuals too looking out for their self-interest sometimes not as interested in the rule of law as you and me. But yeah, so you know, the case they give here is, you know, if you have a, a certain place you want to communicate with, but you know, there’s rules about maybe sanctions or something like that.Well maybe there’s a place that has a server where jurisdiction doesn’t apply there as far as these rules.
Bitstein:
And so, well, you can just, when you, when you put in your anonymous remailer to send off a message to someone, well, just goes through there or communication has done on that server. And then what our governments like, they don’t have the same capabilities. It’s not in their sphere yet. Tim May quotes often John Gilmore saying how the internet is sort of, it takes sense of ship as like damage and then it has damage control to route around it. I’m getting the phrase wrong, but it’s effectively that the internet, the net, which he also differentiates from, say, like the worldwide web. It’s more of like the actual interconnection of people themselves. They’ll find a way, you know, people find a way to do what they want. And you know, we do have some levels of military grade technology now and so we can think in bigger terms today than in the past as opposed to, you know, what rules are we indeed beholden to. And you know, today people take some extreme measures of, you know, getting rid of their studies and ship at certain costs and stuff like that, but you are technically free to do that. And people without even necessarily breaking walls, you can find these arbitragers to route around whatever it is you need to do to get whatever you need done.
Stephan Livera:
That’s right. Let’s move on. So we’ve got secure property titles with owner authority by an exurbia. Now, one of the interesting points that comes out of this is this whole political problem. And he mentioned this in the article around land confiscation. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what was your take on this article?
Bitstein:
Yeah, so this article was, kind of one of the early descriptions of what we would call blockchain today. In terms of like how, how we use it regarding Bitcoin, because I would say that Bitcoin is effectively like an ideal or idealized version of the secure property titles with owner authority. He talks about the different levels on which this can happen basically with, with land confiscation, crypto anarchy. Let me step back to crypto-anarchy is often in my eyes, a way of looking at a political landscape and asking yourself what were the problems that were trying to be solved? In many cases today, I think it could be argued that the state for all of its problems is in a sense, a de facto solution to the problem. So, for instance, today you know, good luck starting your own private defense company.
Bitstein:
There’s certain private security stuff you could create, but there’s also a lot of industries like that, that within your local community would not be treated so well by the incumbents. And so mostly, you know, because of, you know, regulatory situations they’ve, they’ve decided to keep themselves as the De Facto solution, but effectively, like some of these things, it’s not as though the people, it’s not as though the state isn’t solving a problem. It’s that it’s not solving it well. And often too extreme cost in some cases to the point of, you know, a hundred million individuals dead over the course of a century, like some crazy stuff that all of us sort of ancaps are against. Okay, great content. I was just so crypto anarchy is this way of looking at this landscape and saying like, well, what are these actual problems?
Bitstein:
Like, okay, well now that we have military grade encryption and you know, technology and other, you know, digital signatures. And the whole nine yards. How can we re-approach these problems or build upon them in a better manner? You know what are pieces of it that we can chip away to in a more positive and productive manner than what comes with the terrible costs of the state. And here Nick Szabo is trying to look at the problem of basically land ownership. You know, you have a piece of land and you’re trying to agree like who owns it. And that’s a difficult problem. You can, you can talk about the libertarian theory of homesteading and you know appropriation and trade and all of that. And that’s important. But there’s also, there is the reason that law as a discipline exists is trying to figure out these issues and like, you know, given this situation, how does this actually, how do you manage to make light of the fact that, well, this guy’s been here, but like the way that the water flows from his property has this effect on this guy’s property.
Bitstein:
Like, these are our legal conflicts to have to be worked through. And so, you know, it gets more complex than merely saying, well, like whoever’s first, it’s like, yeah, we already know that. How do we apply that? That’s sort of the art of law I suppose. So you have, you have this problem of like, okay, who actually owns the land and how can you make sure of it. And you also have this problem of basically right now we have written records things are a little more digitized now, but for the longest time things were just sort of in records that were in the hands of very centralized institutions that can forge things. Things can burn down. You just have like a lot of uncertainties about actual ownership. So he’s proposing if you have sort of a club of people who have a, a method of assigning ownership to different parcels to a particular public key, and then a round of voting among that club can be done to update those, that information.
Bitstein:
And there’s a couple other rules. This is effectively what Bitcoin is in the sense that you, you kind of harvest a UTXO, you get your hands on when it comes to your private key. And then a club of miners is, is you know, trying to create, create a proof of work for profit. And then I should actually focus the club of nodes is all saying, yep, this is a valid thing or no, this is not valid. And it goes on like that. So you’re able to do this. Now Bitcoin is able to take it to the most extreme because it has no limits on who can enter and leave the club at any time. It doesn’t have to worry about any, any kind of, shouldn’t say that. It doesn’t have to worry. It in fact does have to worry a lot, but basically it’s set up for the most extreme, like anonymous, adversarial and fluid conditions as opposed to what you find in the real world.
Bitstein:
So this is something that I think one has to come to grips with once you start to get excited about cryptography is you still live in the world of what Nick Szabo calls wet code sounds like. You know, actual human people are working and that stuff is a lot more squishy as opposed to Bitcoin, which is just raw mathematics. And so with that, you’re able to have very strict rules as you get into the more sort of physical connection. You have to give up some of those and take on different kinds of trade offs, to deal with the problems of, for instance, someone can steal your property and you’re just left with, you know, yeah. A proof that you had the deed to that land, but you’re not on the land. So it doesn’t really like help you per se, until someone looks at that record and sees that and maybe comes to your help to take back the land.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And I think, I guess putting it into the context as well, we have to worry about in this world with governments that they can just pull the rug out from underneath you, right? They can charge you property taxes, they can levy different conditions on what you may, what improvements you may do to your own property. And so Bitcoin is used as like this wholly different thing because it’s not so political and it’s more just about, as you were saying, just the raw mathematics. Just if you have the private key. And one interesting comment here from the essay is one key pair for each combination of title and current owner, which is kind of funny when you think about it in like a Bitcoin wallet context because what’s happening in the background, your Bitcoin wallet is managing the private and public key pairs for each unspent transaction output. And so it’s kind of, there’s a funny parallel that that is what happens in your Bitcoin wallet today.
Bitstein:
Yeah, I think Szabo was very prescient in sort of the dynamics that go into this. And Bitcoin did sort of settle on the pattern. This is why we can like read this essay and kind of in hindsight, just like project Bitcoin right onto it. Because it does, it does match up very well that way, but he’s talking about a wholly different you know, political question. And I think this is also why, you know, earlier I was saying Bitcoin is this especially you know, bullish way of getting crypto out there is because it’s so confined to this digital virtual currency. It doesn’t have to worry as much about the traps of the physical nature of it. And for certain questions, it doesn’t have to have a solution because it can take on the extreme locality of like, well, Hey, it’s your keys.
Bitstein:
So for instance, you know, if you had a D to a land and then you lost the deep, like, you know, can anyone just like come kick you out of your home? Like that would seem like a weird thing, I think most people would not want to live in a society like that. In Bitcoin though that is taken on as an assumption of the extreme locality is, you know, if you lose the key, that’s it. If someone is able to hack the key and they steal the coins, that’s it. And that’s just part of it. And so Bitcoin is able to get away with being more ruthless around that, which I think is very interesting. But it also, for those who do want to now bring it back into the real world, you do have to realize there are going to be these trade offs you have to be considering.
Bitstein:
And you might not get the utopia you were hoping for, but you can’t do very interesting things once you’re introducing crypto primitives to some of the communication relationships. Great. So moving on to the next one, we’ve got, you know, this here is politics versus technology by Hal Finney from 1994. So Michael, why did he write this and is there any escape from politics? Yeah. So I thought this would be an interesting one to discuss because you know people including myself like to dismiss politics. I try to avoid politics as much as possible except when it, you know, is funny or something. And you know, we also, Oh well Cypherpunks write code, you know, that becomes more of the sort of ideological imperative rather than a description of how things operate where people just get interested. It’s like, Oh, we’ll just write the code, just write the code.
Bitstein:
And Hal Finney is trying to bring some realism and Hal Finney was very good about this. Where, well, in order to use cryptography for instance, like let’s say, let’s say we use an end to end encrypted chat and I sent you a chat and then you just copied the plain text and posted on Twitter. I was like, what was the point of the end to end encrypted? I might as well have just posted that on Twitter myself. And for everyone to see. And the reason there was because, well, you can’t just rely on the technology to deal with the human relationships. You also have to look at the other humans. And so there’s always going to be political conflicts between other humans. And for instance, like, you know, with someone like you, I would, I’d probably trust you a little bit more than others with, you know, keeping confidential conversations confidential, but other people maybe not so much.
Bitstein:
And if you want to be able to have a better crypto world, you have to be able to teach people why they should have particular values that are amenable to the adoption of crypto in the first place.
Stephan Livera:
Yup. And I think there’s an interesting section from this essay as well, Hal writes, if we want freedom and privacy, we must persuade others that these are worth having. There are no shortcuts.
Bitstein:
Right. And, and this is also, you know, he brings up that and I, I do not know where current standing on this issue is. But he mentioned that things like the fifth amendment don’t necessarily or at least at the time they weren’t sure that it necessarily would prohibit the government from being able to force you to disclose cryptographic keys. Now I do think that there are certain ways that you can protect keys from the government, at least in a government with a rule of law.
Bitstein:
But I’m not an expert on that and don’t ask me to go talk to a lawyer. But the point is, is, you know even something like that, you know, you have to, even if you have the perfect cryptosystem and the government shows up with rubber hoses, what you’re going to do, and even their own rules might not be stopping them, like restraining themselves from taking them even if they’re following the rule. So because of that, you know, what you have to do is like actually find people with similar values through these virtual communities and be helping, you know, onboard people to kind of you know, different and better mode of thinking whatever your, your position on that might be. So yeah, I think he makes very good points on that.
Bitstein:
And one thing to note though is Tim May does point out that there is a sort of elitism with crypto anarchy in the sense of people who understand cryptographic technology are going to have an advantage against the people who do not understand it. So the people who do not understand it, they’re kind of stuck being in the Facebook world for the people who do understand it well, they have the capability to be like, well, let’s just set up our own thing. And they can go do that. They have more freedom in that sense. And I think we see the same thing in Bitcoin where there’s so many times we see in the world someone is getting hurt by some thing, some circumstance is bringing them down. And all of us have, the response of like, Oh, well Bitcoin fixes this. It’s like, it’s no longer even a problem that we consider. And I think that’s Bitcoin Fixes This, is in some ways like a you know, a cousin to cypherpunks write code or a descendant because it’s like, yeah, like Bitcoin Fixes This. So let’s focus on how do we continue making Bitcoin happen so we can fix more of these problems.
Stephan Livera:
All right. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. So look, let’s move on to our last one. We’ve got formalizing and securing relationships on public networks by an exhibit from 1997 and essentially he’s talking about contracts. Contract design and smart contracts. So this is one of those things where I think perhaps some of the terminology might like, people use some of this terminology in quote unquote crypto and Ethereum and so on. But really in Bitcoin, we do have some of these things, like for example, we have lightning network which uses some of these kind of smart contracting ideas. So what were some of your reflections on this one, Michael?
Bitstein:
Yeah, so this is a very interesting article kind of going into like above and beyond on just like the ideas of smart contracts and but I think it’s more than merely smart contracts in the sense that partially because of how the word has been used by advocates of various you know, networks and shitcoins and you name it’s taken on that’s sort of quote colloquialism that we sort of cringe at. But it’s more than that. A contract as he describes, is sort of broken down into various parts. You have, you have phases, you have like a part where you’re searching, you’re looking for another individual in which to be engaging in contract with. You have things like negotiation, which is like, okay, how do we actually sit down and figure out what is the contract we want to have?
Bitstein:
There’s the performance, which is the actual sort of transfer of goods and information. And then there’s I’m blanking on the word that he used, but basically the commitment, which is, I think that’s the word he used was just sort of the, the finalization, like, yeah, you’re done with it. So it’s, you know, the simplest example he gives is like the I agree button. Well, it’s like if you click that you agree, you’ve committed now how much that would hold up in a rule of law is or like the court of law is to be determined depending on the situation. But his real point is that for all these, all the contracts that exist in the world and all of these contractual relationships and sort of the act around them when he’s positing is that so much of that can be embedded in hardware and software in a way to lower the costs of dealing with that.
Bitstein:
So he gives a lot, I think the proto examples are sort of best because they’re the ones that people can kind of grok. He explains like the proto example of a smart contract would be something like a vending machine. In a vending machine. You put in the sense and when it reaches a certain amount you can pick, you know, the soda or whatever you want and it comes out and there is like a contract there you say like, if I give you know, a dollar, you’ll give me the soda. And the hardware itself is able to do that without constantly relying on the human to judge the situation. Or to constantly negotiate the hardware is able to act as a good enough agent to just get by where, how often, like yeah, occasionally the person will be like kicking the vending machine and trying to knock it over.
Bitstein:
But generally speaking it just works. And so he’s looking at for all these things, how can we better do this and this. You know, I would say if it comes down to simple things, if you know, being able to like the negotiation process of a contract, well it’s really nice to be able to do that in private, you know, and be able to have encrypted channels to just like hash out what it is you want. And you know, perhaps not that I know that anyone does this, but you know, there’s technology like OTR off the record chat. You know, that seems like a very good thing to perhaps be doing negotiation on because you know, you don’t have, you have sort of a plausible deniability in hindsight after you walk away. Like, you know what, I didn’t like that. But you also like the negotiation happened in there and if you try to tell the world about that negotiation, tough luck because you can’t, you can’t.
Bitstein:
Cryptographically proves that that was me. And that’s like that’s an interesting concept. He doesn’t use this. I’m just suggesting that myself. And I’m sure someone will tell me why that’s a stupid idea. But the point being is like all these things, we can start to embed software in there. Another example that he gives, like a proto example that I really like is a meter in a taxi cab, which itself is not the one that’s executing the contract. But because both of you sort of have this implicit trust in that meter acting how it’s supposed to be when you get to the end of a taxi ride. I mean and that’s a lot of data down, but when you get to the end, you can both look at the meter. It’s like, look, I don’t want to charge you $50.
Bitstein:
It’s just what the meter says. And so because of that, like the transaction costs, you’re not like yelling at the taxi driver, you’re begrudgingly like, well, I guess that is how much it costs and that’s how much I owe. And so you’re able to have this hardware agent diminish those transaction costs dramatically. And that’s very neat. Bitcoin is especially interesting in this because yes, Bitcoin is a smart contract contracting platform its just one that is more limited in scope than some people imagine as being possible. So basically, you know, without the Turing completeness Bitcoin contracts, they’re effectively gift contracts in the sense that you’re just handing over Bitcoin to another key. And within the network itself, the networks knowledge of it has no information about you having sold someone a product. It just sees that you’re moving coins instead the really like, but there is the contract around that you’re giving.
Bitstein:
It’s like, well, if you sign that message, then it’s theirs now, and that’s going to be a contract. But there’s also the contracting capabilities of the unlocking of the coins, which is really what the point of having the private keys is in the first place. But instead of just having a pay to a public key hash, or it’s just, you know, you’re proving, you know, ownership of a public key and signing a message and that unlocks the coins. You can create all kinds of scripts that do more and more imaginative things up until the point year you’re describing lightning outwork, you can create HTLCs which are rather complex contract, but it’s all based on the cryptography available in Bitcoin. And it’s able to do it in a way that everyone who’s involved is consensually agreeing to it and allowing a global network to adjudicate rather than a human judge.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And and I think it’s funny when you sort of zoom out and look at what Bitcoin and lightning use today comparing back to some of the concepts discussed here, so things like verifiability and penalties, right? So quick example, you might be running LND by lightning labs and you might be running C-lightning and we might have a channel together and if one of us cheats the other, then there’s the justice transaction or it’s also known as the penalty close transaction. And that is like an enforcement of the rule that between us in that channel, for example, say, so that’s like an interesting parallel. Also mental transaction costs. Nick Szabo speaks about this idea. I think people, you know, infamous, they speak about it in the Bitcoin community. What are mental transaction costs?
Bitstein:
Yeah, so that’s actually a great essay that I highly recommend people read. I’m also available on the Nakamoto Institute is this article on mental transaction costs and that’s going into the costs of thinking about a problem. So let’s say you have electricity at home the mental transaction costs of bidding on every single kilowatt or whatever of electricity that you’re using would be absurd. Like, it’s like all kinds of like small amounts as like, you know, imagine trying to have a thousand decisions a day about saving a penny. At some point you’re going to be like, no, scre it. It’s just, here’s a big payment. Just give me whatever this is good for. And that’s effectively what he’s describing is like, as you get more granular, some people do have a reason to be looking at things so granularly. So like a large corporation if they are able to shave, you know, half a penny off production costs but they make, you know, a million units of something that’s not a small amount of money saved.
Bitstein:
So it’s a little more telescopic for them. However, for the individual that might not be the case. And so individuals will often, you know, settle on say subscription fees or stuff like that where it’s like Netflix,I don’t want to like negotiate with you about how many megabytes of information came to my computer from your server. I just want movies for the month, so here’s your 10 bucks, give me, give me movies. And so just even if you’re dealing with small amount of money, if not more, because you’re dealing with small amount of money, you’re giving up tons of mental cycles to think through these things and to remove that is a very nice, it’s very nice not to have to think about that if you don’t have to. And so this can be solved either through things I subscription services or perhaps over time.
Bitstein:
You can develop different agents for yourself, you know, pieces of software that can know general preferences that you have such that I can make all those quick decisions for you. And we kind of see this in lightning with the macaroon factories that LND has worked on. So if you have a macaroon that says, okay, well you can spend X amount per day for this to this person or whatever you can just send that off onto a server and you don’t have to worry about something going differently than expected, you know, that yeah. This thing, some days might go, haywire there’s just like a lot of stuff coming its way that it pays for, but it has a set limit. And so you don’t have to think about it. You just, you’ve already had just the cost of like, I’m willing to eat up X amount of money per day. Whatever happens from there is just let it happen. I just want to make sure this thing’s running. And so you can use software for that purpose.
Stephan Livera:
Awesome. yeah. So this is a great essay to have a read. Actually I’m just curious if anyone in the chat has any questions for Michael at this point?
Bitstein:
Well, while they’re asking, if they ask, you know, I’ll note that these are just what, five, I think five essays out of very many that are on the website. And I do highly recommend people, you know do a deep dive into the Nakamoto Institute literature section and just get a real feel for all of the ideas. It could help not only just broaden your thinking of Bitcoin but also, you know, understand where maybe there are ideas that got lost that now you can revive now that we live in a Bitcoin world or just a crypto world in general that they couldn’t foresee. But also you might come across ideas that seemed really cool, but kind of as time went on maybe they weren’t as useful. And so you can by studying the old literature, you can get a better sense of where you are now and how to move forward from there. Both in a positive sense and a negative sense.
Stephan Livera:
Fantastic. Well, I think we will probably leave it there then. So Michael, let’s Oh, okay. I guess we’ve got, we’ve got one question here. What’s your favorite work of sci fi?
Bitstein:
Oh you know, I haven’t, I haven’t read as much sci fi as I should, especially as a, as a fan of the cypherpunks say reference. A lot of sci fi I guess like I do, it’s kind of cliched, but I really do like Snow crash. I think that’s a really fun one. And it gives actually it gives, it gives a way of looking at the world that Tim May actually argues a little bit with for good reason, but it also has just a lot of great ideas that have proven to be prescient today. So for instance, like I think, I think the idea of mind viruses, which is effectively snow crash is a virus that affects someone’s brain because they’re in the virtual reality world or whatever. I think that’s actually a concept that’s more within the mainstream these days.
Bitstein:
I was just listening to Elon Musk on Joe Rogan and he was talking about that very idea. Now he probably, you know, kinda got it from snow crash to some degree, but at the same time he’s able to like tell it to Joe and Joe, you know, it takes him a second to get what he’s talking about, but he’s able to, you know, wrap his head around like the fact that, you know, sometimes ideas can also play, have weird effects on the human mind that might have disproportionate outcomes that you don’t expect. Which is quite a terrifying idea. I also, I haven’t read the whole book, but I really like at least the first section of canticles for Liebowitz or Canticle for Liebowitz which is about a monastery that’s trying to rebuild civilization hundreds of years after a nuclear fallout.
Bitstein:
Which I just liked the just the setup for that alone is something really awesome and it brings to mind questions of thinking into the deep long term. So we think in terms of, you know, I want to save my files, you know, but are you thinking in terms of, I wanna save my files, for people 500 years down the line can actually open them. I think of the South Park episode where cartman wants to cryogenically freeze himself so that he can wake up and the, Wii will be out, it’s old now, but the Nintendo Wii is coming out and he wakes up and it’s hundreds of years into the future. And he finally finds a Nintendo Wii but no one even knows how to plug it in and use it so he can’t play the NIntendo Wii. And I think a lot about that a lot with information and with Bitcoin specifically that has questions of like, okay, Bitcoin works now, how could we make sure that my copy of the blockchain is with me and readable for all of time?
Bitstein:
And that is a very difficult question to consider and we’re going to have to get into that sort of longterm thinking. I think, and thankfully everyone’s kind of on board with the low time preference meme now. But that’ll be very important.
Stephan Livera:
Yup. Oh, we’ve got a super chat here from Vake, which is better and I don’t know if you can even decide here which has better, meat or Bitcoin?
Bitstein:
It’s sort of a false dichotomy cause they both feed into each other. We eat meat so that we can Bitcoin although many people have apparently been able to Bitcoin on other diets as well. But I like to think that I most optimally Bitcoin while eating meat and we have Bitcoin so that we can have a better division of labor so that we can get the resources necessary to survive into, you know, longevity which involves a lot of meat.
Bitstein:
So it’s really hard to say which one specifically. I guess I would say on a civilizational level, I think that Bitcoin is I think they’re both essential, but Bitcoin is the sort of better strategic one right now in the sense of most Americans already know that meat is essential. They don’t, they don’t really want to be eating the soy burgers or anything. So it’s not as, I don’t worry as much about the future of meat. I think that’ll work itself out. But with Bitcoin I don’t worry about it at all. I’m completely bullish, but I also see how, you know, it solves so many economic problems, including better meat production that it’s sort of more fundamental in my thoughts. But I also, you know, Peter Schiff is right. I can’t eat Bitcoin for dinner. So you know, I do have to be Pro meat sometimes.
Stephan Livera:
That’s totally fair enough. I think. So look, I think we’ll leave it there. So listeners, make sure you follow Bitstein on Twitter @bitstein, check out the Nakamoto Institute. That website is nakamotoinstitute.org. And also subscribe to the noded podcast, which is noded.org. Anything else you’d like to shout out at this point?
Bitstein:
I don’t really know. I just Bitcoin, that’s all that’s on my mind right now. So yeah, just go buy Bitcoin guys. Excellent. Get your freedom bucks and your Mnuchies, whatever you want to call them. Go take them to Coinbase if you have to, river Swan, Kraken whoever you need to, Cash App and just get your hands on real money and encourage your friends and neighbors to do so as well so we can, you know, just get all this shit behind us.
Stephan Livera:
Fantastic. Well thanks for joining me Michael and listeners. You can find my show at stephanlivera.com make sure you subscribe and press like if you liked this stuff. Thanks for joining us guys, and we’ll see you in the Citadels.