SLP317 Tomer Strolight – Why Learn About Bitcoin?

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Tomer Strolight, author in the Bitcoin space joins me to talk about his writing and why Bitcoin is so different to what you’ve seen before. This episode is specially created for beginners and people trying to learn more about Bitcoin. We chat: 

  • How physics protects your Bitcoin
  • Bitcoin is more than just money
  • Why is Bitcoin so complicated?
  • Bitcoin and stopping theft

Tomer links:

Sponsors: 

Stephan Livera links:

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Tomer, welcome to the show.

Tomer Strolight:

Good morning. How are you?

Stephan Livera:

Doing well, man. I am excited to chat with you because I’ve seen some of your writing and I think you just have an enviable clarity. I try to write as well, but I don’t really match up to your level! I’ve been reading through Why Bitcoin, and I thought this would be a great one to talk about, as well as just your thoughts on Bitcoin in general. So let’s do a little bit about yourself and how you learned about Bitcoin?

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. It’s been a long journey for me. I didn’t really start to write until I’d been learning about Bitcoin for many years. So I first found out about Bitcoin in 2013—I was one of those people who, immediately upon finding out about it, became obsessed with it. There were very few people at the time to talk to. Most people thought I was crazy as I tried to talk to them about Bitcoin, but I had the person who introduced me to Bitcoin who was enthusiastic about it, and we spent a long time talking. And there was one or two courses out there and one or two speakers out there, so I absorbed everything that I could and really had to do a lot of trying to understand it from first principles as opposed to second-handed from teachers and educators. And it sat with me for a long time. I was really, really interested in it. I didn’t have a job in Bitcoin. I was curious—there were lots of jobs at exchanges, but I really viewed those as anti-Bitcoin jobs—those were jobs where you tried to get people to sell their Bitcoin and buy something that was not Bitcoin. And so I I took a lot of fiat jobs—normie jobs—in the interim. But I stayed very involved in Bitcoin, at least studying it and looking at it and talking to anyone who would listen about it. In 2016 when the block size wars took place, I pseudonymously wrote quite a number of essays at that point in time, so that was really the beginning of my writing about Bitcoin. And I had a few that made an impact, I would say. And that was all on Reddit at the time. And then when we won, when victory was declared, which was like—we were fighting four wars at a time—when we won all of them, I went back to work at what I was doing from a fiat perspective. And for a number of reasons—I just didn’t really have that much energy talk about Bitcoin. Although I tried to teach classes on Bitcoin and people would have me in—bankers and executives. And it was tough. As you were saying, it’s tough to be really crystal clear and concise about Bitcoin. And I noticed that was really the challenge. You’re trying to talk to people about this type of math that they’ve never done before and these really large numbers and how it compares to gold. Like you’re bringing in minerals and elements and mathematics and it was really a tough thing to do to try to condense this learning. This course I had taken from Princeton was incredible, but it was at least 12 hours if not 18 hours, and condensing that smaller than what they were able to do turned out to be really tricky. And then earlier this year—the COVID crisis led to the fiat job that I was doing winding up. I had to reduce the size of the company that I was leading and the founders were still around and so I chose to reduce myself as well. It was hard to find another job. And I was still very, very interested in Bitcoin and this was certainly a time when things were very exciting about Bitcoin. Like Michael Saylor had come in in April of 2020, roughly, and that was February of 2021 and I’d been out of work for about eight months and I just said, Well that’s enough of looking around for Bitcoin jobs. I’m passionate about this—there’s hardly any jobs that really fit my skillset out there—I want to write about Bitcoin. I’m going to start writing about Bitcoin. And I told my wife that that’s what I’m going to do and she was fine with it. And so I started writing about Bitcoin to see what may come. And shortly after I said I was going to start writing, this idea of Why Bitcoin—which is what you mentioned you want to talk about today—came to me, which was: I am a concise writer. I have a lot of knowledge about Bitcoin from all these years. I’m going to take on the challenge of making it accessible, not through some large course that somebody has to take and understand all the complexity, but hand them bite-sized pieces of knowledge about Bitcoin that they don’t have to read any other one in any particular order. They’re all self-contained, but they all speak to something about what I find magical, mysterious, wonderful, about Bitcoin. And that was the motivation for this book—which I didn’t know was going to be a book at the time. It’s still not quite yet a book.

Stephan Livera:

Right. It started as some articles.

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. It’s an audio book and an e-book and I’m hoping to turn it into a physical book really soon, if that’s what we still mean by those words. But there is an audio book of it read by Guy Swann that you can find on bitcoinaudible.com and click on audio books. It’s the only thing he’s published as an audio book. So you won’t have a hard time finding it.

Stephan Livera:

That’s awesome. And so one thing with Bitcoin is it’s a challenge to make analogies that are still precise, because then there are times where people use imprecise analogies and it can lead people the wrong way because, again, Bitcoin is such a different beast. And I think this is something you touch on in the book as well, which is this idea that Bitcoin is unlike anything you’ve seen before. So from the view of the precoiner or the newcoiner—the person who is new—Why? Why is Bitcoin so unlike anything they’ve seen before?

Tomer Strolight:

I’m really glad to start with that article! When I now teach a course on Bitcoin, I start with that article—Why Bitcoin Is Not Like Anything You’ve Ever Seen Before. And I think one of the hardest things I had when I was trying to teach the course about it was: people came in with preconceived notions. They thought, Oh, it’s like a company. I’m buying shares in a company. I said, Well, it’s not like a company. It doesn’t have shares. It doesn’t have a CEO. It doesn’t have any employees. It doesn’t have an HR department. It has raised no money. It’s never spent a cent on marketing. And nobody’s in charge of it. So it’s not like a company. Okay. so then it’s like a government? Well, no, it doesn’t have a president. Nobody’s elected in charge of it. It doesn’t operate on democracy. Okay, so then it’s like a charity? Nope—charities also have boards of directors and they need money to operate. Charities are going around asking you for money all the time. Bitcoin’s not asking anybody for any money. So it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before. And once you can clean the slate—like people come in with all these preconceived notions—and you can erase it, you can then start building from a foundation on which Bitcoin is built, which is [inaudible 6:30]. There’s many different parts of it, but the biggest part of it is: ultimately it’s this philosophy that human beings need money to have a civilization bigger than a tribe. And once you create a money that’s incorruptible, you can create a sustainable civilization. And if you create a money that’s not sustainable, your civilization collapses. So I point out very early on: this is really big. This is fundamental to the human civilization. And the reason I’m so excited about it is I think for the first time in human history, we may have discovered, or invented—whatever term you want to use—an incorruptible money. But because it’s the first time ever, it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before.

Stephan Livera:

That’s really interesting because one thing that I’ve noticed is: some people, when they come to Bitcoin, they look at some way in which something might superficially look like something else they’ve seen before. And so they might say, Oh, look, this guy looks like he’s really influential. Maybe he’s the leader. Maybe he’s the president of Bitcoin. Or they might try to analogize, and maybe that’s an area where people might fall down in their analysis because they haven’t looked at things the right way.

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. No, it’s absolutely the case. I think that’s the way human brains work: they develop patterns and they say, Oh, this thing is like that! And think in metaphors, right? And so when you do come across something that’s this different from anything that you’ve ever seen before, it invariably is going to take time to learn about it and time to adapt to it. And when it’s still so one-of-a-kind, it’s very hard to look at other things around you and say, Okay, well it’s like that from this thing. It’s still—there’s no other organization like Bitcoin in the world. There’s none! It lets everybody use it. It has no CEO. It just operates independently of human intervention—in that sense it’s more like a law of nature, but it’s not a law of nature because it came after the laws of nature. But it relies on the laws of nature. So you start triangulating, you’re oscillating between, Okay, it’s more like this, but it’s not like this in this way. So it’s like that, but it’s not like that in that way. So you’re just going back and forth as you try to get more signal and less noise and more accuracy—if you’re that interested in learning about it. At the end of the day, I think many people will just say, It’s the money. And it works. And yeah, there’s some history about it—and I’m not a student of history or money so I don’t care—but I know it works because I’m an artist, or I’m a chef, or I’m a computer programmer, and I’m just interested in knowing that my money works.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. I see. And with that, as an example, people can see let’s say a CEO of a Bitcoin company and they’re saying, Oh, look, there’s a CEO there. Or they might say, Oh, there’s some venture capitalists who are funding this, so that’s the fundraising. Well, no—Bitcoin itself is a protocol. And that’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who maybe is not as tech-savvy. And I think another really important point that you hit on in the essays is this idea of choosing Bitcoin. It’s that people have to choose Bitcoin, which is very different to most of the money that we are forced to use.

Tomer Strolight:

Right. There’s a lot of my essays in here that talk about how important it is to choose it, but there’s one which was the first one that actually wrote called Why Choose Bitcoin? And it was the article that overcame my initial writer’s block. Like, What was I going to write about first? Was it going to be about the 21 million supply limit? Or was it going to be about the fungibility? Or was it going to be about the connectedness to reality and the energy? And I didn’t know what to do. And this article actually came to me in my sleep. It’s the first article I wrote. I had tried writing before and nothing had quite come to me and I went to sleep and at 3:00 AM in the morning I just woke up and it came to me: that the reason you should choose Bitcoin, or will choose Bitcoin, or why one might want to consider choosing Bitcoin, is because Bitcoin asks you to choose it. It doesn’t tell you to choose it. It’s not about force—it’s consent. And because it asks for consent, it has to earn your choice. It’s doesn’t come at you and say, Here I am, this is it. In a sense I guess it does say, Take it or leave it, but it tries to get good enough to say, What do I need to do for you to take it? Which is very different from the Dollar. The Dollar, it says, Take it! At the point of a gun, right? Like if you don’t take it, you’ve committed a crime. And we will find you, imprison you, and worse, if you don’t accept the country’s money. And then there’s gold. And gold is good, but it failed as money over and over in history. Those people who study the history of civilization collapse, they can always see it’s because somebody debased the money that was originally based on gold—sometimes seashells and salt—but the more successful civilizations, gold. But gold’s problem is it can’t improve. And it’s not built for survivability as money, it’s just an element that has existed since the first stars blew up, and that protocol is done and finished. So Bitcoin is this protocol that continues to improve and it asks you to choose it. And it asks every single person in the world to choose it and it becomes more valuable with each person that chooses it, and with each unit of value that they store in it. So it’s just this thing that’s getting better and better and better and better as money according to Metcalfe’s law or some other laws, which just talk about the power of network effects. And so that’s why you should choose it, because it wants you to choose it—I’m personifying it here. But it is changing in a way that will earn your choice, if you don’t want to refer to it as a living thing. It is changing in a way that will earn your choice for lots of reasons: [because] of it’s community, and the living people who are able to change it, but they can’t—I point out, one of the things that people really value about it is how hard it is to change—and there are certain things about it that seem impossible to change, even though it’s a man-made thing. So again: that’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before, because every man-made thing you’ve ever seen before, people can change. And there’s people in charge who can change them. We hire people to be in charge of—like that’s what a president’s job is to do is to keep changing things in the company so that it continues to do better.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. So it’s definitely this focus on earning your choice. And I think the other important aspect—and you touch on this as well—is this idea that it keeps on earning your choice, because every time you’re a HODLer, every day you’re a HODLer, you are continually choosing to continue HODLing rather than to dis-HODL or spend or sell those coins. And so what causes a person to do that? Well, there’s something there, isn’t there?

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. This is another amazing thing: unlike the dollar—when you move to a country, you accept their currency. When you accept Bitcoin, you get to re-evaluate it every second of every minute of every day and say, Do I still want this? And so it’s gotta be that good that it not only earns your choice, but keeps it, and it builds conviction within you. And I think that many of us who’ve been in Bitcoin for a long time, we just see our conviction deepening, and we hear all the objections and we’ve heard them before and we’ve addressed them, but we get better and better at addressing them. And every minute that Bitcoin survives is more validation of the fact that those objections were mistaken because many of the objections are like, if they were true, they could happen at any second. And many seconds have happened and it hasn’t happened, so the probability keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller that any of these objections are actually true. And often, if you understand Bitcoin really well, you can understand the principle behind why it’s not going to happen. I had a very fun tweet on the weekend: someone had published an article on medium saying, Oh, I’m addressing all the FUD against Bitcoin, all the fear—and my attempt to do it in a tweet, which was, But Bitcoin can’t. I said, But yes, it can. But Bitcoin won’t. Yes, it will. But they’ll—No, they won’t. That was what I said. Because every one of these objections—Bitcoin can’t scale, or Bitcoin can’t do more transactions per second, or Bitcoin can’t—Yes, it can. But Bitcoin won’t this or that—Yes, it will. It will do it. But they’ll—whoever “they” are. Well, No, they won’t. They’ve tried. And they can’t—whoever they are. Bitcoin is built for survival and it’s built to adapt and it’s surrounded by very creative, very hardworking, very committed and invested people. And so yes, it will—whatever it is that it needs to do. If it’s possible, it will.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And you mentioned as well this idea that physics protects Bitcoin. Now this is perhaps a bit more of a difficult idea to grasp for a person who’s new to Bitcoin. So what’s your approach on explaining this idea?

Tomer Strolight:

Well, if we compare it to the Dollar, the Dollar relies on force. It relies on the authority of the government. And so it needs the government to exist and it needs the government to be able to enforce somebody else who says, I don’t want to choose the Dollar. They’ll say, Oh, don’t worry. We’ll take care of it—that guy told you he won’t take the dollar? We’ll send police and we’ll make sure he takes the Dollar, right? That’s the enforcement. That’s the rules that the Dollar relies on. And it’s got its drawbacks for lots of reasons around that. And if a particular country or nation falls—which they all do if you look back, there’s no nation that’s more than a few hundred years old and none of their currencies are even that old—then the currency fails. But Bitcoin isn’t built to ask the permission of any nation to exist. It somehow needs to exist independent of any particular nation. It needs to exist like gold exists independent of any nation. But it’s this man-made thing. And so the genius of the invention of the tie into energy and this adjustment, it has an adjustment factor that no matter how much energy is put in, it adjusts itself so that it operates at a steady pace of one block on average every 10 minutes, no matter whether you put a ton of energy into it—all the energy of the sun—or just one laptop worth of energy, it will continue to adjust so that that energy leads to one block being discovered every 10 minutes. But the energy needs to go in because if energy didn’t need to go in then it turns out you wouldn’t be able to set this pace. You wouldn’t be able to have any objective measure of which things came in which order, because the order of the transactions—which is the truth of the state of the ledger—needs something to say that one is true and another is false. And what Bitcoin does is it looks at which one has the most energy. And energy will be around. And that law of physics which it looks to will be around past the existence of any state. The best we know is it’ll be around until the heat death of the universe. So the one thing that Bitcoin relies on to exist is energy, is the laws of physics—not the laws of Man. It doesn’t care about the laws of Man. So we have some math that allows us to describe physics, some functions that allow us to describe the use of physics, and we use those to create Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin is forever. When I wrote that essay, which I think was the second one in the series, it was the first time I had written that Bitcoin is forever. It might’ve been the first time I’d heard it, and that’s why it is forever because it only relies on the things that are forever, the things that are immortal or eternal—the laws of physics and the laws of math. Those don’t change. One plus one has always equalled two even since before the universe began. And the laws of physics haven’t changed since probably about 13 femtoseconds after the Big Bang. So they’re good to go. And if they change then we’ve got a problem. But they’re a lot less likely to change in our lifetimes. We might have bigger problems than Bitcoin not working if the laws of physics suddenly changed.

Stephan Livera:

Of course. And it is just a very difficult concept for people to grasp because—unless they have read and learned a little bit about cryptography, at least some of the basics—it’s just a very difficult thing to grasp. This idea that, Oh, actually, the difficulty of this system scales based on the energy. And it’s a very difficult thing for people to really come to terms with.

Tomer Strolight:

They’ve never seen anything like that before, right? Here’s a machine or a thing that adjusts itself and it doesn’t allow you to adjust it. So imagine you had a car that you couldn’t take into a mechanic that if he adjusted one little screw, it would just break and it would say, I’m not driving on any roads. That’s what happens if you try to adjust your Bitcoin node. But you don’t have to worry because it adjusts itself so that it operates exactly according to the specification, which is that it travels one block every 10 minutes, on average. So again: that defies all of our conventional understanding of man-made machines, where they break down, they wear out, and you need human beings to intervene to change them. And Bitcoin somehow is this invention that is the exact opposite: it says, Don’t mess with anything. Your copy of it will break if you try to mess with anything that not everybody else is making the same changes to. But don’t worry about maintaining it, it maintains itself. So I have another article that’s called Why People Wonder if Bitcoin is Alien Technology. And it’s things like this that make it so different from other technology that people’s minds get blown and say like, Where did this thing come from all at once doing all these different things?

Stephan Livera:

Right. And I think that also goes into the typical point that people think, Well, hang on, isn’t this old technology? Can’t new technology come in and supersede this old Bitcoin?

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. And they can’t, right? I have one article in the series called Why All of Bitcoins Imitators are Scams. And maybe that’s a harsh word—I know some people are fussed about it. But at the end of the day, none of them are improvements to Bitcoin. If you take the wheel, which is this great invention which nobody’s really improved on the wheel—we don’t know who invented the wheel either. And it works! Nobody’s come up with anything better to move stuff around on land. And people have built things with wheels and we actually have a saying for the people who try to not accept the wheel and do something else, and we say, What a waste of time to try to reinvent the wheel—because it’s good. And all of these cryptocurrency projects are attempts to reinvent Bitcoin. It’s already invented. It works. Changing one variable is just obviously an attempt to say, Hey, I’ve got a different one. Why don’t you come in later? But it lacks the network effect. And it lacks integrity because we often know who’s the one who changed the variable and they often pre-mined a whole bunch of their new wheels for themselves. And they just haven’t added anything to the design of the wheel. And other people do add some things and they’re things that make the wheel not roll smoothly. If you build this huge blockchain that tries to update the state every 15 seconds, and it’s huge, well it becomes a wheel that’s like 5 trillion pounds and not particularly round, and nobody can have the wheel of their own so everyone has to share the same wheel that’s rolling in one direction. That’s a big part of the flaw. And a big part of this is also that it’s decentralized. That it is peer-to-peer. That it has no trusted party—and all the other imitators have these trusted parties. So I just point out in that article: all of these other things that claim to be advances, actually aren’t advances. They’re actually a step back to all the kinds of systems that we had before. They’re also different reinventions of the kinds of systems that we had before. There’s nothing new in them. They’re these solutions looking for a problem that they can apply themselves to. But none are Bitcoin. And that is very hard for newcomers to understand. And I point out in that article as well that we have a saying in the Bitcoin community that says, Don’t trust, verify. And within Bitcoin, if you take the energy, if you take the time, and you put in the effort, you will be able to verify every one of its claims. And you’ll probably be able to invalidate one or more of the claims of any of the other projects. And that’s all it takes for the thing to unravel, right? Like if you take one essential thing—if you take a person’s liver out, they die. If you take their heart out, they die. If you take their brain out, they die. You need all those elements—and you don’t need a whole bunch of others—in order to have a properly formed human being. And that’s this perfection in the design of Bitcoin. And I’m very careful about it—it’s not perfect, perfect. It’s not like it could only be built one way. And people point out, Oh, it has flaws. You have to wait 10 minutes for a block or this or that, but it’s good enough. And this was this big shocker that I had the other day when I was framing it, it’s like, they said that he solved this problem that mathematicians had proven couldn’t be solved: the Byzantine General’s problem. And he didn’t actually solve it: he just came up with such a good approximation to a solution that it’s good enough to last forever. And good enough to last forever is perfect. It’s just a different way to achieve perfection. You asympotically approach perfection. And that’s what Satoshi managed to do several times in the creation of Bitcoin. But now we’re probably getting a little bit more complicated than a discussion for beginners, and I apologize for that.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, sure. No, but I think it’s interesting as well, because there are certain statements and things that are timeless in a way. And like you said, reinventing the wheel is a turn of phrase that everybody knows and understands. So maybe that’s an easy way to put it is to say that a lot of people who are creating altcoins are basically reinventing the wheel. And by putting in some other little aspect to that wheel, they are maybe in many ways making it less efficient and you might as well just use the wheel that we’ve already got. This is the one that works. And while we’re on this whole idea of physics protecting Bitcoin, and energy use—what’s your way of explaining the question of Bitcoin’s energy use, because some people might believe that it is wasteful. It’s wasting a lot of energy, in their mind. How do you normally explain that?

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah I think there’s two parts of it. There’s: why does it need to use energy? And: Why is it not environmentally harmful or wasteful how Bitcoin uses energy? I think we’ve talked a little bit about why it uses energy. It uses energy to ensure that everyone is in consensus and in agreement. And there is an article that attempts to explain that in the series, it’s just a few minutes long. But there’s also one that talks about why Bitcoin’s energy use is not environmentally harmful. And first I would emphasize that not all energy use is environmentally harmful. There’s a lot of clean energy. There’s excess energy that is produced anyways. So it doesn’t do any harm on the margins to use that energy that is otherwise wasted. It also says there are good uses for energy. There are worthwhile uses for energy. Energy may have a cost in some sense, but it also has a benefit. The benefit of having money that every human being in the world can use, and every human being in the world can rely on, and nobody can take away that right to be able to trade with other people—which is what the power of money is, to trade their best effort for something that somebody else made and be able to receive something in kind that they can use to take to somebody else who can trade them for their best efforts—so it’s a very worthwhile use of energy. And we don’t know of any way to do it with less energy. Again, a lot of these reinventions of the wheel claim to have a way to do Bitcoin but without the energy use. And when you understand—when you look closely—you say, No, they don’t have that. They’re reinstituting the very system that Bitcoin is trying to get away from. And I’m speaking specifically—Bitcoin uses something called proof of work. And some of these systems claim to use proof of stake, which uses less energy. But proof of work is paying people with money for doing work over time. That’s what proof of work is, right? You have to put in work, you have to put in energy over time—because of the adjustment. And that’s the only way you’re going to get paid. Proof of stake says: if you’re rich, you get paid. And if you’re poor, you don’t. Like, how is that a system of sound money? That’s the very problem that we’ve always been trying to get away from on the face of it, and it doesn’t change when you go deeper. It’s a system where the rich get richer. And also, in proof of stake, the rich get to make the rules. So it’s not just that they get paid for being rich. They get to change the rules: anyone with 51% stake can change the rules. In Bitcoin, there’s this thing called a 51% attack. All that means is that someone can essentially halt the progress of the chain or undo recent transactions, but they don’t get to change the rules. They don’t get to steal Bitcoin that have existed before. They don’t get to issue any more Bitcoin. With proof of stake, you get to erase the rules. It just becomes the law of Man again as opposed to law of nature. So I may again be going off the trail of what you asked, but Bitcoin’s use of energy is really valuable because it gives humankind the thing—that I was saying at very beginning of this—we’ve never had before. And we’ve always had to use some kind of energy to create any kind of sound money. If it was extracting gold, that takes a lot of energy and you don’t have the option of using clean, renewable energy. You can’t use solar to extract gold from the ground. You’ve got to dig up the ground and that’s got a pollutive effect. Whether your tractors and your diggers are powered by the sun or not, you’re digging up the earth and you’re separating all these minerals that have been buried deep in the ground. And so Bitcoin is a good and moral use of energy if it frees us from all these other things—which is the final point that I make is like, The alternative is worse for the environment. The alternative of having fiat money—which is this system that’s obsessed with consumption—like if we don’t have growth for three months in a row, that’s a warning, and if we don’t have it for six, that’s a term called recession. And every government agency is going to intervene to make sure that we consume more. Well that more consumption is what’s harmful to the environment. It’s like, you’re not consuming enough—you better consume more. We might tax some of these things, but we need to see consumption go up. Otherwise we fail. And so we have this civilization—because of the nature of it’s money—obsessed with growth at any cost. Including the cost of the environment. And as Jeff Booth rightly points out, he says, Well, it’s a finite world. If you keep growing the size of the economy infinitely, you’re going to consume the whole world. You’re going to destroy it. Or you’re just going to change your yardstick so that it looks like it’s growing when it’s really not. I think we’re doing a bit of both with fiat money: we’re damaging our spirits, we’re damaging life on Earth, we’re damaging the environment. And we’re obviously playing accounting tricks by saying the economy grew 1.5% percent while inflation was really 3% so the economy actually shrank by 1.5%.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And I think a lot of it just comes down to a lot of the metrics that fiat economists like the Keynesians and monetarists use that encourage people to all focus on this idea of GDP Number Go Up, right? And GDP is not necessarily a good metric in terms of what is actually good for society. And I think it’s also that in this finite world, we can find ways to be more productive—and humanity is doing that over time. But in order to coordinate that we need a better money and we need a sound money for that. A money chosen by the market and not interfered with by the government. And so in some ways that’s another aspect of it as well is that it can seem very complicated. That’s a common question I get when I’m talking to a newcoiner is they’ll say, Bitcoin is so complicated! Do I really need to go and learn all of this stuff? How do you explain that?

Tomer Strolight:

I have one article called Why Bitcoin is so Complicated. And it points out: we live in a complicated world. Your computer is also very complicated. Your refrigerator is very complicated. Your phone is complicated. How electricity even gets into your house is complicated. How they make the electricity is complicated. You don’t know the answers to all of these things. But some people have to figure out these really complicated things. And money—it turns out—has to be very complicated because there’s everyone in the world who’s crooked who wants to attack it. And Friedrich Hayek, I believe in 1984 said, I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government by some sly, roundabout way. And we do have the government wanting monopoly control over the money. And the government has armies and police officers and judges and jails and weapons. And so we need something that, even though they have these things, without itself being violent in return, right? Money must be peaceful for you to choose it voluntarily. If it’s an act of force then you’re not gonna choose it voluntarily. So we had to invent something. Satoshi had to invent something that people can choose that still cannot be taken away with all of this physical force that you see around us. And it has to be defensible against any hacker who might attack it. So you can imagine, there’s all these complicated things that Bitcoin needs to be able to withstand. And that’s why it needs to be so complicated, because it needs to have the mechanisms to defend itself from all of this. Now it does rely on some fundamental primitives. If you understand what a hash function is, and you understand what a digital signature is, and you understand what a peer-to-peer network is, you can actually understand how Bitcoin works and you can build up in your mind an understanding of why it’s so invulnerable just because of these things. But, if you don’t have someone explain it to you, or you’re not interested in learning it, it will just seem like this incredibly complex thing with big words surrounding it like cryptography. We never studied cryptography even if we took math in university, right? So it’s this field of math that people just haven’t touched. And it’s got a bunch of weird things about it, and it’s about proofs and about secrecy and hiding. We’ve seen proofs in math, but this is a different kind of proof. It’s about demonstrating the validity, the truthfulness of statements, or the authorship of statements, which in the human realm we just have to take somebody’s word for it. Or they draw a signature and we say, Well, this looks like their signature. And cryptography takes that idea of a signature to a mathematically-provable level. So that’s one way to understand some of these things. And that’s what I try to teach without going into these things. I try to say, There’s signatures that you can prove came from people on statements, and there’s fingerprints of data that you can actually say, This data has the fingerprints, so it’s truly the data that somebody represents it is. But again, these are all deeper discussions which I keep trying to find shorter ways to express them, but—we’re going to talk about a whole bunch of things—I won’t be able to express them all in this one hour or so podcast.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think another really interesting idea that might not be apparent to a newcoiner is this idea that Bitcoin is more than just money. It’s going to enable a lot more than just money. In what sense do you mean that?

Tomer Strolight:

The analogy I draw in the article about Why Bitcoin is So Much More Than Money is that cars are so much more than a form of transportation. Before cars, people walked or they took bicycles or they rode horses and carriages, and all of those things had speed limits and quantity limits, right? You couldn’t actually even have horses everywhere in a city because horses take shits everywhere. And so if you’re bothered by the pollution from cars, just imagine every one of those cars taking a dump every few hundred meters—you’d be up to your knees, or higher, in waste. But what cars enabled was suddenly high-speed transportation any time of the day. Over time—not instantly, right? The first cars were slower than horses, they were unreliable, they took time, but they transformed our society. So they were so much more than transportation. The fact that a shopping mall can exist or that the freeway can exist, and you can, in the course of a day or two, drive from New York to Florida. You couldn’t do that by horse. You couldn’t do it by bicycle. You couldn’t do it by walking, for sure. And so they transformed our civilization. They were so much more than just transportation. This internal combustion engine combined with this really old invention called the wheel—which didn’t need to be reinvented—was this breakthrough thing. And I’m saying: Bitcoin’s going to do the same for our civilization that the automobile did. It’s going to connect every human being in the world wherever they are in the world. We’ve been connected information-wise through the Internet, but we haven’t been connected financially. There’s all these expensive intermediaries that you have to convert currencies through—It’s very time-consuming and very expensive. Try sending an international wire and you will loathe the banking system, even if it’s for only $500. But try sending Bitcoin to anyone anywhere in the world and you will say Ah, that’s magic! And if you actually are now using the Lightning Network, you’re like, Oh, this is the future. In the future, you won’t have to worry about currency exchange rates fluctuating against one another, or paying a fee to convert your currency against somebody else’s, or how long it might take to clear to the bank, or having to line up at the bank, or that the bank has closed—all these things that you worry about, about the execution of financial transactions, they’re just gonna be 100% instant, 100% reliable, and not filled with all that noise of different currencies existing. In the same way that, today, if I say, I want to go to the drug store 3 miles from my house, it makes sense to have [a car]. I can be there in 10 minutes and I can get whatever I need and I can go back home with it and have it home. It’s not going to be an exhausting thing, and it’s going to be a very short period of time. The car made the world smaller, and Bitcoin’s going to make the world smaller in the same sense. It just allows us all to connect to each other—with trust. Money is trust. Like money is—you’re a stranger to me, Stephan, right? Like we don’t really know each other, but if you’re going to do something for me, a value, and I send you Bitcoin, you don’t need to trust me. You know you got reliable money and you got something worth your time. Because that’s how you priced your time. And I may be a terrible person, I may be a great person—it doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to do all that due diligence on me. You just need to know that the money’s good. And we can do that now that you and I both speak English, we both work in the same industry, so it’s easy for us to establish trust. But there’s someone halfway around the world who doesn’t speak the same language as me, who works in a different industry, and I can trust them just as much as you and I can trust each other if we’re using Bitcoin, which is trustless. So it’s a really incredible, incredible moment in history. It is why it’s so worth fighting for or advocating for, because it’ll create peace throughout the world.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. That trust minimization, it’s this idea that I believe [inaudible 37:58] was the one who popularized it. It’s this idea that Bitcoin is the money of enemies. And so it’s this idea that we can transact without necessarily trusting each other to a very high degree. Of course, there might be some small level of trust, but the idea is you’re minimizing it because the software that you’re using and so on can be verified. Of course, in practice, maybe it’s not easy for everyone to verify every little piece depending on how far you want to go. But that’s the idea. It’s this idea of trust minimization. And I think to the broader point you were making as well is just that it enables this whole new world. This universal standard for value: we can send sats, satoshis—so a fraction of a Bitcoin—and we can have one pricing system all around the world, and there’s not constant need for currency conversion, there’s not constant need for asking permission, there’s not the constant need for asking all these different configurations and settings and things like, Oh, what’s your SWIFT number and your account number and routing number and which bank and what’s your address and what’s what industry are you in and what’s the source of your funds and what’s your income and all of these different questions that come up. And now it’s more just, What’s your Bitcoin address? Or, what’s your Lightning invoice? Scan it, pay it, and done. And so that’s the world we’re going to move into. And it really is phenomenal when you really start to zoom out and think, What kind of world will this enable? What kind of possibilities will we see that now it’s the equivalent, as you were saying, that [we’re] making the world smaller, people could easily travel with cars or even the invention of airplanes and commercial airplane flight that now people can fly around the world and do things that were previously unthinkable. And I truly believe Bitcoin will enable a world with so much more possibility and prosperity for all of us, so long as we do this the right way and we actually adopt a Bitcoin standard globally. So I’m really optimistic about that. I just think it will take time for us to reach that and for people to come along with us on this journey of the world Bitcoinizing.

Tomer Strolight:

Yes. These things take time. None of us know exactly how fast or how slow it will be. And I think the part that us educators in this space play is we’re trying to bring about a speedier and more democratized or more widespread bringing about of Bitcoinization. Because people know so little about Bitcoin. Almost everybody’s heard about it—which is amazing—but what they’ve heard about it, because it’s not like anything they’ve ever seen before, is not true. Because somebody says, Oh, Bitcoin is money for gangsters. Or, Bitcoin is money that’s bad for the environment. Or, Bitcoin is money that’s made a whole bunch of people rich, but you’ve missed the boat. Or they’ve heard that it wastes energy. And so people dismiss it. So all of these things, they land on people and people take the action that—if they had a rational knowledge of Bitcoin—is not the action they would have taken. Like, they don’t buy Bitcoin. They think that it’s a bad thing. They look for some other solution. And so we’re really still very early. And I feel sympathy and I feel bad for people who are fed untrue information about Bitcoin and who ultimately then make decisions that aren’t in their best interest. And this is true in anything. I feel bad for someone who’s fed bad information about some prescription drug that they end up taking that they then find out they didn’t need to take it and that it has side effects that they can’t overcome now. We have to do this work to understand things and live with the choices that we make. And sometimes there are disruptive things that require that we learn about something new. And I think that this is what Bitcoin is, right? It’s this fundamentally civilization-changing invention that is still in its earliest days of existence. And so there are those of us who are so obsessed with it and we’re studying it and running around and telling everybody we can, like, This thing has been discovered! There’s this invention! And other people say, Well, I’m not interested. Or, I heard that it was something different. And I’m sure there were many people that might—my wife’s grandfather told me this story of the first time he saw a car, he would have been my kid’s great-grandfather—and he said, At night-time, there were these two lit eyes coming down the road, making a sound. And it was a terrifying thing. And he jumped into the ditch because he thought it was some kind of monster. And maybe that’s the way people are reacting to Bitcoin, right? Steve Hanke is jumping in the ditch, calling this thing a terrible, terrifying monster, and that it’s horrible mistake and we’ve got to slaughter it and kill it. And then it comes and it’s a car and it’s just peacefully taking somebody somewhere in a safer, easier way than has ever been done before. And it’s really this very benevolent and beautiful thing. And not this terrible monster that you think it is.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And as you mentioned, it is early and yet the community and the base of Bitcoin users is growing so rapidly. Why is that in your view?

Tomer Strolight:

So there’s another article in the series—and I know now, obviously you’re just teasing me for the articles! It’s called Why the Bitcoin Community is Growing So Fast and Getting So Large. Because Bitcoin is this—as I said in the earlier article about choice—is something that everyone can choose to be a part of. And when you can choose to be a part of something and you can contribute to it, many people do. And the network effect of everybody choosing it, it becomes this community. It becomes this entity of everyone being here because they want to be here. Nobody is forced to be here. Everyone looks forward to what everybody else can contribute to the community. You can code? Terrific. I can’t. You can write? Terrific. I can’t. You are a talented podcaster? Terrific. I’m not. You can start up a business to help people get this? Terrific. I can’t. You can write a more secure wallet for holding people’s funds? Amazing. I can’t. And as all of these people come around and start to do all of these things, even competing within functions to do each one better than the other. It’s like: we welcome every one of these things. And everybody has a stake in it too, because—well just about everybody, right?—people buy Bitcoin. And the better it gets and the more that people understand it, actually, the more money they have, You may have 1 Bitcoin, but it’s more money than it was before because the world recognizes its value increasingly as more and more people come in. So you have this organization that—if it was a company—everybody owns equity in it, everybody works there voluntarily, nobody’s told what job to do, they look around and they see what job needs to be done and they say, If I can do this job better than somebody else, I’m just going to jump in and do it. And I don’t need human resources’s permission to do this job. Like, I decided to be a writer about Bitcoin. I didn’t need anybody’s permission. I didn’t need to appeal or apply to Bitcoin’s head office and say, Hey, I’d like to write articles about Bitcoin. There’s nobody to appeal to, right? There’s no CEO. There’s no human resources department. If you want to work for Bitcoin, start doing what it is that you want to do! And if you’re doing a good job, people will pay you for it, because they’ll buy your wallet, or they’ll pay you for your software, or they’ll ask you to write for them. And you’re on this journey where you’re contributing to this thing that you believe is a civilization-changing technology. And so how on Earth could this not be growing really rapidly? And that in that light, only if it was truly this toxic environment where somebody had seized control of it and was steering it against the principles and values of the people who did want to join it. And Bitcoin also has a very powerful defense mechanism, which people come in and it’s like, Oh, you’re good at defending the principles of Bitcoin. Yes. Come in. And welcome, because I’m trying to build on these principles and I want them to be inviolable. It’s kind of like this militia duty, right? Like when you look at America, the reason that the right to bear arms apparently is just so that everyone can be a part of a standing militia. And just about every Bitcoiner is part of this standing, digital, virtual militia of defending the principles of Bitcoin. If you run a node, you actually are right in the heart of the system. We’re all sentinels protecting the integrity of the network. Each one of us standing by our node, protecting all the rules, ensuring that no rule is ever violated. And if somebody comes in and they’re starting to attack the principles of the system—well, I just say anyone who comes in is greeted with welcome, we try to explain Bitcoin to you, but if you start to say, Well, I think I can change it and I think I can make it better and it doesn’t make sense, we will correct you. And if you insist that your changes should be made, we will argue with you. We will fight with you. We will tell you to go away until you’re ready to come back and really be objective and neutral about this thing. Bitcoin doesn’t need to satisfy the ego of somebody who’s a control freak. It’s perfect as it is. And we are happy to explain to you why that is. And if you came up with a valid objection, we would all make changes, right? It’s not that we are dogmatic. We are rational. We are objective. But many people don’t understand the system and they come in and make suggestions for changes and they’re greeted with, Well, take your change and shove it. Here’s why, but we’re not going to change for you no matter what you offer us in return, because we’re dealing with all the money in the world. And you can’t offer us a hundred trillion fiat dollars to compromise Bitcoin because it’s worth more than all the fiat money in the world. We know it is, even though it’s [not there yet]. Try to buy all the Bitcoin in the world with $10 trillion—you won’t get them all. The price will just skyrocket to the point where 1 Bitcoin is worth a trillion dollars, because I’m not selling mine for any price and neither are you, I bet.

Stephan Livera:

So I like the analogy with sentinels and you’re defending the rules. The users of Bitcoin, the people who are running Bitcoin nodes are defending the rules. And another idea that you’ve written about is this idea that Bitcoin is stopping theft. And I think that’s quite an important one as well. What do you mean when you say Bitcoin is stopping theft?

Tomer Strolight:

Well, I’ve written about that in a number of different articles. So there’s two kinds of theft: There’s like, I’m literally taking something off of your body. You’ve got money or you’ve got gold and you’ve got a sandwich and I take it from you and I give you nothing in return. And I talk about this as being the law of the jungle, because that’s the way things work in nature. There’s a plant and an animal comes and eats it and it gives nothing in return. It just eats the plant. A smart plant will have evolved to take advantage of this and put seeds inside the edible part of it so that when the animal takes a dump, it’s planted a seed. And so the plant reproduces—but it’s not because the animal has come up to the plant and said, Hey, let’s make a deal. I’ll plant your seed if you give me some food. The carnivore attacks and kills the prey and it takes its life and it takes its energy. And that’s the law of the jungle. That’s the law of nature. That’s the law of life. The plant doesn’t ask the sun for the energy, it just happens to be there and so it gives nothing in return. And I’d say that what we as human beings call our code of ethics has implicit into it this notion that that’s wrong between human beings. Between human beings, we can trade with each other. We can pay each other back. We don’t have to take without giving—we can take an exchange. And when there’s someone who’s prepared to exchange something with me, well, I’m prepared to do some work to make something that he might want. I’m not gonna run away from him or bash him in the head, which is the law of the jungle, the fight or flight. We actually have a part of every animal’s brain that’s evolved to fight or flight. That’s the amygdala. And it does us a disservice in our modern, peaceful civilization, because it makes us think that many situations are fight or flight situations when really, if we cooperated, we would do better. And this is the conflict inside of human brain. That we have this neocortex, which is the new part of the brain that’s evolved, that allows us to reason about trading with each other. And we have the amygdala, which makes us think, Oh, this guy’s out to get me. Better get him before he gets me, or, I better get away from him. So there’s this law of human morality that is about trade. And we believe it’s wrong to take without giving something fair in return. And Bitcoin is, for the first time ever, something that you cannot take from somebody else without them voluntarily giving it in return. If you had gold, which was sound money on your body, I could kill you and I could take it off your body. If you have Bitcoin, I can kill you and I cannot take it off your body. It dies with you. And so it enforces this moral law that’s in the 10 Commandments: Thou shall not steal. And there’s other connections to morality. It prevents the inflation, which is a different form of theft. It has the hard cap. We all know what it is: nobody can make more of it any faster than than the way it’s issued. So nobody can play a trick to steal from you through inflation. So Bitcoin has these codes of ethics built into it. I go into detail in this in a slightly longer article that I wrote called, What is the Essence of Bitcoin? And I also just have a very simple one about ethics that’s called, The Bitcoin Rule, which talks about how—you know, there’s the golden rule, which is Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—and I try to explain, Well there’s a Bitcoin one which talks to mutual consent, not just doing unto others as they would do unto you, which doesn’t speak about the reciprocity. But Bitcoin speaks to reciprocity and so it takes it to a whole new level.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And I’m also curious just to get some thoughts of yours on how you think about being a writer and if you’ve got any tips for anyone out there who’s looking to get into writing. Do you have any tips for them?

Tomer Strolight:

Do it! Like, start writing—read as well—find your heroes or your sources of inspiration. Don’t copy them—or develop a voice of your own in time. But I think great artists begin by painting the works of master artists, right? They begin by trying to repaint masterpieces to see how close it can approximate the work of a master and develop skills and styles of their own in the process. So I really recommend, if you want to be a writer, start writing—and don’t hold yourself to the standard of, This isn’t good the first time. Like the first time you tried to walk, you fell and you were clumsy. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to become a great runner if you practice. And the same is true with writing: the first couple of times you write may not be good. Don’t beat yourself up. Be honest with yourself about what is it that you saw that was better in the piece of writing that inspired this piece of writing in you, and try again. It really is important that you try to remember what it was like when you learned to walk, or if you’ve seen a baby learn to walk. They don’t fall down and say, That’s it, I give up. I’m never going to do this again. They’re hell-bent on being a walker—I’m learning how to walk. Just keep doing it. So that’s one thing that I say is: if you want to do anything—but if you want to write—just keep doing that thing and you will continue to get better and better and better at doing it. And evaluate what you’ve done. So if you reflect on it, you can get better more quickly. But set aside time to do it and make sure you do do it. And make sure it’s something that you want to do. You might find out early enough that this thing isn’t for you. But if it feels like it’s the right thing for you then it will be, because you’ve got your motivation lined up with it.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Do you have any tips for people dealing with writer’s block or procrastination?

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. They’re almost like two opposite things in my mind. Writer’s block is like you’re sitting there and you want to work, but nothing’s coming up. And my advice for that is don’t pressure yourself. Go for a walk, have a cup of coffee, put on some music. When I write, I actually don’t sit down in front of my computer. I can’t stand sitting down. I stand in front of my computer with music on—music that has no words because otherwise it would interfere with my thinking about words, but it’s like meditative music or EDM music, or a whole wide variety, didgeridoo music, all kinds of stuff—and I’m not putting time pressure on myself like words per minute. I can type really fast, but that’s not what the exercise of writing is. It is coming up with words. And so I’ll literally be dancing in front of my computer for 3 minutes and then I’ll have one sentence and that’s it. So I’m not forcing the writing to happen at a faster speed than it’s naturally coming out of me. Sometimes I can’t keep up. Sometimes when you’re sick and you’re throwing up and you can’t stop it—I can’t keep up as fast as I need to type. But most of the time, there’s just this really contemplative, peaceful space that you’re in. People call this flow. right? The flow state. And if you can get yourself into the flow state, it just all comes out, and you’re surprised at how beautiful some of the stuff that comes out of you is. So I think that’s some of the advice that I would give for people who feel that they’re facing writer’s block. It’s like, that’s an imaginary thing. You’re trying to do it too fast or you’re trying to do it at a different pace than what’s natural. And I would then describe it as like saying, I can’t run 600 miles an hour—I’ve got running block. Well, that’s just not the speed you’re supposed to run at. If you want to run long-distance, it’s also: don’t run as fast as you possibly can. Pace yourself, take breaks. The same is true for writing. And then to the question of procrastination, there are times when you are more motivated than other times. If you’re perpetually procrastinated, you do need to give yourself the push and just put yourself in the situation, get in front of your computer or notebook or whatever it is, write a title and try to write something. And it’s okay to throw it away, but just write for the sake of writing. It’s like, again, if you’re not in the mood to run a race, well, get up and walk. So just write—it doesn’t have to be great. And you’re not writing for the sake of it being your final published work, you’re writing for the sake of not procrastinating about writing. So you can just rewrite something that somebody else wrote or write nonsense gibberish. But write. And you’re starting to move, right? And it’s like, you may not be in the mood to dance, but if you start to move a little bit and you’ve got the music on—before you know, it, you’re dancing. And I think that’s the best way to deal with procrastination, because what you’re really procrastinating is: you don’t know what to write. You don’t feel good about it. You don’t think you have the right idea. There’s just something. So overcome the procrastination, just do the thing, start doing the act. And before you know it, at one point, it won’t even be a flip. You’re like, Oh, you’re writing nonsense and gobbledy-goop and then suddenly you’re writing something that matters to you. And once you’re writing something that matters to you, that’s amazing. The last piece of advice I’d give—which is maybe a little bit more advanced—is don’t be afraid. Don’t be ashamed. When I was writing these articles at first, I thought, Okay, I’ve got to be really careful not to say anything that is too out there. I want it to be smart. I want it to be true, but I want it to impress everybody. And I don’t want to make claims that are too big. And the more that I got confident as a writer, the more I realized people want to hear what you really, really think—what’s in your heart. I ended up writing two articles in this series, one is: Why Bitcoin is the Most Important Thing Happening in The World. And I’m so glad I wrote that article because that’s how I truly felt. I didn’t write this thing to explain why Bitcoin uses energy. I wanted to impress on people why it’s the most important thing in the world. But I didn’t even know that I had that idea articulated. And then eventually I had it articulated when I was talking to people about Bitcoin and I said, I need to write this article. And I wrote another one talking about exposing—like putting yourself out there. It’s: Why Bitcoin is Worthy of Being Loved. Like, who’s talking about loving Bitcoin? But I love Bitcoin! I do. And I’m not ashamed to say it. And I love it because of the things that it has done to earn being loved. And so that’s why I wrote this article, to try to get people to see: look at what this thing is. It’s worthy of actually being loved. At least for me, it is. And I’m not embarrassed to say it. I’m not embarrassed to tell people I love them. It’s a bit of a taboo subject, or it’s an embarrassing subject. You put yourself out there. What if they don’t tell you that they love you back? That’s okay. Not all love is requited.

Stephan Livera:

Bitcoin loves you back, Tomer!

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. I hope it does. I think it does. Bitcoin loves everybody, right? No matter what you’ve done to Bitcoin, Bitcoin is not going to reject you. It won’t treat you any differently than it treats anybody else. Bitcoin treats everybody perfectly equally—even the people who try to destroy it. It lets them use it without any restriction.

Stephan Livera:

Without fear or favor. So Tomer, have you got any projects coming up that people should be keeping an eye out for?

Tomer Strolight:

Yes. And it depends how soon your podcast is coming out: on October the 31st—.

Stephan Livera:

Oh, the next few days. Yeah.

Tomer Strolight:

Yeah. In the next few days I’ve got my first thing coming out that isn’t an article or a podcast, which is a short film that was based off of an article that I wrote but haven’t yet published because when I wrote it and I read it to the first person who was listening to it, I was like, Whoa, man, this would be so good as as a short film of this duration. And this article wasn’t an article that I voluntarily wrote. It wasn’t an idea I came up with. It was an article that somebody asked me to write. Louis Liu, who is the head of Mimesis Capital—he wanted me to write this article about Bitcoin being generational wealth. And it was a hard article to write because Bitcoin’s only been around for 12 years, so how are you going to write that it spans multi-generational savings? But I had an idea of how to do this, which was to go back into history and show how generational wealth has been destroyed in the past and to project what it might mean when you have a money that cannot be seized or destroyed, or debased—what it would be in the future. And I haven’t seen the final, final, final cut of this thing, but I’ve seen lots of preview cuts and I’ve seen it with other Bitcoiners and the reaction has been incredibly positive. And so we’re near the end of October, it’s almost ready in the next few days. And so I’m going to be working with the producers to release it on Bitcoin White Paper Day, the 13th anniversary of Satoshi’s announcement that he had created this this electronic money with no trusted party. And so it’s nice that it’s happening at that time. I think it’ll be nice. And I’m really appreciative of the people who worked with me on the project, who directed it and edited it. I don’t have skills in video editing. They chose the music and the sound design for it. And the people who are supporting it and helping it get spread, helping more people see it. So I’m really hopeful that this thing does well. And I’d love to do more and more projects like it. It’s obviously a lot more effort than writing a single article, but I think it’s going to be worth it. And we’ll see. But I really have a feeling that this will—the best article I’ve written has had maybe just over 50,000 reads, but that was an extraordinary situation. Most of them I’ll be lucky to get a few thousand reads and under other extraordinary circumstances I’ll get like 10,000 reads. I think this will get viewed maybe a hundred-thousand times or more. And if it does, then it certainly will have been worth the added effort. It’s a video that sends a very positive, hopeful message to people. So I think people will watch it for that. So that’s that project. Yeah.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. I’m looking forward to seeing that then. So look, as we close up, Tomer, where can listeners find you and follow your work online?

Tomer Strolight:

Sure. So I’m @TomerStrolight on Twitter. The same thing, tomerstrolight.medium.com for my own personal blog. I hang out on Twitter Spaces a lot. I try to do Clubhouse every now and then, but there’s a Tuesday night Twitter Spaces that I do which is trying to speak—without raising emotions—to precoiners and altcorners and Bitcoin skeptics, to try to help tell the story and bring [them] along. And there’s others who participate in that. I’m just one of the panelists who speak in favor of Bitcoin on it. And I think if you start to look for me there, you’ll start to see me in a bunch of places. And I did announce recently that I’m working with Swan Bitcoin to help improve the blog, and also, for Swan’s private clients, I edit and write for a private research report that comes out every month called Swan Private Insight. But maybe if people write to you, Stephan, I know you have access to it. Or if people write to me, we can make one issue of it available. And in there, I tend to write a slightly longer-form article that we get to lay out in the style of a magazine, which is always fun. It’s more than just a blog-style article. So I think the easiest way to get this is to become a large private client of Swan Bitcoin, but there’s other ways to get your hands on it too, without having to to become a client.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. Alright, well thank you, Tomer, it has been a pleasure chatting with you.

Tomer Strolight:

Likewise, a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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