EP19 Bitcoin podcast with Ben Prentice.

Welcome back to the bit by bit podcast. In today's episode, I speak to Ben Prentice. Ben started the website, WTF happened in 1971. If you're not familiar with the website, I suggest you click on the link. Maybe you're in quarantine. I know I am. It's a weird

world out there. Maybe you're looking and you're thinking, what's going on? And how do we get to this stage? We've got, again, like we did in 2008, a load of money being printed. It's paying out. It looks like the wrong people. People have misallocated capital.

People have bought back their own stocks. Yeah, you heard that correctly. Again, for anyone who hasn't looked into this, that's normal. Companies can just buy back their own stock to keep the prices artificially high. And then when they don't have any money because

we have a recession or a depression, then they just put their hands out and they ask the government to print a load of money, which devalues yours, and they get it. You don't, but they do. So if you want to look back and think, well, how do we get into this situation

where this is normal? The best place to start, in my opinion, is this website and you have a look and you say, what the fuck happened in 1971? So we're going to jump in. Ben will explain all of this much better than I can. I really enjoyed this episode. It was really

nice to have a chat with him. It's a website I think very highly of. And this is one of my better interviews, despite having some real irritating technical issues. We had, well, I think basically everyone is on the internet watching Netflix or whatever they're watching.

We had real issues taking the call, but we persevered. I've done some editing to try and put it all together. Ideally, I'd like to do another one in the future, but I think you're going to get a lot from this. I really hope that you can bear with it. There's a

few bits in there, you know, maximum of 10, 15 seconds where you'll just hear a load of garbled nonsense. But other than that, I think I've edited it. Okay. So anyway, I hope this relieves you of your boredom. And I hope everyone is safe and well. If after listening to this

interview, you have any questions, either reach out to me or to Ben. Yeah, I hope you enjoy Ben. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today. I wanted to start by asking you what led you to Bitcoin? How did you find it? What were you doing? What was happening

in your life? And how did you stumble across it? Yeah, I'm asking a question. I've known about Bitcoin for quite some time, but I didn't get into it right when I first heard about it. I learned about Bitcoin on flash shot probably in 2010 or 2011 and understood that

it was, I understood then that it was like an anonymous e-cash of some sort. And I didn't think that idea was interesting. But at the same time, I just thought, well, it probably won't work. And then a few years later, I did see the Silk Road stuff popping up, which

I thought was even more interesting because people were using anonymous e-cash exactly and that actually got me to be interested enough to try to just acquire some so I could learn more about it. And I went to, I remember, ending up on empty gocks, map gogs. Proper early,

proper early then. Well, let me finish the story. You'd think so, right? But so I got on there and I was starting to create an account and they were like, you have to provide your bank details and your license. And I thought this was, I thought it wasn't anonymous. And

the whole point of it was that it was on anonymous internet money. And I was like, this is no good. So I actually closed up Mt. Gox and I never had that. Oh, no. Yeah. But I mean, if I had it, then I probably would have sold a little bit after it rose in thrice or probably

would have lost it all and when Mt. Gox went down or whatever. But I was, I think I was trying to do some more research on how to get some when I looked up to getting someone from ATMs and I was like, oh, okay. And I had to look around for some local ATMs and I really

found any, and I think I kind of just forgot about it. So around 2017 when the price started going crazy and not that I was following it at the time, but it started like popping up in new sources that I read and I was like, this thing is still around. And why is the

price going up? What is the mechanism behind that? And why has it grown so much over this time? And that's what led me to start learning about it. And it was very difficult at first to find good information about it. Because I just, I think I started off on YouTube and

there are all these people that want to, you know, trading and filling all this DA and parts and all this stuff. And that was like a lot of the YouTube content and it took me a while to find Reddit that found some Andreas videos and Andreas was, you know, it's very

good introduction to trying to understand how, you know, you really have to shift the way that you say about this thing. It's not just a debit card or whatever like that. And that helped me a lot. And eventually I found Twitter and the podcasting and then that's

when I dove deep and found like Austrian economics. And I think that's pretty much that, you know, I think in order to understand Bitcoin, you have to acquire some and that will compel you to learn about it. Yeah. That was that was the start of my rabbit hole journey there.

So when you when you dove in in 2017, were you already fairly sort of technically competent or was it something that was, you know, did you find that a little bit of a hurdle, technically competent with Bitcoin or just with in general? Yeah, just just in general. Yeah, I've always

been a kind of a nerd, you know, I'm not like a software developer and thing, but I've always been a, you know, advanced user of computers and devices added. So it's relatively easy for me to pick up, you know, I think I started off with Coinbase. And then I, you know, as

I started getting into the Twitter scene and start to learn the mantra of, you know, not your keys, not your coins. I started learning about wallets and got a few wallets and eventually got a hardware wallet. You know, now, now I have at least two nodes running in the house

and it's nice getting more wallets than that. Yeah. It is certainly learning curve though. Even for some of you is actually climb things. Yeah. Most of us just wrapping your head around different ways of thinking about, you know, because we're used to thinking about digital

data that can be copied and we're not very good at digital security. So trying to, you know, learn about digital security and physical security of keys, which are, you know, physical things and about digital security as far as active service and all that, it is a learning

curve for anybody. Yeah, absolutely. And when you, when you started learning about all this stuff, was there a, like a moment where something really hit you or can you remember? Because I look back and I can't remember a moment. Definitely I'm dressed on tenoculars videos

really helped me a lot to get into it. But I can't remember a clicking point where I went, fuck, like, wow, there was, there was maybe a few. What about for you? From Andreas was, there's something big here and I still don't understand it. And I need to keep there. And six months later, after I'd started to get into Twitter and started

to find people like Pierre Richard and started to get the Austrian economic, then so actually I ended up getting in a discussion group. There's a great guy, Justin Moon, who's a developer.

I did his course. Yeah, they'll boot camp. He just kind of, he just kind of randomly on Twitter one day was like, I want to start an Austrian economic book club. And I'd been here and got what's Austrian economic. And he, so basically that moment you're talking

about where I was like, whoa, we had that moment, like, three or four times a week and it was like four times in this one call, we were all like, holy crap. You know, Austrian economics has been around for a while. Bitcoin's been around 10 years. But to sit with a discussion

week, we had Max Hillabrand in this group. He's great as my buddy Cib, Zane, Justin was there for a little bit, but we kept going with it. And Max Hillabrand, who is just an Austrian economics, you know, enthusiast. He rereads the book for fun on the weekends or whatever.

When we were all just discussing and bouncing all these ideas off each other in the language of Austrian logic, we came to some pretty amazing conclusion, just constantly. And we would, we'd get to the end of the call, we're like, we have to stop my mind hurts from all these

mind blows. So yeah, that was definitely my wow moment because then I really finally started to understand it. And when I was, before I understood that stuff, I, you know, I was debating with people on Reddit a lot about kind of economic principles after, see,

he's like, take the, the, the, the knowledge that you learned from Andreas and you could kind of debate economics. I realized that my economics knowledge is extremely lacking, but I did end up doing a lot of research. And I found, you know, we have this concept of

sound money, right? Versus fiat money. And in my research, I was reading about the gold standard in Bretton Wood. And I started finding a lot of really interesting charts, which kind of leads me to, you know, the website that we started with the, what the fuck happened

in 1971? The whole idea for it was that, you know, I mean, my buddy Colin from a Bitcoin Epic Chamber podcast. He kind of, he saw me, I almost everywhere when I was talking about Bitcoin, I'd start bringing these parts up and being look, you know, when, when the gold

standard ended, a lot of things changed. And it's right there in the data. It's very clear to me. And I just started sharing them everywhere. And we were just joking around one time. And he was like, you know, what, what if we mean that into existence as like, yeah, what happened

in 1971. So we just, all these charts that I've been sharing, we kind of just grew them up on a site and didn't put anything else on there. Yeah, I just let people draw their own conclusions and those have been really, really interesting.

I mean, I just had a look through some of them and seeing it, seeing the data there and having them all together, I'm sure you've had this before, you'll say, Oh, well, you know, it came off the gold standard and all these problems started happening. And you try and

explain it to them. And people might say, Oh, well, correlation isn't causation. It could be something else. But when you see chart after chart, after chart, after chart, after chart, all pointing to, like you say, what the fuck has happened in 1971? It's a really

nice to have it in one place. So if you had good feedback from sort of normal non Bitcoin people who have had a look at it, or is it more Bitcoiners who are spending time looking through it? No, I mean, much to our surprise, you know, because we don't really mention

Bitcoin at all on website. No, no, you wouldn't believe like we've seen it in like Bernie Sanders subreddits. We've really, oh, yeah, we've seen it on gold bug sites, for sure. And you get all sorts of responses. Usually, I think pretty much everywhere we see it pop up, you

see somebody go, yeah, clearly, it's the end of the bread and woods gold standard. And obviously inflation, you know, picked up and, and you're usually one guy that really, you know, kind of elucidates that. And sometimes there's a little bit of criticism, but there's never

fails that there's always somebody going, actually, it was, you know, like oil prices like then, or, you know, the end of you needs. Sorry, Ben. I've lost you. It's gone quite badly. I don't know if you can hear me. Are you back? Yeah, we're back. I don't know what is going on with this fucking thing. Sorry.

It's still recording. I believe it all looks okay. I lost you at there's always somebody who says it's something to do with oil prices. And that was about the last thing I think go ahead. Yeah, anyway, I mean, the point is like, it's surprising how everyone has their

own, you know, explanation, whether it be, you know, unions sending or, or women in the workforce or oil prices. But obviously our understanding is that the monetary paradigm shifting. And, you know, if you're looking at the website now, I think probably the most

interesting part on there is it says figure one consumer price index. And it goes from 1775 and for 2012. That's the first on my list of that was the number one. I've got my ones that really stood out were CPI, major currencies trending against gold, and actually

the divorce rates and incarceration rates released it out to me. They're pretty shocking. And I think I think a lot of what's talked about on Bitcoin, Twitter, and money is really a foundation for everything else. And that without having a solid monetary base, everything

gets out of whack, which is scary for that is because money is the tool by which humans collaborate, right? Yes. In fact, it is the tool that allowed us to scale society from beyond just being able to trade directly with people because trade requires not only a coincidence

of wants, but it also often requires trust. And money is a universal commodity, a most liquid commodity in an economy that eliminates the multi coincidence of wants because it's so liquid, you can trade it for anything. And the price system that emerges out of this

paradigm is the mechanism by which we can all assess the value of things. The time value it takes to create the thing, the skill value it takes to create the thing. And it allows us to cooperate on creating things whose parts might be sourced all over the world. When

you make an iPhone, there's all these different minerals and ores that we're refined in these plastics and glasses and wires and rubber and all these other things. And it's not one factor is refining all those one different things. It's taking those pieces from all

around the world in order to create this one thing. And those people in the other places in the world that are creating those things aren't being called up by the Foxconn factory and saying, Hey, can you produce this exactly in this amount? And can you produce this as

not how it works? It's the price system that tells them whether or not it's, you know, they should be making more or less of certain things because they can assess the value that they can get for that. And when the CPI or when the price is being changed by the supply

of money, then it distorts those price signals. And I said that distorts our society itself. It corrupts our society. You can also look at this from the side of the cost to borrow money, right, where we see today, at least in the United States, but I think it's pretty

similar. Or else is that the interest rate has been cut back to zero again. We did ten years of 2% interest rates after the great financial crisis. And now it's put back to zero. And what that tells people is that the cost to borrow money is zero, that the time

value of money itself is zero. And if it goes negative, then that breaks the whole idea of lending money in the first place. Because if I'm going to lend you money, I'm going to expect a return. And if I can get it from the Fed or get it from somebody who's really

close to the Fed for much lower, then what would be said on the market, what that tells you is that the cost to borrow that money and then start a company or keep a company going, by the way, has been distorted and that it may appear that it's a profitable company

based on that. But in reality, we're seeing today that a lot of companies don't really have any cash on hand. They're running on lots of debt. And today, because of this huge economic downturns seen from the global pandemic that we have going on, that these businesses

are all at high risk of failure. And I attributed that to the problem of fiat money, because we don't have any savings. Because it doesn't make sense to hold savings. And it's the incentives are out of whack is basically the thing that unless you're a

fucking idiot, you're not going to put money into a bank account that's going to yield you negative interest or zero, because it's stupid, yeah, right? You put it in stocks and bonds and all this stuff. But then we've seen, you know, stocks are all crashed now.

So all the people's what the wealth that they thought they had, because the stocks weren't the most liquid. See, they're using stocks as money, right? We all understand that this concept. We're using stocks and bonds and we're using real estate as money because money

isn't good at being money. That that has now broken the concept of money because now when all of those people needed that liquidity in this horrible, you know, pandemic that we have going on, we, you know, we have great uncertainty. This is when we need cash balances.

This is why we pull cash balances because of uncertainty. So, you know, the people that didn't pull their money out before the crash happened. Now they've lost that value because and again, that's it is it's people pulling money out of those risky investments to get

into liquidity. The most liquid thing is the US dollar and it's up against everything else because of that uncertainty. But, you know, I argue that with good money, we would have held cash balances instead of just, you know, investing, you know, 80% of our money

into the stock market. We would actually just have cash balances and the crash wouldn't have been as bad and then that complicated. So, you've explained it very well. But just for the listeners and people who, you know, some people a little bit newer to this possibly, can you just talk through what does it mean

when we, we're looking at this chart and I ask anyone who is listening to this, go on to WTF happened in 1971.com and it's the, I think it's the first chart. Let's just have a look. No, is it the second? Where is it? I think it's the fourth, the fourth chart

down and just have a look at this. But what does this mean in real terms to people? How does this affect them? We're talking about the fact that people are having to invest this money into other assets like property and stocks and bonds and everything else to

preserve some of that value so that they don't get as hit as hard or they're purchasing power being eroded away. What does it mean to the normal person? Well, I think if you just kind of look at the chart, you can kind of dissect it. When I found this chart, it didn't have the 1971 line on it. It just had 1913 creation up that

stores are before the creation. So the chart right now is indicating two three separate pair dots, right? You have the space before the 1913 and you can see that this price level does change, but it's within this range and it's pretty steady for from 1975 until, sorry,

1775 until 1910. So over a hundred years. And then you see the creation of the Federal Bureau, which is the central bank of the United States. And you can see it kind of isn't really too crazy. And it does start to get a little bit more crazy as you start to get into the

50s and the 60s. And then, you know, in 1971, it just absolutely explodes. And what that part is telling you? Sorry. I don't know what is happening here. I lost you again. I lost you when we hit 1971. What happens there? Okay. Are you still recording, right? I'm still

recording. Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll edit all of these these bits and put it to miss smash it together a little bit. Sure. Can I actually pause for a minute? Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. Something else out too. So give me one minute. Sorry. Yeah. No problem. All right.

Are you all right? Yeah, no problem. Zoom's normally all right. I don't tend to have any problems with it. So I can only think it's just everyone, everyone loaded onto it. Yeah, it's it's not you, man. It's it's the crazy world we live in today. We're. Yeah. So you

said so in 1971, in my opinion, the the fall from the gold standard has allowed inflation beyond most people's understanding, you know, in the 70s, we saw a very high CPI inflation, but they, you know, they changed the calculation in 1980 and they changed again in 1990. And

so if you go by the 1970 numbers, we're still at very high inflation. So nine 10% inflation. And I think it's it's really hard to understand, you know, if you look at this chart, I think it's really easy to understand how, how bad it is, you know, but I don't know. It's it

literally for anyone who's not looking at it, it looks like a rocket has just taken off it. It's 1971 a rocket takes off. And to be honest, like, although people don't seem to understand, I don't think most people really even understand what inflation is. They sort

of they know, they know sort of roughly, but they don't fully understand. But what they do feel is when they go to the shops, or when they go and order a drink. And I feel it. I mean, even even before looking in into this stuff, you know, you go about 10 years and

you order a drink and it was X. And now it's three times that. And the same with housing and the same with, like we say, student student loans and education, and all this stuff has just got so out of whack that people, especially like the millennials, they're living at home,

they can't afford to buy a property. They don't own anything. Everything's on finance. And they're just thinking, well, what the hell, you know, how do I live the life that my parents lived? And it's not possible. And it seems like this is why I think they feel it. They just don't know why it's happening.

Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. I don't know where you lost me. Did you hear me the whole time? I was just rambling, I think, and then it cut out. Yeah, so I mean, I'm 100% agreeing with you. I think that the people do understand that this is a problem, but they don't, they don't attribute it to the inflation. They just say,

well, the cost is rising, right? So inflation, in economic terms, is actually talking about an increase in the money supply, right? That's why it's inflation of the money supply. But colloquially, we use the word inflation to talk about rising prices. And it's not a one

to one, but it's an, you can't ignore the supply side of the supply and demand equation, because we're talking about supply and demand of money itself. And essentially, I have a thread that's pinned to my profile that states exactly this, that inflation is the greatest problem with society based today. The rising cost of housing and

medical and food are very real to people. And I essentially, what I'm trying to say is that, you know, if you go by the CPI calculation, which, you know, again, I don't even really think is real, because I've seen other data on, but if you go by that, then you have to

raise, you have to get a 4% raise for 5% raise every single year, just to keep pace with inflation from the money that you earn on the yearly basis, forget about it, the savings that you put past, because all this stuff destroys the power of saving. Every 20 years,

again, if you believe the CPI numbers, your money's cut in half. So saving for 20 years of your life, 20 years, half of that is just gone. 10 years, you work free, which is absolutely insane. People don't think about it that way at all. And it destroys, so it punishes

people who stay, right? And so we're talking about earlier about how you retain a half balance to hedge against uncertainty. It punishes those people that have been playing it safe, that did what our parents told us to when we were young and said, you know, save up to

buy that. So don't put it all on credit. The people that are putting on credit are actually benefiting from the inflationary system, because the debt inflates over time, and it's worth less, you know, because we're securing more money in the future.

Yeah. The most successful, the best thing you could have done in the last 15, 20 years is just borrow as much money as you possibly can and buy assets. Buy stocks and then sell them in 2007, and then buy them again in 2009, and then sell them again two months ago. And

then you can just manage. Yeah. As much as you. Yeah, absolutely. And that's crazy. And it's not available to most people is the problem. People might know that people, most people, especially in the UK, they'll go, oh, yeah, property prices always rise. They always go

up generally, even though that's not technically true. But that's what they'll say. So they can work that out. If they could have access to that money to borrow that money, then they would buy those assets, but they can't unless you're already rich. And that's, I think,

you had another chart further on down about, you had, well, it's income growth top 1%, and bottom 90%. But I think it's not just income. It's the fact that once you are wealthy in the way that the system set up, it just puts you further and further apart. And yes, absolutely.

Yes, it's just a stratification effect from people they can hold. So, you know, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, and maybe you can score away a few dollars, you need to go back. If this gets too much and too irritating, just tell me and we'll have to re-book it.

But I'm happy to persevere if you are. Yeah, just going to create some work for you on the editing room. That's cool. That's fine. All right, that's fine. Have you ever listened to a Marty Ben interview? Sometimes just like Pete Riggs? That is my favorite podcast.

I love, I love Tales from the Crypt. It's my favorite podcast. Yeah, well, you know, Marty is, he's really smart, but he is a very downer guy. And he's very kind and he wants to see, you know, he wants to see change in the world in a positive way. I think it's clear to everybody

in the world that something isn't working, and everyone has a different idea over, you know, how we can fix things. But obviously, the big winners believe that we should fix the money. And I think the logic track, I agree with Marty, that we have to unfuck the

money as he would say. Because money is the tool by which we cooperate, if the tool is being distorted constantly, then you're screwing up the cooperation of society and you're creating winners and losers, you know, as we were talking about the low interest rates that essentially,

you know, only banks and people very close to the central bank and get those very low interest rates. And we still see, you know, especially on your credit card, you still see it, you know, 20% or whatever it is. And even house loans are still, you know, four

or five percent, even though interest rates are zero, you know, the Fed funds. So, yeah, so the people that are closest to that figure, that's the continuing effect that they benefit more from their system. And, you know, it's obviously not benefiting the poorest people

among us. I think that's very clear that system has not worked for that. Very good to get ahead. 100%. And then it causes all this anger, you know, you have people, again, I'm sure you have it over there, but it's palpable here. You have people raging saying, take the money

from the wealthy and you know, they have these socialist tendencies. And I understand why they feel that way. I really do because, you know, if you're struggling and you're doing a nine to five that doesn't earn good money and you don't own property, you are just getting

further and further and further behind. And they don't fully understand. So they just think, oh, well, you know, they take it from the rich. But like you say, it's not necessarily the people who have the money. It's actually the whole system that is just weighted towards

them. And I think what you're saying is if we can unfuck the money and we can have a system that is fair and transparent, things will change. I feel rapidly. I would build upon what you're trying to say, in fact, and reinforce that argument because you'll see all these different measures that come back, the horrible effects of inflation.

One of them is called the minimum wage. One of them is redistribution is the policy of taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the poor. Another one is, I think, in my opinion, labor unions are a necessary part of an inflationary regime to protect wages

for workers. So all of these things, you know, and I think I think the Social Security and all these other welfare, you know, Medicare and all these other welfare programs are also other artifacts. And these things are all bandaid solutions. Okay. So if the system isn't

working out for poor people, let's just take a bunch of money from the rich people. Don't fix the site. You'll just try to, you'll bandaids and you'll be like, oh, this is, you know, I'm not very articulate about it. But I think you get the point. No, I mean, it makes sense.

I think trying to, let me say, put bandaids on the thing that's, it's just completely fucked, right? Yeah, I think the thing is, again, like no one knows that there's an alternative. People will present all these ideas and none of them are perfect. But what they're not

taking into account is maybe it's the entire system that needs to have an overhaul. And they say to somebody, you know, do you vote left or do you vote right or do you vote Bitcoin? They're like, what do you mean? Would you mean you vote Bitcoin? And you're like, and

if you try and explain that actually effectively you are voting when you're buying it and you're holding it, it's very difficult to get this point across. I've still not found out about you. Have you found a way when you're speaking to a normal person to explain this stuff?

Or is it even possible to explain this stuff in a date? So no, it's not. And a normal person is somebody who doesn't obsess over a weird magic internet money and spends hundreds of hours of interest. I've kind of changed my approach a little bit.

You know, I've let a number of people that are right close to me that I trust a lot know that I research this thing. And I think it is very important to understand if you want to understand the future because I believe it is only going to keep growing. But I have no intention of

kind of convincing about anything. You know, if they're interested in it, I'll encourage them to grab a small amount or maybe I'll point them to a few resources. But I like to just let them know that I'm here if they have questions because if you go back to the beginning of the

thought, you asked me how I got into Bitcoin and learning about, you know, anonymous internet markets and all that stuff or how this decentralized system didn't do it for me at the time. And I was technically a client. What did it for me was number go fucking. And I was like, whoa,

it's this thing. Now I'm going to do it again. And that's going to do people. And why, you know, why is the number going to keep going up? Well, as Matt O'Dell likes to say, I think Bitcoin is the best money we've ever seen. And it's more people realize that price to rise. And the reason

it's the best money we've ever seen is because it can't be diluted and say protect your savings, right? Even if the price is a volatile in the short term, because this market largely doesn't understand this thing that requires hundreds of hours of research and economics. And the other

the other thing I talked about, I don't remember if I sent it to you if you include that show notes is the Bitcoin spectrum. No. Yeah, I did a whole podcast with Colin on the Bitcoin Echo Chamber about the Bitcoin spectrum. There's this giant bend diagram of all the different disciplines

that you favor required to understand these competing disciplines, like photography, and your science, and economics, and politics. And I don't have in front of you right this moment, but you have to understand all of these different things. Yeah, multi discipline, right? And it's

not trivial, you know, as I don't claim to be an expert on all of them, but you need to have a base knowledge and to see how they because, you know, you'll see that the FUD stuff that pops up like the Bitcoin is going to boil the oceans or that it's going to be replaced by quantum

cryptography or, you know, all the other things. You really have to have a scholar.

We've gone again. Where did you drop off? Just literally when we were just talking, we started talking about having to understand the multidisciplinary, you know, boiling the oceans is where we got to.

And then it just literally goes, you know, like 10 times slower sort of speed and then just cuts out and it just does it every time. Yeah. So, you don't have to include that part, or I can try to say it again. Yeah, so we've got to basically were saying that it's multidisciplinary and that

until you understand, you know, all this FUD you were saying, you know, the different types of FUD. Yeah, like it's hard to kill the FUD, right? So, you know, I mean, there's a guy with fun with Bitcoin, I guess his name is Coin Icarus. And one of the things he said to me was that I wake up

every day and I try to kill Bitcoin and I can't. So if I can't kill Bitcoin, then I keep working on it, actually being enthusiastic about it. And that's the people should come into space and be extremely skeptical and try to question everything. But in order to question everything, you need to

understand an immense spectrum of different disciplines. And most people, you know, probably don't have a good enough handle on those things to adequately criticize it. And yet they probably will criticize anyway. Yeah. Well, I think it comes down to like, A, you've got to be, and I'm talking

about myself here, a bit of a fucking loser to spend this much time. You've got to be a little bit like there's not many people who are going to throw thousands and thousands of hours at learning about monetary policy and cryptography and all, you know, that's one. And then two, even if you

are that sad, a lot of people just don't have the time. It is a massive time vamp. So, you know, like you say, it's just, it's just throwing that, throwing that time at it for most people doing a nine to five, it's just not possible. I found out, I found out about this stuff. I literally stopped

work two years ago and I haven't gone back because I've just been obsessing because it's just so interesting that, and if we're right, it makes such an important change to the world that you can't, you know, I'm only starting to really wrap my head around it. But I can't think about anything

else now. It's too important and interesting. Well, because we think it will change the world significantly and we think it will change the world the better. And that's why it's so fascinating to me. That's why I can't look away from it because I always wanted to be a part of something that

changes the world. And I always wanted to see people do better. And I think it's sad to see, I have so many people that I know that work extremely hard and are, you know, just scraping by.

And I've always kind of wondered, you know, why, why things aren't going so well. And I feel like I've finally understood why, you know, it's this insidious underlying mechanism of our money that's broken that, you know, we can't see because we just see

that the, you know, the thing costs a little bit more than that. Time to go to the store. It's hard to see, right? When you speak to people, you see, like you're saying, they're they're working their bollocks off and they're trying their best and they're just struggling

or they're just treading water. And if you know these people, I've just turned my video off, by the way, I'm hoping it may be safe, some bandwidth or something to maybe stop it from jumping out again. I don't know if that'll work or not. But yeah, it is hard to see.

And I think it's something that's happening for a lot of people. It's not, you know, it's not a small percentage of people that were struggling. It's it's a lot. I can hear you now. I can hear you now. Okay. So, yeah, at least this is some brain training for us. We have to keep

remembering what we were talking about. We were talking about, yeah, basically, this being society, you know, making serious changes to the world and it being important enough to spend that once you're sucked in, it's difficult to step away and think about anything else because

everything else seems pretty dull. Yeah, I can't imagine going back into an office job or sales or something like that when when in the back of your head, you're thinking, I know about something that can change the world or has the potential to. And I guess that's what

draws us all in. Yeah, I 100% agree. You know, and there's an argument to be made that you can just buy some Bitcoin and forget about it and, you know, wait 10 years and go about your life but not worry about it. But I think this thing, you know, it's still it's still evolving and

still growing and I still want to be a part of of that movement in a sense. And I like to, it's fascinating to me intellectually because it's most challenging thing I think I've ever tried to understand because it touches so many aspects of life and so many different disciplines.

And it keeps me interested in that way and it keeps my, I think, my mind sharp in a sense. And I don't, yeah, I don't think I could ever just ignore it anymore because it is still fascinating to watch it unfold and, you know, watch like the lightning network unfold. And, you know, I just saw

6102 on Twitter was talking about how, you know, is liquid Bitcoin, you know, you shouldn't call that Bitcoin. You should call them tokens redeemable from this, you know, federation. And I love watching that dialogue and watching smart people disagree and that that's always going to be

fascinating, I think. And it's boring. And then it's boring and then, yeah, and then all the suits will be interested in it and we'll leave. Well, yeah, as Max Hillibrand said, there's no, you know, there's no US dollar Twitter, there's no US dollar community that, you know, talks about

you know, once Bitcoin hyper Bitcoinization happens, then, you know, there'll be nothing to discuss, I guess, which has to go back to our lives and that'll be sad. Even if number go up and it really go up and it becomes global money, it will be kind of sad. I'd miss it.

No, no, no, no. Well, dude, Max, it will, you know, as Brady says from says in Bitcoin, it's the dawn of the Bitcoin Renaissance, you know, if we can finally store wealth, if we can finally cooperate on scales that are unimaginable, we're going to scale society so rapidly and

technology is going to develop their energy solutions. That's true. I think that is true. We'll see incredible things to come. And, you know, I think that's, you know, society is still pretty amazing and we still develop new technologies all the time. I think, you know, I sit around

and think about when I was first learning about the internet when I was around 10 years old and it's just imagining all the things you could do with the internet could scale and, you know, once, you know, computers would get a little smaller and here we are doing that talking,

you know, across across the world. Even despite the challenges we have in it. Yeah. I think it's, it's pretty incredible. All the stuff that we see and it's, you know, like, like inflation is a slow creeping thing and it's hard to see it happening as we forgot to, you know,

take our, take a look back at, you know, what life was like even 10 years ago. It's, it's pretty that's true. But how much it increased productivity and our ability to communicate and cooperate.

That's very true. And I think you're right. It's, this is, I guess, sort of the base is and what you're, what you're pointing to in, in your website is the unfuck the money. Make people realize there's a problem, present an alternative, which we think we possibly got, and then rebuild

and, and start to, what are you saying? Like a renaissance. I mean, the things that could be possible if we get this right are mind-blowing. And I think, like, I think you're hinting that it's kind of people couldn't imagine what the internet was going to do. I think it's,

it's the same with Bitcoin. I mean, do you have, do you have some projects or ideas that you're paying attention to that you, or, or ideas of things you think could happen that really excite you?

Yeah, I think that, you know, you hear people say it all the time, but I think things like BTC pay, and, you know, being able to cheaply run a node off like a Raspberry Pi device are so incredibly powerful to places that's emerging markets, because they can, you know,

for $50 get a Raspberry Pi and have a global marketplace, completely self-sovereign global marketplace. They can't be deep platform from it. It's permissionless. They, all they need is barely a connection to the internet, and it can be extremely low-band with them. They can accept

payments from anywhere in the world, and they can offer their services from anywhere in the world, and they'll be even more geographic arbitrage. And that's great for the world as a whole, I think, because I think you see a lot of financial oppression in a lot of places. So I just think little things

like that, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel like this exciting killer app, but the paradigm shift that is involved in that is, I think, kind of hard to grasp. Yeah, when you say it, and especially when we talk about this stuff on Bitcoin, Twitter,

no, you don't get numb to it, but you're like, oh, yeah, you know, that's normal. But when you really think about it, like you've just said, for any human being on the planet with an internet connection, for say, $100, they can now participate and earn money and spend money and set up a business

and communicate with anyone else in the world. And there's no barriers. That's, that is mental. You can take it down even cheaper than that. I mean, if you don't, you know, you don't need this, you know, complete self sovereign know that's BTC pay server and all these other things on it,

you could just run it off of a $20 Android device, which are, you know, if they're found everywhere, even in the poorest countries have these things everywhere. And you can use a generator and hop on a mesh network. And it can be much cheaper than that. And I think that's fantastic,

because I think these people barely have access to good money and the places that they exist in. Not only do you get access to good money, but you get access to a global financial system.

That's, that is really paradigm shifting. And it looks like a while, but it's, it's really not, you know, once, if things start to catch on and, and you know, a small, small country in Africa or something, all of a sudden starts, you know, being really interested in Bitcoin, the way that they

can adopt it is, it's so rapid. And so there's, there's so little barrier to do it that it can happen. So, and it's, you know, and it's, yeah, and it's never, I can say this with a hundred percent confidence, it's never, ever going to be possible for these people to go and open a bank account

and go through things and start a business like we have the opportunity to in, in parts of, you know, UK and United States, they just can't. And that infrastructure will never be there for them. The fact that this creates that possibility, people underestimate quite hand porn, that is,

and like you say, if it does catch on, and you do have, I don't know, you have a kid in India who's doing cartoon drawings and he's selling them online on Fiverr or one of these, you know, similar sort of websites and he's earning Bitcoin, they could effectively, if we do see the price rises that

I think we're all expecting, they could suddenly dig themselves out of a seriously bad situation and actually do very, very well. And that's just not possible within the other technology.

Yeah, and, and take that money and reinvest it in their own community, you know. I think the, the, the countries that have been, you know, the first world of countries, as we say, developed the market have been kind of benefiting off the back of emerging markets for quite time,

and there's a lot of geographic arbitrage to happen. And, and, you know, I think a kind of leveling of the playing field is, is great. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And there is nothing else that can do it. Do you see, what you see is the biggest barrier to that other than just,

you know, people being aware of the technology. And I think that is difficult for people to wrap their head around. But other than that, what do you see as a, as a barrier? Is it just, do you see it as it's scaling? Or do you see it as something else for these people to, to jump in? Do we need

the lightning network to be more accessible to people so that they can do smaller transactions in these sort of countries or? There's, there's two big barriers. One is really easy to understand.

It's just time building, you know, building liquidity and building the tools and building understanding just takes time. The second barrier I think is, and this kind of goes to the first one, is that custody is, is tough to do when you have self sovereignty. You know, it's scary to be able

to lose all of your, all of your funds. And I think that is very scary. Yes. I think a combination of time and us developing better tools and better methods, in addition to a greater understanding, and, you know, learning how to diversify risk and getting better at digital security and

getting a little better at physical security and kind of getting away from this whole, you know, letting, letting big corporations and big governments take care of us that we can outlearn how to take care of ourselves a little better. You know, that's, that's positive in the

long term, but, you know, it really, it just takes time. It's not something that can happen overnight. Absolutely. I think especially for, for the, like you're saying, the first world countries who are used to, they so used to having their hand held and everything being easy and relying

on someone else and someone else is going to protect me. And if my money gets lost, then someone else is going to ensure it. And I think almost it's a bigger change for them than it is for people in these third world countries that have it hard. And I think maybe, maybe they

are going to be the, well, I kind of hope they're going to be the people to adopt it quicker. But like you say, it kind of, it needs to be more usable. And I guess that's, like you say, that only comes with more liquidity and sort of people building products to make it easier for people.

Yeah. And I think that that is still happening. You know, building liquidity is the price going up in the first place. And that helps with, helps with that short-term volatility as well. I think the long-term volatility has proven itself to be, you know, overwhelmingly in the positive

direction. The short-term volatility does kind of hold people back a little bit. But as, you know, more people come in and more having to go through and Bitcoin gets harder and harder, as a money, a harder money that liquidity will continue to build and that part will get easier.

And as, you know, tools are being developed, I do, you know, to answer the question, I think the Lightning Network is, you know, I do believe that the Lightning Network is kind of the key going forward for some of our transactions. And I think larger transactions will still happen at the base

layer. It's really hard to see. I think there will be other scaling solutions as well. Things like liquid, you know, I don't know. I think that works really well for stages, for example. And I think, you know, I don't think the future is clear. And that's, again, why I'm still so

fascinated by this industry because, you know, nobody really has all the answers. Even the smartest people among us, they still are still disagreeing on a daily basis. So I certainly don't find my claim to have all the answers. But I'm pretty bullish on the Lightning Network. I think the channel

management thing will kind of be abstracted away. And I think the solutions to, you know, problems like how do I get incoming liquidity aren't as hard as I, you know, I even imagined them to be six months ago. And I started to realize that you can just kind of, you know, loop it or

pay it to some other balance. And I think a lot of that stuff can be abstracted away. And just, again, it just takes time, you know. Yeah. And I think a lot of people have said this, but time does seem to go sort of differently in the Bitcoin space. And when I really, when I

really think, and it really does, I mean, I think back, it was only, I don't know, a year and a half ago, whatever it was, when the Lightning Network was, there was only a few nodes on the network, no one was using it. And if I think back to, I'm bad with times, but it was roughly that sort of

time, you know, a year, year and a half. And I think from then to now, I wouldn't have even dreamt of messing around with it. I wouldn't have even dreamt of setting up a node, I wouldn't have even dreamt of any of this stuff. And now I'm like, yeah, okay, it's easy enough. So what happened,

you know, what happens in another year or two, it does seem that things are, it's easy to sort of think, oh, things are a bit slow, or, you know, it doesn't feel like it's moving fast enough. But when you really zoom out, things are moving at a staggering rate.

Yeah, I mean, just look at what it was like to FedZack on Bitcoin in the early days, you know, using Bitcoin Core versus an A or there's just an app on your phone and, yeah, and it's still self sovereign. And, you know, I think people have a hard time extrapolating and, and seeing how

technology and software and how things can scale. And really looking how that will work in the future. It's very difficult for people to do. And I think you saw that with the internet, you know, with people like Krugman saying that it'll amount to nothing more than fact machines.

Yeah. And you can see that in the opposite sense too, that sometimes, you know, people's predictions about the future are so wildly off, you know, even very, very smart people. So the future is unknowable. And we should all work to kind of, you know, try to create the future that

we want to see, you know, is the future unknowable? Or did Satoshi, is he come back from the future, as you've seen the shit that is about to hit the fan of all the problems? And is he come back from the future? Do you have a time travelers? I find that scenario highly improbable. Me too,

but it's fun. The most accurate way I can say it. You know, if you look at Ansel Linder has an amazing chart, and I can send you these, you can include them in the show notes. Yeah, that'd be great. It's the development of Bitcoin. And 80% of it occurs before 2009. And, you know,

it's all of these different technologies, and all of these different experimentations, well, I mean, e-cash, and cash cash, and proof of work, and reusable proof of work, and cryptography, you know, you know, all of these different things put together that once they were just in just the

right recipe, they birthed the donning of this new era. So while the code is pretty interesting, and the mantras of the code are pretty amazing, really the system itself wasn't that revolutionary, it was just combine all these things together that created this revolutionary thing. So I don't

think, you know, Satoshi has some kind of deity. I think he just kind of basically understood some some basic concepts about sound money and about cryptography, and he was just in the right place, and maybe had access to just the right people, and saw just the right things that happened before it.

And, you know, it was kind of just the right place, right time. You know, Dan Held has some amazing writings about plantings and all that. He's awesome, Dan. Much better than I could. It is interesting, I completely agree with you, and then my personal, not that it matters, but my,

I like to think about these things. My guess, if I had to put money on it, is it was how for me, that's my guess. But it is fun to think about these crazy ideas and how it all was put together, because it is so well-changing, and the fact that nobody knows, obviously, is great. It helps

the system. But when you spend so much time on this stuff, I'd love to know, I'd love to know who it is. I'd love to just have some sort of insight into it all. Yeah, well, the human mind is always curious about what it doesn't know, and I think that's natural. But I think the smartest

thing I've ever heard about Satoshi is the people saying the smartest thing he ever did was disappear, because we tend to want to DFI him, and I think that's really, really negative on our journey, because the thing has become decentralized enough now that nobody controls it, and the only way

that the thing can move forward, if anybody controls it, then it's game over, man, because the temptation of print money is far too great. History has shown us time and time again that humans cannot resist that temptation, unless we take that control away from everybody,

that it will continue to go on, the debasement of our currency, and therefore the debasement of our society has been an unending sad story to look out in thousands of years, and what's amazing about this decentralized protocol is that it incentivizes us all to protect our own well. Our own selfish

needs, we will protect the decentralization of this thing. We face the final bosses, I guess.

I completely agree, and I think that is one of the most brilliant things that was ever done, was stepping away, but also just one thing that I find so clever is the way that you say the incentive structure, the game theory behind this thing, is that it uses human greed,

is using our greed to make this more secure, and that's so clever. The fact that my hope is that the more powerful people, the people who pull the strings, the smart ones will start to invest in this, and once they've got that skin in the game, then the incentive suddenly is for them to

allow this thing to or to help this thing. I have a feeling that it's starting to happen, it feels like now it's starting to happen. Yeah, we saw US congressmen in the past 12 months speak positively about Bitcoin, extremely positively, and at least one of those that he doesn't own

any because he doesn't want to conflict with interest, but that situation you're describing is called the principal agent problem, that all it takes is a few of these guys in power to be like, oh, you know what, we can prop it off of this, and just by holding some, and maybe fun for a

little while, and say, you know, Bitcoin's bad, and it's for terrorists, and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, now there's no capital gains taxes on Bitcoin, and all of a sudden, their bags are pumped, so yeah, the incentives are pretty hard to ignore. Yeah, it's very clever.

All right, well, yeah, look, I don't want to take too much of your time up, but what I wanted to just finish on is, if you are right, and I think you are, and if this thing continues to suck in more and more liquidity, and people develop better and better systems and make

it more accessible to more people, do you have a vision or an idea of how this is going to change society, because the charts sort of hint, where we talked earlier about divorce rates, incarceration rates, the sort of idea that the poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting

richer, and we've got all these problems in society. Say you're right, and say this thing takes off, and more people start using it, what sort of change do you think is going to happen to society, and do you think it's going to be positive? Yeah, I mean, I think in general,

we'll be a much more prosperous society. I think you'll continue to see the cost of things going down, and the ability to save money, again, going up, and the financialization of the world, the Wall Streetization, the stock marketization of the world is going to slowly kind of disappear,

and I think you'll see less steam usage, and less of the rich getting richer, like you said, I mean, and that's leading to turmoil throughout the world today. The protests in France and the power grabs that we see in the United States, where it seems like the scales are being tipped

further and further on both sides of the political spectrum, that is due to economic strife in my opinion. So the less you see of that, the less extremism there is, I'm fine with some people having more money than others, but this stratification system that we're talking about keeps the people

that are having it the hardest. It keeps them down, and it keeps the people that have it the easiest, the wealthiest, that keeps them off, and that's frustrating to me. So it's not that I want equality, but I definitely think that there is a lot of inequality, and it's unjust. It's not just because

those people worked harder, or they were luckier, or whatever, I think this is just one of them. So I don't like to make predictions about what society would look like, but I just think it would be just in general more prosperous, and I think there's already the people I meet in this world,

whether they be poor or rich, or in general, very good people that want the best for everybody, and I don't want a few various actors to be able to take that away from them. I just think it'll be better in a lot of ways, but I don't know how to answer that question.

No, I tend to agree that I think that things will get better, and I think what you said earlier is really important, that things will get better, but it takes time, and I think just being patient is really hard, but I think it's important, because these things do take time, and if anything

good takes a lot of time and effort. That is very true. All right, well, Ben, we've had some problems, obviously, with technical issues, which has been a pain in the ass, so thank you very much for sticking with me, and thank you so much for joining me on the call. It's been really, really good to

chat to you, and I urge any of my listeners to go onto your website. WTF happened in 1971.com and have a look through the charts, because even if you're not a Bitcoiner, go and take a look,

and just ask the question, what the fuck happened in 1971? Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you sticking with me as well, and I appreciate people for listening and understanding that we got off track a little bit, because of the technical difficulties, but show must go on, and still just

as important, and I appreciate you having me. You can follow me on Twitter if you want @MRCOOBP, and reach out anytime. If you have any questions, I'd love to chat. Excellent. Well, I'm going to link your Twitter and all the information in the show notes as well,

and yeah, anyone who wants to get in touch, definitely follow your Twitter, because it's really, really good, and definitely get onto the website is very interesting. And yeah, thank you again. I'm going to end the recording now, and I will just chat to you for two minutes, and then

yeah, we're done. All right, thanks, man. All right, thanks a lot.