EP22 Bitcoin podcast with Heavily Armed Clown.

Welcome back to the bit by bit podcast. In today's episode, I speak with heavily armed clown. He's the co-creator of WTF happened in 1971. For anyone who hasn't already checked out the website, I suggest you have a look now. Maybe look through it as you listen along

with this interview. For those of you who are already heavily involved in Bitcoin, I apologise if some of the topics we're talking about are dumbed down and the things that you already understand and know well. I'm trying to make this episode as accessible

as possible to newcomers in the space. All of this can be quite confusing and it takes a long time to wrap your head around it. But what I'm really trying to do is point out that there might be a problem with our current financial system and that we might have a

solution. Anyway, I hope you enjoy and any questions, please feel free to reach out. Thanks again for joining me. Really nice to meet you in person off Twitter. It would be good to find a little bit more about what the fuck happened in 1971 and dig a little

bit deeper into what's happened in the past and how we can fix things in the future. So, Colin, if you can just introduce yourself for us, please. Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me on. So, Colin, better probably known as "heavily armed clown" on Twitter and with my podcast, Bitcoin Echo Chamber. It's not super popular, but

that's probably the moniker that most people know me by. And lately, Ben and I were the co-creators of WTF happened in 1971. That's probably been our claim to fame as it's rocketed. The Twitter accounts about to pass both of our personal accounts and phones. It's humbling.

Yeah, it's such a good website to point people to. I always do it now when people are asking me questions because having it there, visual in front of people just to scroll through, it has to make them question. It's a great website.

It is. It's amazing because we can reverse track the hits and what we were doing in the beginning was going and seeing where people had arrived at the website from. And originally, it was mostly from Twitter, and then it kind of percolated its way out onto the rest of

the internet, and we're getting hits from Reddit and hits from Facebook and hits from random obscure forums that are completely unrelated to finance and economics. And some of the discussions that are going on in these places around the world just really made Ben

and I kind of doubled down on the project and start to take it a little bit more seriously because we're seeing conversations happening in far left subreddits on Reddit, like Bernie Sanders for president subreddits and in just types of places where you'd never expect our

message to resonate with people. But one thing is for sure, when people look at the data, they know something is wrong. They know that something is broken, fundamentally broken with the way the system works. And they don't always know there are answers. They tend to

blame a lot of other things before they arrive at the monetary explanations. That's one good thing with that website is that you don't mention Bitcoin on that. If you mention Bitcoin, you're like, ah, here's the solution. And now let me tell you what the problem is. People already have their guard up, but it's quite clever because it's

just saying, here's a problem, work out what the problem might be, and then you try and push them to the sedation. Yeah. And that was, that was actually a conscious decision that Ben and I made because if people want to know about Bitcoin, there's already a ton

of that, right? I mean, that you can just go anywhere. If you just step one foot into the Bitcoin echo chamber bubble, you're going to immediately have a million people turn to sell you Bitcoin, right? And in it, in it, at first glance, or like at first entry,

it sort of feels like you're in, you just walked into like a pump into stock group or something like that. Like it just feels a little scammy. You're like, why are all these people so excited about this thing? This feels like a Ponzi scheme. And if you don't

have the prerequisite knowledge, like if you're not already seeking out Bitcoin, that can be, and there's a time and place for it too. Like I don't mean to say that I think that that's bad thing that we have that. I think it's, I think it's good. But what we wanted

with, with 1971 was to sort of, we're not trying to sell anybody anything, right? We're just trying to get people to ask questions. It just so happens that Ben and I both think that Bitcoin is the best answer. But you know, we don't want to spoonfeed people any conclusions

because those conclusions are not going to be hard. You know, if they're not hard one, like if they're not discovered on somebody's own terms, then they're not going to hold to those conclusions, you know, definitely. I know like personally from coming in, I thought

I was a scam. It's just, you know, I didn't understand really there was any importance behind it. It's just, it's not something, you know, I'm not a technical person. I'm trying to try to get more understanding around those things. But I was just like, I don't

understand how this can possibly work. Like someone's in control and someone's going to fuck with you. That was basically all I thought. And it takes a long time of looking through this stuff to finally get to a point where you feel comfortable and you're like, I feel

pretty sure like this is what I think it is. But it does take, it turned me a few years to get to the point where I felt comfortable. And you're not alone there. You know, like, I think the only people that ever really looked at Bitcoin and immediately understood its

potential were like systems engineers and like advanced software guys and like maybe this, the early cypher punks, you know, who had been trying to build these types of solutions for decades. Those are probably the only people who immediately looked in this and understood

that it wasn't about replacing PayPal or Visa. And it wasn't necessarily a Ponzi scheme provided that it worked as intended because it certainly is a pyramid, right? I mean, the people who get in at the beginning tend to be much better off than the people who get in later. And that's the nature of monetization of anything.

I think if they've had the foresight to buy it early and chuck it also, like probably the people who did buy it early, like, once it actually rallies and it goes 2X, 4X, 10X, the likelihood is unless they really understood it, they probably jump out.

Yeah. I would. Like, if you didn't understand it, you'd be like, Oh my God, this thing's just gone 10X. I'm definitely selling. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's conventional wisdom, right? I mean, if you're in the casino and you win like $10,000, well, what's your first stock going to be? Well, I better take

this money and run before they, before they take it back because they always want to try to take it back, right? Exactly. So obviously, after looking through the website and certainly I've been following on Twitter for some time, I can see you very much believe in Bitcoin.

But how did you find it? So Bitcoin for me was a little bit of a roundabout journey. I don't know exactly when I first heard about Bitcoin, but it was on Reddit. And it was probably probably like 2011, 2012.

And it, it didn't, it didn't interest me at the time. I wasn't really interested in economics. I might have been, but I wasn't something that was on my radar at the time. And Bitcoin came, you know, more like in mention, I saw people tipping each other with it on Reddit

and, and talking about how, Oh, by Bitcoin, it's going to make you rich one day. And I was like, well, that's, that sounds crazy. That sounds silly. And it wasn't until years later, probably 2017, 2016, 2017, when I personally started taking more of an interest in finance, just entry level stuff, like what stocks should

I buy? How you know, you know, what makes a good investment and what doesn't. And I just started reading books and I happened upon and the Fed by Ron Paul. I don't even remember what I think what it was growing up or particularly in college, I had met people in my life who

were Ron Paul fans and they always tended to be the most sound critically thinking individuals. And if you don't know who Ron Paul is, he's like one of the primary libertarian politicians in the United States, probably one of the only good politicians that has been around

in the US for a pretty long time. And that's a stretch. Like that's, that's a tall order for any politician. Yeah, exactly. To be, to be ideologically sound is a tough thing to do when your policy decisions are driven by your donate, by your donors. So I read and the Fed and it really opened my

eyes to a lot of things because it sort of sent me down this rabbit hole to understanding what happened in 2008, right? Because I was just about to get out of high school when the 2008 financial crash happened and I didn't understand any of it at the time. So as I

got older, right about a decade later, I'm looking into these things. I'm trying to understand these mechanisms and I'm just thinking like finance is so complicated. Economics are so complicated. How do people understand this? Like, you know, you look at all the formulas

that they teach at the college level of economics and finance and all this calculus and just arcane wizardry that goes on at the Federal Reserve. It doesn't make any sense and it's not supposed to make any sense, right? I mean, I took an entry level economics class in high

school and I could probably tell you that I learned about supply and demand and that was probably pretty much it. That's about the only only bit that does make sense. Exactly. Yeah. A friend of mine recommended I was talking about in the Fed on Facebook because

it got me all fired up. I was like, wow, this is this is crazy. This is a whole new paradigm that I've never been exposed to and I was posting about it. And one of those very smart people that I had mentioned, you know, that I'd come across in my life who I could just

tell understood the world better than I did because they're just grounded critical thinkers. The type of people who generally supported Ron Paul suggested another book to me by G. Edward Griffin called The Creature from Jekyll Island. He said, if you like in the Fed, you're

going to love this. I was like, okay, I'll take his word for it. And I read The Creature from Jekyll Island. And that book is a tome. I mean, it's like 800 pages long, but it doesn't read like a textbook. It's more like a, it's more like reading a documentary. If that makes

sense or like reading a mystery novel, but it's all nonfiction, of course. And it just goes through the history of monetary policy and the banking system in the United States and in Europe going back to, I would say like the 17 or 1800s and works its way up to the

creation of the Federal Reserve and all of the second order effects that that has had on the world. And that book really opened my eyes to a lot of new ways of thinking. And that's what started me down the Austrian economics rabbit hole. And that was when I

read Hayek and Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe and Haslett and Holzman. And those guys really had a formative impact on shaping the way that I understood the world, right? So while this is going on, I'm knee deep in penny stock investing or penny stock trading. And I made

a pretty good living doing it. And this was right around the time that the cryptocurrency bubble was in full swing, the altcoin bubble with all the ICOs and everything. And anybody who was anybody in finance was paying attention to the amount of money people were making in

very small amounts of time and cryptocurrency. And I sort of happened back upon Bitcoin right around the time that I was really diving down this Austrian rabbit hole. And I'd love to say that I immediately saw Bitcoin and thought, Oh, there it is. That's the solution that

I'm looking for. But that really isn't true. I would say technically, I started to understand Bitcoin after like some basic tutorials and stuff like that. But then I didn't really come full circle on Bitcoin. Like I bought it into the whole altcoin narrative and everybody's

going to have a token and blockchain the world nonsense at first. And it really took, I would say a year or so of just daily dedicated study to starting to understand the intricacies of the system and why, you know, blockchains can't scale if they're going to remain decentralized

and why Bitcoin and money tends to converge on the one most liquid good. Lots of difficult to learn lessons that on the surface are not easily understood, sort of percolated their way into my Austrian economics rabbit hole. And then I just landed on this firm conclusion

that Bitcoin is the one and only shot. I mean, it is the best chance at saving ourselves from the creature from Jekyll Island, if you will, not completely agree with it. I think that's why we're all here. Once it clicks, it's just like, is there been any time where

you've been able to step away from Bitcoin or what's going on? Or is it just kept your attention since then every day? Because that's why I've found I haven't been able to step away. It's just it's fascinating beyond anything I've ever been involved in before.

Yeah, once that mind virus gets you, you know, if you understand the implications of this, if you understand the problems that it's trying to solve and how wide reaching they are, you cannot let go of this thing. I mean, it gets hooked into you and you're just obsessed.

You might not spend every day, you know, reading technical documentation on the lightning network, but you're going to be thinking about it. You're going to be checking the price. You're going to be tweeting about it. You're going to be wanting to talk about it with other people

because it's it's such a huge paradigm shift. I mean, I think, you know, if I if I reflect on it, honestly, I think when I from when I first got sort of bit by the virus, yeah, I don't think I've had a day go by where I wasn't at least thinking about it in some

capacity. It's a violation. It is a virus because you can't you can't get out your head once it's in there. It's not, oh, you can't get out your head because you think it's going to make money. It's you can't get out your head like you say the implications. And I think

the things that this me often, I think a lot of people off in this world can be helped or fixed with it. And so the more you you go through daily life and I think, yeah, that's a pain in the outside. I don't agree with this or I don't like the amount of control

governments have, or I don't like the fact that our money is being debased. And these things all lead back to fix the money you fix the world, or you have a you have a better world. And once you know that, then yeah, it's it's huge. It's massive. Yeah. And Bitcoin

has a really unique incentive structure to, you know, I mean, I can go out and protest. I can go out and vote. I can go out and campaign for my favorite political flavor. But I'm really not going to impact that much change. Hell, I can go and run for political office

myself. But I'm just one individual and I'm not going to be able to affect. I can't, I can't change the incentive systems in the world that make the world the way it is, right? Show me the incentive. I'll show you the action. That's what Warren Buffett says. But what

I can change is or what I mean is the way bitcoins incentives are aligned is that, you know, as this thing continues to grow, those who are already in it are rewarded and capital is allocated to them. And the longer they can hold on, you know, in theory, the more capital

they're going to be rewarded with in the long run. And that, I mean, that wealth transfer, I mean, we're not even talking about like an investment opportunity anymore. We're talking about a complete redistribution of wealth from the bottom all the way up to the time of society, if we're right about this thing.

Okay. So this show, like I said to you before, I'm trying to, I already point people when rather than trying to sell them on the idea of Bitcoin anymore, I just try and get them to question, look, do you think there's a chance that there is some bullshit going on

behind the scenes and you're getting fucked and you don't understand how? That's what I want them to question and then come onto Bitcoin. So I'm already sending them to your side, but can you talk through so that I can send people to listen to this? What went on and how has it affected society since what went on happened?

Yeah. So and this conversation is difficult, right? Because there's nuance. It's easy for me to make a meme that blames every parabolic chart, every data point anomaly that you can go to WTF 1971 and see, right? You can see all these really impressive looking charts

that have major inflection points in 1971. And we've cherry picked the data a little bit to display that phenomenon. And it's easy for us to point a finger and say, Oh, look, it was the end of Bretton Woods. But if you spend any time in the discussions really quickly,

you'll see some very justified criticism. You'll see, well, it wasn't just that. It was this and it was this and it was that and it was this and all of those points are usually correct. They're not always all correct. I mean, I don't think someone blaming the hippies makes

a lot of sense. But many of the things that people tend to describe that cause disruptions in economic harmony, if you will, the capitalists' efficient allocation of profit and resources through the free market can be traced back to a systematic destruction of sound money

throughout history. And yes, while 1971 wasn't necessarily like the end all beat all destruction of money, unlike anything we'd ever seen, it was the nail in the coffin. And you do see some immediate and some longer lag effects on the greater economy when the United States

ended the gold window, ended the Bretton Woods Agreement under President Nixon. So to understand the implications of that, you really kind of have to go further back in time. You know, it's easy to just point a finger at 1971, but the creation of the Federal Reserve happened

in 1913. You know, it was made illegal for the US citizens to own gold in 1933 under Executive Order 6102. Bi-metallism could be traced all the way back to the 1800s. And then before that, we had federal, national banks, I guess you could call them all the

way back to the creation of the United States that were constantly fought over under the early presidential terms. You had like Jefferson abolishing a bank and then Madison Instituteing a new bank just because they had things they had to pay for and they didn't have ways to

expand the balance sheet of the federal government, if you will. And they couldn't necessarily raise that capital that they needed to fund whatever activities that they wanted to pay for directly through taxation, because people didn't like that. People wouldn't allow that.

So there's a lot of nuance in history. And to really understand the implications of the history, you have to understand the economics. You have to have a firm basis understanding of economics and what is sound economics and what is crockpot economics. A really good

book on getting a baseline for that understanding is Henry has less economics and one lesson. It sort of just goes through, it's a series of chapters that sort of point out the flaws in thinking in basic economic, what's the term, basic economic fallacies, right? Like

things like the broken window fallacy, where lots are going to take our jobs, that type of stuff and it helps sort of ground you in a better understanding of economics. But it really isn't until you move on to the more meaty stuff like human action by Mises that

you really start to understand the deep, deep intricacies of human action. That every decision that we make is a value decision at any one given point in time we're choosing to give up A for B. And I cannot determine what you will choose to give up for A for B or for

B for C or how much of any of those you'll be willing to part with to gain at any point in time. That's going to be up to you. And the entire world is filled with individuals that make that decision constantly and our decisions might change based on the time of

the day or the weather or the time of the year. You know, there's all these factors that go into the decisions that we make. Even with the same product or service, right? Right. A lot of those arguments that people come up with are a little bit weird. Okay,

so in all honesty, a lot of people won't take the time to go and read through all these books and make the sort of commitment that you have to to really understand it. If you were trying to explain it to, for example, I speak to friends who are working 78 hours

a week, they've got children, even though they might actually be able to find some time realistically no matter how much I tell them they won't. If you have to explain it as best you can to them in terms of what's happening when they're increasing the money supply,

what does that mean to them? Because they'll hear it, but they might not understand what it means. Right. So, and again, it's hard to answer the question out right because there's a lot of history and nuance, but I would say first start with looking at when the market

determined what money was, right? Because a great place to start with this understanding is Nick Zabel is showing out, right? Because he outlines the history of the monetization of different commodities throughout history and throughout various societies. And we saw

people use all kinds of different things for money throughout history. You saw seashells, you saw feathers, you saw probably rocks, like big rocks in particular were used to denominate debts and credit or debits and credits. And at some point throughout history,

societies all over tended to converge on precious metals, in particular gold, and then to lesser degrees, silver and copper, because of the divisibility problems of gold. And you have to ask yourself why those precious metals were the de facto free market choice as the

most liquid good, right? To facilitate the exchange of goods and services amongst humans like you and I making active decisions every day. And that's really your best place to start is like, okay, well, why did we choose to use gold as money? And the answer is far

reaching and probably pretty complicated. But really, it's because gold is scarce. Gold is durable. And because gold is shiny and people liked it. And it was useful for them to store their value and exchange with other people for the things that they wanted. They

could be relatively assured that that gold would hold its value if they accepted it in exchange for goods and services and then needed to use it to purchase something else. So fast forward a little bit in history. And we see people coming up with all kinds of new crazy

ideas, right, governments pegging gold and silver to certain exchange rates between each other, governments printing paper and using that as currency instead. And where that really comes from is the portability and divisibility problems that you run into with precious metals.

Right. It's hard for me to carry around or even better yet, keep my entire net worth in gold and keep that at my house or carried around in my pockets. I have to keep that out of bank. And then when I want to spend it, how do I take three ounces of gold and

use it to pay for a gallon of milk? I can't. So what we saw emerged there was the evolution of paper notes, which started out as one to one IOUs at banks that could be then taken back to the bank and redeemed for that equivalent amount of gold. And slowly over the years

that lost its attachment, we started seeing banks engage in fractional reserve lending. We started seeing expansion of the money supply through those means. And what happened when we had the creation of the Federal Reserve and then the closing of the gold window was

really just a systematic expansion of that loss of touch of the scarcity of money retaining people's value in exchange of goods and services that the free market had decided was best handled by gold. I know I didn't really answer your question there. It kind of just rambled.

But I feel like I have to touch on the history before we can really get into this. No, that was great. And you're absolutely right. You do have to take a bigger view if you sort of look at the last 50 years, 60 years, none of this stuff makes any sense. But when you

look back across human history and you start to realize what was money and why we had money and what's happened to our money, then it all clicks together. So that does make sense. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, I think everybody has to have at least at one point in their life. Even if it was when you were a little kid, looked at a dollar bill or a pound or a euro and just said, "What is this? Why does this have value? Where does this come from?" And maybe

they googled it, maybe they asked their teacher or their mom and dad, and they got some answer. Yeah. You know, I probably wasn't a very good answer. And then they were kind of just like, "Oh, well, I guess I won't really ever understand this." And then they just move on with their

life because they just use that money to buy the stuff they want. And that's all that really matters, right? They get an allowance, they go on about their business. But the idea of using an infinitely re-creatable, maybe not infinitely, but for all intents and purposes,

infinitely re-creatable resource as money has wide-reaching implications that we haven't yet seen the full breadth of. And that's honestly true just because of the fact, if nothing else, that fiat money is a new experiment. It's only been around for about 100 years

and maybe it's been around a little longer than 100 years, but it's only really been in wide global adoption for 100 years. And no fiat currency has ever lasted as long as the ones that we have today.

Pound and dollar, like the oldest, roughly, are they something like that? Exactly. Yeah. The pound, I believe, is the oldest. We were, I think, a pound was a pound of silver. Right, sterling.

Yeah. So I actually know how much a pound of silver is in terms of the metal. But a pound now buys you one fifth of a coffee. It's not very much. So, yeah, it's devalued a lot. And it's funny, you know, if you look around the world, a lot of countries, the names in

their currency, are still tied to the original weights that they use for the metals that were originally associated with their currencies. The pound, the chronar, there are others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. They're either the name of the coin

that they used to use that was precious metal, the weight of the coin that they used to use, or it's actual content. That means for a person who used to have a pound, and that was a pound of silver, and I have to Google it, but it's a lot more than a pound. So what it means, what you're saying

is that as they have increased the money supply, and as they have printed more paper, which is supposed to represent the metal, they have now more paper than they have metal, which means that the value of the paper goes down effectively.

Right, and that was really the problem 50 years ago. Nowadays, what happened in 1971 was the gold window, meaning that there was a pegged exchange rate for the US dollar for the equivalent amount of gold in the US treasury. And Ben and I have kind of looked into this

and we don't have a really good answer. I don't know that the average American in 1971 was going and exchanging their dollar bills for gold at the US treasury. I don't think that they were. I don't know why they would, especially because gold was illegal for US

citizens to own all the way up until the 1970s. Or it was either the late '60s or the early '70s, because of the executive order 6102 that was passed in 1933. So people were already very used to thinking about money as the dollar bills that they carried around and not its

equivalent amount of gold in the treasury. So that took years to sort of undo for people to sort of forget what money really was, what the market preferred to use as money. It took years to undo that link. And what 1971 represented was a break in that peg. The United States

finally said, "Okay, we are no longer redeeming gold for dollars for the foreseeable future, until we deem it's a good place for us to be again. We're closing the gold window." And what that did was sort of break any type of restraint that might have been on the process

of money creation, that might have brought liquidation and default to bear should a great liquidation event happen. And we saw the evolution of all these crazy new modern money theory economics evolve out of this weird pseudo growth fake money bubble that happened with

all of this creation. Because when you think about money creation, what it really is is the redistribution of wealth. It's essentially a socialist system. You're taking capital that already exists, that's already been created through the labor of others. And you're redistributing

it by inflating the supply of the money. I like to say that inflation has been around for a long time. And it was something that we saw under a much different name in the days of kings and queens, where they would clip the coins and keep the clippings for themselves

and then recirculate the coins under their supposed equivalent weight. And then they would use that those clippings to create new coins and then they would circulate that. That was really just theft. But it was inflation. It's the same thing that we think of today

as inflation. They just don't call it theft anymore. They say that it's good for the economy. It does sound better, doesn't it? You question it less. You go, "Oh, yeah, inflation." And everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to have inflation. Yeah, inflation's good."

They'll say, "Oh, well, you need inflation in an economy. What would be your rebuttal to that? What would you say to people who say, "Oh, well, you need inflation." Where do you even start? I mean, it's, first of all, one of the most frustrating things

is to get an arguments with people about how you define inflation or about what is inflation. Inflation is very easy to measure. It's very easy to measure. If I have $100 and I print 10 extra dollars, well, then that's 10% inflation. But economists or governments or whoever the

powers that be have decided to create all sorts of convoluted formulas for measuring effective inflation in a society. Using various weighted baskets of goods and measuring their price changes over periods of time, we get a very skewed view of what real inflation numbers

are. And if you want to know real inflation, you just go and look at how M1 and M2 and M3 has changed over the years. And you'll see massive increases in money supply don't necessarily directly correlate with immediate increase in prices and commodities and services. And

that's just extremely complicated to try to explain why that is. But it's for a whole number of reasons because goods and services respond to demand. If I'm an entrepreneur and I see that the demand for something is going up, well, then I'm going to increase the supply

of that thing and try to meet that demand because there's usually profit margin there. So we have this massive increase in technology that we've had in the last 100 years that has completely revolutionized our way of life. The way that you and I live today, Max is

much different than the way our grandparents did. And that's all thanks to technology. And that's caused a deflationary decrease in the cost of goods and services in some cases that's actually counteracted inflation despite the amount of wealth redistribution that we've seen.

And that's a good argument for it because no one complains about the cost of things going down with electrics. They don't have an issue with that. Why would it be a problem for anything else? I guess is what people need to ask.

Exactly. So yeah, one of the main problems that you hear people give against, well, if there was no inflation, then no one would ever buy anything. Because your money would become worth more next year than it is today. And you would just sit on all your money,

you'd hoard it. That's the word they love to use. And you'd never spend it. Well, that's just nonsense. I mean, we have to buy food. We have to buy clothes. We have to satisfy our needs, right? We're creatures constantly making value decisions. It all goes back.

And this is why it's important to have that base of understanding of economics because it all goes back to human action. We're all making these constant value decisions. At any point in time, whether your dollars were getting worth more or worth less every single

day, it doesn't matter. You're still going to make the same value decisions. You're just going to come to different conclusions based on what type of currency you're using. Let's just imagine that you didn't have inflation if we didn't have that. And so effectively,

what we're saying is goods and services would become cheaper relative to the money which would become worth slightly more. But what you're saying is you're still going to buy what you need to buy to feed yourself, to close yourself, to put a roof over your head,

all the rest of it. And then maybe you just think slightly more about buying shit you don't need. And you save that money because you know that, okay, because right now, like a lot of people I speak to, just like normal non-Bitcoin people, they'll be like, "Oh yeah,

well, you've got to spend money now because money's cheap. It's better just to spend now." And you're like, "Well, I mean, technically, yeah, they are right in the current world, but it doesn't necessarily benefit anyone. Or only if it's a very small amount of the

population to live in that way. And basically, we just buy a load of shit we don't need, and we have to try and invest in things we don't understand just to try and keep our purchasing power." Which it just doesn't seem, that doesn't seem good to me.

And even if you don't understand that implicitly, even if you don't, you know, at a subconscious level, that affects everybody. It affects your decision-making processes, whether you understand the fact that your money is worth less a year from now than it is today. It

affects our society. It affects the services that entrepreneurs seek to offer you, right? They want to satisfy your more immediate needs. They want to offer you something cheaper and faster and... They want to offer you the junk, quote unquote, now, as opposed to the... And

you can see examples of this if you look at architecture. Look at the way that we build our houses today versus the way we built houses 150 years ago. The difference is... Absolutely, shit.

Yeah, those houses are still around. Whereas the houses we're building today aren't going to be around for probably another 20, 30 years, and then they'll need to be torn down and rebuilt.

Yeah, the quality, especially... I mean, here I see it, I was in property before I became involved in Bitcoin for many years. And the quality of the new builds that I've gone around sometimes, I just think I could not buy this. It is a pile of shit. But they get

away with it, and people buy it because everyone's under this illusion of when property is the whole number go up, especially in the UK. Everyone just has that thought that property is always going to go up, and they never question like, "Why?" They never question...

They're just like, "Oh, yeah, it's fine." They think the quality is still the same because it still looks like a house. They don't know. You don't see what's behind the walls and then the quality of where it's been built. And they don't understand that increasing the

money supply increases the cost of these assets. And then now we have an entire generation where no one can buy properties here. The average person in their late 20s, early 30s, like loads of people are still living with their parents or flat sharing, and they can't

live the lives their parents lived. Yeah, and you really hit the nail on the head when you said that everybody has to be an investor in order to keep pace with inflation, in order to protect their value. And this is something that's really hard for the baby boomer generation,

in particular, to understand, because they have benefited from asset inflation their entire lives. They got in at the bottom of the debt ponzi, right? And they've been riding it all the way to the top ever since. So when millennials and Gen Z come along and they

say, "Well, we can't even afford to go to college. I'm starting my life with $150,000 in debt. I can't buy this house to benefit from the inflation. I can't buy gold. I can't buy stocks. I'm trying to feed myself. I can't even get married because I can't afford it.

Not me, personally. This is just the narrative, right? The average person, for sure. And the baby boomer says, "Well, we'll just get a job. Just work harder, right? Just buy these things and then you'll get to where I am." But the reality is that inflation, particularly

inflation of assets, has priced newer entrants into the markets out in a lot of cases. And we're seeing a huge shrinkage because as the years have gone by, we've seen a detachment of wages and productivity growth in such a way that wages are no longer really even keeping

pace with inflation and that this middle class is actually shrinking. We're seeing the top 1% get more and more wealthy and the bottom 90% get less and less wealthy. And that problem only continues to exacerbate as time goes on because those with the assets benefit, two

people benefit from inflation the most, those with the most assets and those closest to the money printer. And if you're a hardworking, regular person like myself, you're neither of those, right? I mean, you might have some assets. You might be able to work your whole

life and squirrel away enough to retire into a stock portfolio, assuming that those things continue to go up. If we believe the meme that, "Oh, yeah, real estate is a good investment because it always goes up. Stocks are a good system because they always go up." If you

believe that meme and you're willing to risk your future financial sovereignty on buying into a Ponzi scheme, well, then, you know, I guess you're happier and dumber than I am. Yeah, it is interesting as well because when people say that and they're like, "Oh, well,

because it always has," that's crazy to even say that. I mean, to say, "Oh, yeah, it will because it always has." You're not looking into it in any way. You're just going, "Oh, well, because something's happened before it's going to continue to." And then they're

not looking at like, "Why?" And like you say, I think with especially that generation, like boomer generation, my parents' generation, they did it right that way. And I don't think that they've had to think about it. And you do have, you know, they will argue and they

will say things like, "Oh, well, you know, the younger generation is just lazy. They need to work hard there." They'll say, "Oh, you just, you know, you work hard, punch in your hours and you'll work your way up in a business and you'll make some money." And

they just, when you actually look at the numbers and your charts show it, that's just simply not true. That is so different. I think it was like, what was it, three, four times salary to buy a property then? And now it's like 10, 15. It's completely different world.

Exactly. And my favorite one is the, "Well, you know, you might not be able to afford to buy a house, but I bet you can afford to buy that new iPhone 11 or whatever that you bought last weekend." Just totally false equivalence comparisons. I mean, yeah, you know, at a point,

it might be a little bit true. Yeah, you probably spend more money on things you don't need instead of saving for the future. But how can someone who has no assets build up enough of a financial base in order to be able to save for the future if they can't afford those assets? Of course,

they're going to go out and buy the newest iPhone. Of course, they're going to spend all of their money on frivolous activities and useless junk. It's because they can't afford anything else and they might as well give themselves some luxury in life. And don't

get me wrong, I am not sitting here trying to justify those types of behaviors. I think that they're destructive for society. And I think that they're bad. And that's partly why I'm so passionate about the money, right? Fixing the money and getting to the root of the problem,

because many people would tell you that the root of the problem is greed and consumerism and vapid self-absorption. But those problems aren't causes. They're symptoms of a greater underlying systemic problem with our economy, with our money, with our ability to store value

into the future and make more informed decisions. If I hand you $100 and say, "You have to spend this right now," you're probably not going to spend it on something super smart. I mean, you might max. You probably go buy big stocks. But most people are going to be like, "Okay,

and I'm like, if you don't spend in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to take it back. I'll buy whatever I can." If I tell you that you have 10 years to do something with that money, then you're going to make a much wiser decision because you're going to have more time to gather

information. And it highlights, too, when you said everybody has to become an investor. That is sort of moving backwards in society as to what we really want when it comes to free markets. We want more specialization in the economy so people can focus on being better at whatever it is that

they do. And that's how our society has flourished to the point that it has today. We've built up enough surplus that people are able to specialize. You don't have to worry about where your next meal is going to come from. So you can get really good at using spreadsheets and doing spreadsheets

for the office that you work at. That specialization is what has enabled us to get to the point where we have people that can send rockets into space and put people on the moon. You can't do that in a society where everyone is worried about what animal they're going to kill to get clothes from and

where their next meal is going to come from. And it's very foolish to think that just because something is the way it is now, it will go on that way forever. We had to work to achieve the collective wealth of humanity that we have today. And it can very quickly be destroyed.

Yeah, I completely agree. So what we're really saying is that to really boil it down, there was a break from reality in terms of how much value is actually being created and what is backing money was broken and now doesn't align with reality so that the value of people's money is declining. The

value of assets is climbing and all the new money that is created just goes like it was with the coin clipping. You were talking about with King's queens clipping the coins and then that money would go into their pockets or the people closest to them. Effectively, we still have exactly the same system

except it just sounds a bit better and it's got lots of fancy words around it. But pretty much they are taking the value of your money and then that is being redistributed to the people at the top effectively. Right. And you know, another one of the major differences is that it's much

easier to abstract a way that theft now than it was in the days of the golden silver coins. Right. I mean, you know, the king could only clip a coin so many times before the merchants weighed them on the scales again and said, this feels a little light. No, that's not what this coin is worth.

I don't know who clipped it, but I have a feeling I know who it was and it at a certain point, you know, people weren't going to take that. The paper money printing has abstracted away our understanding of reality so much so that we can no longer even comprehend the amount of systematic

theft that's happening. And a good example of this is if you look at what's going on in the world right now, I think a lot of people are waking up to this because governments are coming forward and they're saying, okay, we've got a we've got to give everybody money, you know, $2,000 a month

or whatever it is, we've got to bail out all of these businesses. We've got to spend trillions of dollars to do all of these things. Well, the thinking individual is at least going to say, where is this money coming from? Like, I thought we didn't have any money. I thought

didn't the government shut down for a month last year because we were arguing over how to spend the money we are we we did have? I mean, aren't we already in $25 trillion of debt here in America?

Like, where are they getting these trillions and trones and dollars? Found it down the back of the sofa, didn't they? Right, they must have. I mean, it's got to come from somewhere, right?

And if you start asking questions, you're like, well, it came from the Federal Reserve. Okay, well, where did the Federal Reserve get it? You know, that's when you start to realize, well, the way they're just printing more. I mean, that doesn't that should shock some people because I think a

lot of people haven't really understood that before until they start to see it in action. And you know, I don't think it's a huge leap in logic to think, okay, I have this slice of a pie, right? There's only so much pie. And if more money is being printed, my slice of the pie is

getting a little bit smaller. Even though I'm not eating it, it's getting a little bit smaller because there's only one pie. There's you know, we only have the world that we have printing money doesn't create wealth. I think that that's one of the probably the most difficult fallacies to undo is

that governments do not create wealth. Printing new money does not create wealth. It reads its existing capital. That's an important point. I just maybe you can just go a little bit deeper on that because I think that is something that people really don't grasp. So can you just explain

that a little bit deeper? So the easiest way to think about economics is to break it down to two people in a room, right? If you have two people in a room and they use coupons to exchange things. Like let's say you and I have marshmallows and then we decide we're going to create one

slip of paper for each marshmallow that we have. And at any point in time, you and I can exchange slips of paper with one another and they're each equivalent to one marshmallow, right? If we create and that's a very simple way. It's a very simplified, elementary way of thinking about an economy.

Obviously, economies are very complex. There are lots and lots of people with lots and lots of goods and services and they all interact with each other. But we can logically break that down to a very simple analogy. If we create more pieces of paper, that doesn't mean we have more marshmallows.

We still have the exact same amount of marshmallows. You might now be able to take all the marshmallows from me if I'm none the wiser and you keep giving me all the extra slips of paper you've made.

But we still only have the original amount of marshmallows that we started with. Yeah, exactly. The value is created from goods and services. If I wanted one of your marshmallows, I might say, "Okay, well, I'll do some editing for you." Or whatever it is, then we've actually

created value for each other. But what you're saying is that the value is not in that piece of paper. It's in the work that's being done by one of us. Right, right. And there are all kinds of textbooks written on pushback for this type of thinking. There's people that say,

"Oh, well, now what you need to do is get the velocity of money going. You need to get Max spending his marshmallow coupons to Colin so that Colin goes and decides to start a business doing people's hair so that he wants to earn more marshmallow coupons." And they talk about

liquidity traps and all of these things that are extremely complicated and really just designed to abstract you away from the fact that your value is being eroded through the system. I mean, that's just what I believe. Stolen is just the correct word, isn't it?

Okay, so that's what's been happening. Obviously, like you said, it's not just like a switch was flipped in 1971 and then nothing had happened before. But over time, what we're saying is that there's lots of little things that have changed or some big things that have changed, which of

all of them taken value from the average person and redistributed it to people who make the decisions effectively. So it seems like we saw that in the 70s. We saw that with every big crash. We saw it in 2008. Everyone on Bitcoin Twitter has been saying for the last few years, something's got to

happen. It's going to be really bad next time. We're now seeing it. It's going to be blamed on coronavirus because there was no problem underlying. It's just literally corona has caused all this, according to most people. But what we're now seeing is what is it? $6 trillion has just been

printed, something crazy. I mean, what does that, what do those numbers mean in relation to what's happened before? Is it a lot? Because they sort of have said it like, oh, yeah, we just need to print $6 trillion and we just need to bail out all these companies like Boeing and everything else.

But that sounds like that's going to make a huge difference. It sounds like we're going to have some real serious issues going forward. Yeah, you know, it's tough because everything that's going on today is unprecedented. I mean, just yesterday, we had a negative $50 barrels of oil. I mean,

in what reality does that make any sense? You know, I understand the, I understand all of the nuance to it. I understand why it happened. But how does it make any sense? Right? How does it, how does financialization become so abstracted that one of the most useful and valuable resources in the

world, the one thing that we all depend on more than anything else, regardless of how you feel about, you know, energy usage and whether or not we should all be on wind and solar or whatever.

The fact remains that fossil fuels are the single most important and revolutionary thing in our society because they enable us to enjoy the life that we have today. They enable us to have goods produced in China and food grown on the other side of the world every single day available to

us. It enables you to get in your car and go to work. How do we end up in a world where that most valuable resource is worth negative dollars? You know, it does not make sense. It is possible by malinvestment that's enabled by cheap money and cheap credit. And as far as like the implications

of printing all of this money, we don't know, you know, directly, like what's going to happen in the short term or in the medium term or even in the long term. We can take a guess, you know, based on history, history is a really good teacher. Historically, you know, Weimar Germany

printed money to pay for their deaths after World War I and ended up with crazy hyperinflation. I mean, a shoe was worth, you know, a few marks in 1913. And then by the end of the 1920s, it was trillions of marks. And that caused major, major economic and societal disruption, you know,

break down even at the family level, right? Because if you're a family and you can't provide for your own, it's going to just completely destroy the fabric of your existence. And you're going to look to any solution you can to be able to solve your immediate crisis. And that's how you ended up with

this major swing in political power. And that's how you ended up with, you know, World War II and the rise of fascism and communism and socialism all across Europe and Asia over the next several decades was just major economic disruption. So, you know, I tend to be cautiously more

optimistic than that because they didn't have Bitcoin back then. They didn't have the ability to share information like we do today. And I think that that's probably one of our most valuable resources is that people like you and I can hop on this call and share ideas and discuss these

problems as they're happening before they happen or after they happen and hopefully come up with solutions, hopefully come to better understandings of the driving forces behind these things and hopefully be able to make a better future, you know. But I would hate to see, you know, if you can

look at a chart right now, the federal balance sheet is a percentage of GDP. It's higher than it's ever been with the amount of money printing that they're doing right now. And I'm sorry, I know, I don't know where all your audience is, but it's easiest for me to talk about because actually

mostly in America, okay, it's most in America. It's easier for me to talk about US centric stuff, just because it's what I know. I don't mean to exclude anybody when I do that. It's just easiest for me. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. Percentage of GDP, federal balance sheet, Fed balance sheet is

a percentage of GDP higher than it's ever been. And it has just gone parabolic. I'll post the chart on Twitter later. I think I might have already retweeted it. I'm not sure. But super eye opening, right? Because it's unprecedented. The federal reserve has been around for 100 years. It's never

been, I don't remember the exact percentage. I want to say it's never been over 15 or 20. And it's currently close to 35, I think, or something like that. What does it look like when a government nationalizes an entire economy? I mean, look at Japan, it's been going on for years in Japan

already. And people make the argument, they're like, Oh, if they could do it, we could do it. But things are much different when you're looking at the world superpower with the global reserve currency, printing tons of money and buying up every asset. If someone had said to me, even five years ago,

what would be happening today? I did just said fuck off, don't be stupid. That's all that would have been my only response because it just sounds so mental. Because it is just mental. What's going on is just it doesn't make any sense that oil went negative. It doesn't make any sense that we

have negative rates. Like, I don't understand how people are even because it's happening in Europe now. And people are like, yeah, that's fine. Like, what do you mean that's fine? Like, I'll ask you to lend me money. And then I'll promise to pay you back less than you've paid me. And like,

you're going to go for that deal. You think that's a good deal in normal life. Like, no one's going to go for that. But they accept it because they're like, Oh, well, the people in power sets, right?

So it's right. You're like, well, think you just think like just if it doesn't work in normal life and normal people who interact with each other would never go for that deal. Why are you?

Right. This way doesn't make any sense. It's, it's, it's, it's increasingly becoming more and more things are descending into madness. Things are making, you know, like, stock equities going up amidst global shutdown, global economic turmoil, sovereign state bonds heading to zero percent

or negative yield. You know, how does that make sense? How does a government fund its operations with negative yielding debt? Obviously, they're going to have to print a lot more money because who's going to buy that debt? Except for maybe, you know, the Federal Reserve and whatever equivalents

there are around the world. It's crazy, man. I mean, and, and the further this thing goes, you know, you look back at some of the early, some of the more classical economists in the days of like the Great Depression in America, they were first to sound the alarm on interventionism on

nationalization of economic activities of making the claim that anything was too big to fail and trying to prevent the government from stepping in and intervening. Lionel Robbins said that the length and severity of the Great Depression was actually prolonged because of government

interventionism because, you know, the government came in and did things like burned fields of crops and killed pregnant pigs just to try to drive up the prices of commodities. Just crazy, you know, while people were starving all around the company or all around the country, the types of decisions

that no sane person would ever make are made by governments that can abstract away responsibility and think about things in a vacuum from an academic perspective in ways that have no real practical application and just make no sense. And the further we get away from reality,

the more of that we're going to see negative oil prices. You know, and, and what's the real problem with oil? Well, the demand is practically zero and the supply just keeps increasing because nobody's burning the oil. And what are the solutions? Well, the government's going to bail out the

oil company. Does that really solve our underlying problems? No, it doesn't. You know, it's like the government buying all the toxic collateral, buying all the bad debt. Does that solve the problem? No, the problem is that it's bad debt and that it shouldn't exist. It needs to be liquidated. The

greatest examples of this are the way that forest fires work, where, you know, every few years, forest fires happen naturally and it tends to purge certain types of undergrowth and trees that grow on the forest floor very quickly. And it keeps that type of the analogy here is the

malinvestment to a minimum. A certain purge, economic purge, like downturn, a liquidation event keeps malinvestment to a minimum. But if that malinvestment is continually pruned and those small fires are not allowed to happen, then when a liquidation event does happen, if it's been put

off for decades, it's going to be a massive forest fire that's going to devastate, you know, an entire countryside. That's probably the best example that I've ever heard of the liquidation of malinvestment. That makes a lot of sense. And then nothing can grow on it because it's

just completely destroyed. Yeah, that makes complete sense. You know, it's not like we bail out small businesses or normal people. It's, you know, if they say, okay, well, we're just going to bail everyone out. If you've got a small business and it's failing, we'll bail you out. If you've lost

your job, we're going to sort you. Whatever it is, we're going to bail all of you out. That would be one thing. I'm not saying it'd be right. It would definitely be wrong. But what they're doing is that they're choosing who gets bailed out. And it seems like they're the people who definitely

should least be bailed out. And then everyone else gets screwed and lose their value again. Right. So this is something Ben is really good at explaining. He likes to say that whenever you print more money, you cannot distribute it to everybody equally. Because if you do,

nothing changes. If we go back to our marshmallow scenario, right, and you have 10 marshmallow coupons and I have 10 marshmallow coupons and there's 20 marshmallows. And we each double our amount of marshmallow coupons. Nothing's changed. Right. You still have the same relative amount

of marshmallow purchasing power and so do I. And there's still the same amount of marshmallows. We have to distribute that new money unequally. Essentially, what we're doing when we do that is we're redistributing capital. And this is something if you read about, if you ever read Frederick

Heicks book, the road to surf from, he gets into this a lot about the forceful redistribution of capital and the moral hazard that it carries. Because economies are ruthlessly free markets are ruthlessly efficient and allocating capital to the most efficient players, to the ones that best

satisfy human need, human action. When individuals who have limited amounts of information, which is anybody in the government, right, nobody in the government is omniscient or all knowing or all powerful. Yeah. When they step in and they intervene in those traditional market

interactions and they reallocate capital according to what they deem to be most important, right? We think that this organization is too big to fail. Therefore, we're deeming to print all this money, right, which we talked about is just redistribution of existing capital. They're taking it away from

people who already have it. And they're giving it to this person rather than letting the market do that naturally through liquidation events. They're redistributing that capital forcefully.

They're socializing the losses. That is very dangerous. That's when you end up in situations where the capital that's been allocated can no longer be efficiently employed to satisfy the needs of human desires. It's how you end up with shortages. It's how you end up with way too many

booths and not enough sticks of butter. Or it just gets worse and worse and it compounds to the point where, well, now the government has to control, they have to issue every factory a quota and they have to determine how much of each commodity needs to be produced to satisfy the

needs because they are the ones allocating the capital, allocating the resources. And no individual can do that. And even if the government appoints an individual to oversee each and every individual commodity, they don't have enough market information to be able to solve that problem

at such a high level. It has to be complex. It's way too complex. It's way too complex. Exactly. Well, not only is it way too complex, but even if we don't take, it's crazy and stupid, even if you don't take into account that there could be corruption. And just again, taking it back

to a log logically, there's always going to be someone who's going to take advantage of any situation like we're human beings. So if you put someone in control and they have the chance to do something that's going to benefit them or people close to them, it's going to happen. And we see

it happening. So it's a shit and stupid idea even without that. And then if you take that in as well, then it's just madness. So for anyone like who maybe now is listening and thinking, okay, maybe they need to do some reading and I'm going to link some of the books that you're

talking about. And we're going to try and always expanding in the other shows and I'll point them across obviously to your podcast as well. But if they're starting to question it, and they then do and they get to the conclusion that, okay, no, this is bullshit, I am getting screwed.

Now, can we talk about why we're really here? What do we think Bitcoin can solve? And what is this other system? Like, why is it better? And how can it fix the things that we're talking about?

Right. Yeah. And that's a lot. You know, that could probably be a whole episode in another episode. It could be a series of episodes, I think. I think with Bitcoin, what we're seeing is for the first time, maybe ever, but certainly in modern history, the monetization of a new,

of a new, I guess you could call it an asset. I don't like to call Bitcoin an asset because I think of it more as a currency or a money, but we're essentially witnessing an emergent monetization.

And this monetization, so the term fiat, right? Yeah. I'm sure most of your listeners are familiar with the term fiat. Fiat means by definition, by decree, your paper money has value because that value is given to it by decree, by whatever authority prints it, and by whatever authority

demands it to pay taxes and demands it to be used in terms of legal tender for exchange of goods and services. Bitcoin is the first example that I can think of in modern history. That is the monetization of a new currency, a new money. It's been tried, right? With people in the past who

have tried to sort of circumvent legal tender laws and create their own monies out of things that we're familiar with, like gold and silver. And those things tend to get shut down because governments don't want competition because the most powerful tool that governments have

is the ability to manipulate the money supply, to manipulate the creation and the contraction of credit. So what we need to keep in mind is that Bitcoin theoretically solves the double-spend problem, that if you send me the Byzantine's general's problem, if you spend me one Bitcoin,

the Bitcoin ledger will make sure that you cannot send that Bitcoin to somebody else, right? And that information is publicly verifiable and it's distributed to anybody who runs a Bitcoin full note. So what that does is it decentralizes the authority structure, right? And it takes this

problem that we have of the people closest to the money spigot abusing the senior edge rights, abusing the wealth that they can create and extract from the rest of the world. And it puts it basically into computer code. And that computer code is distributed in such a way amongst the

users of the network that it's theoretically, I don't want to say immutable, but it's extremely hard to change, right? We can dictate things socially through social consensus, things like monetary policy. We can dictate things like finality of exchange, right? There's no chargebacks on

Bitcoin. It's theoretically possible to attack the network in a certain way where you can achieve those goals. But what we're really seeing is the emergence of a new paradigm. We're seeing a complete change, you know, a lot of the gold bugs talked about wanting to go back to a gold standard,

but there is no going back to the gold standard. I say all the time gold failed his money. Yeah. Good. No, I was just going to say, so to simplify that down, it's like you were talking before about you and I had five marshmallows each or 10 marshmallows each. And then we're

saying that what's happened with money the past with fiat money is that more marshmallows or claims to those marshmallows are being introduced into the system and redistributed to other people, meaning that we have less claim to less marshmallows. We have less of what we already had.

Right. So what you're saying is with Bitcoin is that there's only a certain amount of these marshmallows and nobody or it's very, very difficult for that, I think, almost impossible, that there's ever going to be any more marshmallows than we've agreed between us or anyone using that

system that we want. No one can introduce more is basically what you're saying. Right. Yeah. I would change that analogy, not the marshmallows, but the coupons for the marshmallows. Because we can always go and make more marshmallows, right? The problem isn't that we can't make

more marshmallows. It's that our claims on those marshmallows are being invaded. So, yes, yes, that is a good way to do the analogy where those marshmallow coupons that you and I exchange with one another, there will only ever be, you know, 21 million or if we think about it in terms of

Bitcoin. And it's important, you know, there are a lot of problems that you think you see with Bitcoin on the surface that if you do a little digging, you'll find have been addressed, right? Because it's amazing how few people understand that you can buy a fraction of

a Bitcoin. You can buy up to 100 millionth of a Bitcoin. You can't settle that on chain, but there are ways to obtain very, very, very small fractions of Bitcoin. And we might even see that get further subdivided in the future. Well, just programmable, right? So, there's always going to

be a way to do these sort of things. Maybe not write the second, but... Yeah, you know, I think the programmable side of Bitcoin is often overlooked even by its greatest cheerleaders because we're so excited about everything else that we tend to forget. Just the ability to publicly audit and

programmatically distribute money just within a corporation is game-changing. I mean, imagine if you could distribute money to certain departments and monitor its use, you know, in real time on a publicly verifiable ledger that removes the need for a lot of accounting headaches.

Really with that, what we're saying is that if someone tries, first of all, if someone tries to slip in another claim for a marshmallow, and I try and say to you, "All right, I'm going to pay you with this," you can just verify straight away without asking anyone else in media that you can

just go, "That's bullshit," relying. It's not real. So, it gives anyone the ability to have the absolute bullshit detector and that they know what is real and what is not, and that their money can't be inflated. And when you're talking about accounting, could you go a little bit deeper into

maybe what the implications of that could be? Yeah, I mean, I mean, what specifically? We can guarantee that we have a certain amount of Bitcoin on the system and because it's programable money. I believe it could change things in terms of accounting because you can have basically systems

that will run to account for everything on the back end and it can't be played with. Like, "I can't lie to you from my accounting. You will always know," he says he has this much, he doesn't.

Or he says he's sending me this, he can't. There's no way of a third party changing things around to trick someone basically is what I'm saying. Yeah, Bitcoin is honest to a fault on the public ledger. Bitcoin cannot lie. Whatever Bitcoin's ledger says is. So, if you own an organization

and for whatever reason, I don't recommend this, you're conducting internal operations on chain, then there's going to be publicly verifiable record of every Satoshi that's come and gone out of your business and gone to the various representatives within your business. So, you could see exactly

how much money with ultimate finality, exactly how much money you sent to parties within your organization and exactly how much of it is still in their possession. And exactly, I don't want to speak about it with too much certainty because Bitcoin is still pseudonymous, right? I mean,

you can pseudo anonymous, you can send the money to anybody and if you have the private keys, nobody can stop you. So, there is that problem. You might not necessarily know exactly where they used it or what they used it for, but you are going to know whether or not they're still in

possession of it. Yeah, okay. So, supply can't be changed. That's a big problem with the current money as far as we can see. So, supply can't be changed. It's impossible for the system to lie.

What other things make it different to what we currently have? What other things excite you? I would say the, you know, we live in an increasingly globalized world. 10 years ago, you and I wouldn't have been able to do what we're doing now. It just would have been,

we probably could have tried it, but it wouldn't have been very good. It wouldn't have been a good data. The world is quickly changing. It's becoming more and more interconnected. Like I said, the exchange of information and ideas is greater than ever before and continually increasing. It

only makes sense to have a money that's as scalable and as compatible with that increase in communication capability. Bitcoin sort of is the internet's default currency. You know, it's not always what people are going to use as money, but in a lot of cases, it's like the internet's preferred

medium of exchange. And you've seen this happen. Like anytime black markets arise on the internet, it's usually Bitcoin that acts as the medium of settlement for whatever activities it is, whether it be hacking and holding people's computers ransom or buying the selling of illegal goods

and services. All of those things, maybe less so as more and more truth has come out that Bitcoin is not anonymous. I think that a lot of that business was done when people mistakenly thought Bitcoin was completely anonymous. But in terms of it's sort of moved from black markets more

into gray and white markets on the internet, at least. Whereas right now I'm not incentivized to spend my Bitcoin, but one day if we reach a little bit more of a saturation of liquidity in the Bitcoin market, I could see using it all the time for all kinds of things because it's

just such an easier experience. I'm not exposing any of my data when I make a transaction with a merchant. Whereas with my credit card, I'm telling them everything about myself with Bitcoin.

All they have to do is send me an address and I can send them the money. And nobody can stop that. Nobody can tell me that I can't spend that money. My bank's never going to freeze my Bitcoin.

I don't know if anybody has ever been traveling and had their credit card frozen when they're in another country. But that's a huge pain to be cut off from your financial resources when you're in an unfamiliar place is a very uncomfortable experience. That can't happen with Bitcoin.

Yeah. That's massive. I think that's something that's quite overlooked is, like you said, people get so excited about other certain parts of it. But for me at least, I love the fact that you're in control. I love the fact that with my Bitcoin, if I want to send you Bitcoin now,

I can do it. And no one can stop me and no one can get in the way. And it doesn't matter what it's for or why I want to do it. And it's pretty quick. I know people complain about sometimes the amount of time, 10 minutes or an hour or whatever it's going to take to get through. But the fact that

I can do it is pretty world changing. And there's no other thing on the planet that you can do it with. Right. And the only people who complain about the speed of Bitcoin settlement have no real basis of understanding of the finality of that settlement.

Yeah. Bitcoin with six confirmations, meaning an hour's worth of settlement, is probably more finality than you're going to get from just about anything else in the world. I mean, it's sort of a sliding scale. It's not necessarily like, yes, it's immutable versus no, it is not.

There's always going to be a cost to that level of relative amunability. And I hate to even say that because that's sort of an oxymoron. But relative finality, I think, might be a better way to say it, rather than relative amunability. But try to settle a million dollars in gold

from here to China and see how long it takes you and how expensive it is. Right. I mean, Bitcoin is like the ultimate and the fastest and the most secure method of final settlement in existence. And I don't care what cryptocurrencies you might have heard somebody talking about on Twitter or in YouTube comments, their cryptocurrency is not

faster. It's not more secure. It makes technical trade-offs to give you the illusion of thinking that has finer, faster final settlement. But that's really just security theater. It doesn't offer the same degree of finality that Bitcoin does in as fast as the amount of time it does. And that's

only because Bitcoin is the most dominant when it comes to the amount of hash power that secures the network, the amount of electricity that's expended to guarantee that your transaction is final every single 10 minutes. And let me say it is final. If I've just received Bitcoin and I've

got like, you say, six confirmations, whatever amount of money that is, I'm absolutely comfortable with it. I know that's my, you know, I know that's mine. Whereas with banking, I don't know, that money can be taken back. I don't own my bank account. The bank earns my bank account. So,

or if I want to then send that on to someone else, they can freeze it or stop it or seize it or, you know, that final and that knowledge of really owning something is a special feeling actually, which I've never experienced with anything else is like, wow, okay, this is mine. That's very powerful.

Right. And this is maybe too much information for this podcast, but six confirmations might not always be the best decision window for you. Like if it's more money, if it's millions of dollars, or maybe eventually like billions of dollars, because it has happened, you know, there have been like

close to a billion dollar Bitcoin transactions, six confirmations might not be enough. You know, you might want to wait several hundred or a thousand or two thousand, but you have that option.

Because if in the event that that transaction is attacked and rewritten, all that happens is you go back to square one, you know, whoever the original center of that Bitcoin was now has it. So, when making really large settlements, that's just going to have to be done the way any type of

settlement happens in the business and legal world slowly and carefully and with the right paperwork. But Bitcoin offers like a much more streamlined process of settlement. I mean, imagine, you know, I don't if anybody's ever closed on a house, you know, and seeing how much time just

getting the paperwork done through the bank takes, it's unbelievable. That type of bureaucracy can be streamlined through Bitcoin so much faster. It's almost unbelievable the way that that could be handled. And obviously, it's a little bit different because we're talking about debit versus

credit, but I think that hopefully people understand my point there. No, that makes a lot of sense. And like you're saying with property, you know, even if you're rather than waiting six, like you're saying, or you wait a couple hundred or even a thousand, it's still nothing compared

to the equivalent. Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. It's it sounds like a lot, but it's not. And like you say with property, I mean, the last the last few that I've done here, I don't know what it's like in America, it takes here the last two have been over four months from someone agreeing to,

yes, I want the property to solicitors wasting time and money, banks fucking around, and then finally actually being completed is like four months. Right. Yeah, I mean, imagine if you could, you know, if you wanted to buy a house from someone with cash, you'd have your lawyers

meet you, you know, somewhere tomorrow with all the right paperwork, assuming they're able to get the paperwork done in time, have him sign the deed over to you, you hit send on the Bitcoin, and then you guys say, all right, we'll put this, everything goes in escrow for a week until there's

enough confirmations on the Bitcoin transaction. And then both parties exchange their escrow, and it's good to go. Yeah, it's amazing. All right, I think you've really explained that well, so thank you for going through that. I'm sorry, I've sort of dumbed it down and, you know,

you've had to go down to that level. It just the whole reason I've started this podcast is to get the masking questions. And I think that you've done an amazing job of going through all of that.

So thank you very, very much. Yeah, I hope it wasn't too abstracted. I'm a big picture guy, like I tend to think in big picture. So it's hard for me to answer a question without feeling like I'm providing the right context because I don't want to do people listening a disservice. I hate

being misunderstood. Yeah, no, I think you've done an amazing job. So all right, so that's all the basic stuff. If you don't mind, I'll just ask you, if you've got another five, 10 minutes, I just wanted to get into some of the stuff that I'm really interested in, and maybe it won't be

quite so basic. But what do you see happening in the next call at five years? What is it that is really exciting you at the moment? So are we talking about what's the context here? Are we talking about the context specifically within Bitcoin? What do you see and specifically

within Bitcoin with the current problems we see in the world right now? Do you see things accelerating? And do you think that we are well-positioned with the developments that we're seeing in Bitcoin to actually help people who want to use Bitcoin and sort of relieve some of that pressure

that's there? Are we ready to be the lifeboat? Yeah, so for one thing, I will say, I don't like to make like price predictions and stuff, but I am more bullish on Bitcoin today than I have probably ever been. And I've been consumed by it for years every single day, like we said in the

beginning, it's actually unbelievable to me. I feel like the potential just gets stronger and stronger. I wouldn't be surprised and don't hold me to these people. I'm just saying it's possible.

I wouldn't be surprised if in a year Bitcoin's at half a million dollars. I mean, it's that insane, and it will happen that fastly. I go there that quickly. I really do believe that. You believe in this sort of gradually then suddenly? Yeah, I believe that this has been a

a slow growing exponential curve, like major long-term exponential curve. I mean, it is going to be insane. Now, I will caveat that by saying Bitcoin is not your first layer Bitcoin is not what you are going to use to buy your coffee. Just the technology is not designed for that. I do think

that abstractions of the network, higher layers and side layers get built out to it. That do allow for that type of settlement at the merchant, for everyday types of things. I don't know that we're there yet. I've played with lightning quite a lot. I love lightning. It's interesting following on

side chains and pegs, things like liquid. Tons of interesting stuff happening on lightning, but I don't. It isn't there yet for the average person. It's difficult for me to get liquidity on lightning. I'm actively involved in Bitcoin every single day. It's not stuff like Jack Mallard's

strike that operates as a middleman between lightning and the traditional legacy financial system. That's a really interesting step in the right direction. I worry a little bit for him about that, but I'm not his parents. I agree. I listened to an episode recently where he was

talking about how it's set up. I did think good on you. It sounds awesome, but I wouldn't be sleeping. I mean, you need people like that to push the boat and give things a go. Without them, then we never move forward, so a massive respect for him going for it.

In terms of the macro perspective, it's unbelievable. I mean, the potential that Bitcoin has here and over the next several years, yeah, I might be sadly disappointed a year from now, we might just have been flat or lower than where we are today. It's going to take more than that for me to

sort of lose my pace on this, to lose my vision, if you will. People just don't understand how scarce this is. They don't understand how little Bitcoin there really is and the significance that today, the average person can still obtain at least one whole coin. That's not going to be the case

much longer. The math just makes it impossible. The longer this goes, the more blocks we produce, we have a halving in 3,000 blocks in three weeks or whatever. It just keeps me up at night, because you look at the amount of money coming into this thing every single day.

You just do the math, and it's inevitable. It really is taking time bomb. Yeah, you said earlier, one thing where you said in the economics class, you'd done basically just supply and demand, and that's pretty much all they'd gone through. Well, once you understand

what Bitcoin's about and why it's useful and why more people are likely going to use it, and that it gets more and more scarce and harder to obtain over time, you only have to look and say, are more people using it? Yes. Are more people going to find it useful, especially with what's

going on in the world? Yes. Is there less and less supply over time? Yes. Well, what else can change then number, number go up? I don't see how we're wrong on that. That's the thing. It might not be next year or it might not be the year after, but eventually, like you say, it's just simple maths,

like it is pretty basic. When you've gone to the point where I have where you see Bitcoin as a way to exit the fiat system, and you're really pretty much ready to go all in with the exception of whatever obligations you need to meet within the legacy system, it almost feels unfair.

And I know that sounds silly. That sounds silly, probably, to a lot of people listening. You're probably like, dude, Bitcoin's gone down like 60% in the last few years. Like, you're out of your mind, like you're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about. Just wait. Yeah. Yeah. I completely

agree. I completely agree. All right. So in the technical development side of things, is there anything that is exciting? I saw on your Twitter page, you were messing around with a Raspberry Pi, and I wondered what you were doing with that. I know I've just... Yeah. That's more

of like a... So I would... My goal is in two years to be a full-time software developer. I'm nowhere close. I'm terrible. I'm awful. But like, sort of like my side project, my hobby activity is...

I've always really wanted to learn how to build circuits, and the Raspberry Pi's make it so easy to program digital inputs and outputs into boards. So I've just been playing around with a breadboard and Arduino, and trying to build basic circuits and write code for it, and it's

fun. It's a lot of fun. That's cool. What languages are you learning? So primarily, I'm trying to program with Python. I've messed around in a little bit of HTML and JavaScript, but I'm not an HTML and CSS, but I'm not a huge fan of web development. And the Arduino stuff is

mostly C++. That's cool. It's interesting. I'm doing a very similar thing. I built my node the other day, one of those my node things with the Raspberry Pi, and I really enjoyed doing that.

And then I was like, "Oh, I really enjoyed that." So I bought another one, and I've just built another one, which I'm now putting Linux on. I bought one of those Google Pixel 3s to put...

I want to put Samurai on it, and I want to have a new operating system. So I'm starting to learn Python as well. So I have to chat to you a little bit more about it, because... Yeah, you have to...

I learned the hard way that if you really want to get into Python and get into programming, you really need a dedicated Linux system, because I've always used Windows, and I tried programming Python on Windows, and I just feel like it was just too painful, and I'm not a Mac person. I never

will be. So I had to get eventually getting a dedicated Linux system, just like a laptop to use for programming and stuff like that. And it was so worth it. It's so much easier. Do you use Ubuntu or what you use? Yeah, I'm using Ubuntu right now. Yeah, that's my project this evening, is to set

Ubuntu up on this little Pi, because I actually have always had Macs, but I do want to change across, and I was chatting to someone, and they just said, "Run a separate system, get used to it first, because if you just go straight into Linux, you're just going to get yourself in a right old

tangle." And trying to do a boot is a problem. Don't even bother. It's terrible. It sounds horrible, you're like, "I don't want to have to get a separate computer, but I just bought a cheap laptop, and I just used that for most of my programming." And yeah, it sucks to not have my big screens and

everything, but it is what it is. So how long have you been going with programming? It's slow, man. I would say I started probably maybe like a year and a half to two years ago, but I tend to get burned out, I get stuck, I get frustrated, I lose interest, but I'm constantly

trying to come back to it, because I really do want to transition careers in about two years, and I'd love to work full-time in Bitcoin, particularly in software. I think that it's the future, and I think that even if the economy gets really bad, I think that there will still be

a place for good software developers. I think you're right. I had exactly the same thought. Have you ever done Justin Moon's course? I have, actually. Yeah. I hate to admit this. I've never completely gone all the way through it, and part of that is because of that course is actually what drove

me to get a dedicated Linux system, because trying to do it on Windows, I was constantly running into issues, and as far as the Python goes, I have run into problems where I just don't understand what's going on anymore. The first half of it, I do really well, and then I just get to a point

where I'm like, "This Python's over my head. I need to go back to something a little bit more beginner and then revisit this," but I've probably gone back to that course like four or five times now, and I just really need to buckle down and fix my weaknesses. Self-teaching software development

is hard, man, because you get stuck and you get frustrated and there's so much you don't know, and you don't know what you don't know, and it's just tough, but I'm trying to stick with it.

I will meet my goal, I will. It's hard when you don't have anyone. I don't know. Everyone's different in their learning, but sometimes I'm the same. I'm sad. I'm going through things, and you get so far, and then you just get stuck. If I had someone next to me and I could just go,

"Hey, what's going on here?" I'm pretty sure most of the time it's a one-minute explanation, and I'm like, "Ah, yeah, I'm just being an idiot. It's this." But when you don't have that person there, and you're just trying to Google through stuff and go back a step, it is incredibly frustrating.

Right. It's one thing to learn a programming language. Anybody can learn a programming language. Anybody can learn basic programming logic, but to then take that and use it for something, is hard. To go from your little safe Python development environment to building an application

and getting it on Git, or what have you, using libraries or compiling all of it. It just gets very unwieldy very quickly for the untrained laymen trying to go their own way. Exactly. But like you say, especially with what's going on in Bitcoin, it seems that this is going

to be a very useful skill. Absolutely. Yeah, I would recommend anybody who's unhappy with their lot in life to consider software, because you don't need a degree to work in software. You can learn what you need to learn online, and you've got to be willing to work pretty hard, because it's

not easy, that's for sure. But there's so much open-source software that you can work and contribute to and get experience. I'm excited about it, so maybe you'll feel the same. You're listening.

All right. Well, listen, I think we'll probably wrap it up there, because I try and not keep these too long. But like I said before, thank you so much for coming on. It's been really, really good.

Hopefully, off there, we'll have a little bit chat about software development in the future, because it sounds like we're doing similar sort of things. So yeah, it's always good to learn.

Sure, man. Hit me up anytime. Same with your listeners if they ever want to chat. I'm happy to talk. You guys can find me at HeavilyRMC, the letter C on Twitter. Yeah, and your podcast. My podcast is Bitcoin Echo Chamber. You can just go to Bitcoinechochamber.com. It's not a super active podcast. I don't upload every week or

anything, but I have some pretty good episodes on there, which might go back and listen to. All right, mate. Well, yeah. Thank you very much for coming on, and yeah, I'm sure we'll speak soon.

Thanks, Max. I enjoyed it. Thanks, mate.