EP49 Bitcoin podcast with Giacomo Zucco

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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Now what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah! Oh! The greatest scam in history. Let's get it! Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Alright you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in this space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back to Bit by BitEveryone. Today I got to speak to Giacomo Zuko.

I've really been looking forward to this for some time. I love this conversation and I hope you enjoy listening. Before we jump in, I just wanted to say thank you so much for everyone who's been reaching out, asking questions and who's been enjoying the show.

If you want to help build the show, if you can like, subscribe, share with any friends, that really, really helped me to continue to book great guests and also thank you for Coin4UK for sponsoring the show and allowing you to purchase one you like.

Enjoy. Hello? Giacomo, can you hear me? Yeah, can you? Can you? Yeah, I can hear you now. I have my volume right now. How are you? Fine, thank you and thank you for the patience for the organization.

I know it's very, I'm playing the diva but it's always very difficult to play calendar theatres. No, it's fine. It's not a problem at all. It's really nice to have you on. It's been something that I've wanted to do for a long time and I've really respected listening to your views on statism

and your ideas on Bitcoin and everything else almost from the beginning of getting involved. So, it's a real pleasure to have you on. Thanks. They're yours, mate. So, yeah, Snao Toshi was doing all the organization in the background because I was deplatformed for the third time now this year

for speaking my mind about this stuff and it's only spurred me on more to... It's amazing, isn't it, freedom of speech is being eroded before our eyes and it's made me more and more push this podcast towards kind of the idea of freedom of speech and being able to control our own data and being able to fight back

against this sort of status the way that things are going and I couldn't think of anyone better than you to have on and help me wrap my head around it because there are still some holes in my theories and things that I wanted to pick your brains on and I think this year has proved more than ever how important it is

that we challenge things and that we change to a better system. Well, sure. My pleasure. I always like to evolve my thought by challenging with other people. And also I can start right away even before you ask anything specific, asking myself and wondering myself

if deplatforming is really, consistently speaking, a problem of freedom of speech and this may just seem like an academic debate, like a very abstract debate but I think it makes sense to actually really get to the bottom of these questions because the point is that we cannot react to what is happening around us

irrationally, just reacting and going in the other contrarian way. I think that people who loves reason and logic and freedom which is actually a derivative of logic and reason. People who like reason, they have to be consistent.

They have to be also sometimes a little bit obnoxious about not overreacting being proportionate and I always wondered, I always thought that deplatforming is a very interesting challenge we have right now because, well, at least let me put it this way.

It was a very interesting challenge until last year because we went through ages in which censorship was actual censorship, so it was the power of the state coming to your home and arresting you if you were disagreeing and basically using violence, initiation of force against your property

because of your opinion and that was clearly censorship and something that was pretty common around the world, basically everywhere. And then we started to use the same word to actually mean something a little bit more subtle, a little bit more nuanced, which was deplatforming.

So theoretically private business, a guy who created a platform that put some effort in a platform to grow the platform, decided that you're not welcome on the platform anymore because of some reason that maybe internal inconsistent, maybe dubious, maybe not nice, but they are just their reason.

I mean, they are the owners of the platform. So there was a lot, I remember a lot of discussion with fellow libertarians and fellow liberty minded people about can we really call it censorship or not?

And it seems like only semantics, but it's not just semantics because against censorship, against violence censorship, I have the right to rebel proportionally using even force. While against deplatforming from a private property, I just have the right to move away to another property.

But then I say that this was a challenge last year, because after these coronazism madness this year, I think that we actually are finally back to a more clear picture. There have been cases in Australia of, I remember the case of that family wife and mother being arrested in her home in front of her children

for publishing a Facebook post in Australia, not like in Belarus or Kyrgyzstan or whatever in Australia. And so now the actual censorship is, the lines are a little bit blurred. There is something like, for example, what happened to Gab, the social network. Gab is quite interesting because it is just business

and free market deplatforming, so it's just boycott on the level, because basically Twitter banned this guy, so he created another Twitter. But then the guy providing the company, providing the hosting for the remote server, basically discontinued the service, and that was, of course, a problem.

But then this guy created another hosting and hosting platform. But then he did it with the money coming through PayPal, and then PayPal basically disconnected the service. So at which point, when you have all the market apparently consistently colluded against somebody, this is still just a question about, you know,

move away and do that in your own property. So it's very, I mean, I still think that deplatforming is not, probably we should still keep this separated term for the reason that the level of critical severity of policemen breaking into an apartment and arresting and uncapping a woman in front of her children

and dragging her to a cell for her opinion is such an aura, it's so terrible, so incredible, that probably it's not correct to just throw it together with a guy suspending their service to you, especially in case of Google, YouTube, they are basically free services to us in exchange of advertising.

And so it's still bad, but I think that in the first case, we have to really think about non-compliance and even use a force, I think proportionally use a force. On the second level, probably we have to get better at working the, you know, the cypherpunk talk, you know, cypherpunk write code.

I mean, we probably, it's right to complain if we feel that the policy of some, I don't know, if Google sensors you or if Twitter sensors you, it's right to complain, but maybe we can do something more.

For example, I was thinking about Twitter and then it stopped because I'm already talking a lot and you didn't even ask it. No, no, it's good, it's good. But because it's, you know, it's something that I happen to think about a lot, so even without a specific question, I have a train of thoughts about this topic.

So about Twitter, I'm thinking that Twitter is not really, so you have been censored on Twitter, you created another profile, that was not a very high friction, right? You just create another profile, you can even do that with the same email if you just put like a particular character in the first part of the name.

So it's not that much of a friction. The friction is to getting me to follow you again because now you have to explain me that you have the new account and you have to message me and you end up in spam.

So what if we create, for example, an automatic Chrome extension or something that will register using the Twitter API all the followers and followers and when we exchange some kind of public key, like we do it on a basically on key base or something like that.

And automatically, when we want to create a new Twitter profile, the Twitter profile will insta-follow everybody we were following and send a message to everybody telling us to follow the new one with a signed message.

And if our friends, I mean, if I'm running the plugin as well, you get sent, sorry, you create a new user. You send me the message, my plugin will instantaneously follow you automatically because I already have the signed message.

So I don't even have to do the effort. So this is just an example. I will not build it because I'm already committed in a few things. But these are, I think there are a few low-hanging fruits that we can start using, not instead of complaining, but together with pointing out that the censorship doesn't make any sense.

I think you make a good point in terms of we should be using technology to our advantage to overcome this kind of thing that's going on because, you know, it can be done. I think the thing is with things like Twitter, you know, they have the network effects and it's easy to say, "Oh, well, let's just start our own version of Twitter."

But it doesn't quite work like that. And also, when you're talking about the difference between the platforming and being dragged out your house, of course, like, you know, one of them is disgusting, it's absolutely horrific.

It makes me feel sick to think about it. And the other was an inconvenience for me. It was a pain in the arse. But what I see is it's a sort of sliding scale and it starts with one thing and it ends somewhere completely different.

And I think for people who are getting banned from, you know, it is a company and they can decide who they want on their platform and not. But some of the things that people are getting banned for, you know, talking about a money that they believe could be better for society or saying that they believe the free speech is important

and getting banned for that is a little bit different to racial abuse or, you know, threatening people or anything like that on a platform. And it does worry me that people can't speak their mind about issues that seem to be things that should be discussed by more people, not less.

Well, I agree. I agree. The reason I pointed out the difference is that I think that rational people must always be proportional. And we have to use proportionality, basically, as a guiding principle.

And that's what you use when you do self-defense in general. You don't shoot with a bazooka. There is like a small bit of trying to steal an apple. That's not proportional. I mean, people who are aggressive, they are giving up their rights proportionality to their aggression, basically by a stopping argument, like Stephen Kinsella

and other Western economics explained. So if you want to be proportional, I think that, I mean, if you see somebody entering a home and kidnapping a woman because of her speech, the only proportionality there is calling that behavioral criminal, and that is a very strong statement.

But it basically implies that even a forceful reaction to this criminality would be justified, and I think it would. Of course, it would not be simple or strategically convenient. It may be a disaster, but at least from a point of view of justice, it would be justification, it would be justified, even maybe strategically stupid.

Well, on stuff like Twitter, I think that the real proportionality for us is actually to, I mean, maybe cultural, we don't have to normalize. We can say that the company has the right to implement stupid policies, but we have the right to call it stupid, and we should probably not normalize the stupidity over a certain level.

So stupidity, but even also in consistency. You cannot say anything about a particular source of virus, but you can say everything you want about another virus. You can talk about curative crystals, but you cannot talk about vitamin D.

There is no consistency inside. You can talk about eating the rich and doing the Marxist revolution, and you will not be even demonetized. Well, if you talk about central banks, you will be canceled.

So there is inconsistent. And what we can do is not letting them normalizing it. And so, it's true. These companies are the right to implement super stupid policies. And we have the right to criticize it and to build alternative tools.

And you mentioned the network effect, but I'm starting to think more and more and more that actually, if we start to be a little bit less lazy, I know that I tell, it's not that you are lazy and they are lazy.

I am lazy in the first place all the time. I follow convenience over principles many, many times. But if we start to become a little bit more cipher-punk in this sense, there are some low-hanging fruit.

I give you another example, we cannot move from Twitter to this new, we tried right with Mastodon. With Mastodon, there is this bitcoin hackers instance managed, I think by Novakov or somebody.

And a few people move there, like a wax-wing move there for good, and Luke Dasher moved there partially. But the point is that I'm not moving there because there is too many people here on Twitter.

So I stay here. So what can we do? For example, we can have better tools to seamlessly publish across platforms. And when I say across platforms, I don't just mean that, I mean, Luke Dasher writes something on Mastodon and this is posted on Twitter.

This is easy. This is already done. This is super easy. But the point is that I want some kind of Twitter profile connected with some tool that will read all the things that the people I was following writes on Twitter and will translate it inside the view of this other platform.

I mean, I don't want to enter into technical details because our discussion is more political. But my point is I think there are a lot of things we can do with technology to mitigate the situation that we are not yet doing because until last year, the situation wasn't convenient but was not dramatic yet.

It was not really out. I mean, it was bad, but it was tolerable. This year around the thing that the situation started to become absolutely intolerable. The things that are happening are so stupid.

My friend yesterday received a message from Facebook that a Facebook post that he was writing, but he didn't published. So he was preparing a post, but then he was not publishing it. He was keeping it as a draft, and Facebook basically communicated him that the draft was canceled because it was containing like a wrong medical advice

or something like that. Of course, it was about medicine at all. It was about politics and dictatorship and freedom and stuff like that. So even the draft is completely out of control. So now the situation is so bad that I have some hope people will find incentives to become more activist with tools and building and software

and work around and hacks. Yeah, it's interesting. You said it was workable last year and this year, things have changed. It's kind of how I feel about it. Where do you see this all going in terms of, you know, we've seen some absolutely fucking stupid things happening this year

and there's so much fear flying around and the control is just tightening and tightening and this grip I'm noticing in the UK. People seem to just go along with whatever they're told now, although they won't, they won't actually say it out loud or in the open.

I think more and more people are becoming sick of it. And they are starting to wake up to the idea that maybe not everything that's being done by the government is in their best interest.

And I just wonder where you see this going. Like, can it ever be reversed or will power just always want more power? And until we overthrow it, it's just going to get worse. Well, the honest answer is I really don't know.

I thought I knew I could kind of try to predict the general political dynamics again until last year when everything seemed bad and corrupt and decadent but more rational than now. And then after the coronavirus, I really cannot predict reliably the political reactions of the people and of the politicians anymore.

I'll give you a few examples. When I was at the beginning in February, January, even, I was looking at as many people, I was looking at videos coming from China about, like, whistleblower disappeared about the virus and people falling on the street.

And of course, theoretically speaking, the possibility of some kind of sickness killing people around the world is absolutely possible. So at the beginning of January, at the end of January, and even at the beginning of February, I was taking seriously concern.

I was asking my wife to keep her parents insulated because they are old. We were taking active precautions just like some, I mean, not as crazy as people are doing now, but back then without information, I was kind of concerned.

And I was a little bit pissed that political bodies like the World Health Organization and a few politicians in Italy, they were actually downplaying, since the virus back then was not within the narrative, the priority narrative was, yes, there is the apocalypse and we need more government to stop the apocalypse,

but the apocalypse is, you know, global warming, climate change and capitalism and patriarchy. I mean, there were other kinds of apocalypse to stop. So this specific apocalypse was not in the rather back then.

And most political bodies, they were minimizing it. One of the reasons the World Health Organization was actively minimizing is that they are basically, they are in bed with China, and China's Communist Party was asking them to downplay it, and also the first kind of alarms about the novel coronavirus arrived from basically Taiwan.

And so in order not to recognize Taiwan as a counterpart even in an emergency call, China decided to cancel the alarm from Taiwan and even the World Health Organization. So it was kind of, at the beginning, it was like, this is bad because government bodies are actively sabotaging any kind of health prevention.

And then they started to say around that the masks were completely useless, and whoever was wearing a mask was basically a bad person and stupid, and it was damaging people. And so they were basically downplaying everything.

And then I started rationally to think, okay, now they are switching a little bit the narrative, but come on, there is a limit to the degree of complete turnaround of the narrative you can do in a few days without being clearly ridiculous, ridiculous by everybody.

I mean, it's impossible that the World Health Organization will move from there is no pandemics and Taiwan doesn't exist into, oh, there is the pandemics because now China said the race. And it's impossible that politicians that are mocking people wearing masks

and they are saying that whoever is scared about the virus is racist against Chinese people, now they cannot switch to we are all dying and we have to stop everything. So my first prediction was, okay, there is a little bit of consistency that they have to preserve at least a period of consistency,

so they will not switch from nothing is happening to we are all dying. And then it happened. This widget overnight from nothing is happening. And I even remember World Health Organization, WHO, was sending, there was this statement, this news about them suggesting government to censor people creating panic about the virus.

So everybody was saying there is a virus, it's bad. They were asking social networks to censor it because it was spreading pain. So this widget from that, the fake news back then were that kind of news.

For example, zero edge was not suspended from Twitter because it was downplaying the virus or saying that the virus is not so terrible. Zero edge was suspended because they say that the virus was terrible and possibly created in laboratory.

So the narrative at the beginning was everything which is going in the direction of panic and fear is fake news and we have to censor it. And that is widget overnight to the completely opposite narrative in which everybody was not super scared and terrorized and is not giving up anything else,

including curing other diseases and including keeping the economy running, including keeping basic human rights respected. Everybody was even thinking about everything, anything which is not coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 prevention is basically criminal with killing the grammar.

So remember coming back from the United States with the last flight from New York to Milan with my wife and she said, "But what is now? They are basically locking down Milan just like they did in China."

And that was basically, I was in completely denial. I say, "Well, come on, it's impossible. Do you really figure like Italian policeman locking down a city like in China? We don't have a strong enough communist party with an army."

They cannot do that, it's impossible. Then we arrived home and after a week it happened for real. What was predicting was impossible to happen. And not only that it was possible because they decided to do it, but my hope that something like that was unenforceable because you don't have enough

policemen to stop people from entering the next city Milan, the way it happened is that citizens self-enforced and locally enforced, the total of down to everybody else, people started to throw water an object yelling at people going outside home.

There are a lot of history of like, so the way they enforced it is on one hand to give excessive punishment to people not staying home. So people running alone in the wood, they were arrested and they recited the criminal accusation, not just the economical find.

So they had the criminal, basically the criminal curriculum ruined for that stuff. That there were incredible scenes like I remember the primetime main television program where the host was in connection with the helicopter, the helicopter of the Italian version of the IRS.

They were following a guy running on a beach alone until they finally arrested him. It's just like, you know Ray Bradbury when there is the guy in Fahrenheit, there is the guy running because he was not burning books anymore.

And so there is like the hound which is hunting him and people watching from television the hound just like a hunger games level of craziness. And so people were also self enforcing like people throwing water and throwing stones at other guys, your neighbor was exiting and they were basically trying to tell you

to call the police or to throw your stuff. So my prediction basically went south very, very fast. And then I remember another moment in which I said I started to see the Black Life Matters situation with the Lloyd murder.

And I said, okay, this murder was bad objectively. The American police is out of control, this is objective. I don't care about the races, I don't really care about that. But this is clearly a movement against the police.

And let's see what's happening now. I was seeing oceanic seas of people floating the streets. And then I said, okay, if now they shifted in one minute, in the word of one minute, they shifted from everybody should stay home and everybody was going out of their home is a criminal killing grammars.

Now they are saying that it's okay because the race is bad, so everybody should be outside gathering millions in places. And even in Italy, you know, there were like two million people protesting for Black Life Matters in London, everywhere.

So they cannot keep this double standard. Now that the problem is back to racism, they cannot keep the same level of craziness about health because the narrative is shifted. And yet they prove me wrong again and they manage to basically say that whoever is going to prove like extinction or extinction rebellion, manifestation is okay.

Black Life Matters manifestation is okay. But if you do something which is like different, then you would be like in Australia, you would be arrested. And even in Berlin, people got arrested and dragged forcefully away from the square.

So right now, this is a very long introduction to tell you that all my realistic models of the level of craziness are at this point completely overcome by reality data. The situation is crazier than any kind of simulation I could have done.

So it's very difficult for me to project things forward at this point. And really, unironically preparing for any kind of bullshit scenario, even things that I was thinking were conspiracy theories, survivalist, prepare paranoia one year ago.

Now, I'm actively preparing for that, like stuff like under-skinned chips or crazy stuff that were basically the content of crazy conspiracy theory. Now, I'm preparing for that because there is really no limit anymore to what is expectable and what not, because the population manage, okay, you're right in a way.

It's clear, it's obvious, it's in the air that people don't trust authority anymore. There is no trust. So the trust is broken. You cannot easily find somebody really racially stating that the so-called scientists are trusted and reliable or politicians or bureaucrats or judges or cops.

They are formally, racially, anti-authority. But then they are so little, they are so little commitment to rationality in general. They are so scared, panicked, irrational that they cannot form any kind of independent thought.

So they fold back to the thing that the authorities say the last minute by default, even if they trust it. So even my family and friends, I see that they are skeptical of what the government said.

But they don't know what to think in general and that's so deep and so disrupted that at the end they follow back to think what the government said, even if they officially say that they don't trust it anymore.

I think a lot of it seems like it's just that they're controlled by fear and you've got, you know, like you've just said, everything you've said, none of it makes sense. Like nothing that's happened this year makes sense.

Nothing that you could rationally predict happening happened. And it's kind of difficult for me. I'm trying to wrap my head around it and think, like I obviously have the idea that nothing that they're doing is actually for our benefit.

But what I can't work out is why, like I can't work out what is to be gained other than potentially like a controlled demolition of the economy, more control. You know, outside of that, I can't really understand it.

And this idea of this potentially forced vaccine and getting the militaries involved and the tracking and all of this stuff, it scares the shit out of me. And the fact that nothing makes sense.

I just spend my days just sort of rattling around in my own brain trying to work something out. And I wonder if maybe that's the goal. It's just confused the fuck out of everyone so that just no one knows which way's up.

And then they have a plan after that. I don't know. Well, I cannot exclude anything for sure, of course, but I'm very skeptical about the consistent organized plan, because of several reasons.

First of all, if you look back at all the nonsense, if you had a plan, you will play out better. For example, avoiding the self-own about the masks before they are forbidden, they are mandatory, you will be more consistent if there was a plan you think.

Unless, as you say, the plan itself is to gaslight people with contradictory messages until people are basically getting mad. But then again, I'm skeptical about central planning in general.

I think that one of the reasons I'm skeptical about the government is that you cannot plan successfully complex system at scale in the long run. Because you don't have the -- as Hayek demonstrated, you don't have the information and you don't have the incentives as public choice theory demonstrated.

You don't even have the right incentive to plan. So you can do a planning for your life, and that's already difficult. You can do a planning for your family, and that's more complicated. You can do it for your company, and you have to be -- you have to have a great discipline, a great mind, and a great adaptability to plan a company.

But then over that, when you enter -- when you try to plan the life of millions, you fail. And I think that this failure is both ways. You fail if you have a good plan. Like you want to -- you want to basically plan the economy to eliminate poverty and to do something, and you fail.

You want to fix the climate in order to have always the better climate possible everywhere, and you fail, and you produce a lot of unintended consequences. And I think that even if you want to scare people out of their mind globally with a well-designed conspiracy, you eventually fail, because it's a complex system.

And you can never know when somebody will backfire, and somebody will actually create a negative feedback loop and go the other way around, because they're a complex system, and this is the lives of million people.

So I don't think that any human being cannot plan for the good of everybody or for the bad. They don't have consistent incentives, and they don't have complete information. So I'm very skeptical about design, and I think that most of the things happening in a complex system, they are emerging from local incentives.

And in the case of the modern world, the local incentives are very similar across the world. And if I think about, like, my friends that actually supported the mass incarceration, the home incarceration of people, or my family members that were supporting this craziness,

and I have to think -- I mean, they are not clearly part of any conspiracy. There is something local. There is some local incentive to do that. So in a way, I think that you are right. This is about control.

But it's not about control like a small cabal of people running, like, lying down a plan to take control of the world and to do, like, the greater set. I think it's more about, like, a cultural obsession, a global cultural virus, which basically convinced the generation of people that central planning can work

and that -- I mean, there is a lot of cultural roots of this madness. If you think about that, now there is a COVID-19 disease. But before that, the world was already ready for an apocalypse.

It was like -- it was an incredible gift for the mainstream culture that there is the global deadly pandemic. Because before that, there was -- the planet was dying in a matter of days because of global warming and climate change.

And even now, sometimes when there is no, like, stupid news about the number of tests, positive RPC tests, there is no scary news about coronavirus, and then you will immediately find people falling back to, like, wildfires created by global warming or, I don't know, pollution or whatever.

So the culture was ready, but not ready at the level of some kind of secret cabal governing the world. Already at the level of the guy who was just talking to you at lunch at the office and your family member, the more mainstream people you know were already convinced of a few cultural, let's say, frameworks, which are basically --

humanity is bad, and the solution is government always. And you cannot trust people because they will misbehave, but somehow magically you can trust people in government because they are not people anymore.

Now they are the mystical body of government. So now they are free from their sins as -- so, basically. And as many Bitcoiners say, stateism is a religion. It is truly a religion. It is a very complex religion.

It is not a unified church, but it is a religion. And it is somehow a parody of Christianity, where there is actually an original scene, original scene may be, well, you may be patriarchy or racism or global warming or whatever.

Another is the things that are ritual that you have to do. You have to recycle this bottle. Even if I show you that the numbers of something you are doing with this bottle don't matter, you don't care about the numbers because this is a ritual.

You have to be part of your conversion of your -- I mean, you will get your metaphysical reward by participating to this ritual. The same goes for, I don't know, putting the mask on even if you are not -- even if you are in the middle of a jungle alone, you put your mask because that's a ritual.

And at a certain level, even voting and election are the same, you can -- I mean, I get mad because I studied some statistics when I was in university. And so every time I discuss with people about politics, I try to watch into these paradox.

So people discussing about useful vote. Like, I prefer this candidate more. I don't like this candidate, but I have to choose between realistic scenario. And since candidate A, let's say, I don't know, Vermin Supreme, he cannot win.

So I have to vote for Biden or for Trump. But the point is that, okay, you are doing a practical choice, but I can show you that, practically speaking, the probability that your single vote will affect the reality around you in a pragmatic way.

If you count the number of votes in people's, your vote has less probability to affect reality than you have a probability to be hit by a meteorite by going to the ballot, basically. It's realistically impossible.

Just like if I jump now, maybe everybody else is jumping, so we will change the rotation axis of the Earth, and so we will fix the climate. But it's completely, the probability are practically zero.

So, then people, so I tell them, your vote cannot change reality. But then they answer me, okay, but sometimes you do things not because they affect the reality on their own, but because if everybody did like this, like, you know, I can't get an imperative, I act as I would want everybody else to act.

So, but in this case, you don't have to choose the lesser evil. In this case, you can just write anarchy on your ballot. You can just write by Bitcoin. You can just, I mean, you can just stay home and decide that home is your ballot because if everybody else stayed home.

So, you see, there is a paradox in which people really stop thinking and they believe that I have friends that are like they spent hours concerned about what to vote at the election, because like it's a moral choice that we'll have any consequence or reality.

But it doesn't. It's a religious ritual. It only has a consequence if you think that this metaphysical, progressive, political framework of the world makes any sense at all. So, to get back to my answer is I think this is about control.

I think that like that medical doctors and hospital directors that get more money for inflating the numbers, they will do that. I think that people like journalists that get more money and more clicks by scary people, they scare people.

So, everybody has a local incentives. The local incentives of some categories is about fear because fear is a great marketing tool. So, many people use fear to sell it, maybe to sell it to the government, to get subsidies or to get rewards or something.

And in particular, politicians and borrowers, so the parts of the components of the state, their local incentives is always to find a problem that politics can fix. So, they will always overblown any problem.

And if it's not COVID-19, it will be climate or it will be racism or something. And the funny thing is that most of the time, these problems are problems that the government and politics created in the first place.

Racism is bad because it's bad to judge people by the amount of money in their skin. It's objectively bad. But then again, without a systemic slavery system created and supported by the state, without laws keeping people segregated without apartheid, I mean, all the genocides in the world, the

racial-based genocides, but even other kinds of genocides, they were only possible because of the political machine of the state. There was always impossible to have localized random weirdos.

I mean, you can have the local weirdo going around with a KKK mask and being very nasty and being an asshole. But you cannot have a scale, mass murder without the machine of the government actively enforcing it.

So the government is creating problems or such as a comparative problem, like even pandemics. Pandemics are bad and they are natural. But without World War I, you will not have had the Spanish flu as big as that because the war destroyed the livelihood and the iconic standards and the immune system of people.

And without the world of the 100 years between England and France in the beginning of the 14th century, you will not have the Black Death in Europe because it was a partially consequence of the political devastation of a giant war.

And even now, without China actively trying to hide the virus at the beginning, you will not have this kind of panic and confusion situation. And without government forcing people for environmental reasons to remember the rhetoric about public transportation.

So cars are bad because you are polluting. So everybody should go always in public transportation, which is basically a petri dish, which is basically people after it. I mean, it's terrible, right? And same for school, like homeschooling is bad.

Kids should actually stay in this concentration camp, on the donation camp with other 30 kids of their same age in small spaces. And now you have the problem of contagion. I mean, it didn't take a genius to see that mass schooling is a huge spreader of diseases in general.

So the government creates problem, and then there is always local incentive to take the problem that they created and to sell themselves as the solution. And this is happening very, very – I mean, this is going very well.

This is going great. Now, the level of skepticism of people about that is very, very low incredibly. Yeah. I think, well, firstly, there's a lot to unpack there. Like, one of the main things I've picked out from what you've said is, you know, the incentive systems are there, they're in place that everything always grows government.

It always gets bigger because they're creating problems, then, like you say, they're selling a solution and that they are the solution to the problem that they've created themselves. And then we go along with it, and the people on every level of society go along with it,

because it creates jobs and money for them, and they don't think about the bigger picture. And then we're talking about this is a huge system, a massive complex system, and that all of these complex systems fail, central planning fails.

And what we've got is a government that controls us more and more and gets bigger and bigger, and then we've got a financial system that controls us and is getting bigger and bigger and more crazy by the day, and we know that both of these fail, but we carry on with them,

and then conversely, you've got Bitcoin, which has a completely different incentive system, which we know works, and there's a very small group of people who are basically saying, "Can we just fucking wake up and see that there's another option and that what you're doing is crazy?"

And those people are kind of seen as the crazy ones. So how does it happen that the current system, does it have to collapse? Does it have to be that people actually stand up and wake up and go to something that is a better system and stores their value better?

And therefore, by taking that, being able to take that weapon away from governments, which is that they can control people, they can create slaves through debt, and they can control people that way.

If we take that away from them, do you see that that is a big step forward in bringing the state to be at least smaller, if not completely, going away? Yeah, so what we are seeing here is basically a positive feedback loop, like a vicious circle.

You can find it even in nature, and there are some, most of the situations in nature you have an excess on one side, and then there will be a negative feedback that will actually recreate or rebalance, but sometimes you enter some situation that are basically positive feedback loops.

And then you have growing and growing and growing and some kind of explosion, and then you have a return to actually not to normality, but to the other extreme and then eventually to normality after the explosion.

So I fear that the political situation and social situation and the economic situation may be similar to this kind of feedback loop. I don't see many negative feedback loop triggered. Yeah, there are some, like in a way Bitcoin is itself a reaction to the overreach of financial censorship and financial manipulation.

So if the government didn't start censoring WikiLeaks and inflating the dollars, if there was no inflation, no censorship, no financial exclusion, people would just use fear, maybe a good kind of fear.

Maybe with a gold standard, if e-gold was not ruled illegal, and the creators of e-gold in the 2000s were not jailed, maybe we would just use e-gold. So Bitcoin exists because they exaggerated on one path.

So you have some kind of negative feedbacks, but I don't see these negative feedbacks mitigating and slowing down the madness. In a certain way, it's even accelerating it. So it's a tool for some people to protect themselves, to protect their families, to protect their future in the accelerated madness,

but it doesn't seem like something that is going to discolate the madness until it's over. And if I think back to other examples of very bad political negative feedback or positive actually, but positive negative sense, positive feedback group, you can see the Soviet Union.

And, I mean, yeah, there was a reformation at Peristroika, but the reality is that Yeltsin and Gorbachev, this was not like discolating and undoing. This was just waiting for the peak of the problem to explode and collapse and total collapse.

And then some people just managed the liquidation of the collapsed society and the collapsed state and the collapsed economy with a lot of suffering and a lot of pain and a lot of waste and loss.

So even if you go even, I think the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc is probably stranger now, it's a very extreme image, but it's not even as extreme as the thing we are looking forward to in my opinion.

Because when the Soviet bloc collapsed, the other bloc, which was the mildly democratic socialist bloc of the, let's say the mildly version of socialism in America, they were actually alive and kicking.

So you had one flavor of socialism collapsing in the east, and one other flavor of socialism actually striving in the west. And so the collapse of one was just mitigated by the fact that the world had another reference point in the second.

So, I mean, the Soviet Union is over, now it's the Pax Americana, it's the center of the United States. But then probably what we are looking at now is the collapse of the center of the world, the collapse of the United States itself.

I mean, we had the speaker of the Congress yesterday basically ventilating the hypothesis of removing the president in charge because of what it was saying about the disease, about COVID.

So it's unprecedented. If you think about that, it's crazier than the thing you may read on history books. So if the center of the modern world are going toward the collapse, and even speaking from the monetary point of view, it's not yen that is going to make more noise while falling.

It's the United States dollar, the entire global economic system is based from a center bank point of view and also from a correspondence, correspondancy bank for international payments and clearing and settlement.

Everything is based more or less over the specific center point of failure of the Federal Reserve. So if we have that, this is even bigger than the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is probably something closer to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the fourth, fifth century after Christ.

So something closer to that. And again, I cannot be sure that there is no way to discalate the spiral. But most of the time, this kind of spiral, if they keep going worse and worse, they will just reach a level where they just explode.

And you will just have like the price of Bitcoin. You see there is a bubble, the ICO bubble around the Bitcoin bubble in 2017. You see the kind of reasoning that people is using to buy Bitcoin.

They are into a completely irrational expectation that it will double the price every day. In the peak of 2017, the 17th, the 17th, the norm is that we are talking to. They were not, they were completely unaware of what Bitcoin is, but they were certain that it was going to double in price every day.

And how can you, how can you discalate that slowly? You can, you can just see the limit of this. And then you will not see a nice, soft, smooth escalation. You will see a collapse. And so I'm not trying to play the Cassandra here, but I think, I don't know, I don't know, sociologically very unlikely that we can discalate this situation

without a very, very huge collapse. Yeah, I have to agree. And you were saying earlier about voting, basically just being an illusion of choice. And I do feel that no matter what people think they can do with their vote or with sitting around a dinner table and discussing politics, it doesn't change anything.

And it seems very much that things are just going towards chaos, just pure chaos and that you will have some form of collapse. You have to, like nothing this crazy can continue forever. And this is why I'm sort of very much trying to work out now.

Well, how do, how do we look at a world where we can be self-sulfurant and how do we use the technology that is available to us to be prepared for this? And I just did the hackers' Congress, the paranormal police.

I was on the HCP TV for the sort of, for the weekend and soaking in as much as I could about all the tech and sort of how to use it and how to, you know, really protect myself. But the only way I can see this going is a lot of pain and a lot of misery.

It's not the way I want it to go, but it does scare the hell out of me. And, you know, is there any way that this can happen in a more peaceful way? Or do we have to see some kind of civil war and some kind of massive overthrow of governments?

Or is there any other option? Well, the option which is closer to the image that I was trying to summon before, which is the collapse of the Roman Empire, is not even really civil war. It's not really even a violent overthrowing of the government.

It's a level of collapse of the institutions where, I mean, I guess I'm not sure. I'm not even an historian, but I guess the typical Roman citizen in the 400 after Christ, he didn't really care anymore about the violent overthrowing of government because there was no government.

People by themselves, basically, the culture and the logistics and the technology were basically absorbed into the spiral of madness of the government. Of course, again, one of the main points of the destruction and this collapse and the previous perversion was the money.

At the end of the Roman Empire, money was the main symptom and also the main cows of the decline of Roman civilization. So money was going through massive manipulation and inflation and debasement.

And people could not trust money anymore, so they started to use alternative and less effective monetary means. And people could not trust religion anymore because the Roman politics was falling and people could not trust the government anymore.

They basically collapsed, which, I mean, right now, if you look at the United States, it seems like it's close to some kind of civil war because you can see these two blocks like in a way is still right versus left.

So you see the crazy work culture that wants to cancel everything and throw status down. And then you see the conservatives that want to, well, conserve in a way. Like, can we just go back to the way things were in the 80s, which is actually, I think that even if I don't find that situation completely symmetrical,

I understand that the one party here is completely out of their mind in a more picturesque and more crazy way than the other. But still, both parties, both sides of the civil war are basically going to lose.

It's not like American conservatives understand what the Fed is doing under a conservative administration isn't sustainable and it's crazy and it's going to explode.

So, in a way, you see both parties ready to kill each other in a civil war, but I think that what is more likely is that both party will start to understand eventually when we reach the tipping point, which I don't know where it is and when it is.

But after that tipping point, you basically see these disfections just losing interest and a small reduced amount of people trying to get power over what is left. So, I don't know, a collapse is not necessarily a civil war.

But anyway, getting back to your question and also giving some positivity, some positive twist to this person. Yeah, so dark, it's so dark. We went in a dark place. I mean, we are trying to be realistic, but it was not very, very happy as an image.

I think that in a way, the current situation, technologically speaking, is very close to the original cypherpunk dream. These people in the 90s, they were basically thinking about a society. They were very influenced by the cyberpunk, let's say, the dystopian framework.

And they were thinking of the future in which everything is basically intermediated by technology and internet. And if you manage to, I mean, they were in a way, they were giving the physical freedom of movement, of going around as already lost in a way.

And they were focusing on saving the freedom of the cyberspace, so-called, which is the only place in which you could actually try to keep government out because the government cannot arrest your internet avatar if you just disconnect the internet.

So as long as you can control somehow, or you can avoid that the government controls any access to the internet, you can still find freedom within the internet, within the cyberspace, so-called, this is a little bit a boomer expression cyberspace, but still it's very effective.

And this vision by the original cypherpons were a little bit naive and very niche because people don't work like that. People don't, I mean, except for nerds, people, they want to work around, they want to interact face to face, they want to go to conferences.

And yet, I think it's very indicative that even if Satoshi Nakamoto was a perfect pseudonym that was never violated with a great of sec, most of the people working with Khan, including me and you, but even the developers, they usually use their name and face.

And there are a few people that try to stay anonymous for a while, but then they just see that it's not worthy because you miss the fan out of conference, so you say, "Okay, screw up sec, this is my name, this is my face."

I'm still trying it, I'm still trying it and I'm getting close to exactly what you're saying because it is so hard.

It's hard, right? Even now, from a certain point of view, your voice is giving us something and it's very difficult and you are missing out. Of course, you can have double persona, you can have a public persona which is a little bit low profile, and then a more vocal persona which is anonymous.

You can do stuff, but the reality is that very few people can keep that going because you don't have – until now, we didn't have strong reasons to do that. In my life, I've not yet been – I have friends that have been stopped in airports for several hours for Bitcoin stuff.

To me, it never happened yet, so I'm very privileged so far, so I'm not really – I don't feel the incentive very strong to stay anonymous. But under the situation that the world is going to, I think that somehow it's like a perfect cyberpunk scenario.

I mean, cyberpunk, we're imagining a world where you never leave your computer and if you do, you wear a hoodie and a mask in order to hide yourself, and you just ship stuff through internet services and you just pay over the internet.

Which is basically what the world was or used to during March and April. It's like a country. Of course, nerds, particularly the computer nerds, they were, I think, the less affected people by this because they already had smart working.

They already – they actually like to hide their face with a mask. Some people in parallel in the police, they were wearing masks before the pandemic emergency.

So they were already used to that. In a way, the world that this craziness is building is a world that is actually incentivizing people to go further and further into the rabbit hole of crypto anarchy in a way.

Most of the – some of the people I know, they never even tried to like work in the black market or in the gray market because they had great fiat regulated wages.

But now they are in trouble. And now they start to sell consultancies online and they don't want to use PayPal because they don't have the bureaucratic approved code to work in that sector.

So they are forced to ask for a – for some kind of informal tip for the – for the job. And you cannot send an informal tip over the – over the internet with credit cards because it's not informal anymore.

So you'd have to use Bitcoin. It's not huge yet, but I think it's growing. It's a trend.

But a word in which everybody is forced to limit the interaction, the physical interaction is a word where the cipherpunk and crypto anarchy, especially scenario, stops to be very absurd and very naive and very, very nerdish and becomes somehow mainstream.

So I don't know. I think that – I think there have been two kinds of self-sovereign models in the late '90s and in the beginning of 2000. One was the crypto anarchy manifesto. And that was very, very niche and very, very, very – I mean, elite and not widespread.

And the other was the sovereign individual. And the sovereign individual made very good prediction. And also, in a way, it predicted something like Bitcoin in certain ways.

And it's very influential to Bitcoiners and to me as well. But I think that the model of the sovereign individual book is possibly – is not going to work in this new situation because it was assuming something that was really typical on the '90s, which is the possibility to travel,

which was getting easier and easier. I mean, it was still difficult to find visa for some places, for some people. But it was going easier, becoming easier and easier every time.

So you travel, you move your company, you go around, you – basically, you move physically. The physical freedom of movement was considered something going to become more and more every year.

And then you have like the charter company, you have the bank account in one country, the passport in another and the fiscal residency in another. And you leave in another one and you have a wife in another one and a home in another one.

And basically, this is the seven flag theory in a way. And this was very influential to me before Bitcoin. And I remember, before in 2006 and 2005, I was traveling to Panama with friends to watch different passports and stuff. I mean, what if we can become more free by doing arbitrage and shopping around across different national states?

Well, I think that right now, I'm still doing that, but I'm not doing that like a shopping theory, like a happy sovereign individual. I'm doing like an emergency citadel situation. It's like I'm talking with friends like, where can we go that we can stay safe if she really starts hitting the fan?

So it's a more protective, it's a more conservative, defensive ideology and everything which is more optimistic and more proactive is actually shifted to the Internet. I'm starting to think how I can, I mean, I have a few, I may or not may have a few business going running over the Internet without any kind of identity linked to it.

And I think that most of the people I know are starting to seriously think about that kind of stuff. So, to have a positive note, I think that the sobering individual model of seven flag and going around and traveling a lot.

Maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe it would be harder and harder in the next years. People are still thinking that this is going to go back to normal. And the friends I know that Travis a lot, they're just waiting for next year to get back traveling. But I'm not sure that's going to happen.

Control is especially controlled if you can control people from moving around physically. And I mean, it would be very hard for controllers to give up this kind of massive unprecedented control on the global scale.

Yeah, it was interesting. You were talking about sort of having money in one place and a house and another and this seven flag theory. I was, I don't know if you know, Pavel, Pavel Luptak.

Yeah, I was speaking to him the other day, literally about this and it really interested me because I was thinking, you know, this is a way of hacking the system and having more freedom.

And so, you know, obviously, we've gone quite dark on this episode, but it was all stuff that I really wanted to cover and, you know, thank you so much for coming on and going through all this stuff with me.

It's been really good for me just to go through it and see the way that you're thinking about it.

But I thought maybe if we could close out by anyone who's listening to this and maybe they're thinking, okay, these two, maybe they're not complete lunatics. Maybe what they're thinking about could actually happen and I want to protect myself and be ready for the worst if it does come.

What would be your outside of just by Bitcoin? What would be your advice to somebody who's thinking, what can I do to protect myself and my family for if the worst comes and how can I sort of give myself the best chance of having some freedom?

Because this is something that clearly you are thinking about and have been for some time. Well, first of all, I'm repeating myself a little bit, but I don't, just to clarify it to be very sure that I'm clear about this. I don't think that the seven flag theory or the arbitrage, the geographical arbitrage theory is useless now.

I think it's even more useful. It just reduced in scope. So I think that thinking about places to move with the family and places that, I mean, the coronavirus situation was a good litmus test

of what the government can do. And it was a surprise litmus test because, for example, Sweden is, let me be quite frank, the socialist shitball. It's not a place I would expect freedom to be uphold.

And even Japan is a very interesting country, but it's not a place you go for freedom, typically. And yet you find that they do not, well, while the entire world goes into complete fanaticism and complete overturn of any fundamental right,

Sweden and Japan and South Korea are actually emerging quite fine. And the United States are not, except maybe within the United States, you find South Carolina, and if you accept, I mean, you have seven states, basically the United States where no lockdown

happened anyhow. And the distribution of this stuff was surprising to me because, I mean, I'm in Switzerland right now. I was expecting Switzerland to be good, but I was expecting Switzerland to be way better than this.

I mean, I was really expecting better from Switzerland. It was not as crazy as Italy, of course, but it's still not good at all. And Italy, I was expecting to be bad, but not really China level of bad.

I was expecting something less bad, and it was incredibly surprising the level of craziness in Italy. And what's happening right now in Australia, I think most of the people, I mean, yeah, Australian were always paranoid about borders and control, a little bit control

districts. But this level of facial, literal facial in Australia was probably unpredictable. And even in the US, I mean, you have, I was expecting Texas to, I mean, Texas Governor would not even give a shit about this.

Or my place I was going years ago to find passports in Panama. In Panama, a lot of them was nasty. And many tropical parties like tax heavens that were mentioned by seven-click theory, the Bahamas, the kind of craziness and physical reduction of rights and freedom in these places were horrible in many places.

So I would say this kind of situation created a little test is not exhaustive. Like now people that say, well, Belarus didn't shut down, so I want to go to Belarus, wait, but in Belarus, if you speak about the government, you are arrested anyway, since before.

So the difference between Belarus and Australia, I mean, people who are defending Australia and blaming Belarus and Lukashenko, they are hypocrites, because it's exactly the same basically right now.

But it doesn't mean to say that in Belarus, you are free, because except for a very particular situation, in Belarus, you will more easily blocked from going away from entering. So let's use this situation as a litmus test to understand which governments are relatively safer,

and which governments are relatively crazier. But this is not exhaustive, of course, because you also have to look at pre-existent conditions of that government. So I would suggest people not to go to Belarus, or even, I don't know if I would go to Sweden to be very, very frank.

So we are discussing a lot about the government that are behaving better or less bad, and I think that relocating physically is still a choice, but it's just not a choice of maximization of profits like it was before.

And so going around a lot and staying in several countries, I think now it's more a matter of maximization of safety. It's more like during World War II, you want to go to Switzerland if you live in France or Italy, but you don't go to Switzerland to do the globalist shopper.

You go there to stay there, because everything everywhere else is dangerous to travel. So maybe the geographical arbitrage theory is still valid, and I think that people like Pavel would be necessary to also understand where to go to compare.

We are discussing with a lot of people about where. And so physical security is probably still something to look at. Of course, if you can, somebody can, somebody just can, because of family and parents or money, somebody cannot move.

And because it's late, maybe they stay in a counter that will never let them go anywhere anymore. And then the second is, the first is mid-space, and the second is cyberspace.

You really have to start, you already said it, you buy Bitcoin, you protect your Bitcoin, you mix your Bitcoin, you coin-join your Bitcoin, you don't connect your Bitcoin to your legal identity.

And if you do, you fix that somehow, and you get it stolen or you sell it, and then you buy it again in a more privacy-compliant way. And you start to use VPNs a little bit. It's difficult to get from norming to paranoid in a second, but at least you start planning.

And you don't have to be, you start learning and studying. I don't expect people to stop using, I mean, I am a Bitcoin fan.

I do have a phone where I have Google Maps activated all the time, because it's just, because I need it, because if I have to travel around, I don't want to use open maps with some kind of fake GPS that on this phone, I will probably leave it home if I'm doing something that I don't want people to know about.

But if I'm just going, where everybody already knows them, going because it's a conference, everybody knows I'm there, and we'll just use a normal Google phone. So I don't expect people to become Satoshi Nakamoto, but at least they have to learn what does that mean and what are the steps that you can go.

I start to understand what is the direction in which you can go, and then you can take the steps if you need it. That's great. That's brilliant advice. Thank you.

Well, Jack, I don't want to take too much of your time. It's been amazing speaking to you, and thank you for never censoring your speech. Thank you for not backing down being toxic. And I love how you break things down, and you look at things with logic rather than emotion, and I think we need more of that in this space.

So thank you again for coming on, and where can people find you to learn more? Well, thank you for asking me first place, and actually, as you have seen, because I gave you some kind of preview, I finally managed to create a website.

My intention is to put all the material that there is about me, articles and videos. There is some stuff now, but I will put, hopefully, almost everything with time. And you can use the same website also to follow, which is jack-o-moduka.com, so my name, GIA, C-O-M-O-Z-U-Z-U-C-C-O.com, and you can find there even my next courses.

Right now, there should be nothing in calendar because I finished something last week, but I will put something new in calendar probably next week already, and you can find seminars and workshops and courses both online and offline.

And you can also book my time for stuff, because I'm starting to force people, even people who want just to talk with me, I'm starting to force them to book an hour because I'm a very bad time manager.

So I need a technological help. It's also a way to use the technology for more freedom. Awesome. All right, Jack-o-mo. Well, thanks again, and hopefully, when all this pandemic nonsense is behind us, there'll be a conference I'll see you and we'll grab a drink.

Absolutely, absolutely. Looking forward to it. All right. Cheers, Jack-o-mo. Cheers. Bye.