Why Authoritarians can go fuck themselves with @odell

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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.

All right, 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 the space and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode was recorded for 21ism. This was for the recent code block and are recorded with Odell. I always love chatting to him. He sheds light on a lot of things that people are unlikely to even be thinking about yet.

As always, he's thinking many steps ahead. And I want to thank him personally and from all of 21ism for watching people's facts, making sure that people think about their privacy and raising awareness for the things that actually matter in Bitcoin.

If you haven't checked out the 21ism website, I suggest you go there today. You will also find the incredible article written by our very own self-banked, along with all the previous content and magazine.

I really hope you enjoy this show. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to me. Before we dive in, I just want to thank my show sponsors and everybody who's been screaming sat on the podcasting 2.0 apps.

I also love the personal messages. It really is awesome to see that people are enjoying the content. So thank you for that. First up, we have Casa. Casa make it incredibly easy for anybody to have multi-six security.

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they can reach out to me or the team at foundation. If you use the code bit by bit, you will get $10 off your purchase. And finally, we have fast Bitcoins. As many of you know, I had Danny Brewster on the show not too long ago.

Him and the team have been working very hard in the background to protect their users as much as is possible, and to make sure that they keep your data secure. They really push to make sure that you do not keep any sat on exchange.

I caught up with him a couple of days ago, and I can tell you that there is something really exciting happening in the background. As soon as I can reveal what's going on, I will let you know, and I'll probably get him back on the show.

But until then, I just wanna say thank you to him and all of the team for continuing to support the show, even though I continuously bash KYC services and tell everybody not to use them. I do know that not everyone's gonna listen.

Most people will enter the space through a KYC service, and I just wanna make sure that if you are going to do that and you're not going to take my advice, I suggest you go to the best exchange that you can.

One that is gonna care about your privacy, one that is gonna keep your data safe, or do their very best to do so, and I really do believe in that team. To find out more information, you can go to fastbitcoins.com, and you are also welcome to reach out and ask me any questions.

I really hope you enjoy the show. - Hey, mate, how you doing? - How's it going, my dude? - Yeah, really good. How was your Thanksgiving? Did you have a nice time? - Yeah, it was good. Do you Brits know what Thanksgiving is?

- Well, not really. We just know that you eat lots of food and hopefully dunk on your family members who don't help Bitcoin. - This was, that's more or less correct. There's a little bit of alcohol and football involved as well, but I think Thanksgiving has a very special, it has a, it's more special than it used to be,

the last two years, because, you know, I still have some family members that are decently COVID-scared. So for them to meet in a closed environment without masks on eating food with each other, I like to think it's more significant than it used to be.

- Yeah, it's nice, a bit of human contact and good food. That's what it's all about. - And like just to wake them up a little bit, to remind them, you know, what's important in life, to stop being so fucking scared all the time.

So that was a big thing for me this year. This was actually the first year in maybe eight years that Bitcoin hasn't come up at Thanksgiving. I think they can all just like hear my response on their heads so they just, no one brought it up and I didn't bring it up.

I was waiting to see if someone else did. (laughing) - I guess when you've been on a losing streak for as long as they have, they eventually think, fuck this, this is no fun this game. (laughing) - I like to think some of them got it.

I mean, they all get, all their gifts for me throughout the years are always Bitcoin. So they're like forced toddlers, even if they don't fully agree with it. - That's very kind of you. - Well, I'm glad you had a good Thanksgiving.

It sounds like a lot of fun. So I might steal that tradition and bring it over to England. We can't have enough of these sort of gatherings. So I might be taking that. - Exactly, do it. - Firstly, thank you for joining us on 21ism.

We were chatting, we've had a bit of a pivot because we wanna be a bit more direct on what we're covering and cover the topics that we think are really important right now. We were talking about privacy and why this is so vital for civilization going forward.

And obviously your name came up there. Something that I've been really thinking about a lot recently is, you know, looking back and thinking, well, if Satoshi had fucked up, if his upset wasn't as brilliant as it was, and if we knew who they were, I think the whole thing would be very different.

That's my personal feeling on it. And so when I'm looking at like, what's being built going forward, especially with all eyes on anyone who is freedom loving or freedom of speech loving, they're gonna be demonized over the coming years.

And so it's something that listening to you and Marty over the years has really made me think about more and more. And when I came in, I was like, I was always quite a private person, but I didn't really think about the implications.

And it's changed the way that I'm living my life. And I'm seeing it more and more with more people. But it's a theme that I think, if we fuck this up going forward, you know, as a collective, we're gonna have serious implications.

So I wanted to get your thoughts on it and just riff on that idea a little bit. - Well, first off, thank you for inviting me on. I mean, 21ism is a project that I've been watching. You build out with the rest of the team for quite a bit now.

And I've been very impressed and happy to be a part of it. Of course, I did come on your actual podcast bit by bit. I don't even know how long ago that was, but I love that show. I mean, I think you really do one of the best podcasts in the space.

- Thank you. - So it's a pleasure in general to just be talking to you again. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm always happy to talk about privacy. I think it's a very important topic. I think it's one of the most important topics.

And I think that, you know, we're kind of hitting a crossroads here where people don't really realize that we've never been in this situation before. I think people's default is always, well, that's how it's always been.

It's like a mental process that people go through a lot just on their day-to-day lives with everything. But this privacy conversation, I mean, we've never had our lives so digital and they're becoming increasingly digital.

And we have these companies that are literally designed to monetize our data. So they're storing this data as long as possible. And they're using it for various different ways and they're sharing it around.

So they have a direct incentive to collect the data. And then we have governments who have clear incentives to try and get ahold of that data and store it for as long as possible to use it against citizens that might go against them in the future.

This is a, that's something we've seen in the history of nation states and governments since the very beginning. If you have enemies within your citizenry, you know, one of the biggest tools you can have on your side is to catalog who is against you, what they have done, how they live their lives,

any kind of dirt you can get on them, that sort of thing. So we're having all of this come together and it's starting to hit a critical mass. I don't think we've necessarily hit the critical mass yet, but we've seen these major breaches happen.

You know, we saw Facebook lose data on hundreds of millions, if not a billion users. I'm not sharing the exact number. Super intimate data. We've seen, I think it was like Equifax or TransUnion, one of the major credit card bureaus in the United States lost intimate data on every single adult American.

I think it was Argentina we saw, they lost their whole ID database and including the president got doxed and like... - Quality. - Messy got doxed, like all the rich people got doxed. Like even if they can't protect the data of the rich people and the leaders, the average plan is truly fucked, it needs to take matters into their own hands.

As for the Satoshi thing, I've always had this pet theory and it's just a fun little game I play. I mean, I don't know if I actually even believe it anymore, but you know, he, she, they is rumored to have a million coins.

I always like to believe that when we have easier privacy on Bitcoin, that's when the coins will move, they're just waiting. (laughs) You think they're still out there? - No, I don't think so, but I mean, I can see, I mean, look, at the end of the day, if those coins move, right, everyone's gonna track where they're going.

Are they dumping? Are they doing this? And it can be used to docs, whoever Satoshi is. So if I was Satoshi, I probably wouldn't have had the balls to wait this long, but let's say I did theoretically, I'd be waiting for privacy on Bitcoin to get easier and then I would start moving them

when people could interact on my, on my transactions. - And it's so good that they were so private. Whoever they are, no matter who they were, there would be some shit dug up on them. And that would be the perfect feeding frenzy for the media to say, well, - Oh, I understand. - The person who created

this tool did this or said this or whatever it is. And even if they hadn't done anything, they would plant something or create some bullshit. And then that kind of like is a smear campaign for the whole project as stupid as that is because it doesn't matter who's invented it really,

but I do think that we're very lucky that that's happened. - Yeah, I mean, I would go as far as to say that, you know, maybe Bitcoin wouldn't have been successful if it didn't happen. It provides, you know, if you have a creator to go after, it provides a massive centralization risk, a massive central point of failure.

And there's no doubt in my mind if the creator was public and they, and we knew who it was. Like you said, smear campaigns, imprisonment, blackmail, coercion, maybe assassination. Like all these things are on the table and would be expected as Bitcoin grows larger and larger and starts to threaten nation states.

So I'm extremely grateful that whoever Satoshi was decided to do that, but even more than that, I mean, it takes an insane amount of skill and self control to be able to maintain that level of appsec all these years with such a large bounty on his head.

It's truly impressive. - Well, it's something to aspire to, whether any of us get close is another thing. But, you know, it seems like it's becoming more and more important. Like you said, I'd be shocked if we're not on lists, many, many of them.

And, you know, those of us who speak out about the things that maybe we're not supposed to or that most people think that we shouldn't. If we stop doing it, then no one speaks, which is a bad thing.

If we continue to do it, special platforms like Twitter and any of these sort of platforms, we are gonna be tracked, we are gonna be monitored. And then there's the conversations where we're saying, well, fuck all this, we need to actually push things forward, we need to do better, we need to work together so that we build a better world,

better society for our children. And then it's like, well, where do you do that? And so that's why I always like and always appreciate the actionable advice that you give in terms of switching to certain platforms.

The first time that I ever got a privacy phone was because of you. I was like, you kept talking about graphic, you know, ass and these pixels. And I was like, fuck it. I don't know what he's talking about.

And I spent weeks and weeks trying to sort myself out until I got one of those. And it's just, it seems a bit overwhelming, I think, for a lot of people. But these steps are now a point where, you know, before it was playtime in my head and now it's like, this is the real deal.

Like, this is, we actually have to do this now. We have to stop fucking around and move forward. - Cheers to that. - Oh, I like that. What are you drinking? - I'm drinking, I'm gonna mispronounce it.

Glen Farclause, 25 years. - Ooh, very nice. - Very nice. - Single malt scotch. Was this a gift or were you just bowling? - This was a gift. I pretty much, like, I don't buy bottles that are more expensive than like 100,000 sats for myself.

But the word has gotten out that I like scotch. So I give everyone gifts that are Bitcoin and most people give me gifts that are scotch. That's where I stand right now. - It's still a shit coin, but as they go, it's right up there.

It's a quality shit coin whiskey. It's a good place to store your wealth. - It's my favorite shit coin. Yeah, I mean, as far as your personal journey and privacy phones and actionable advice and as you were talking about earlier, I mean, I strongly believe that it is, I wouldn't go as far as to say a waste of time,

but it is less productive trying to convince people that they need privacy and more productive to build out the education, build out the tools, support the tools, run the tools and have them ready for when people inevitably realize the need.

Because I think more and more people are going to realize the need as these hacks, as these leaks, as the overstep from corporations and governments becomes more and more apparent. And as these people realize the need, we need to be ready for them.

And honestly, like hundreds of thousands of people are realizing the need every couple of months maybe is, I think, like a relatively good guesstimate. So being ready for those people rather than trying to convince someone that doesn't want to be convinced is way more productive.

And that's where my focus has been lately. - Do you think that we have even the people within, you know, who care about privacy, the little subset of Bitcoiners who are really interested in improving?

Do you think we have a blind spot in terms of this whole idea of this digital identity and all this weird shit they're going to be trying to do with the internet? And, you know, you talk quite a lot about tool being the best we have, but it's flawed.

A lot of people are talking about like go tenors and mesh networks and these sort of things. But it seems to me like you can run all the VPNs and have the privacy phones and have a Linux laptop and run PopOS and use PGP and do all these steps.

But then like if they have this strangle point on like where you're connecting in, it seems as though it's going to fuck a lot of people. Is there anything in your mind that can be done about this or are we sort of destined to just have to create our own version of the internet somehow?

- Well, we do have things like the blockchain satellite. We have things like mesh nets. You know, mesh net development isn't quite there yet, but it's slow and steady. There's a lot of progress being made.

And the idea of a mesh net is that nodes on this network can communicate directly without relying on the internet because the internet is pretty centralized. So it does kind of represent a central point of failure.

You know, I think no matter what there's going to be a period of darkness, the question is how long that darkness is and how bad it is for our friends and family. I think we can reduce the impact on ourselves and we can reduce the length of the darkness, but there's going to be this period where it gets really dystopian

and we're already decently into that. You can see the creep happening. You know, a lot of things become very apparent to you when you start going down the privacy rabbit hole. And now with privacy and self sovereignty, there's a trade off there on one side of convenience and cost versus privacy and self sovereignty.

And people are going to have to make that choice for themselves, but until we have like a critical mass of people, at least in a given jurisdiction realizing the need, you end up in situations where, for instance, a couple of years ago, like I deleted Facebook, all my social media, except for Twitter.

I still have Twitter. It's purely Bitcoin and privacy focused. I know I'm a bit addicted to it, but I try and limit my usage of it. I try and limit the amount of data Twitter has on me. But I've completely removed myself from social media.

And like, what did that do? The majority of people that I was interacting with before didn't remove themselves from social media. So they're continuing on. I miss events and stuff that are posted on Facebook or posted on Snapchat or posted wherever.

I miss, people don't get notified when it's my birthday, right? So I have like a group of writer dies. And actually, it's really funny with Bitcoin, you don't share your birthday with anybody, you mean?

So like, I have a group of like old school writer dies that like, there's like 10 people that know enough to wish me a happy birthday on my birthday. - Well, happy birthday whenever it is, just in cases today.

- Thank you. - When you have stuff like these vaccine passports, which are essentially movement licenses getting implemented, if you opt out of those, which I think everyone should, regardless of your views on the vaccine, you should opt out out of the actual passports, you're greatly reducing your ability to travel.

I love traveling internationally.

Without opting into that, that becomes insanely difficult. So you end up making these trade offs. You know, I'm gonna live rurally. I'm gonna buy my own land. I'm gonna tend to that land.

I'm gonna try and live in a self sustainable way that is outside of the greater society. And you kind of become a little bit of a pariah and that is unfortunate 'cause you shouldn't have to make that trade off.

But in the short term, it's really hard to see that not being the case. We're gonna need people to basically choose that option to opt out of convenient things they like to do. I mean, I went to, for like the last 15 years, probably longer than that.

I've gone to the US Open every year, the tennis grand slam in New York. And last year was canceled, so I didn't go that year. And this year, it was vaccine passport required. So I didn't go.

I refused to comply with that bullshit. And you watch on TV and you see, you know, a full stadium full of people that opted into it, right? And I know friends who went that I've been going with for the last 15, 20 years.

I know family that's gone. I know past coworkers that have gone. And I didn't go because I'm opting out and that really hurts, you know, or like weddings. I love weddings. Weddings are pure love.

I think they're like one of the most important things we do as a culture. You know, I haven't been able to go to certain weddings because of my stance. Sometimes it's because they were based in New York City and the venue required it.

And sometimes it's because the person required it. And that stings, right? But there's, we're in this weird middle ground where, you know, you might have to be the outlier in your community.

You might have to be the outlier among your friends and family, but someone has to do it. We need, it's a chicken and egg. We need, we need people to stand up. And hopefully we hit that critical mass sooner rather than later.

So you don't have to make that trade off in the first place just to have some decent privacy guarantees. - Most principles, isn't it? And I'm totally with you. I'm happy for anyone to do whatever they want.

As long as it's, as long as they're happy, I'm happy as long as it's not infringing on my rights or my privacy or my freedoms. But yeah, I'm with you in terms of people should stand the fuck up and not allow, or not even go to places where you need to have a vaccine passport to go.

Because by doing that, you're legitimizing it. It's a really difficult one because we are kind of, a lot of people say, oh, you're cutting your nose off despite your face, but it's like, no, I'm cutting my nose off to save future generations and to be able to look at myself in the mirror because otherwise you're spider-less.

- Yeah, I mean, you gotta make this stand somewhere otherwise it's gonna get worse and worse. And I would even go as far, I mean, and it's kind of a tricky one. I've had this conversation with a lot of people is faking one of these passports.

- Legism is almost as bad as just straight complying to it. - Mm-hmm, yeah, I think it is.

It is because then there's more people on that side and it makes us more and more of a minority. And I feel like it gets to a certain point where you're enough of a minority where everyone will turn against us.

Like everyone's very happy to virtue signal about helping minorities, but just not us as minority, not people who don't want the vaccine. And so we're a minority that are not accepted in society and as that goes forward, there has to be a stand.

And I think that's really been a focus for 21ism very much in the last six months is that what was happening is we were having our calls and we were saying, right, you know, we've got to get our six categories here.

Who are we having for meme? Who are we having for code? Who are we doing for this? Let's get these articles written. And it was very like obviously Bitcoin focused, but what was happening is we would end up talking about freedom and the vaccine stuff and how much it pissed us off and who was losing their job within our groups

and all this sort of stuff. And I think it was basically the major part of us pivoting to doing just one category and focusing more of our time on the freedom aspect and basically saying, fuck you to all the stuff that's going on and trying to have some impact there because we love Bitcoin, like we're all here for that,

but you know, it's no good if we're locked in a cage. And I think, you know, where we're talking about the privacy stuff, that's where that fits in is, well, if you're gonna speak up and you're not gonna comply, great, but then try and avoid as many lists as you can and keep yourself to yourself as much as you can

and keep your interactions that maybe don't fit within the narratives that are acceptable with other plebs to be offline as much as possible because otherwise we're just painting a target on our backs and they're just go, oh, well, here we are.

Here's this unvaccinated person who doesn't wanna comply with X, Y, and Z. They're trying to destroy the economy. They're terrorists and they're this and they're that. And I think it's very easy with some of the stuff that we say to be put into a bad light and for us to be demonized.

And so it's a very fine line. It's very difficult to walk that line. - Yeah, I mean, it's something that I grapple with a lot personally as a public figure who talks about this. I'm sure it's something that you are constantly considering.

There are times where I don't say certain things publicly because I don't want that to be on my permanent record even though I strongly believe them. I'll talk about them privately, but I will not talk about them publicly.

I think in general, from a freedom perspective, freedom movements benefit greatly from individual participants, practicing some level of self-control, some kind of focusing on privacy, trying to bring more conversations into the real world rather than online where they're easily surveilled and tracked.

Obviously, if a large amount of participants are not known participants and aren't easily identified, it makes taking down these movements way more difficult. Then we saw that in Hong Kong.

I mean, unfortunately, Hong Kong did ultimately fall, but their most recent freedom movement was a lot stronger than their previous one, the Umbrella Movement because they didn't have any official leaders.

And that's how they crushed the Umbrella Movement was they went after the official leaders. In this case, they had to go even more authoritarian and they had to go after participants because it was kind of like a hydra.

It wasn't like a single leader movement. But it's a balancing act because we do need people to talk about this publicly. Like if we're afraid of talking about privacy publicly, if we're afraid of talking about freedom publicly, then we're already way deeper into an issue than necessarily we actually are.

Like if people can't feel at least some level of free speech and judicial protection, then we've truly slid into a pure authoritarian society. And there is a time and place for that. Almost, the public speakers are almost a canary in the cold mind if they start getting thrown in jail and persecuted.

But until that moment happens, these types of movements gain a lot from having public individuals out there speaking and educating and spreading the word. And these public figures ideally will be varying different public figures with not necessarily that much coordination between them

so that there's a little bit of decentralization there. With varying levels of how public they are. So like a perfect example, I think would be... So I'm pretty public. I mean, I don't share intimate, private information but people know what my face looks like.

I speak at conferences. Then we have you who has a very popular Bitcoin podcast. Everyone knows your voice. If you're a sophisticated actor, they can probably figure out who you are. If it's like an NSA or an intelligent service or something like that.

But the average person doesn't know what you look like. And then we have someone like Bitcoin Q&A who we don't even know his first name. His voice isn't as docked. It is a bit docked. Once again, a sophisticated actor can probably figure it out.

Then we have someone like 6102 who we've never heard his voice. Don't know his name. Don't know where he's from, where he lives or anything like that. So those are like four levels of public proponents and public educators.

And then underneath that, you have masses of people that are all different levels of that privacy scale. And ideally, you'd have more of them being privacy focused and taking privacy seriously.

- Yeah, it's a sliding scale, isn't it? - And there are uses for all of it. You need all of them. You need everyone. You even need the full docked people as well. And you need them all the way down.

But it's one of those things, once you've done it, once you've docked to a certain level, then there's no going back really. You know, it's very, very difficult to regain that privacy. And there are a lot of things that I wish I'd done differently.

- Yeah, likewise, my dude. (laughing) I mean, some things that I think about are like, I think you mentioned this. Maybe it was a month ago or something about when you're actually putting your podcasts out, you know, using something like Anka or Libsyn or something like that.

I keep thinking to myself, well, okay, I'm relatively private and I do what I can. I docked my voice, but outside of that, there's not really anything else that links me. But then I'm using services, you know, like you've got Anka and Libsyn and all these different ones.

I'm thinking there must be a better way of doing this. Like the same with 21 isn't putting our podcast out. There must be a better way that we can either self-host or use something where we pay in Bitcoin or, you know, that there are lots of these little snagging things or Twitter, for example, like,

'cause every time I've used a phone that is linked, is not linked to my identity, it gets blocked. So like, I just get knocked off straight away. And so it must be like smarter ways. Are there any things that you've heard of or that you're thinking of at the moment that aren't really being discussed

that you think are like useful for plebs who are speaking but don't wanna be on a list? - Well, you can definitely self-host podcasts and we all should. I mean, I already, you know, Anka's owned by Spotify.

I've already had them. They censored one of my dispatch episodes, episode seven with Catan, ironically on self-hosting. (laughs) But they didn't censored for that reason. They censored because I ended it with Elton John's Rocket Man.

They took down that episode. So I'll give them that. But yeah, we should be self-hosting our podcasts and you can still listen to that episode at silldispatch.com/cd7 because it's on bitcointv.com.

But anyway, we should be self-hosting or as much as possible. We should be self-hosting our podcasts. One of the issues with podcasting is it's all based on this RSS feed. So we have people subscribe to our RSS feed.

So if we switch, there's switching costs there. There's a friction there because you need them to move and migrate to the new RSS feed. So that's the major hurdle I see in that respect. When it comes to Twitter, I mean, Twitter's already dead.

It's just not priced in yet. Like there's really no way to privately use it. You can use it in more private ways by not using your real name, using a name, trying to connect through VPNs and stuff.

But at the end of the day, they keep pushing forward with this, basically this KYC, which is you need to activate a phone number. And they're like pretty malicious about it. They like hold you hostage if you don't either put a new phone number in and they'll reject certain emails, emails, suffixes like domains, hosting providers,

if they're more privacy focused, like they love Gmail because they almost treat it like KYC. So pretty much when you use Twitter, you should almost operate under the assumption that you'll probably fuck up something at some point and Twitter can know who you are, right?

Now that's a trade off and it's not actually necessarily a deal killer. If you're comfortable with Twitter and presumably the US government and presumably if they don't secure that information in well, other people, you know, knowing your IP address, potentially knowing who's behind the account.

So when you are, even if you are using a name, you probably should be tweeting from it in a way that if it did come out who was saying those things that you'd stand behind them. Now obviously there's more private platforms.

Matrix is fantastic, which is almost like a discord, Slack type of interface, but can be self-hosted and all these different people run servers. I know Divertor runs a server. Bitcoin Q&A runs a server.

You can run your own server. You can run it through Tor. I hope and it seems like we're going in this direction that we will have more privacy focused, censorship resistant, distributed social media options.

I think that we're farther away from that goal than a lot of people would like to believe. And I think the main reason goes back to that convenience and cost trade-off with privacy. Most people do not realize the need for privacy yet.

Most people are sharing their entire lives on social media. They could give two shits that these are all surveillance firms. And those people are less likely to move to a platform that will be inherently less convenient to use.

A centralized system will always be more convenient. The only caveat to that is unless regulation becomes so burdensome that the centralized options have this burdensome regulation and the distributed censorship resistance ones do not.

And we see that today with Bitcoin because if you use a centralized option, it's almost always going to have KYC AML. You're going to have to upload all your personal information, take a 3D scan of your face, you know, provide your firstborn child to them and just give them everything to use the service and a distributed open source

censorship resistant tool will not require that from you. So there's less friction there because of this burdensome regulation. But if you forget about the burdensome regulation, you're going to have always, it's always going to be more convenient and cheaper to use a centralized platform.

So when it comes to trying to have a broader audience and a broader reach, you kind of have to go where the people are. And we've seen this in the past, I mean, it's not the best example.

I guess Mastodon would be a good example. We've seen movements among Bitcoiners to try and switch to Mastodon, which is like a federated version of Twitter. People can run their own servers and then you can interact between the servers if the server admins allow those servers to interact with each other and you can run your own.

And I tried to make that work, but I really don't like social media in general. And Mastodon is, you're still broadcasting everything out that's going to be there forever.

So I didn't want to really split my time between the two, Twitter and Mastodon. And Mastodon had way less, it only had the people that really cared about privacy and censorship resistance there.

It didn't have this broad mainstream crowd that can also take in your education and also can listen to the tools that you recommend and can make that first step into that world. So I think a lot of these tools and networks will first be used by like niche groups that are growing that are more privacy focused.

And then over time, we'll start to see mainstream audience, but until then, you're gonna have to basically make different trade-offs. And like my trade-off is I use Twitter. Now, Steph on Lavera, another good podcast, like he's on Facebook, LinkedIn, everything.

He's all over the place, right? He made a different, he made a different trade-off balance inside. He was like, I'm going to go for the absolute normie that's on LinkedIn looking at Bitcoin content, right?

I've decided to write those people off. I'm like, I'll take the normies on Twitter, but I'm not gonna go for like that LinkedIn route, right? Or that Facebook route. Yeah, but Stefan went for everyone, right?

But I remember first listening to Stefan's podcast, like early days, I was lucky enough to find it pretty early. And I was like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? I don't understand 90% of what's being said.

Like it's a pretty technical podcast. It took a long time to like be trying to research and stuff. So I guess you're thinking that that's a case of like cast a net out wide, and then the normie person who stumbles across it will probably think, I don't know what you're talking about,

but then if they are really interested, they will persist and then they'll fall further down. So he's just casting a bigger net and he knows that, you know, 90% of it, he's gonna have to throw it back.

Is that the sort of thing you're thinking? Yeah, but like, I guess my point is that everything has trade-offs. And one of the first things that people have to realize, I mean, I think at the end of the day, if you want to distill what solves this government and corporate overreach, it comes down to personal responsibility.

And people are going to need to start critically thinking for themselves and analyzing these different trade-off balances for every little thing they do in their lives and make a choice that they can live with based on those trade-offs that they've made an analysis of.

And I respect Stefan and Stefan made that decision, right? I'm gonna go on all the social media platforms.

Went on a different trade-off balance and I'm like, I'm gonna stay on Twitter till I get banned. And that'll be like my outreach to a more mainstream audience. And then there's people that have really small shows and really small communities that only exist in IRC, only exist on 4chan, only exist in matrix, only exist on Mastodon, right?

And they made a different trade-off balance. And that's good, we need to have people in all different scenarios, making different decisions for themselves with different trade-offs. But it's a reality that people need to accept.

It's an unfortunate reality, but people need to accept that reality. And there's really no perfect solution. I guess that's what I'm trying to go for. Yeah, and so like, we are seeing privacy improve, we are seeing certainly on an individual level is what I'm seeing from a lot of people that I interact with.

If we play it forward and I know there's no such thing as a black and white win or lose here, but let's say we win. They're as close to it as we can get and the privacy on Bitcoin gets better, more and more people could start caring, more and more people start using these tools and we do end up with a really fucking good money

that is pretty damn private. How do you think that starts to affect society and change things? Because the way that I'm looking at it now is like, there's a serious sickness, certainly from what I'm seeing around me here in the UK.

And it's so far from what I want to be seeing. Do you think that the tools that we're trying to work on that Bitcoin used correctly can really make this impact and make this change? - Well, first of all, I operate under the belief that we have to win.

If we don't, then we're gonna be living in a complete dystopia. Our kids are gonna be living in a complete dystopia. Their grandkids are gonna be living in a complete dystopia. It gets dark very, very quickly.

So we have no choice. And this is, to me, is not just Bitcoin. It's the greater free and open source movement. Like we need open source tools. We've come to the realization, Snowden really helped me with this.

By the way, another public figure who came out as pro privacy put a face to the movement or put an additional face to the movement. He was not the first. That these large centralized megacorporations that span the whole globe easily comply with government demands, blackmail, gag orders, requests, whatnot.

So what is the answer there? The answer there is free and open source tools that we can verify how the code is working, that not a single person owns that code, that it can be shared, it can be modified, it can be improved.

It's like a virus. It is very hard to kill it. There's gonna be a copy of that code somewhere in the world and it's gonna get shared again. Maybe not through the same medium it got censored the first time.

Maybe through a different medium. So free and open source software, it's a key aspect of that. Bitcoin being free and open source money becomes a key aspect of that. A lot of ways, people tend to, people tend to get a little overwhelmed with the thought of, oh my God, you have private money independent of governments.

I don't think it'll be that much different than the world that people lived in in the 50s and the 60s. At that point, were they using government money? Yes, they were using government money but they didn't have wiretaps in their homes.

The government wasn't able to track all their transactions. They were using cash. The money was kind of based on gold. This is the kind of world you see starting to develop in a post-Bitcoin world with a digital element attached on top of that, right?

So what if we could have the 50s, the 60s, maybe not the 40s 'cause of World War II, but you get my idea, like the before they completely fucked up the money, before everything moved to credit cards and digital payments, before people bought wiretaps from Amazon and Google installed them in their house,

before people had internet connected cameras on their front door step, before people posted every single thing they do with their lives on centralized surveillance-based social media. We lived in a relatively private world and it wasn't Armageddon, you know?

It was people had strong families. The economy was good. They had a way to move up in society. They felt purpose. They lived long lives. Like, it shouldn't be this foreign concept. Like, a lot of what we're fighting for is to get back things that our previous generations had.

Are we looking for more as well? Yeah, I mean, obviously Bitcoin, encryption, global encrypted communications, global money networks that are censorship resistant and private are fundamentally different than anything we've had before and it empowers the individual, like we've never seen before and I expect all of that.

But at the base, a lot of it is just fighting for things that we have lost along the way. It's like a sound money and sound culture revival rather than reinventing anything. Like you said, it's not that long ago.

And we are seeing it on an individual level. Like you said earlier, you wanna move more to the countryside, you wanna be self-sustainable, wanna have a family, you wanna live like people used to live and it's not that long that this crazy shit's been going on and we see how quickly it gets crazy.

Like you see how people are just fighting over all sorts of things and screeching at each other and everyone's angry and fucking, it's such a weird experience to be watching the way that people are behaving.

And then you have like this little group of Bitcoiners who are doing what you've said. They're like, well fuck all that. I'm just gonna stack my stats. I'm gonna get fit and healthy. I'm gonna build a family that I look after and love and I'm gonna have a little patch of land and grow my own produce and buy good quality meat

and just live like a human being is supposed to live and it excites me to think that we can go back to that. And it makes you more creative when you're living in that space rather than just all the stresses and all the worry and all the politics that is going on at the moment.

I can't see that if we go there, like you said, it's gonna really change that much in our day-to-day spending having private money but it's gonna change the way that things develop and grow and I think in a really, really positive way.

I mean, if you even just talk to our parents, like our parents when they were our age or my parents when they were my age did not have every single payment they made tracked. They didn't have every single conversation they had tracked.

They didn't have every picture they take tracked, every location they've gone to tracked. Like that's not something they grew up with. Even my dad to this day, he's like one of like the last all words on cash.

Like he doesn't even, I don't even think he realizes like how much my peer group, how much my age group has completely moved over to digital payments where every single payment is tracked.

So a lot of it is just going back to those roots. There are going to be different technological nuances to that is my view. I mean, I think in this middle period, there's going to be basically like a bifurcation of society.

Like there's gonna be a whole group of society that decides to go into like this centralized metaverse type of thing that is completely surveilled, you know, the pod people or have whatever you wanna call them.

Like that's gonna happen and then there's gonna be other people opting out. So there's gonna be this divide until things kind of like naturally level themselves out. And then on the Bitcoiner side, on the sovereignty side, on the privacy side, if you have private money, if you have private communications, if you have 3D printing tech,

all these tools are tools that empower individuals, but they also empower local communities, right? And you can imagine situations where you have a small local community and they're able to trade with another small local community that's halfway across the world because of the ability to communicate privately,

because of the ability to send money privately, because of the ability to transport goods privately. So that was never possible before. And that's why we saw the birth of the modern nation state, was basically a coordination issue where you couldn't have all these local communities ever where efficiently coordinate amongst each other.

So you have this top down larger formation, which is the modern nation state. But in a post-Bitcoin world, in the ideal post-Bitcoin world to me is a world where I see a lot of local communities all competing with each other and trading with each other on a global basis without the need for a larger hierarchical government there.

So like a kind of radical localism mixed in with technology and to me, I call that citadel theory, but I've been told that it's way more tolerable to people if I call it localism, so. - Yeah, well, I've been running a show recently with the Mechdel theory, which is the citadel theory, but then that you have these Mech networks of plebs

who communicate with each other. And what I've found is that we've got some fucking amazing people all around the world, all growing produce, 3D printing, they can build, anything that I can think of, they can build it or design it or whatever food I want, they've got it and it's high quality.

What I'm finding where the problem is, is not with the transactional, the communication. It's actually with the logistics. And so, I'm talking to someone and it's like, oh yeah, I'm doing this completely organic beef or chicken or I've got this new project.

Oh, where are you? I'm in South Africa or I'm in America. And I'm like, well, that's fucking great. So how am I going to go and get this now? You know, in an ideal world, I don't want to feed the beast.

I don't want to give any of my time or value to this fiat culture or this fiat society. I want my value to go to other people that I value and who I know are not going to go and do something stupid with it, who are going to actually help build.

So that's the big snagging issue where I'm like, how do we get around this, especially with the movement licenses coming in and they're trying to restrict us in every way they can and that you can only see them trying to do that more.

So if you've got any thoughts on that in terms of actual movement of physical goods or people, like how we get around that without using existing systems? Well, I mean, like right now that is obviously a major hurdle.

You see this a lot where like this new technology is mixed within the confines and the restrictions of our current world. A good example of that would be the darknet markets where the biggest hurdle of functioning on the darknet market is actually shipping the product around the world and doing so in a private manner.

And there have been some creative solutions and one creative solution was is there's this dark marketplace in Russia, it's Russia only, right? We go back to borders and stuff where they like hide whatever the goods are at a coordinate location.

They do like a drop where they drop it in some coordinates in Moscow. They send you the coordinates and then you go pick it up instead of using the shipping. Now obviously that's confined by borders.

Another thing and that's a stop gap. That's something like working within the current confines of our current society. Another thing where you see this like future idealism mixed in with the current confines of our society is with this whole sea-steading movement where people think like, oh, if I go into international waters,

then I can be sovereign. And you just see these governments just come in and they just destroy you. 'Cause they have militaries and they don't care if you figured out some kind of loophole or something like their Navy's gonna come out there and they're gonna make your life living hell.

So I think a lot of this is growing pains and what happens is we basically need to see this transition to society moving to a more localist style society before some of these things can actually become reasonable.

And in the meantime, you're gonna see like stop gap solutions for them. But one big thing that I've been watching and this goes both ways is autonomous drones. So right now on a tech level, it's not really that feasible.

The range of these things isn't that great. On the longer range, you run into issues with countries and stuff trying to protect their airspace. They can shoot you down. But it gets interesting as we start moving to more local societies.

And you can imagine a situation where you have these autonomous drones. They're pre-programmed. And all they know is the next hop. So they're going from hop to hop, dropping your package, dropping your goods at the next hop.

And then another drone picks it up and takes it. And you can imagine that spanning the whole globe where you hand your package to a local autonomous drone. It goes out, hits its first hop, 15 hops later.

It gets across the world in a relatively private way where each drone only knows the next hop. That's kind of similar to how Tor works on an internet level, but you could see this working on drone level.

Now, when I said on either direction, it's because autonomous drones are gonna become very, it's gonna become like a hot button issue because what happens is right now, the only time we've really seen drone warfare is a larger state, someone like the United States, bombing someone like Yemen or Pakistan or Afghanistan.

And they control those drones remotely through, like they have a US Air Force pilot in a shipping container in Arizona. It's bouncing, the connection's bouncing off of satellites and stuff.

And that pilot is deciding when to shoot and when not to shoot. Now, the biggest negative trade-off of something like that is that they can be jammed. That connection between Arizona and Pakistan can be jammed.

Now, the US hasn't used drones against any kind of sophisticated actors that can do that jamming. But if someone tried to use drones against the United States, we'd be jamming their shit all day.

So autonomous drones, the cool aspect of it and the dangerous aspect of them is that they can't be jammed because they're making the decision themselves. Now, if they're just going somewhere and dropping off a package or making that decision themselves, it's not being controlled directly by a human remotely.

If they're doing, if they're armed drones, they're making kill decisions on their own, right? So they're deciding whether or not they're going to shoot and who they're going to kill. And if those drones, and they will eventually start working off of off-the-shelf parts because that is the natural progression of technology

that we've seen, they start working on off-the-shelf parts, then we're going to see situations where there's going to be drone attacks. There's going to be like 25, 30 drones are going to attack a community or attack a government building or attack something, right?

And even if you capture one of the drones, first of all, you can't jam them. So let's say you shoot them down or you neutralize them or something, you're going to look at the drone and it's not going to be obvious if it was from China or if it was from Russia or from the United States or if it was from some sovereign actor somewhere

in the world whose identity you don't even know. There'd be no way to tell because they're off-the-shelf. So it opens up some very interesting possibilities in terms of censorship resistance.

Drone networks, and I don't think people are ready to watch that play out. Like that could be playing out within 10 years. That's not that far away. Yeah, the scary side of it is putting some pretty fucking horrific images into my head.

And I think you're right. There's no real way to avoid this. But if we look at the positive side, that's really exciting because if you don't then have that traceability and it's part of a network, then it's not linkable to someone who's controlling it.

I suppose if you had it programmed where you said, okay, well, we've got a network of drones, just for example in the UK because of the flying time on these things or the battery life on these things, they're not gonna be able to fly past a certain distance.

But that package then gets switched with the next one that's on a charging station. And then like you said, they don't have the information where it has previously been, et cetera. I see this as being very, very difficult to stop.

And the only concern I would have with something like that would be let's say for example, Bitcoin Q&A has baked me some fairy cakes and he wants to send me those down by drone. Well, what if they then get eaten by someone on the way?

Who's then responsible for that within that network? You'd have to have some kind of not insurance necessarily, but some kind of way of monitoring that because there has to be responsibility for missing goods or items.

That would be where I'd see like a potential snag there. But it does seem exciting. I mean, you also have the, well, so for that issue, I mean, I'm hoping and there's been a lot of, I mean, work on this front has been going for like 20 years now of like reliable synonymous, anonymous, ideally,

I guess it's not anonymous because you'd be attached to a Nim. So, pseudonymous reputation systems, web of trust reputation systems. We've seen this in the PGP world where they've called it web of trust where you have, you know, you have this public key, private key pair and it is attached to a drone.

And that drone as it successfully delivers packages gets positive reviews. And you don't know necessarily who that person is, but you know that it's the same operator and that operator has been a trustworthy operator.

So, I would like to see more of those kind of reputation systems to be built out and start to get used. Just like everything else that we've discussed today, it's gonna take kind of a, people need to get burned kind of first kind of thing for people to start adopting them.

And that's what we've seen. I mean, there's been a lot of friction in adopting these kinds of systems. Most of the reputation systems we see rely on a ton of personal information. A perfect example for the average person in our age group nowadays would be something like Uber or Airbnb where as you start renting from Airbnb

or you start using Ubers, you get a reputation system. The Uber driver has a reputation and if they fall below a certain reputation, they're no longer an Uber driver and you're no longer a passenger.

Stuff like that, but Nim focused using public key, private key cryptography could be ideal for this situation. The other issue you still have is you still have a surveillance issue two-fold.

I mean, the drones could still presumably be tracked, especially if you're a high value target, sophisticated actor. We recently saw Jay Stark potentially get murdered. They were tracking his packages.

He definitely took precautions. He was very smart with his opposite. He fucked up somewhere along the way. And then the other thing is the, first of all, RIP Jay Stark. - Yeah, RIP. I was gonna speak to him at Parallene Police last year.

We exchanged a couple of emails and it didn't happen because of the things getting fucked up, but I was so excited to speak to him and the things that have been possible because of what he's done is, yeah, I mean, incredible, man.

- Yeah, real shame and tons of respect over here for what he accomplished and it's a true loss. The other thing that you have to worry about and we'll always have to worry about this is, and then our reputation systems can help in this regard as well, is the situation where you have, you know, an informant or a spook, undercover agent

who's on the opposite side of that transaction. And they can put whatever they want in that package. Right, so if I'm trying to dox Bitcoin Q&A, I went over his trust over a course of two years, three years and then I can, even if we have a perfectly private, onion drone shipping system, you know,

he lets his guard down, lets me ship him a shirt or something and he's got a little tracker in it. And then I know where that package arrived, right? So nothing is perfect, everything is gonna have trade-offs, but that would be a significant improvement to where we are today in terms of actually moving goods around the world.

- Yeah, well, I look forward to that being possible. Maybe not so much the kill drones, but the-- - The kill drones are gonna happen now, dude. And like, people are not ready for it, it's gonna be bad.

- How can you be ready for it though? Like, I mean, what the fuck are we gonna do? I mean, other than being private, I'm gonna go around like Mary Poppins with an umbrella that's like Kevlar or something, like, I don't know.

- Well, you have to have like your own land with your own kill drones that are in defense. It's like the only, you need like an anti-kill drone system. There's gonna be a dark period. Unfortunately, there's gonna be a dark period and I'm happy we can laugh at it because it'll be quite dark.

- You're gonna have to. If you can't laugh, I laugh, you're gonna cry. So I'd rather laugh at that. But yeah, Matt, thanks so much for joining me today. And from all of us at 21ism, thank you so much for everything that you do and for raising awareness on how important privacy is.

It makes a massive impact and the fact that you've docked your face and do the conferences, thank you for doing that because without it, a lot of people wouldn't be pulled in and we need that.

So yeah, massive respect as always for everything that you do. It's always a pleasure speaking to you. - I appreciate that. I appreciate you, brother. It's truly a pleasure speaking with you.

I look forward to hopefully meeting you in person one day. - Absolutely. We'll go up to Scotland and get pissed on whiskey. - Funky, let's do that. Let's make that a plan. I'm gonna hold you to that.

- A hundred percent. - I was supposed to go to Scotland right before all this COVID nonsense happened, so. Hopefully soon. (laughing) - And just keep fighting the good fight. It is, it is, it is, it's truly appreciated, I appreciate it's the wrong word.

It's truly an honor to see both you and so many other people in this space standing up, providing educational resources. When I first started, I mean, you mentioned earlier, like when you first started listening to Stefan, like when I first started, there wasn't much good education material there wasn't many people focused on privacy,

there wasn't many people focused on Bitcoin, it was mostly, there wasn't that many people focused on free open source software, it was all distractions, shit coins, pump and dumps, proprietary tools, and it really gives me a sense of peace and that I can just, I could walk away and know that there's so many other people out there

that are fighting the good fight, so thank you for that. - Absolute pleasure, well, stay on the line for a minute just to make sure we get this audio and yeah, thanks again, mate. - Cheers.