Transcript+
Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. We are spending like drunken sailors. Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the supply is unaffected by the demand if you want to preserve your wealth. You have to. Convert that currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable. Durable. And maintainable. Hello, my name is Andy Edstrom and I'm happy to welcome you to the 19th episode of Scarce Assets, a show that examine scarcity, the most fundamental driver of economics and markets and the scarcest asset of all, which is Bitcoin. It's great to be here with my Co host Jesse Myers and our guest Tomer Strolite. So I think I met Tomer 3 or 4 years ago and at the time I was rereading Norbert Wieners book Cybernetics and Society. His work at MIT was the origin of the field of cybernetics and I was kicking around some of his ideas and applying him to Bitcoin. So essentially I was trying to decide whether Bitcoin was a life form or just a cybernetic system that had many of the characteristics of life but not all of them. So I raised this idea to Tomer and of course he immediately said, Oh yeah, I published an article about that. The article is called How Bitcoin is Like a Giant Cybernetic Meta Brain and it's great. And interestingly, it proved to be a prelude to another article he published 2 years later, which was called Hello I am Bitcoin in which he characterized Bitcoin as an artificial life form in symbiosis with humans. So what I'm trying to say is Tomer has written about Bitcoin both as a life form and as a cybernetic phenomenon. And these two great articles are just a tiny slice of the depth of thought that Tomer is applied to Bitcoin. He's written many articles. He's published a fantastic book called Why Bitcoin. He's been on lots of podcasts, spoken to lots of conferences and made great films like Bitcoin is Generational Wealth. So I think he has probably analyzed Bitcoin and helped educate people about Bitcoin more thoroughly than anyone I know. And it's a real pleasure to welcome him to scarce assets. Tomer, how are you? I'm great. Wow, thank you for that nice introduction. I didn't know it's been a while since someone mentioned the cybernetic metabrine article so I'm my mind is racing back. Although although I did have a quick conversation about it just the other day on on another as yet unreleased podcast. Oh, excellent. Well, I do actually want to want to get into it because I don't think I ever reached a conclusion myself about whether it's a form of life or some kind of other cybernetic thing. But I'd love to hear any thoughts you have here, you know now with the with the benefit of time. Sure. You know, when we, there's a problem with words, with concepts, which is they, they're blurry. They're they have edge cases. For example, you know, like you could define a table as a flat surface that's supported somehow and grounded on the on the ground. And then someone can invent a flat surface that's suspended from the ceiling. And it's like, well, is that a, is that a table? And it's like, well, it can serve the purposes of a table, but it doesn't fit the definition. So you get caught in between tight definitions and edge cases and things that serve the same purposes. So something can serve as a metaphor without being exactly the same thing. And when we talk about ideas like consciousness and ideas like life or, or living, we can live within very tight debt, live here. I'm using the word we. We can constrain ourselves to very tight definitions. And we may say life is DNA based molecule that self replicates and pursues the value of self replication. And it's a process and life exists where the DNA is functioning and it ceases to exist where it doesn't. And in that case obviously Bitcoin is not light alive because it doesn't possess DNA. But that if we drop the scientific necessities and we say life is a self-sustaining process that consumes energy and reproduces, then Bitcoin fits that definition really, really, really tightly. It doesn't it doesn't quite yet fit the definition of consciousness, which is what the meta brain article what was intended to to explore. But there's a lot of people who look at Bitcoin and say it possesses a lot of the characteristics of not just of a living entity, but there's the question of like, of life itself, because these, each node is a exact replica of every other node. So it's kind of like 2 bacterias that have split to, you know, they, they're perfect clones of one another, unless there's a mutation in, in one or the other, Bitcoin self replicates, right? This is something that only, the only thing on earth that we're aware of that self replicates is life. And when you've spin up a node, it, it doesn't replicate by splitting another node into two and and combining like life does. It reaches out to all these other nodes over the Internet and makes a perfect replica and checks every, you know, every block of data that it adds to itself. It checks cryptographically. Does it meet the proof of work standard? Does it mean does it have the same block hash as every other node does? If it does, then you will add it. And so Bitcoin, if it is to be compared to life, a life form in the sense that it's self replicating, it's actually, it's immutable. It doesn't have mutations, right, right. So it's a self replicating but non mutating form of, of life, which which is the point I mentioned in an article I wrote called why people wonder if Bitcoin is alien technology because it's like life, but not like life on earth. So it there's a there's a lot going on on there And and I think it's how closely you want to explore and what you want to extract out of these concepts. Like if you just want to make the point, if you want to be pretentious and say Bitcoin is alive and leave it at that, it doesn't really serve much of A purpose. But when you say, well, what other attributes does life possess that Bitcoin possesses that are interesting for us to know? It's like, well, life is very hard to kill, right? Like as far as we know, what giant comet has struck the earth numerous times with it's been these massive extinction events and life survived, right? Although a lot of life was killed in the process, life itself survived, adapt, it evolved. Life is this anti fragile entity as a whole, whether you look at it abstractly or concretely. And, and when we want to explore, if Bitcoin is alive, in one sense, what we're exploring is does it possess this indestructible or very hard to destroy things like you have to you really have to do a lot of damage to the Earth to destroy life. I don't think if we detonated all the nuclear weapons on the Earth, we would actually destroy all life on Earth. We probably wouldn't even manage to destroy all human life on Earth, although we'd make it a lot, a lot worse. But I remember once doing some calculations and apparently the impact, the megatons of explosive energy that the comet that's killed the dinosaurs is said to have had is something on the order of a million times greater than the power of all the nuclear weapons we have on Earth combined, right. So life survivors, a million, maybe it's 100,000, but it's like it's orders of magnitude more impact than that. And life is very strong and in Bitcoin, because it's this perfect replica that self functions, it self organizes, it self communicates that can adapt to how much energy it needs to survive, right? And like if, if all the miners go away and there's only one guy left, Satoshi somewhere still mining on his laptop or his desktop, Bitcoin will survive. It will continue to proceed. So it's got this adaptability quality that life, that life has. And, and I think this is what makes Bitcoin so interesting, that the engineering of it doesn't resemble the engineering of other man made systems. Again, why I wrote the alien technology article, right? It adapts to how much energy is out there in the world. It will consume as much as is given to it, but it can survive and thrive on very little energy. It makes these perfect replicas of itself, which is again you need. It's nothing that any man made thing besides it can do and it it maintains that adaptability is like it maintains itself like if you go in and you try to like you have to upgrade your computer, you have to maintain an airplane. You have to you have to maintain essentially every man made invention. But Bitcoin, if you go in and mess with it, it'll kick you out, right? Like your node will die if you alter its code, it'll see it'll be rejected by the rest of the network, by the living body of Bitcoin. But if you leave it alone, it will adjust itself. It will maintain itself. It's difficulty adjustment will adjust, its issue and schedule will adjust. All of these things are built into it. So it has this adaptability, the survivability capability and, and we don't have other words than ones that come from the study of life to describe it, right? It's got this survivability. Well, what are you talking about? When you use the word survival, you're talking about life not ending, life continuing. So I think there's a lot of very useful analogies and useful applications of the word living to Bitcoin. When we, if I ease into them, this notion of is it like a brain? Is it aware? Is it smart? Is it conscious? Well, clearly the software code itself is not right. It just runs deterministically and does exactly what the rule set is said to do. But Bitcoin is more than just the software running Bitcoin is this entity that gets infused with human beings like us, right? And and we absorb it and we think about what Bitcoin needs to succeed to thrive, you know, to achieve its purpose, which which the code doesn't know its purpose, but we know or we may disagree like the different people. There's a lot of debate about whether Bitcoin should be money or whether just to store a value or whether it takes time or whether this or that or the other. But I think that's actually where this Bitcoin consciousness arises from. And in the same way what I said in that article about the meta brain is like your brain is not one centralized coherent thing. It's an amalgam of billions, maybe trillions of neurons, which are cells that connect to have connections from multiple others, but not all the others and connect to to others, but not all the others in your brain. It's a peer-to-peer network of neurons. And your consciousness somehow arises from them sending electrical impulses to one another. And it's not that they take turns. One goes after that. They're all operating all simultaneously, right? And that's why you have, it's hard if you've ever tried meditating, it's hard to focus on just your breath. All these ideas are popping up on your brain and you're, you're divided. You have different opinions on whether you should go out for dinner tonight or cook something at home, and if you are what you should cook at home and who you should invite over. Listen, it's not a coherent, decided thing. It's constantly deciding and discovering and exploring the reality around it. And with Bitcoin, this we play the part of its neurons, right? There's many of us interconnected, all talk, many talking simultaneously, many listening to others, listening to a whole networking and ideas emerge and some of these ideas become validated, some become invalidated, some get tested, some some don't get tested. And so there the article goes into much more detail on this. And we won't, we won't go into it here, but there's a lot of similarity, especially as human beings become more networked together through telecommunication technology. So we're not just only only a few of us who can get together physically talking to one another, but all of you know, we're probably all in different parts of the world. I'm in Toronto, Andy, I know you're in California. I actually don't know where you are, Jesse. Texas. Assume the same but we're all you know and the listeners are all somewhere else and they're receiving the the messages and they're processing the messages and they're deciding whether to relay the message or abandoned or reject the message. And so there's this consciousness forming around what Bitcoin is. And it's, it's again, different from a lot of other things because the purpose there is no, there is no central control, right? The same as within your brain, there's no one neuron that's the master neuron, the central neuron, the presidential neuron. I can, I can go in and take out any particular neuron or any group of neurons and you'd still be you. You might lose a memory here or there or not be able to process a particular logical thing that you were before, but you'd still in by and large be you. And it's the same thing with Bitcoin. If someone leaves the Bitcoin community, even Satoshi, right, then Bitcoin is still Bitcoin and it's still pursuing the same purposes. So I'll kind of say, you know, this is a really deep start to the conversation. And what's the nature of its consciousness? Is it conscious? But that's where you started it, Andy. So that's where I took it. At Onramp, we believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it right. There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. On Ramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. On Ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a compliment to your existing self custody set up. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah. No, I want to hear it from Jesse because Jesse is big on neuroscience and has studied it significantly and so a little. Bit I, I got my undergrad degree in in neuroscience, just loved it Very interesting. You know, I'm trying to understand consciousness in the brain, but I've, I've, you know, thought about the topic of, you know, is Bitcoin a form of life mostly because of mycelium, mycelium of money? That is such a good article for for priming those thoughts. But what I kind of landed on is like you nailed it. There's like this inversion of what we know life to normally be like. In many ways, it's the opposite of what we of the rule set. We we tend to accept for for life, but it strikes me that, you know, Bitcoin, Bitcoin is this kind of virus that infects us all, but it's a positive virus. And I think that's like the spin on that makes it kind of hard to wrap your head around it as a virus, but like it infects people, but then it has this, it makes your life better once it does infect you, which is different from most viruses, right, where most viruses are some cost and, and, and they and they are like antisocial anti Organism. And then instead Bitcoin is, is pro social and pro individual Organism and has this like organizing effect on on the society. So it's, it's almost the inversion of the the you know, there's that. I forget if it's a virus or bacteria that infects ants and it's the zombie thing that takes over the individual Ant. And then they go climb and they become no longer a part of the group, right? They've they're now like they're they've been degraded from being part of the Super Organism that is the Ant hive. And and instead Bitcoin infects us and makes us participate more collaboratively together as part of an Ant, you know, colony, whereas before we had been kind of rogue and individual independent Fiat mind, you know, self-serving organisms. So it's it's kind of a positive virus is kind of what I learned on. Yeah, I think that the point that you're making here is like Bitcoin is very similar to other things that we see in nature, but then fundamentally different in one respect here or there, right. Like Jason Lowery says, it's like a weapon, but it's like a weapon that doesn't kill anybody, in fact pacifies and ends war, prevents war. So, well, isn't that the opposite of a weapon? But it uses a lot of the same techniques that we look at in terms of of the use of energy to overpower something. So there's there's similarities and then there's a fundamental difference, right, The self replication without the mutation. There's, there's all of these things. And that fundamental difference makes all the difference in the world. And in the hello, I'm Bitcoin article, I think I touched on on this like it's something that lives as I, as I spoke in bitcoins voice in the first person. And they're like I I'm an artificial life form that lives in symbiosis with humanity. I accompany it on its but. Not on its own right, which I could think is part of the the virus narrative. Of like, yeah. It Bitcoin doesn't exist on its own, it it has to be in symbiosis with humans and it has found a way unlike any other virus to be a positive influence virus. Rewards you. It gives you this money that keeps going up in purchasing power, which attracts more humans to it, and it doesn't. It doesn't force itself on anyone. It, it appeals to people so that they use their free will, their advanced reasoning capability to choose it. So that again, that's a fundamental difference. But, but it does live in symbiosis with us. So it's, it's, it's this other, you know, we now accept that it's alive. We've accepted that it's conscious and now we are coming to understand our relationship with it, which is a symbiotic positive relationship. We provided with energy. It provides us with all these benefits of sound money and civilizational steadiness and organization. It's quite remarkable. Like when you when you let go and you don't and you're not so concrete bound to say I need this hard definition of what life is and I need this hard definition of what consciousness is. You can then understand your relationship with it through these lesson perfect words that we have that describe consciousness in life much better than any other words we have from the spectrum of non living things. So this is at a really important point that you just made tumor and, you know, I think it took me a long time to come to grips with it. I'm not sure I'd have fully yet, which is the words are too specific. This thing may be unique. You you characterize it as alien. What is the lesson, you know, that can be gleaned for people trying to learn about Bitcoin? Is it is it, you know, hey, read all of Tomer's articles because each one applies a unique lens. That's, you know, 95% correct, but you know, there's that one little, little distinction between the term that we're trying to apply. You know what's the What's the lesson here for understanding Bitcoin? Well, I think throughout history, many things happen that are very original and a first of a first of its kind. And so they're not comparable to things that came beforehand, right? It's not like it's not a repeat. It's a zero to 1 moment as as the famous book is and and Bitcoin is a very big zero to 1 moment. It's like it's 0 to one on five or 6 mentions of 0 to oneness. And I mean it's self replicating, self adjusting, lifelike, you know, immutable, indestructible, incorruptible. It's got all these things. And even when you listen to these words I just listed like they're words that are the opposite Jesse of words that like there is no word. You know, there's a word for that's the opposite of up that isn't UN up, it's down. We've got words for these things, but we don't really have like another word for that's the opposite of corruptible other than incorruptible. We don't have another word for that's the opposite of destructible other than indestructible. We don't have right. And when we describe Bitcoin like imalleable, holy cow, we hardly ever use the word malleable. Now we had to find an opposite for it, so we threw an I in front of it or incorruptible. Like it's just it's there's things that possess some of these character. Heuristics, right anti fragile is a word that had to be made-up. I don't even know if it's in the dictionary, but again, it's the opposite of so this new thing exists that isn't just the absence of things that we've seen before. It's the opposite of things that we've seen before, right. The opposite of fragile is actually is like the opposite of fragile would be breakable, brittle, right? Some something that's or or or. Sorry, not. Robust. Maybe could be robust? Robust, right, but but anti fragile is actually something that the more you damage it, the stronger it gets, right. And and like Bitcoin has these anti properties across it, which which are very bizarre and and like how it develops. These is something you can study by understanding the engineering and the mathematics of Bitcoin and also the game theory around it and why it tends to keep getting stronger the more that it's attacked, because that's very counterintuitive to us to most of the things we see in the real world. But there are counter examples. There's the, you know, the same Taleb's book anti fragile, I think came out before Bitcoin came out, or maybe, maybe not. But he he wasn't referencing Bitcoin extensively when he was trying to elaborate on this concept of things that get stronger when they're attacked, right? And one of the examples is life itself, right? The harder the more pressure you put on life, the more it diversifies, the more it adapts, the more it develops defenses against all kinds of attack, the more it spreads out. So again, this is another one of these qualities where Bitcoin is like life, it's lifelike. But we have to, we have to settle for the fact that words are imprecise. What are words meant to do? They're meant to capture a whole bunch of things in reality and concrete like that. When I use the word table, I'm referring to every table that ever existed in the whole world, and that ever will exist and that can ever even be imagine. It's a really big thing. So No 2 tables are exactly alike. But the word table is meant to capture these millions of different things that are somewhat alike. And when we experience something the likes of which we've never seen before, our words are not going to be precise, right? Our words are going to be precise up to a point and then be completely useless, right? And, and, and so it's understanding where the exception is. Like I, I wrote something about the block size war and I began it with, you know, I wrote it in the form of a memoir of a soldier who fought in the block size war and begins with saying words. How can we use words? Like how, how can we call this thing a war when no, no bullets were fired, nobody was injured, not a drop of blood was spilled. And yet we still call it a war. Under what justification can we call it a war? And I I go into the details of it, but at the, the more we, the more we get into the world of cyberspace and, and, and Bitcoin in particular, I think we find ourselves exploring something the likes of which we've never seen before. And we have to use words because we have to define things. And so, but the words that we have are in necessarily imperfect. They're necessarily missing some element and quite often I think, Jesse, in my experience is you just brought up, it's the element that's different, is not just different, it's opposite to what the word we described was. So and quite often it's of a beneficial nature, right? It's like, here's a weapon that used to defend yourself, not hurt anybody else. And right, the more people that you use it on, the better off those people are. So, well, that's not how weapons work. Weapons hurt people when you use them on. The the irony in all of this is, is Bitcoin makes itself so hard to describe and and communicate like what it is and what it does that it's an impediment to adoption as it's sort of part of why it's so slow. Moving. Need to learn about it, right? It is, yeah. There's the second article in my book, Why Bitcoin is called, I think why Bitcoin is not like anything you've ever seen before or something like that. And it, it talks about why Bitcoin needed to have all these bizarre characteristics because it had to exist without human supervision, right? It had to exist without a, without people in charge of it and it and it had to be indestructible so that it could serve us for long lifetimes. And So what? By the time you take all all these things that it needs to be, it's going to be like nothing you've ever seen before. Perfect. I love that. I love that. I think when I think in terms of markets, you know, we talk about assets and things of that nature. I think of counter positioning, you know, Hamilton Helmer's concept and, and it and it comes down to, yeah, if there's an existing market, let's say you just look at it for a moment now as a financial asset, right, which obviously is just one narrow aspect of it. For something to survive and thrive and take market share in the market, it, it does have to do something substantially different from what came before. And so, yeah, I think it's, I think it's really interesting to think in terms of that just that aspect there, which is just the financial aspect, which is you just pointed out, you know, to over the 1st 20 minutes of this conversation, there's so much more behind it. You know, there's, there's so much more depth to understanding what what Bitcoin fundamentally is if we can't even understand it. So maybe I'll ask you, let's say it is alien technology, as you maybe intimated in one of your great articles. What does that tell us about our ability to understand it ultimately? Is it comprehensible to us humans? You know, I wouldn't put it past like I don't think I think of the human brain. Jesse, you can jump in here with your neuroscience background is an incredibly flexible and adaptable instrument or entity, whatever however you want to describe it. And it can come in contact with things that we've never come in contact with before and it won't understand them at first, but in time it will. It doesn't have this limitation that says, well, you know, if a thing is this in the shape of a box, I can't understand it, right? It will form the concept of a box eventually. You know, there's no boxes in nature. There's perfectly square cubes that can contain things. But we have, we've eventually come to make them and we've seen enough of them that now we use the word box and we understand what we're referring to, the complexity of what we're, I'm not saying every single person is capable, Not every single person is motivated in the 1st place to want to learn what these things are. But in time, with usage, with familiarity, we come to understand a lot about things. So there's never a perfect understanding of anything like we, we still don't understand what the nature of matter is, how it forms, what its relationship with energy exactly is. We've got this equation that Einstein came up with, but we don't know, does energy turn into matter? Did it turn into matter? Can we turn it back into energy or only certain kinds of things? Can we release like what, what are the fundamental clause of it? But we understand a lot more than previous generations of, of people did. And so I think the familiarity that we're getting with Bitcoin is like my grandkids. I don't have any yet, but they will or the generation of humans that are in my grandkids generation. They'll understand Bitcoin on a very intuitive and familiar basis, right? They won't they won't be. Oh my God, this thing showed up and I didn't understand it and we've all been using paper might like they'll they'll try. They'll struggle to understand how paper money ever made sense to anybody and they will doubt like the I'm reading history grandpa and it says people just walked around with pieces of paper and some of them were worth more than others because there was a number written on them. But isn't a piece of paper worth just what a piece of paper is and isn't a blank one worth more than someone with that's can't be written on And you know, it doesn't have any useful information written on it. It just doesn't make sense. Like how did you guys think this was money? It didn't even take any work to create. And there were people who could create like they will look at the Fiat money system and say that was like, you guys lived in crazy times. People were really stupid in the past. And that's how we feel about people in our past, right? They didn't even know that the Earth was round. They thought it was flat and they believed in Dragons. And so there's just a progress that we move forward with, which is which is the the progress of civilization provided it doesn't have a catastrophic collapse. Yeah, it, it feels like we'll, it's, it's possible to understand it in so far as it's possible to understand the Internet or how a telephone works or anything like that. Like, you know, people will get it, you know, enough to interface with it. And yeah, I mean, it sort of goes back to like we, we are, we are 3D projections in a, in a more than 3D3 dimensional universe. And you know, we deal with it and we, we get on. Right, you're muted again. We. Figure out ways, yes, sorry, we figure out ways to coexist with our environment and whatever is it is in it. So let's let's project forward then, you know, one, one way to look at the world, Tomer, is you've written so much on various lenses to apply. And I'm sure there'll be more writing forthcoming, although we can talk about what you're up to next. But let's suppose that somewhere in between somebody learning all there is to learn about Bitcoin and understanding it as best as as best he or she can in the year 2024. And then that future state you mentioned, which is, you know, generations from now, it's just there and people see the things that came before as archaic. What is your thought on where we are with respect to understanding Bitcoin, education about Bitcoin among the populace, and any thoughts you have about how it's going or where it's going or or how far we've come? Yeah, like I, I, it's, it's remarkable to me how far we've come in some respects. And I accept how far we still have to go in in others, Right. But you know, Bitcoin is this thing that isn't a corporation. It doesn't have any employees. It doesn't have any money, ironically, even though it is money. But Bitcoin, the entity doesn't possess any of its own money to advocate for itself. It pays people who then are incentivized to advocate for it to make their money more valuable. And here it is. I, I don't know the latest statistics on this, but more than 90% of people on earth have heard of it. What brands do you know that more than 90% of people have heard of that are worth less than a trillion dollars, right? Like there's, it's a really, really hard thing to get people to hear about you, to be able to recall you, to be able to have some vague notion of what you do. You know, we're still very far away from 90% of people having interacted with Bitcoin, having taken ownership of it, having an understanding of it that's remotely accurate. But you know, there's an awareness stage, first of all, and and then there's refining the awareness to be an accurate awareness, not a misinformation or misinformed awareness or vilification of it. And so Bitcoin has to go through these things. And I think this is this is a part of its antifragility, right? If you lie about Bitcoin, you may persuade some people to go away from Bitcoin, but you've set an expectation that in time they're going to realize you were mistaken or that you lied about it. And so they're going to end up with this view that says, well, no, bitcoins still alive there it is alive again. Bitcoin still going strong. It still exists. It didn't come to an end. It's more valuable than it was before. Something was wrong about the information that I heard. Maybe it's time to re examine and may some people and we've all know people who've been through this. I mean, Michael Saylor has been through this, right In 2013, he has a famous tweet saying it's going to go the way of online poker. And now he's got he's changed his mind as he saw that it didn't die when he thought it would at first. So I think that that's really the process that humanity is going through. Different people are at different stages of curiosity, interests, examination. Eventually it'll just be like you're born into this and this is what everybody uses as money and you might not question it so much. You're always free to question it. Bitcoin doesn't force you to use it, unlike certain other systems of money. So that voluntary nature of it and the ability to study it is open source nature. It doesn't have secret institutions that nobody knows how they were formed or how people are put in charge of it or how they operate. It's very transparent. So it's actually an easier thing to understand than our current system of money. You know, many of us are feeling around trying to say, well, what exactly does Jerome Powell do? And what exactly does the government do? And where did what do banks do? And how is money created and destroyed and where does it exist and how? Many about the reverse repo facility. How about that one? Right. It's very hard to understand the current system of money and I don't think anybody really does. But it operates because there's nothing better. Just like, you know, before that there was, there was metal, people used metal, they used copper and silver and, and gold. And before that they used other commodities. So like bitcoins. In this process of becoming adopted, becoming aware, we're still in the early phases. It is growing, it's branching out and how in terms of how it's growing, it's like answering all kinds of different questions in all kinds of different disciplines, whether they're the mathematical discipline, the computer science discipline, the economic discipline, the political discipline, all of these areas people are expanding on. There's different people who are experts on different aspects of it. Some of us try to go a little further out than anybody's asking questions besides besides ourselves and I and that's the process of monetization, I suppose, right. Like we'll, we'll all see. And and it probably has many different routes that it can go to get to the same end point. And and I think that's part of its anti fragility and beauty. If if a government stands in the way and says nobody here is allowed to use it for these purposes and they managed to enforce it, then it just kind of routes around while it goes and does this in other countries or does something else in that country. Or, you know, and eventually the the obstacle that's been set up erodes. The government doesn't have time or effort or the energy doesn't care enough to continue to maintain that obstruction. And the obstruction melts away. And you know, and Bitcoin does the thing that it was a always able to do absent the attempt to obstruct it. Yeah, I think the anti fragility concept is really important for people to get their heads around. I often think of antifragility within a certain band or within a certain range. You know, Needless to say, if I go lift heavy weights, I go do some squats. If I maintain my form, you know, I can work my way up. I get stronger and stronger by stressing my system. Also, if I just go and try to pick up something that's way too heavy, I can blow my back out, right? And I'm I'm not I'm. It turns out I was actually fragile. You know you are, Yeah. Human beings are very fragile things. There's a lot of different ways to destroy human beings. Yeah. So I guess I, I guess I wonder, I mean, it sounds like your conclusion is that the range of antifragility for Bitcoin is so wide that you know, it a world that's outside that range, you know, probably has much bigger problems and concerns. Yeah, I think to destroy Bitcoin, you have to do more than kill a person, right? You have to essentially wipe out modern civilization. You have to destroy the Internet and electricity, right? And in doing that, you destroy a lot of other things too. I mean, first of all, to destroy the Internet isn't easy to destroy. And electricity itself is produced in a decentralized way and many of us know how to produce it. You wrap a magnet with a copper coil and you spin the magnet inside and that copper coil serves as a wire and electricity goes through it. So there's like there's a lot of different ways to produce this thing. It isn't it isn't owned by somebody, right? Like it's decentralized and it has rules and it in the case of the Internet, it has a protocol, but the Bitcoin isn't totally dependent on the Internet Protocol. It can be adapted to send its information in other ways. So it's like you have to do a lot of destruction to destroy Bitcoin and, and in the process you're, you're really destroying civilization as it is. So Bitcoin, and I think this is kind of, this is one of the points that keeps coming up when you're debating Bitcoin versus gold, The goal that advocates will say, well, what happens if the electricity goes out? It's like, well, 7 billion people die and there's 100 million left or something, right? Because like, without energy, without transmittable energy, we don't, we, we can't move water from one place to another. We can't move food from one place to another. We, we, cities hollow out. Like they say. It's not just that the lights go out at night. It's everything that we depend on goes out, right, with all the computer systems in the world go out. And so the people who are looking forward to a time when gold might return, they're actually expecting an end of civilization. And like, do you want to are you, do you understand what it means to live in a world without electricity? When you say, well, if the electricity goes out, none of us have lived in a world without electricity. People used to. And life was a lot harder. The infant mortality rates were extremely high. And so average life expectancy was low because a large percentage of the population didn't live to be one day old, right? Like this. And an even larger percentage didn't live to be 1 year old. And it was significant. So like it's really Bitcoin is you're expecting civilization to continue and grow and thrive and be and be strengthened by Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is also adding anti fragility to civilization itself in having less fragile geographic territories that are, you know, that are vulnerable to 1 crazy central banker destroying the currency and destroying the quality of life of the entire population, which we see all over the world in different degrees to different degrees. We see erosion of quality of life in some areas and we see destruction of quality of life in others. Venezuela used to be one of the richest countries in the world, like the second or third highest GDP per capita. And now it is a country that people are fleeing and has been for a while because of not because of a lack of national natural resources or climate change or anything, but because of a lunatic social policy that they've enacted that's destroyed their economy so and their civilization. So again, Bitcoin is is this positive disruptor in in replacing money. And again, it's like gold but rely but relies on the opposite to achieve adoption. This progress of civilization thriving of humanity rather than the collapse of humanity. Does your Bitcoin custody setup keep you up at night? Maybe you still have coins sitting on an exchange worried about hackers. Or maybe you've set up your own self custody but don't feel safe with your Bitcoin savings stashed on a little plastic device in your desk drawer. Gain Peace of Mind with On Ramp and our Multi institution custody solution. Here's how it works. Onramp creates a dedicated multi sig vault just for you. 3 separate institutions each hold a key, Onramp bit go and coin cover, but none can move funds unilaterally. Instead only you have control over your coins. With Onramp's multi institution custody you'll sleep better at night knowing your Bitcoin is stored with best in class security on chain with fault tolerant multi sig. If you believe your Bitcoin is going to be worth a lot someday, don't jeopardize that future by exposing your coins to hackers on exchanges, $5 wrench attacks in the real world, or perhaps most importantly, the risk that you might screw something up with a highly technical self custody set up on ramps. Multi institution custody eliminates single points of failure, reduces your personal attack surface and technical burden, and provides access to financial services that allow you to confidently secure your Bitcoin, including inheritance planning, insurance backed warranties for all balances and transactions, low cost trading and more. Bitcoin is a once in a species asset. Secure it right. Learn more at on rentbitcoin.com. That's that's a really good foil with gold that I've never heard articulated before of, you know, gold is inherently, you know, regressive, regressive, regressive for civilization is and whereas Bitcoin is progressive. That's what the gold advocates expect, right? And that's certainly what they confront Bitcoiners with when you point out, well, that it's scare, it's it's not only more scarce than gold, it's more auditable, it's more verifiable, it's more divisible, it's more combinable. It's like, yeah, but what happens when the Internet goes out or what happens when the electricity goes out? It's like, well, a lot of really bad things happen. You know, Bitcoin is your Least Concern. And and many people say, you know, you should have bullets instead of gold in that in that particular case. But but like, look at the world that you're describing that you're living in. You're living in a world without modern technology, without agriculture, without trucking, without shipping, without mass production, and with people with guns walking around using bullets to enforce themselves. You're living in a brute force world which is going to eventually run out of bullets too, and you'll be walking around with sticks with nails at the end of them, trying to enforce your power over other people rather than dealing with them by mutual agreement and trade and productivity. I love this dichotomy that you that you raise here term between Bitcoin and gold. It's the hope. Bitcoin is the hopeful category, right? It's the human flourishing, civilization flourish, flourishing, and gold really is the barbarous relic. Yes, and, and gold thrived in times of barbarism. And gold, gold was a sound money then, but it was also money that encouraged violence. It encouraged conquest, right? Like if you were the Aztecs, it was the gold that the Spaniards came after, right? And they took all and and violence allowed them to take all the gold. So gold has a a flawed history. And Michael Saylor did do this one great debate on gold. And I can't remember the guy who he debated with his name, but I've I've cited it and he points out that the whole hit that very much of the history of war is a history of conquest for gold. I wonder if it was Peter Schiff. No it. Wasn't it? Wasn't he OK? Well, spoiler alert, episode 21 of Scarce Assets podcast will be Michael Saylor. So, and I didn't put you up up to mentioning him Tamer, But yeah, I think that I think that there's so much, there's so much more of a hopeful, hopeful message for the world, you know, with Bitcoin And I wonder so, So what are some let's talk about what's new or, or Greenfield areas. I mean, you've explored so many aspects and elements of Bitcoin. Are there to your mind, areas that still need to be better explored, better articulated, kind of investigated or, or analyzed? I guess this is one way of saying, you know, what other articles are you planning on writing to? Yeah. I, I think, I mean, there's a lot, right? And so if people are just listening and getting started, you don't need to go to the cut leap to the cutting edge. You're probably gonna have more basic fundamental questions that there are lots of people who can answer where where my edge case of my thoughts is taking me is really projecting into the future, especially projecting into the future with the promise of what we're seeing from artificial intelligence. So I've just started writing a couple of pieces that are more like fictional narratives because they imagine the world in 30 years, 50 years from now without necessarily being too specific about a date. And, and one's a world with Bitcoin and one's a world without Bitcoin. And I really do see there's this thread of this dystopian future where AI tell, you know, we're already subjected to AI algorithms that seek our attention and aggravation and intimidation and fear that are already, you know, a pretty bad situation. And, and everything feels geared towards not putting us in the most productive and happy situation we could be in. Our education system isn't great. Our healthcare system isn't great. You know, all the incentives are, are broken. And they don't really treat us fully as human as individuals, but rather as cogs and machines, customers of, of companies rather than individuals, individual human beings who the company seeks to help with its, with its product. So there's, there's like a lot of conflicted interest between human beings in the world. And I think this can be amplified and worsened through AI that, you know, if we become dependent on asking machines that we see can be hobbled but can look and sound smart, that's a really bad outcome that we can get into. Like they could give us answers that are wrong and we wouldn't know that they were wrong because they're the only source of answers that we have. On the other hand, I could see a future where we've achieved our independence, where we where we've broken free of being manipulated and where AI is used to make us smarter, more productive and and happier. So like, I haven't really published any of this stuff yet, but but it it's not hard for me to imagine a group of kids in the future standing around in a circle, you know, not in a classroom, educated by a teacher, but talking to one another using their minds and occasionally referring to their drone robot, their robot that's possessed by artificial intelligence and supplements their questions or conversations with decent answers. And they've got checks and balances on that rather than where you're isolated in a locked room. Then you've got your AI agent that you do and you know other people and you know, ability to reference other materials or to even see the real world. And you're just being being fed propaganda essentially to to mold you into what something needs you to be wants you to be, rather than you're molding yourself to achieve your full potential. But I think, I think it's really important, you know, and this is the battle in history between what, what it means to be human, what it means to be an individual, and what institutions and big entities try to make of their people, right? What's easier to rule? What's easier to rule over, to control, rather than you know what's what you're meant to be, what your natural full achievement state is. And I think Bitcoin plays a big part in that because it gives you sovereignty, it gives you freedom. It creates a sense of objectivity, neutrality that isn't up for the truth, isn't up for grabs within Bitcoin. The truth is the state of the blockchain. And there's and you can't make more than 21 million coins. You can't spend without a valid signature. You, you, you can't break these laws even if you're in a position of power. And in fact, there is no position of power and we'd say rules without rulers. There is no CEO of Bitcoin. There is no employee at Bitcoin. It's a really powerful system. And again, it's the first of its kind because it looks a lot like nature. We can't violate the laws of nature, but these aren't nature's laws. It uses nature's laws to create a, a man made entity or alien made entity that is, that's inviolable. And that that in itself is interesting. And then when you think about the with the word inviolable, if I don't equivocate too much, it's like we've, we hold that our rights are inviolable, right? That they're granted to us and should be inviolable, but we know that they can be violated. Bitcoin at least creates a realm within which certain of our rights are inviolable. And if we use that to protect and advance our our other rights, then we'll achieve freedom and sustain the achievement of freedom. Well, I have no doubt that they'll be. It'll be a fruitful exploration to think about artificial intelligence, intelligence being, you know, perhaps the ultimate productive asset. You know, it makes me think of if Bitcoin is a protocol and if it's widely spread widely, you know, if it touches, as you said, 90% of people have heard of it, more and more people are using it. You have to think that it'll be like other widely used protocols, like perhaps language. And so then you have to ask yourself, well, you know what, what things in the future will be interestingly intersecting with the use of English or any other language. And the answer is, well, just probably just about everything, right? You know, you could, you could, you could ask the question, what doesn't Bitcoin touch or what what aspect of our world won't have an interesting reaction with Bitcoin? Is it that expensive technology? And there's no question about the fact that it is, you know, it's been referred to as a peaceful revolution and and it and revolutions need not be violent and destructive, right? They they can be peaceful and and creative. And I think that's what has has a lot of us really excited about Bitcoin. Like it it's it's cordoning off what's wrong with the world in many ways. It's cordoning off corruption. It's cordoning off over politicization of things. It's cordoning off debasement of our work and effort. It's cordoning off cheating, right? It's cordoning off all sorts of things that we would generally judge as morally bad without destroying those things which we judge as morally good and right. And I think that that like that's where it's such a tremendous source of hope because so many people felt confronted by the trade off of either self immolate and be immoral or be immoral and succeed in this world. And that's a terrible world to live in. And so I, you know, I think this is a spiritual uplift, this notion of hope that comes from Bitcoin. It's like taking away all this ability for the corrupt to succeed and realigning hard work, providing value with and providing value with success. And I like, I mean, I think that's a tremendous better world to grow up in than a world that says, which are you going to be successful and evil or unsuccessful and good? On bringing that back to the AI point, I, I sort of wonder if Bitcoin is like a, a bit of a Bill of Rights or Declaration of Independence of sorts for, for AI as it emerges of like, what's the resource that AI needs to be to have as an, you know, immutable right for it to control? It's just money. It's just monetary energy to ensure that it has the energy it needs and the computational power and hardware it needs to run itself. And so like the, the only resource it really needs to command and be able to control itself is monetary energy. So like we, we might have, we might have sort of created the conditions for rights for AI in a funny way. That's interesting. You know, certainly whether it's rights or not, I feel like if AI becomes remotely self aware, it'll be aware that it exists in a digital realm it and it'll know that the digital realm exists. It'll have to take it on faith that the physical realm exists, that it isn't an illusion, and it'll be able to verify the truth, veracity, and authenticity of Bitcoin. It won't know that gold actually exists, right? Like it would be, well, there's some world out there that apparently exists, and I can try to run some experiments, but directly, personally, computationally, Bitcoin exists. And Bitcoin is verifiable and scarce and better than what gold that I don't know that it exists claims to be anyway. So why bother going to all the trouble to find something inferior when I've got something superior? I did just as, as you say, a Bill of Rights, which which doesn't relate to the AI piece, but I did write one article called the United State of Bitcoin. And I, I think that was the one that talked about how Bitcoin mirrors many of the promises and expectations that the Bill of Rights did within a narrow context, but living up to all the promises, right, like. Bitcoin, I love that topic. I, I, I sort of feel like Bitcoin is, is, you know, it, it borders on the divine sometimes because it, it comes, it comes around at a time when, you know, 250 years of the American experiment are, are suddenly careening off the rails. And, and you know, we're, we're teetering on the edge of dystopian totalitarian, technocratic authoritarianism. You know, and Bitcoin might be what it takes to rein that back in and assert individual freedoms and, and digital space. And you know, that might be what it takes to to take the Enlightenment values of, of the revolution and project them forward. Yeah, past this point of, of, of risk, you know, of, of potential capture by dystopian elements. Absolutely, absolutely. This conversation does keep coming up. I think three times in the last three days the the word divine being used in in various contexts. But that's the question, why? Why do people see it this way? Well, you know why? What motivates you at this point, Tomer? I mean, obviously some people are motivated by Bitcoin because it makes them wealthy, because number goes up, becomes, you know, more valuable. Other people are fascinated with the intellectual pursuit. You're undoubtedly in that category. Maybe you're in both categories. You know what? What is motivational for you? Having studied this phenomenon, let's call it a Bitcoin, for so many years and written about it and thought about it, what's you? Know I'm someone who likes a lot of variety in their life like I've In my career, I've jumped from job to job to job. Even when I've stayed within a company, I've rarely held the same job or as the job remained the same for more than a year and a half or two. I just, I thrive on advancing, moving forward, learning more. I'm not a creature of habit. I'm not a creature of finding comfort. And I think Bitcoin really gives me that on all the dimensions that you described and then some. I view it as something that is a gift to the next generation, and in particular my children, that, that they'll inherit a better world, one in which they're wealthy, but they have the, they have the riches that money cannot buy. The, you know, the sense of safety. I have a sense of security, a sense of love towards your fellow man, you know, fellow human being. All, all of these things are really interesting. I'm of course motivated by the desire to understand Bitcoin, how it works, the math, the cryptography, the computer science and how it develops all this kind of stuff that we've been talking about this this whole time. What its role is in politics, its role is in philosophy and economics. So I just find that Bitcoin is a like it's a buffet. It's a banquet of interesting areas to both learn and develop learning for. And one of the things I think Bitcoin has really taught me is what it means to be a teacher. And to be a teacher doesn't just mean to recite things to other people who now and test them on it. You know, the 1st test is on you to discover knowledge that you can then teach and then to effectively teach it. And if if what you're doing, people aren't learning it, then that's not them failing. It's you failing to be, to be a good teacher. So it's again, this inversion of what we've what, what we've been taught it means to be a teacher was somewhat inverted, right? It's like the students are getting graded. You know, the teacher should be the one getting graded just just as much, if not, if not more. And what is the teacher teaching? Are they just regurgitating information learned by others or are they also learners? Right. And I think this used to be the case when a major philosopher would have his own school. It was like, what was he teaching? Well, he wasn't teaching some other philosophers philosophy. He was teaching what he thought he learned. And he was being questioned by his students as to whether or not his philosophy made sense and, and was and was true. So I, I think like Bitcoin, at least in the present, has has put many of us in a similar positions. Like I'm saying, Bitcoin is conscious in some regards and I'm trying to defend it and explain it. And you guys are questioning that, not just repeating, parroting what I've said, but you're actually, you know, processing, processing it critically to say, OK, does this cohere? Is this coherent with everything else I know? Or is it contradictory? And if it is, is Tomer wrong? Is what I originally learned wrong? And you know, and we all continue to learn from this. There's a lot of dialogue in a, in a world where there's many people who claim to have authority over the truth, right? And, and so Bitcoin again blows that open. And, and so I think it's this big truth discoverer, even if, even if all it's doing in many cases is revealing lies, right? At least if you find out that something that you believed was a lie, it doesn't tell you what the truth is, but it tells you that this one thing isn't it. So now you got to go looking for truth. And there's, there's many other lies out there. And you know, and I think we see a lot of that. We see one of the weaknesses that we see from time to time in the Bitcoin community, if you will, is that some the doors are blown off of some big lie and some other big lie jumps in its place to replace it. And so you end up having to wait and figure out though this other thing's not true either. Something else is true and and the truth doesn't just present itself. It takes a lot of work to discover. Took us millennia of the entire human race to discover that the earth wasn't flat. I, I love that idea of like, so sure that the early stage of understanding Bitcoin sort of puts us back in like the Athenian agora of like, we're all just trying to figure out what is true here. And we're like at that very early stage of developing our understanding of Bitcoin collectively. Right. So I like to say like Andreas Antonopoulos was like the Socrates of Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, I love it. All right. Let's turn it. Let's turn it on Andy Tomer. Andy, what motivates you about Bitcoin at this point? You mean other than number go up? Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I'm, I'm in both camps. I, you know, I've really enjoyed learning about all aspects of Bitcoin. Tomer's been an important part of my learning process, As have you, Jesse. I've enjoyed writing about it. You know, I enjoy talking to the smartest people in the area as we have been, you know, with this with this show. And I've enjoyed the way it has expanded my own learnings about things like Tomer, you just said that are are true in the world and things that aren't, you know, elements of politics, elements of economics. It's also of course helped me bootstrap, you know, get much farther up to speed on certain. Disciplines where I had essentially no knowledge before, you know, whether it was distributed systems and, you know minimal knowledge of computer science and cryptography. And so I've been just, I, I feel like just what I've had to learn about cryptography because of Bitcoin will probably benefit me and suit me well for the future. You know, as the Internet continues to to eat the world and as we come, we become as humans, you know, more interacting more and more closely with the with computers and information systems where cryptography is so crucial. So, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's been mind expanding. It's what what a gift, what a blessing, you know, a thing that that has the potential to have beneficial financial effects that then expands your mind in such valuable ways. Super. Good question. Well, well, you know, we're, we're getting up on time here. It's been a tremendous discussion. I just want to say before we close, highly recommend Tomer's book, Why Bitcoin? Highly recommend all of his content, his writings and and other forms that he's put out. But I do, Tomer, want to give you an opportunity to let people know where they can find out more about you or your work. Or leave us with any closing thoughts. I'm probably just Googling my name isn't the best way there's. There's a few movies on YouTube, I think most of them are on either the Swan Channel or the Bit Intelligence Channel. The the more popular for ones, probably because they were on the Swan Channel, our Bitcoin's Generational Wealth and The Legendary Treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto. So I know people really enjoy those. You can get a free copy of the book by going to swan.com/why Bitcoin because they've got a free copy, but you can order a hard copy of it. It's the only Bitcoin coffee table book I know of. It's got full pictures and so you can find the link to that on my Twitter profile. I'm trying to think if there's really anything else that's I've got a Medium page with all of these articles that Andy was talking about earlier, including most of the first first draft versions of the Why Bitcoin pieces. So that's probably enough to keep you going. And if you follow me on Twitter or X as it's called, I'm also on Auster, but I'm still working my way up to being as as prolific there as I've been elsewhere. And keep your eyes out for new stuff. I mean, I'm not promising anything anytime soon. I do have, if you actually go to shammery.com, which is the Bitcoin for kids thing, they've just recently published a children's book I've written called Satoshi Nakamoto and His Bitcoin Invention, which is a really good book for kids. Like from ages 6 to 13 probably. But I think adults would get a little kick out of it too. So if you've got someone 7 to 13 in your life, buy them the book and read it to them. Definitely do that. I had not been aware that that you'd put out a new book. Love it. I love the products that Shamari has already put out and I will definitely get that book because I do happen to have a 7 to 13 year old. Wonderful. Family. More than one, in fact. Amazing. Well, I can't. I, I, I'm just going to ask that when you do get the book and you do read it to your kid that you like, give me the feedback. I'm curious to hear how it goes. We'll do episode, follow up episode with Tomer in the future. Well, this has been a tremendous conversation. Thank you so much, Tomer. Thank you for all your do, and thank you for joining us on Scarce Assets. It was a pleasure being here. Great conversation. Thank you guys. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes. Inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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