What do you think of Lugano, Jameson?
It's one of my favorite European cities.
Can Bitcoin be used as a weapon against us?
I would say the short answer is no, and what's your short answer, Jameson?
Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil, so one way that Bitcoin could be weaponized
against us would be exerting pressure on your centralized institutions or also surveilling
the chain due to its weak privacy attributes.
While that is true at the moment, it's a transitory phase.
New technologies are being developed all the time for improving privacy and so on.
If you know how to use Bitcoin, that's not really a problem.
Since Bitcoin is a peaceful tool, can this be a peaceful revolution?
I see it in a slightly different way.
It's more akin to armor than to a weapon, so by removing the incentive for the attacker
to attack you, like removing the profit from the equation, like if I point the gun at Jameson's
head and say, give me all your Bitcoin, and he doesn't, and I shoot him, I will never
get the Bitcoin.
It moves the schelling point of violence, if you will, and thereby removes a lot of threat
vectors that are currently present.
In the fiat system, we're constantly under threat, and we're being threatened if we don't
use the systems that are around where at the end of it, like if you follow the dominoes,
sooner or later you end up in jail if you don't pay taxes and if you don't use inflationary
currency.
So that's where the violence is, and Bitcoin is a great tool for removing that kind of
violence.
Yeah, I mean, what is a weapon?
You can get into a semantics game, it could be a matter of perspective.
One could say that a defensive weapon is also a weapon.
The cool thing about cryptography and about its applications within Bitcoin and the protocol
is that it does give an asymmetric advantage to the defender.
So we're really imposing a much higher cost upon these authorities if they want to come
in and manipulate us and take our money.
They have to do it piecemeal, one sovereign holder at a time, rather than only targeting
a handful of central institutions.
Yeah, I'd like to also expand on the Oppenheimer versus Nakamoto idea.
The Oppenheimer movie was very popular this spring, and we made a little movie about the
similarities and differences between Oppenheimer and Nakamoto because they were individuals
who figured out ways to harness the power of physics to change human incentive structures.
And the Oppenheimer reason that by building the biggest, baddest bomb ever, he would prevent
world wars because the world would be in a sort of perpetual Mexican standoff.
But if you look at like Bitcoin is being accused of wasting energy, but the largest
atomic bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba in Russia in 61, consumed more energy than
the Bitcoin network has done over the 14 years that it has existed.
So like the worst thing you can do for world peace is give money to governments because
they're the most destructive things around, like they are the ones who create the problems.
Bitcoin is a great noise removal tool where you can remove all that violence and all that
noise.
If who controls the violence controls the world, could the world become total chaos
if Bitcoin becomes the standard?
So chaos, violence is chaos, right?
So what you remove is the chaotic aspect of like if the only way to enrich yourself or
the most profitable to enrich yourself is not by pulling a gun on someone, but to give
something of value up for something of value back, like that's a consensual exchange.
And I firmly believe that the more consensual transactions there are in the world, the more
peaceful the world is.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the theories of how a hyper-Bitcoinized world could result
in harm reduction, general nation-state violence reduction is the question of funding the violence
itself.
And when you can essentially do mass theft from millions and millions of people by printing
money and use that to fund your wars, that skews the incentives on when you have a propensity
to actually use violence against people.
And it really removes a lot of the consent of the governed.
I think much more straightforward when you actually have to convince people to take their
money and use it in favor of a war.
Would you believe that in that world, individuals could stop being violent?
I'm not so sure that it's so much about control or safety.
If I was going to take an optimistic view of why Bitcoin may result in a decrease in
violence just amongst normal people, that would probably be one of prosperity in the
sense that I think a lot of low-level violence, street crime, if you will, is the result of
people finding themselves impoverished or in poor economic conditions or essentially
having a lack of options of ways to survive and thrive without harming others.
Our sort of optimistic take would be that if we're not in a fiat world, people won't
have that one factor that is constantly impoverishing them further and further.
To add to that, the top layer of society, the certain segment of the population will
always be psychopaths, but you make things harder for the clever psychopaths because
they can't manipulate systems to control people as easily as they can now.
While you may still have street-level violence and barfights and stuff, I think removing
the real bad actors from the top or at least removing the ways they have to fund themselves
via inflation to wage war against other countries and such, that whole thing will be much more
harder on the Bitcoin standard to pull off.
What is your opinion that Bitcoin itself could be our protector of private property?
I think the Citadel meme is a fascinating, speculative phenomenon. It comes from this
interesting story some anonymous Reddit user posted where they claim to be a time traveler
and they told us of all of the horrible things that would happen over the next few decades
as the world slid into madness and only the Bitcoin adopters were the ones who did not
lose all of their wealth.
The point of the Citadels is not that we may someday find ourselves in a more peaceful
world, but rather it's what is the process going to be to get there.
The sort of pessimistic take is that one potential path is that the world will have to suffer
from massive collapses and massive chaos and during that period, if there is a small
group of people who are thriving while everyone else's situation is becoming terrible, then
they might get turned on just for the sake of having depressions to protect themselves.
That's why physical protection during that period of chaos could be something that you
need to worry about.
Yeah, and I like a more optimistic take.
I mean, we've got social media, we've got Zoom calls and what not, and we've got Bitcoin.
So we've got this.
It's just up to each and every one of us to opt out of the old and adopt the new and
live in this new, better world.
So I'm optimistic about the future in that sense, for sure.
So in conclusion, is Bitcoin a tool or a weapon?
I'd say it's a tool for removing noise.
It's not the signal, it's just the greatest noise remover ever.
So what it does, it makes it easier for people to find their calling in life and to do what
they're supposed to do with their lives, like to find their path.
And I think there's a lot to this, you know, it's deflationary and Bitcoiners are incentivized
to help one another.
Like, if Jameson helps me, I help him with whatever we do, then we both gain because
Bitcoin, if Bitcoin thrives, we thrive.
So Bitcoiners and Bitcoin are the same entity, really.
We store them in our heads and we're, it's just about keeping secrets.
So we are the Bitcoin.
So we're incentivized to help one another and be good to one another.
And like, I think there's so much more there than we would barely scratch the surface of
what that means.
And as you say, it's the only private property that you can properly own.
That means that people will want their Bitcoin more than they will crave the Lamborghini
or the yacht or whatever.
And in the long run, it leads to this, or at least takes humanity closer to this
philosophical idea of that which you can do without your own.
So you move away from consumerism and like go into a mode of being of like being
satisfied with less while still having more, which is a another fascinating thought.
I mean, Bitcoin is a freedom enhancing technology.
It is a tool for economic empowerment.
You know, it enables us to interact with each other economically across vast
distances without any third parties that can mess around with what we want to do.
Now, the freedom that this gives to individuals and the ability for them to
interact with other people without asking permission from authorities, from the perspective
of those authorities, this is a weapon or at least this is a very dangerous tool to them
and to the infrastructure that has been amassing over centuries and millennia.
You know, it potentially threatens the very architecture of civilization as we know it.
Yeah, I mean, we are their tools and we're becoming more less tooly if you want.
So it's neither and both?
There's a sci-fi movie called Arrival where the aliens who come to Earth, the word for tool
and the word for weapon is the same in that language.
And it's an alien that has a different concept of time, which I think is perfect for this
conversation because that's what we're talking about.
It's tool and weapon are two sides of the same coin.
If you remove the time element and go into subjective timekeeping, like time chain stuff,
then there's something there, it's kind of hard to follow maybe.
But I mean, what is a tool? What is a weapon?
It would be like the first time that a weapon will be used for a peaceful revolution.
Well, I mean, it's a complicated system. There's a lot of games theory at play.
I think the optimistic take on how we can proceed forward with all of this is the fact that,
this is also a sociological phenomenon. Bitcoin is people.
It is a protocol, it uses math, it uses game theory to secure this global network.
And what we've done is we've created machine consensus for what we believe is an optimal form
of money. But whatever happens, whatever stressors or attacks come in from outside the system,
those of us who are paying attention, we can raise the alert, we can talk to our fellow peers
who are working on it, and we can try to come up with solutions to use this tool or make it a
better shield, make it be able to react to attacks against any weaknesses that might be found.
Yeah, and to that point, I mean, we are the Bitcoin, we are the network. So if Bitcoin for
some odd reason should just stop existing tomorrow, the next block is never found or whatever.
I can still shoot James on a DM. I still know all these people, we're still building this network
of people, we can still communicate. So we'll figure it out. Like Farrington says, like the
really yield is the friends you make along the way. And I think that's profoundly true since
we are the Bitcoin. If there is one question you could ask Satoshi, what would it be?
What's the maximum airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Loved it. I still love it. I mean, it's a great city, great place. What do you think of Logano with
James? It's one of my favorite European cities.