Jameson Lopp, welcome to the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast.
Great to be here and specifically, always interested in having novel
conversations rather than the usual repeating my various tropes on security,
privacy, and why Bitcoin is amazing.
Yep, again, those are great.
Those are appreciated and necessary, especially with folks who aren't into
the space and haven't had those conversations.
I'm super grateful that there's people like you out there who are able to have those.
But we're also glad to introduce a bit of novelty into your day.
So again, this began, you had shared some tweets on Twitter about the intersection
of God and faith in technology and Bitcoin.
And so then that spurred, you know, because of your following, like that
spurred a whole bunch of responses that range somewhere between polite,
respectful, and screeching, a whole range of other things.
So I just kind of just replied, not knowing what to expect.
And your exact response, if I remember correctly, was that
sounds incredibly uncomfortable.
And so I'd love to do it.
And so just that attitude, I just appreciate that a lot.
So I'm just going to let you kind of introduce yourself to people who may not
know who you are, and then you can just kind of take it from there as far as why
this conversation come to you as something that seems interesting and worth a
discussion worth having.
I would say I like discussing controversial topics in general, and that may be one
reason why I've managed to get a decent following on Twitter is because I don't
care if people disagree with me.
I think the disagreement, at least civil disagreement and having rational discourse
is how we learn more about each other.
And even if we don't agree with each other, we can at least try to better
understand each other's perspectives.
I think most people know me as a nerd.
I'm a computer scientist.
I have been engineering Bitcoin wallets for nine years now.
Been interested in the space for a little over a decade, and I just have a bunch of
different nerdy projects where I have been trying to understand Bitcoin for a
decade, and as a result, try to convey as much of my understanding to others, at
least as simply as possible.
And even though I'm a nerd and I mostly focus on technical aspects of it, I will
say that over the past five or six years, some of the more interesting aspects have
been less technical and been more philosophical, sociological, and trying to
understand what is this thing that we call a consensus.
I mean, obviously, we know what machine consensus is, and we've automated a lot of
rules around consensus for what we think sound money should be like, but there, I
think, will always be this more ethereal meatspace consensus that we're constantly
trying to grasp at and trying to codify, and that's where a lot of the human
aspects and ideologies come into play.
Now, from my religious background, I'm a good old Southern boy.
My father's side of the family can be traced back to the mid-1700s, coming in
through New York, Pennsylvania, and then settling in North Carolina, I think, by
1800. Pretty much all of my family is still in North Carolina, South Carolina
area. And fairly conservative Christian background. Went to three different
denominations as I was growing up. Started off in the Baptist Church for a
few years, spent a decade in the Lutheran Church, and then finished off my
middle school, high school, in the Methodist Church. And as a result of that,
due to some of the interesting differences between these denominations,
I actually went through the confirmation process not once, but twice, because the
Lutherans, if I recall correctly, do it in the fifth grade, and then the
Methodists do it in seventh and eighth grade, a two-year process. Maybe even a
three-year process, but I think it was two. It's been a while. So yeah, I mean,
obviously, I've read the Bible, went to Bible school, went to a Christian summer
camp, at least three or four years, even participated in running like vacation
Bible school when I was in high school, and went to church every week. Something
crazy was happening for my entire time that I was living with my parents until
I went off to university. I will say I started changing my perspective probably
around middle school when we started getting more into hard science classes,
learning about the scientific method, so on and so forth, trying to apply some of
those concepts and square them with what I had been taught in the church. And then
by the time I was going into high school and getting even nerdier and more into
hard science, I basically threw up my hands and I was like, okay, you know, I get
the narratives. It's interesting to me. I can't disprove any of it, but neither can
I prove any of it. And so I've been a pretty ardent agnostic since then and
have tried to, you know, study some other religions as well, understand religion
just from a high-level perspective. And so I'm not an atheist. I don't hate
religious people. I don't hate spiritual people. I think everyone should be free
to do and say and believe whatever they want as long as they don't try to impose
those things upon me and affect my life. I certainly draw a distinction between
spirituality and religion. My perspective is that spirituality is kind of man's
search for meaning. And there are so many unknowns out there, so many things
that we are simply incapable of explaining, that it can be disconcerting.
Especially from a cosmic perspective, these things are very interesting but
difficult to talk about. And in fact, I don't like to spend too much time
thinking about them because they make me feel less of a person. You know, if you
try to even comprehend that you are but a speck of sand on a dot in a void of a
universe, it can make you feel basically worthless, right? It can make it very
difficult for people to have a sense of value or purpose. And so I think
spirituality is one of the ways that we try to reconcile this difficulty of
handling all of these unexplained things. And so spirituality and wanting to
believe in higher being or higher sense of purpose or whatever I think makes
complete sense to me. Taking it another step though and getting into organized
religion gets a lot trickier. And I understand it from the sense of
community because I got a big sense of community for nearly two decades from
being active within Christianity. Obviously, pros and cons to it, but
from a historical perspective, I also have a lot of problems with organized
religion because it's run by men and men are fallible and can do bad things. A lot
of terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. And in
fact, in a sense, I see a lot of organized religion and churches as a soft form of
a state. I think the simplest way to look at this is look at the Catholic Church.
They are the largest landowner in the world. And how have they pulled that off?
Well, there was of course some period of time when there was actual violence that
was used, but it wasn't generally overt violence. I see it as more of a soft form
of coercion through threats, the indulgences programs and all of that
stuff. You're going to hell if you don't give us a lot of your property. And that
worked very well. Or your relatives are going to stay in hell if you don't give us
money. And I certainly want to be careful and you don't want to
overgeneralize too much. It's not that all churches are coercive and so
on and so forth. But it's difficult for me to draw a line, I think in many cases,
between faith and indoctrination. And one of the things that concerns me and where I
see a lot of parallels happening is between the Bitcoin and the crypto space. I mean,
each crypto network and protocol, its own opt-in network of rules, but also narratives. And a lot
of people in the Bitcoin space have controversial views about what should be constituted as a scam
and what's not a scam. And I'm sure we'll get into some of that and like why Bitcoin is the
best in our opinions. But I see people that I consider scammers in the space using a lot of
similar rhetoric and narratives as some organized religions, particularly when it comes to logic
and making unfalsifiable claims. And so I've clashed with a number of scammers in the space
because of their sort of cult-like antics. And now over the past couple of years, one of the
things that has drawn more of my concern, and I think why I started bringing up some of these
topics, is that I've seen more people start to tie their own religions and personal beliefs
into Bitcoin. And so I certainly have concerns over what could happen if that trajectory continues to
the extreme. In particular, what happens if we end up with kind of sects or denominations of
Bitcoiners who are so tied to their specific religion and to Bitcoin that it could actually
result in issues within Bitcoin and disagreements over the protocol and forking and so on and so
forth. Yeah. First of all, that was fantastic. We're going to get into a lot of the different
specific things that you mentioned. I do think that comparing the monetary and religious worlds
is a very fertile ground for comparison. There's a ton of things that these things share in common.
And so I think that it can be confusing, especially to people who, I mean, I don't
think this is a very controversial statement to say that we are the most secular society
in world history. I don't think that's crazy to say that. I think... At least in America,
I think that's true. Yeah. But I would even say just beyond that. I mean, just even, I mean,
if you were to poll people who would identify openly as an atheist or agnostic or who don't,
they can't even make sense of the idea that you could believe in God. I think that there's far
more people that are in that position today than they have been in the past. I think there's a
number of reasons for that. This is another conversation, but I think fiat currency has
played a big role in that. I mean, just the fact that if you can create money out of thin air,
if governments and central banks can create money out of thin air to subsidize whatever
ideas and messages that they want, and they don't want competition, this is the origin of central
banking was trying to get rid of competition. It makes sense that you'd want to crowd out other
messages that would challenge your claim to power. I think that we could probably make a pretty
convincing case of that if we, if we wanted to go that way, but let's just do this. Let's go this
route. I screenshotted a few of your tweets and the ones that I thought we could kind of riff on a
little bit and that would be beneficial, helpful, and then entertaining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I
mean, like we said, in these currencies and protocols and stuff have interesting narratives,
but I think even beyond that, the internet itself is changing humanity. And I've actually been
watching a number of interesting documentaries about different cults lately. And I think that
a lot of these cults probably would not have existed if not for the internet, because the
internet allows you to instantaneously reach out to billions of people. And now you're able to find
the people I think who are able to be influenced by really weird extremist narratives a lot more
easily than would have been possible pre-internet. Agreed. And that actually leads right into the
first tweet that I pulled out. You tweeted social media sure puts the cult in culture. And so again,
very witty turn of phrase, great tweet. I guess you kind of just did impact that a little bit,
but is there anything else you want to kind of add in explaining kind of your think behind that tweet?
I wish that I was better or understood psychology better, but since I'm a tech guy and I'm a
programmer, I tend to think of things in terms of kind of programmable state machines. And you can
get into a whole argument about whether or not the brain should be considered as that. That's still,
I think, an open question. But if we consider people's brains to be like computers and these
computers, they receive input. Currently I've also said this, that our methods of communication are
still incredibly primitive. Just the fact that we're using words is an incredibly low bandwidth
and imprecise way of communicating our thoughts and what we're trying to convey to each other.
And yet these words, these languages, they're still able to have an effect upon people. And
I think if you hit upon the right narratives and that clicks with a person's particular
background and basically everything that comprises them in their thought processes,
then you can essentially start to reprogram their thinking. And that's what happens with
a lot of these networks, whether it's a religion or a cryptocurrency or a state,
any sort of large group, usually that is being headed up by some sort of hierarchy or leadership,
the value of these networks grows as the size of them grows. And so any halfway decent leader
of any kind of movement is going to be constantly searching for the right combination of words and
narratives to reprogram as many minds as possible to join that movement.
Sure. I would agree with that. I would also say, and I think you'd agree, you can argue the
chicken or the egg problem. I would argue that Bitcoin, the day that it was created, found,
whatever, released, it was this profound thing. Even though it hadn't reached the wide adoption,
the seed was sown. The seed was sown that was going to turn into this incredible what it became.
It obviously had to go through real processes, real dangers, real decision-making. I mean,
the fact that in the beginning there were a few dozen people who were into Bitcoin didn't mean
that there wasn't some internal logical correlation between the way that Bitcoin was structured and
the world in which Bitcoin lives and the world that we live in. There's correlation, real,
I would argue, real correlation between those things. So if Bitcoin doesn't prioritize Bitcoin
mining and the structure mining in the way that it does, it's not nearly as compelling,
or if you want to use the phrase anti-fragile or something along those lines. So I do think
that the rhetoric around these things matters. You can present these things in very creative
ways and that helps. But I still think you can be the greatest rhetorician possible. And if
there's not correlation between your message and reality, you're only going to be able to get so
far over a given time horizon. You can fool people over the short run, but over the long run,
it's tougher road to hoe. The one thing that came to me as I was reading that was, again,
just the etymology of the word culture. So the etymology of the word culture,
it means to cultivate or to grow. And so it's based in the root word culte or cultus. It's
either, they can't decide whether it's, I think it's cultus is French or culte is Latin. And it
means to worship or give homage to something. And so it's really interesting that right within this
word culture, which is how things work and how things are priority structures and all these
different things, you have this word worship right at the heart of that. And I think that this is
something in my experience, I would say one of the weaknesses in America and the West more broadly,
especially the last a hundred years is we don't have a very good, deep understanding
of what worship or religion is. Like we think about it in ways that they don't have the same
depth as it has been understood and realized. I feel like by a lot of people, at least according
to the different holy texts throughout human history. And one of these things just within
Christianity, you have the apostle Paul, he's writing to the church of Corinth and he says
to them, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. And so,
whereas we think about spirituality and religion, and we think it's, okay, I go to this service on
this day, the apostle Paul, and he's seemingly got a lot more in his head in terms of what is,
what is both required and what this consists of to have a relationship with God. There seems to be
a lot more involved than the average, I would guess American, or I would say average American
would think. We just don't have the same type of religious culture that even exists in countries
where Islam is the prominent religion. There's no separation in many of those countries between the
Quran and law. And so I think that one of the things we, it's difficult is just having a
conception and a grounded conception of what religion is. I think it's hard to come to a
point where people can agree on a definition because of our variety of different backgrounds.
It's probably related to the fact that the origins of America had a lot of religious
persecution in the history. And so I think as a result, Americans have built a culture,
if you will, of not treading on people from a religious standpoint.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, again, where you are right now, it's not just,
it doesn't just happen, right? The places where we find ourselves and what we find ourselves
believing are either, I would say, directly related. We've received them from somewhere,
or in many cases, we're reacting against things that we've received in ways that make a lot of
sense. It makes sense that we have those kinds of experiences. But I do think that's important.
I think that really, when you're trying to answer this question of what religion is,
you're really getting at the heart of what it means to be human. You're trying to ask,
what is a human? And without getting really in depth into that, it just makes me think of,
there's a Christian author who wrote a book. He's a college professor. His name is James Smith. He
wrote a book called You Are What You Worship. And he said, if you wanted to find the religious center
of American society, he's like, you wouldn't go to a temple, you wouldn't go to something,
you would go to the mall. He's like, what you find is you enter and immediately you're inundated
with smells and with these pictures of people wearing certain clothes or wearing certain
jewelry or looking a certain way and they're happy. And you're walking in there, you're
inundated with these visions of the quote unquote good life. And the interesting thing he says is,
they're not trying to reason with you. They're not trying to get you to think,
do I have enough money for this? Or is this a good use of my time? They're trying to make you
forget that. And they're appealing right to your senses. And they're trying to go right at your
sensuality. They're trying to take that route to convincing you that you need their products.
And so I think that this is part of the challenge throughout human history is we have these senses
and the temptation is to be dominated and to allow ourselves to shape the way that we view the world
around these sensual perceptions that we have. That's one temptation and that can be helpful
and good. But then we're constantly tempted to not use reason. We're tempted to only use
our senses and avoid reason because reason is difficult. This is the reality, reason is very
difficult. And so I think that that's the combination or the relationship between faith
and reason is something that you have brought in a number of these other tweets that I've found.
I don't know if you want to add anything about that or just your thoughts on the relationship
between senses and reason and I would say epistemology. I mean, how do we know what to
trust between senses and reason? Do you have any thoughts on that? - Yeah. I mean, I think one of
the big pieces of overlap is the challenge, the difficulty, the amount of work involved to try to
explain things using logic and facts. And this is one of the reasons why I started going down this
path was to try to figure out are Bitcoiners who are ardently religious being hypocritical with
regard to some of the ethos of Bitcoin or what I'm really leaning more towards is that I think that
in general, almost everyone is hypocritical with regards to some of the main ethos of Bitcoin,
the tropes around don't trust, verify and so on. And I've seen this play out over the years from
several different perspectives over things that I promote like privacy and security.
These are other major ethos that a lot of people in the space talk about. And yet, at least from my
own anecdotal experience and working in this particular space for 10 years of security,
is that human nature is to seek and prioritize convenience over almost all else. And so the way
that plays out with privacy is that very few people even think about privacy until it's too
late and something terrible has happened. Similarly, very few people spend a lot of
time thinking about their security until it's too late and something has happened to them.
Religion, it could be interesting to try to get into understanding that more. But it does seem
like a lot of people, they take the narratives that have been presented to them, often through
family, it's like it's a traditional thing, it's part of your upbringing. And I can say from my
own experience, it's very difficult to reject the things that you have been taught for several
decades, especially when there's the additional societal and peer pressure of understanding that
you're essentially going to be ostracizing yourself from a decent portion of your friends and family.
I fully understand that in ways that, again, I'm not going to get into on the air, but I
would love to chat with you off air because I completely agree. There comes points where
certain beliefs that you have or certain conclusions that you arrive at that maybe
are out of step with the Overton window or out of step with some sort of the group of people that
you've been formed by and grown up within, that reality of, "If I say what I believe about this,
the cost could be huge." I think it's a challenging thing. Again, it's also necessary.
If what we're finding is true, then we should be willing to surrender the appearance of unity that
isn't actually true unity. I think this is a great thing to bring up.
You had a trigger word for me there, which is true. I think that is one of the basis of all of
the conflicts around religious beliefs and so on and so forth, is what is truth. It's been a while
since I really dug into this stuff, but over the past week or so, it reminds me of going down the
Bitcoin rabbit hole and trying to "understand" Bitcoin. My decade of going down the Bitcoin
rabbit hole culminated in me writing a really long essay entitled, "Why Nobody Understands
Bitcoin." I think that that is very similar to some of the issues here, which is that if you
really want to perfectly verify some fundamental truth, you end up going down further and further
down, whether it's the historical rabbit hole or the scientific knowledge rabbit hole.
You can get to the atomic level of things, and then you get to the sub-microscopic level,
and then most of the religious things turn into talking about creationism and the nature of
reality itself. And eventually, you hit the limits of human knowledge. It's like human knowledge,
we simply do not understand everything because to do so would require omniscience and God-like
understanding of the universe. And so, at some point, as a human, you hit your own limits,
you hit the limits of all human knowledge, and you have to decide, "This is the point at which
I am satisfied that the set of assumptions I'm operating off of are good enough that I can call
my conclusions to be truthful."
- Yeah. And this is, again, I think you're rightly identifying part of the issue,
again, an epistemological one. How do we know? What are the standards of knowledge that we have?
And I think this is where some of the disagreement, again, understanding of it,
but just the disagreement with some of the way that religious faith is presented at odds with
science, I don't think it's helpful the way that it's framed, and this is why. First of all,
I think it's great that you acknowledge everyone has a bent. Everyone has something that they're
bent. First of all, shout out to Marty Bent. We have him as a bent too. But everyone has a bent,
the thing that they're most familiar with. So scientists, they're going to tend to put more
emphasis on scientific standards of evidence. People who... I was a Bible philosophy major,
and so that's just more my comfort zone than getting into an exhaustive conversation about
Euclidean geometry or something. Some of these things that I'm not as strong in.
But one of the things that it's easy to do is to minimize or just look down on the things that
you're not as strong in and to elevate your particular area of expertise as if that is
the more important or more real one. And so the reason why I think this is important is because
the reality is that we have different standards of evidence within the world. We operate within
several standards of evidence all the time, and it's not that you can exist without one or the
other. We have to constantly operate within multiple worlds. And the two primary ones that
I think will be helpful to talk about in this example would be the difference between historical
evidential standards and scientific evidential standards. So scientific evidential standards
are things that we can go out and are reproducible. We can do experiments, we can repeat experiments
and demonstrate repeatedly that certain things work a certain way within the world.
Now, there's other things like historical standards. We live in a country that has a
constitution that was, I think most people would agree, there could be some radical skeptics who
maybe know, but was written by a certain group of men at a certain period of time who were
influenced by certain things. And even though none of us can prove scientifically that these men
existed or that we don't have blood samples from these guys necessarily, we can't compare them with
active samples. Even though we can't prove scientifically these things that this narrative
that we've been presented is true, we still go along with it. And we're okay saying that based
on we have this book that these books or these things that were written in this time, there's
things that are left over from these guys that they wrote, the ways that they reasoned. We can
look at them and have a reasonable degree of certainty that these things are true. The fact
that we can't have scientific certainty is not somehow an indictment on historical lines of
evidence. It's like comparing apples and oranges. I see this argument happen and I see people doing
this. And again, I'm sympathetic to it, but I don't think it's helpful because it's trying to
force an understanding of the world. It's trying to present the primacy of one standard of evidence
that is part of the world we live in at the expense of minimizing another part of the real
world that we live in as well. And so again, there's challenges to both these things. The
challenge obviously with historical lines of evidence is people can lie. And so people can
be wrong. They can just be deceived and they can present things through their own lens and that can
be a challenge and that can cause problems. I fully recognize all those things. But the fact-
Yeah. I mean, there's provenance issues, right?
Yes. Yes.
The sort of chain of custody and retelling of things or especially, I mean, if you want to
get into biblical stuff, I guess you can question translations. And I guess the fact that most of
these books, they were probably written on parchment that didn't hold up very well and they
had to get rewritten many times and who knows what was put in or taken out or so on and so forth. I
mean, one of the more interesting classes that I took when I was in university was a history class
and it actually ended up being more of a biblical history class, a completely secular history class,
but focused a lot on Jesus. And my main takeaway is from that class is that there's more than
adequate provenance that there was a man named Jesus who existed in the time that we've been
told and that he went around and that he amassed a following. I think there was sufficient evidence
that he was killed by the Romans. And then it gets kind of murkier because a lot of the things that
were written about him were done decades, if not generations later. And then the books, the sort
of looking at the way the Bible was constructed is that that happened over, I think, many centuries
and that there were plenty of biblical era texts and accounts that did not go into the Bible.
And we don't know anything really about the reasoning behind why some things were put in
the Bible and others were left out. Yeah, I would debate that a little bit. I mean,
there definitely were things that were presented as being from certain time period that, again,
these weren't just guys who were just spitballing, you know, they were like, one of the things I was
just listening to Chris DeStefano, if you're familiar with him, he's a comedian. So he just
went on Bill Maher's podcast not too long ago. And you have Chris DeStefano, who is, I mean,
I don't know if he's Catholic. I believe he was raised Catholic and he just said he didn't put
much stock in it. But then he read this book called The Case for Christ. It's written by this
guy who was an investigative journalist who became a Christian in his adulthood. And so he just read
through this whole thing. And one of the arguments that Bill Maher presented against it was just the
fact that as far as we understand, many of the either gospel accounts, the gospel accounts were
written, as far as we know, around 30 to 40 years after Jesus lived, or 40 or 50 years. And so that
understandably to a certain degree, like raised questions for Bill Maher. He just said, I
appreciate him on tons of things. He's been a voice of sanity on many fronts. But so yeah, just
this reality of the fact that these things weren't written for 40 years, that caused him great pause.
It gave him great pause about trusting the trustworthiness. Again, there's explanations
for those things. These guys are being literally chased, pursued, and all across the Roman empire
by the most powerful empire. The fact that it took them a while to have time to, or they chose to
take a while to sit down and write down their experiences. Again, I fully understand why that
could be something that could be questionable. All I'm trying to suggest is that the fact that it
took that long, there's no way these guys could have laid out the truth. The fact that it took
them this long, that doesn't follow. And this is, I would say, another thing that would help,
especially given the consequences that these guys articulated from their own mouths for telling
things that were like knowingly telling lies. People object, understandably to a certain degree,
they object to some of the gravity that is expressed to the consequences of things that
are called sin. So lying, there's a verse in the book of Revelation where it says,
it gives us lists of people who will end up in hell because of their sins and lying is one of
them. So if you are somebody who's one of the leaders of this burgeoning movement, and then
you're saying this is the consequence for lying, and then you turn around and are lying, you're
going to be a hypocrite. Now, most people, obviously in our experience, we've seen tons of
religious figures be hypocrites. And there's plenty of non-religious figures who are hypocrites
as well. And so again, we're immediately skeptical of claims like this because of how much easier it
would be to believe that someone is just either hypocritical or wrong. Again, I think these are
understandable objections, but I don't think none of these are silver bullets that are somehow
impossible for thoughtful people to believe. - Yeah, I mean, I think my short takeaway is
that I'm skeptical of any and all things originating from humans. That doesn't mean
that they're worthless. It just means that you need to keep in the back of your head that there
may be imperfections, flaws, things left out, who knows. - 100%. I would say I agree. And that's
where the Christians would come out and the Christians would say, yes, if it was just left
up to humans, then that is a perfectly and even more reasonable thing to say. But the Christian
claim is that God is superseding this process. Again, you don't have to believe that, but that's
part of the claim though, is that God is superseding this process and helping ensure that what he wants
to communicate is communicated. And so I think one of the challenges for especially people like us
who have the ability, we have a technological ability for precision that in a certain expectation
of different fields like science and history that are so much different than people were able to
have 2000 years ago, that it's easy for us to dismiss different evidential standards. So for
instance, it's easy for us to dismiss the way that things are done within the scriptures. So
one example of this would be of the four gospel narratives, there's three of them where it
presents the color of the garment that Jesus was wearing just prior to going to the cross. There's
two of them that says the garment was purple. And there's one of them that says his garment
was scarlet. And so modern people, we read that and we immediately were like, that's complete,
you know, look, this is prima facie evidence that this is, this just isn't true. This didn't happen
or that these guys are wrong. And so what we, again, this is just one example that we don't,
we don't take into account is this like many older texts, when they're telling things,
they have more things that they're accomplishing than just giving the simple history. They're
laying out again, like multiple layers of things. So in the case of this example, within Jewish
tradition, they would offer one day a year, they would offer a sacrifice. They would sacrifice,
you know, a goat for the sins of the people. And so there was one goat who would be slain,
you know, throat would be cut and they would offer it as a sacrifice. There was another goat that
they would, you know, the, the priest would put his hands on the animal. He would basically, you
know, pray this prayer that would ceremonially transfer the sins of the nation to this animal.
And then they would let it go into the wilderness. And so in Jewish tradition, the color of the,
they would tie a cord around this, this goat's neck when they let it out into the, into the
wilderness and the color of the cord was scarlet. And so the interesting thing about this is the
context in which this color of the garment is given is in the context of releasing the criminal
Barabbas and letting him go free and then sending Jesus to the cross. And so there's, you know,
biblical scholars who say like, again, there's very good reasons based on the fact that that's
the context that the author, I believe it's Matthew's goal in writing what he wrote about
the color of the garment. He's not trying to make a historical point. He's using this thing to make
a theological point about who Jesus was in his role. And so I think there's things like that
within all, I mean, lots of ancient literature that present challenges for us when we want to
take these things seriously, we want to give, you know, special people, even people who aren't
Christians or something, they still want to give these things a fair shake and there's historical
and just cultural things that provide challenges to being able to do that.
- Oh, it sounds like you would agree with me that it's probably not a good idea to
take the Bible literally. - I think I would want to define
terms a little bit more than that, but I think I would agree with what I think you mean by that,
which is things are not always as straightforward as they appear. And we could go to a lot of
different things, a lot of different examples of that. One of the things that I would love to kind
of get into is, again, we talked about this a little bit, you'd said religions are interesting
in the sense that they are opt-in consensus networks. Some are more centralized than others
and adherence to any given religion tend to be maximalists who consider all other religions to
be wrong. Then I'm just going to read a couple more of these, the responses to that, and then
get to one of yours responses to that. Robert Breedlove replied and said, "Religion is also
interesting in that it tends to lower the cost of establishing trust or maintaining cooperation
among adherence to a particular religion in much the same way that money does for network
participants." And then someone else replied to that and said, "Religions are also interesting
to me because they work without any verification at all. They manage to achieve network effects
strictly through the established trust Robert mentions rather than any sort of evidence."
"How can one be a religious Bitcoiner without mental gymnastics?" To which you replied,
what you mentioned earlier, "This is an apparent hypocrisy from my perspective that
I'm trying to understand. It's memetics all the way down. Perhaps we fool ourselves that
Bitcoiners verify rather than trust." I think that totally makes sense. The one pushback,
again, that I would give from the perspective of someone who does self-identify as a religious
Bitcoiner would be, I think that don't trust verify is a very useful tool. I just don't think
it's an absolute tool. It's a great hammer and for hammering tasks, it's great. I just don't think
that don't trust verify is this eternal maximum, this eternal tool that's good in every single
context. And my basis for saying that is because all of us have, we exist and have human relationships
to which we can't provide this level of scrutiny. The trust that we put in our loved ones can't
stand up to this test of don't trust verify. All of us-
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many things that you can't verify. We can't verify what's going
on in other people's heads. And then, as I said, from a cosmological and even understanding of
the universe perspective, we simply don't have explanations once you get to a certain level. So,
at some point you have to decide that you're sufficiently satisfied with what you believe
your understanding is of a given situation. - Yeah. And what's your level of comfort
in operating within trust within a given relationship, right? I think, again,
marriage relationships or some of the most intimate relationships that you have, relationship
with your kids. I know your kids, we are born completely dependent upon our parents for better
and for, in many cases, awful for worse. But I think this is the reality of being human in the
world is humans are different than animals in which many animals within a few hours of birth
are able to run around on their own. They're able to secure food for themselves. Humans are not like
that. And so, I think that, again, I think that by virtue of seeing that, by virtue of our experience,
we can acknowledge that trust is, it's important or verification is important. We shouldn't just
blindly trust. And I would argue that God does not ask us to blindly trust. There's a difference
between faith and the idea of fideism. Have you heard that idea, fideism? - Doesn't ring a bell.
- Okay. So, fideism is basically trust for trust's sake. It's basically,
it basically would be saying like, "You can do it if you just believe. If you just believe hard
enough, then you can do whatever you set your mind to." That is very much at odds with the Christian
understanding of faith, which we kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, where it gets back to the
relationship between reason and faith. One of the things that you see God in the scriptures say
is he's, you know, Israel, his people Israel are not going along with what he's asking them to do.
And his words to them are not, "Just trust me." His reasons, or what he says to them is,
"Come, let us reason together." He's actually asking them. He's like trying to encourage them
to think about the course of action that they're making. And then in other places, God, or the
apostle Paul writes, and he compares people who are not, or people who are not living in accord
with the way that God has designed the world, the way that he's revealed it to be. He says that
they're living like unreasoning animals. And so, Paul is saying, "Actually, the problem with some
of these people is that they're just operating according to their desires, these physical
desires that they have, rather than thinking." They don't want to do the hard work to think.
They just want to, you know, be freer to live. And so, I think that, I don't think that at least
Christianity, I can't speak authoritatively to these other things, but I think that the relationship,
the hostility that some people perceive between the two, I think is overdone. I understand why
that is because, you know, the belief in things like miracles, belief in, you know, things like
the resurrection from the dead, these are difficult to accept things for especially modern people to
believe. But I don't think they're as hostile as... Yeah, the Bible does not have the same
level of issues that many people who are not religious attribute to the Bible.
- So, I don't know if you saw, but I actually ran some polls on both Nostra and Twitter.
- Oh, I did not.
- And I said, "Have you verified Bitcoin's supply schedule yourself,
or are you just confident in it because you believe that enough other people have verified?"
And, you know, as expected, a higher percentage on Nostra saying that they verify, it was like 60%.
And then it flipped on Twitter, only 40% said that they verified themselves. So, 60% were trusting.
But some other people had some good points that it still works out fairly well in terms of, you know,
Bitcoin's security model, because you don't need to have everyone verify the rules of the network.
Even if only one person is verifying and they see that something's going wrong,
they can kind of raise the alarm.
- Yeah, especially in a world where we have something like social media, where one person
can access, you know, can make their voice heard to a degree that, you know, again, hundreds of
years ago would have been impossible, right? You know, especially before the creation of something
like the printing press, you know, with the ascent of the printing press, you could make,
you know, your ideas and your thoughts, you could disseminate them much
widely more quickly than before that case. So I would agree.
The other thing that I wanted to ask you about, you had tweeted this and
said, "Free your mind," and then you, as many people on the internet, present a glorious meme
from the office. So the meme says, "Your religion does not prohibit me from anything. It prohibits
you. Learn the difference." And so, again, this set off a firestorm in the comments below.
So I'm going to read a couple of those. It says, "Nittwit said, 'If everything is permissible,
is that true freedom? Can our own thoughts, actions, and choices actually unwittingly enslave
us?'" I'm not being snarky. I'm just asking philosophical questions. "You replied, 'Ultimately,
everything has constraints. We're all imprisoned in a variety of ways. Many are involuntary. Others
are voluntary.'" So let's just get into that question. Again, this question of freedom and
what is freedom. So we've already addressed the question of what is truth and kind of talked about
how can we know. So now we're just getting into this other small question of what is freedom.
Could you kind of articulate how do you understand freedom?
Yeah. I mean, I see it as agency to be able to make your own decisions and act upon them.
The opposite of freedom is having constraints that prevent you from doing specific things. And
this is, of course, where it gets tricky again. And I think a lot of the controversy and contention
around that is that most of what people think about in terms of religious constraints tends
to be, I guess, around morals and ethics and what is good? How should you act as a human?
This is a whole other rabbit hole that's interesting to get down.
Obviously, some people believe that you can't really have morals and ethics without
a higher being who you're essentially trying to satisfy their dictates or decrees or you're trying
to do and act the way that they want you to. I think this was one of the fundamental issues
that I had that started causing me to distance myself from religion, which is that I was unable
to square the idea that there was an all-powerful being that created me and therefore is also
supposed to know all of past, present, future and fully understand everything. And that they
created me as a flawed individual that then if I use the brain that I've been bestowed with to
question these things and to act in ways that I believe are moral despite what I'm told otherwise,
that dooms me to some sort of eternal punishment. It seems unfair to say the least. And it's very
hard for me to respect such an entity that would put me in a situation like that.
Sure. And that makes total sense. That actually brings us to... You had a great back and forth
with Jimmy where he... Yeah, I'll just get into what you mentioned. You said, "I don't respond
nicely to threats. This includes those who point a theological gun at my head and threaten me with
eternal damnation." Jimmy replied, "That's like saying Bitcoin is a monetary gun to your head,
threatening you with eternal debasement. The choice to buy Bitcoin is yours. The choice to
follow God is yours. The consequences are what they are. There are no threats." And then you
responded, "Fiat is the threat of eternal debasement with literal guns behind it. Damnation
is a narrative constructed by humans. It's noteworthy because only some organized religions
decide to use the threat of damnation in order to exert control over the populace." The only,
I guess the problem, the inconsistency that I would see there is, again, just the begging the
question of damnation is a narrative constructed by humans. So that would seem to be standing on
the same ground that it's trying to establish. That's the question because the Christian claim
is that, "No, God actually exists. He's explained out this narrative of this is the world we live
in where actions have consequences." And again, this is not some sort of accusation or some sort
of threatening of you. He's just stating very matter-of-factly, these are the consequences of
choices. This is just logic. If A, then B. I think that's kind of the way it's presented.
I think, again, a specific example of this would be in the biblical narrative, God tells humanity,
he says, "If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will surely die." He's not threatening them.
This is not consequence. He's just saying, it's just like saying, "This is a poison thing. If you
eat it, you're going to die." He's not in any way threatening them. He's just telling them, "Hey,
watch out. I just created you. You're in this place that you're just learning about. And here's
this mortal threat. Don't do this." Now, that could bring us into a whole other set of questions,
which is kind of, I guess, more in the vein of what you described, which is, well, why would
God do that? And so, that's a great question, but that's a whole different level of things.
Because then you get into, here I am as a finite human being, questioning the decision-making
prowess of an all-powerful entity who made and designed everything. And so, the fact that he
would do something that me, the finite creature, wouldn't understand, that actually shouldn't...
To me, that isn't surprising, that there'd be some differences of opinion. But I don't know.
You want to kind of elaborate on that? Yeah. Well, so, this is where I like to
draw the distinction between deism and theism and why I think, as an agnostic, deism makes a lot
more sense to me. And you may have also seen some of my touching on simulation theory and stuff.
I think someone asked a question about my views on God being an alien that's just playing with us.
Amongst the infinite number of possible explanations and possibilities for a creator
being, I think it makes more sense to me that a creator is running the universe as some sort of
experiment because they want to see what would happen. It's much more difficult for me to...
And so, that would be the deism. It's like, "Okay, something created the universe and maybe
they care about what happens, but either way, they're pretty hands-off and they're just letting
it run. And then whatever happens, happens." And then, of course, the more theistic aspect would
be, "Okay, the creator created the universe and they have a lot of reasons and they're meddling
with stuff. They're sending, they're creating their son and they're sending prophets and
manipulating us in different ways for whatever their end goal is that we don't fully understand."
And it's a lot more difficult for me to square that as sort of an intervening God with the fact
that God is also supposed to already be omniscient and understand everything that is going to happen.
Why even bother going through the motions if you already know everything that's going to happen?
Yeah. No, and again, that makes sense. And I think it makes sense on one level. And the reason I
would say this, it definitely makes sense if you're an engineer. It definitely makes sense
if you're a programmer, right? Because again, there's a reason why this sentiment is pretty
common within the, I would say, within the technology industry. This is not known for
being a bastion of Christian belief. But I think part of this would be, again, you think about,
"Man, this is a waste of resources to create this thing that has these flaws, that ends up with all
this waste from one perspective." At the same time, just the reality of the pushback would be,
the romantic side of things would be, God could have created a world full of robots,
but then that's not, then you know what you're getting. With this way, like in the world,
the way that God lays out and the way that it's laid out in the scriptures is, God is this God
who creates humanity to be, in one sense, his children. So he creates people who bear his
image. He creates them to live and live like he does. Basically, live motivated by what he's
motivated by and doing the things that he does. So God creates and then creates humanity to be
sub-creators, to go out into the world and take the raw materials of the world and make them,
turn them into useful things. And so, if God just makes everybody automatons and then just, boom,
there's no real drama there. There's no real mystery there, but the nature, and this really,
what you're talking about, gets at the heart of who God is. And what is God's character like?
What type of being is he? And so, the ways that the scripture answers this question would be that
God is love, and love does not coerce. Love tries to reason and tries to woo. Again, I don't know
if you're in a relationship or not, but this is one of the things where we don't just walk around
finding a woman and then grabbing her by the hair and just pulling her along to go along with our
desire for her to do what we want. "Oh, I want to have this type of life, and so you're going to
come along with me." The way that this works, generally speaking, is we reason with the girl,
or we reason. There's a reason process. We present ourselves as why we're a good match,
or why we're somebody that they should want to spend the rest of their life with. And so,
this reason process that is costly for us is actually, it's a big part of what it is to be
human. And so, from that perspective, again, even though the cost, this is the other thing I would
say, is God doesn't create the world flawed. God creates the world in such a way that He can be
disobeyed. He can be not trusted, and then we'll get to experience the consequences of that.
But He does not create a world that's got these... That's this awful place. He creates a good place,
and then, again, gives humans the ability to do what they want within reason, while still being,
while still reserving the right and the ability to step in and intercede. And this is what I would
say, the reason why that's not... Because again, you could say, "Well, there's been millions of
people who've died, and so that's millions of people going to hell," and all these kinds of
things. And so, why doesn't God just intervene in all these situations so that nobody has to
go through that? Again, that's a great question, but now we're moving beyond what is, and we're
trying to get at, "Well, why would He do that that way?" And so, that's just another level of
challenge. But I don't think God intervening... The fact that He intervenes... I just think about
like this, if you're walking down the street, and I see you, you don't see the car coming,
I see the car coming towards you, I run into the road and I shove you out of the way,
I have violated your will, I haven't asked your opinion, I just have interceded, and I've pushed
you out of the way of oncoming danger, and I've rescued you. Now, again, have I violated? Yeah,
I did. But again, it was because I assumed that we're both under the same goals, to a certain
degree, of wanting to be alive. And so, God interceding, He's preserving, He's like, "I'm
giving you free will, I'm giving you the ability to make choices." And yet, God reserves the right
to step in and save us from the consequences of our own decisions. And so, I think that's
kind of the tension that we walk... In terms of the logic of it, I don't think it's illogical.
I think there's definitely moral challenges that it raises, especially for us, but it's not
illogical. - Well, I guess the question of God as a micromanager, if you believe that God is
omnipotent and omniscient and whatever, then there's no reason why a God could not intercede
in absolutely everything. But there's so many explanations, I think, that make it possible to
explain how some of these things can be true. For example, and I'm sure this will be blasphemous to
many people, but this kind of goes along my whole simulation theory thing, is that
whatever God is, from a relative standpoint, from our perspective, God is omniscient and omnipotent
and you could say, I guess, operating on what is it, like a different Kardashev scale of amount of
energy that they can manipulate. And so, from a relative perspective, they very well may be
all-knowing and all-seeing and be able to manipulate anything. But this is, once again,
where we get beyond the scope of human comprehension. Just because, from our
perspective, it's infinite, it doesn't mean that such a being would actually be unlimited.
We don't know what constraints, if any, God may have. And it's not even really possible for us to
fathom such a thing. Because once again, we're talking about what is outside of our universe
that we can even perceive. - Yeah. Yeah. And I think the
challenge there would still be, so if God is an alien, then the question still becomes, well,
where does the alien come from? And I would say this would especially, really, all that does is
push the question back farther into time. That would be my argument for it. And I think one of
the best things and most helpful things that I've read or listened to on this topic is a scientist
named Dr. Stephen Meyer. He went to Cambridge, got his doctoral post-grad in evolutionary history,
something along those lines. And so basically, he comes out and he basically is like, "The issue
that we have is something like the ability of Darwinian evolution." So there's lots of people
who understand, who are not Christians, they recognize that there's the limits of Darwinian
evolution. It can't demonstrate where the bang came from. It can only describe the post-bang
world. And so one of the things that he describes, again, there's people, more popular level,
I would say, people who they wouldn't necessarily grant that. They think that Darwin evolution can
provide an explanation of the origin of life period. But one of the things that Meyer pushes
back on is he says, "Darwin himself could be forgiven for believing that because Darwin didn't
know about DNA." But one of the things that he points out is when the moment that we discovered
that within every single cell of everything that's ever existed is a literal programmable set of
instructions that you can adjust and produce predictable changes in. He's like, "The idea
that this thing just happened really just goes right out the window." And he says, "Basically,
because in our experience, if we're going to use that as a standard is scientific, what we can
demonstrate every single thing that we know about, wherever we find coded information, it's the
product of an intelligent mind." And so he points out when they found the Rosetta Stone in the
desert, they didn't go, "Oh, look, the product of wind and erosion." And even though nobody saw how
this thing was made, nobody was there to observe it, we knew that it wasn't the product of wind
and erosion. And it was because it was programmable information, repeated symbols, these same kind of
things. And it was the product of an intelligent mind. And so this is the same similar kind of
thing is the alien would still, I would imagine, still be created out of some sort of organic
material. He would still have- - These are all assumptions.
- Yeah, I know, but there are limitations in order for life to exist. So you still would need some
sort of nutrition. You still need some sort of something along these lines, if it's not an
eternal self-sustaining creature. If it's still a derivative creature, you still would need to come,
be derivative from something, be dependent on certain things. And so this is the claim,
is that God is this independent being. He's this creature that is completely self-sustaining.
He doesn't rely on anyone to exist. And so really the question that comes down to is,
for most people, you come to the point of, is the universe eternal or is God eternal?
Somewhere along the lines, we have, at some point, everyone acknowledges that there's this miraculous
situation that is completely outside of our experience and our way of understanding how
the world works. Is that the result of an eternal being who began this somewhere,
he existed eternally, but then caused the material world to exist? Or is this somehow
other than that, did this process just come about and we just have no access to it?
To which many people would say, "Yet." And so their faith would be in... There's many people
who operate by a basic faith that, "Well, just given enough time, we'll find out more information
and perhaps get closer to that." So I would argue both sides of the equation are still
operating on a kind of faith. They're still operating on a trust that either time or some
other discovery will provide the information that we don't currently have.
Yeah. I mean, I think you've hit on why I think, well, I look at both atheists and theists from a
similar perspective is because there's ultimately unanswerable questions. And the thing that really
irks me though is just how many assumptions people make. For example, well, first of all,
we can't grasp the concept of infinity. And that's true whether we're talking about space,
time, whatever. I mean, we don't even know that we understand time, right? So we don't even know
that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything. We don't know that there could have been something
before that, or maybe the before doesn't even make sense from our own limited perspective of
what time is. It's very mind boggling. So I don't know. I think the most honest thing that we can do
is to try to state what our assumptions are and then what we've built off of them.
Yeah. I would agree. I think that, again, that's a good faith way of doing it. Again,
from a Christian perspective, the one thing that I would add is the Christian claim is not that,
and again, this is going to be controversial for some people, but it shouldn't be. There's
some people who are like, "I've studied the scriptures, and so I believe." In my own
experience and the experience of many other people, it's not that we did this exhaustive
study and then we came to believe these things. In my case, I grew up in church, hated every minute
of it, wanted to just live my life and do what I wanted to do. And even though I believed these
things on a basic level, I believed Jesus was real. I just didn't want to have anything to do
with him. I wanted to go chase girls and play basketball and do all these things. But there
came a point where, again, the thing that I knew that was true that I just didn't want to have
anything to do with, the thing that broke through it, or the thing that changed was just the...
This guy preached the Bible. I've heard the same story a million times. I could have
communicated to you the same message that he told that day, but he shared it. And it was just
basically lights turn on. And it wasn't just, I believe that, again, I mentally assent to these
truths. It was God loves me. And I know that God loves me in a way that materially changed how I
saw and my desires to live in the world. And so the example is, I, again, only went to this when
this happened. I was at a Christian camp as well. And the only reason I went there was to chase
girls and play basketball. And the rest of the week, I ended up, I was like, all I wanted to do
was get alone by myself and read the Bible and pray. Which I would have told you, you were a
complete moron, preposterous that I would ever have voluntarily done such things. And so that
just, again, I wasn't some saint who became perfect overnight. It wasn't that at all, but
I just had a different set of desires that initiated at this particular point in time
that have then continued on and born different things. So that would be what I would say is,
the Christian claim is not fundamentally... The Christian claim is that God stepped in,
in Jesus. And he communicates his truth, the reality of who he is in a personal way
through the preaching of his word. But there's still like, there's this testifying to the reality
of what he's saying. So there's the communicated message, but then he is actually stepping in and
interceding and kind of having the meet cute of these two things. So that would, I would say,
again, the reason I mentioned that is because the Christian claim is not, we're all out here trying
to figure out what's going on. And the Christians are, they've got their Bible and they're studying
and trying to make sense of it. And they're just doing the best they have. The Christian claim,
which I granted, it sounds insane, is that no, God actually has confirmed these things. He himself
has communicated these things. I grant all of the... Well, what about the Muslims say the same
thing. The Jews say the same thing. All these guys have their same thing. And again, I would
say the same thing to that, that I would say to somebody who would say to me, "Well, Bitcoin only,
but what about Ethereum? What about Doge? What all these things? These guys all say that theirs
are great too. Why should I believe yours?" And then you go back to the key specific components
of Bitcoin that would make it unique. I do the same thing. I go back to specific points within
the Christian claim, the Christian gospel that would differentiate themselves from other religious
claims. So I'll give you another word on that. Well, trying to, I guess, tie it more into
Bitcoin, do you, or have you come across more people who seem to be, whether it's deifying
Satoshi or using religious narratives, like the immaculate conception of Bitcoin, or in general,
positioning Bitcoin as a state of perfection that was bestowed upon us that we must not...
It must remain sacrosanct. We must not abuse it type of notion. This is what I was getting
at as one of my concerns of ways that this could have long-term negative consequences on the
ecosystem if we start approaching Bitcoin from more of a religious view than a science and
engineering view. I would 100% agree with you both. Again, you see the dangers. Actually,
let me just ask you this. What are the dangers of that that you see? And then I can kind of,
I'll share kind of the couple that I see.
So this is one thing that I've talked about a bit more over the past year or so. I think there's
some overlap with what you could call the ossification camp of the Bitcoin protocol is,
some people might say perfect, others might say it's good enough and it has proven itself over
the test of time and therefore we must not touch it because we're more likely to break it than to
improve it. And of course, I as an engineer, I see all your software networks. These are living
systems that are maintained by humans. And if you're not improving them, then they do tend to
degrade. - Yeah. So you see those things. And again, you see those things way better than I'm
going to be able to see them or articulate them. The thing that I would see and the problem with
that that I would see is more spiritual, which would be the temptation for humans all throughout
history is to take a good gift and absolutize it and try to turn it into something that gives them
ultimate meaning. Or they try to take this thing that's good and turn it into something that it
was never meant to be. And so the thing that I would point out too is just, I mean, money does
not exist for its own sake. Money is a tool that exists to serve higher ends and bigger picture
things. And so to look at something like Bitcoin and try to orient your life around it in such a
way as, and to tie your identity to it and try and tie the preserving of it to, I don't know,
like the reason why humanity exists or something along those lines where it does get weird and
cringe and all this, I fully embrace and agree with you. It quickly, the religious discourse
or the discourse within Bitcoin that tries to talk about it in religious terms can quickly get
very cringe and go beyond what I think is either healthy, defensible, good, or reasonable.
Tom: Yeah. Sort of a similar thing that I also see is, well, you know, the meme,
Bitcoin fixes this. And I think that that is getting applied a bit more widely than probably
it should be is that if people attach themselves to the notion that Bitcoin will fix many of
humanity and society's problems, I think they're going to end up disillusioned and disappointed
and that could also lead to some negative outcomes. But it's like you say, money, it's a tool
and it can be used for good or bad. And I think it is very difficult to talk about how do we improve
money and with the understanding that improving money also means that it will be used for evil
things. Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. And this is, again, this is another thing that people,
it just doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm sure you've heard all these arguments of,
you know, oh, you know, Bitcoin is used for drug dealing. It's like the dollar is used for a hundred
times more drug dealing than Bitcoin. It just doesn't make any sense. This level of objection.
Again, I'm like, let Russia use it all day long. Let Iraq, Iran, anybody like use it all day long.
Like this is, I mean, the reality is that good things are used for bad ends. That's just what
happened, but that's just what happens. But the benefit that Bitcoin has to the rest of us is a
good enough and valuable enough thing to still desire for it to be around and still take action
to incentivize its adoption, even though you're going to get this small percentage of people
are going to use it for, you know, truly awful child sex trafficking, all kinds of truly awful
things. You know, the benefits outweigh the cost. I think there's a lot of, well, I mean, I'm sure
there's many different sort of freedom arguments, but it definitely makes me think of second
amendment firearms arguments as well as like the vast majority of firearms are not used for bad
things and in fact are used for defensive purposes. But, you know, the natural consequence,
and this is going back to the sort of freedom argument, but the natural consequence of getting,
giving people more freedom is that you're empowering more people and some small
percentage of them will abuse that power. - Absolutely. Yeah. And again, this is, I mean,
to kind of close that square, you know, just in terms of what freedom is, there's a,
there's a pastor who has since passed, his name was Tim Keller. And one of the things he talked
about, he basically says, freedom is more complicated than you think. He just basically
said, so the idea of like freedom, the idea of freedom, not being simply the absence of
restrictions, you know, like you can have a fish who says, I'm going to free myself from the
constraints of this ocean. And he jumps out of the ocean onto the shore and proceeds to die
because he was actually, because of the nature of what a fish is, it's designed to find freedom
within certain parameters. In his case, the parameters of seawater and, you know, these
kinds of things. And so I, again, Tim Keller would argue and many Christians, and I would argue that,
you know, humans are the same thing. We don't find freedom within the complete absence of
restrictions. You know, there are, there are many different realms of restrictions, which we, if,
when we, when we submit to, we find freedom. So you could, you know, nutrition, there's certain
nutrients that our body needs, where when we submit ourselves to that biological and physical
reality, we find ourselves living healthier lives on the, on the whole. There's, you know, a bunch
of other things as well, relational ones along these things. And there's a number of different
constraints that, you know, it's, it's actually within the presence of the right restrictions that
we find freedom. And again, that sounds, sounds weird, but it's, I think it's pretty obviously
true. Again, at the end of the day though, there's, in terms of morally, you know, you could, you
could try to answer things like, well, you know, if you, you could try to, you could try to get
from, is to ought. So, you know, there's certain, if we go around having sex with anything we want
at any time, you know, we'll not only rampantly spread disease, we'll have, you know, kids all
over the place or, you know, all these things you could, you could try to go, okay. And because of
that, because of these very naturally observable physical downsides, you shouldn't do this.
But you, you really can't get there. You can, you can say this is less than ideal,
but you can't get to the point where you should, where just on the basis of observation alone or
scientific basis alone, you can say, and thereby you shouldn't do this. Because we all have,
we all have disagreements or we all have risks, acceptable level of risks that we're willing to,
to take in, in living life. And, and so if, if morality and moral principles are just these,
you know, we're just these individual, each one of us is, you know, kind of operating,
flying by the seat of our own experience and understanding, then we, I mean, that's just
moral relativism at the end of the day. And that has all kinds of all kinds of it's just fraught
with danger as well, fraught with, you know, potential for things like you saw in, in Nazi
Germany, things like you've, you've seen in all kinds of all kinds of situations, you know?
And so this is where I do think it's important, you know, the idea of there being some sort of,
most people, when push comes to shove agree that there are things that are objectively wrong.
The question is, the reality is that most people don't have a grounded, consistent basis by which
to by which to define what those things are. So you had mentioned earlier that people think that
if you don't have, if you don't believe in God, then you, you can't be moral or something like
that. In my experience, maybe there are people who believe that in my experience, what I've heard
people say was that there's not a consistent, there's not a consistent way to get morality
without God. There's absolutely people who are way more moral. There's actually absolutely
people who are agnostic atheists who are completely good people, you know, on, on many
levels. But what I think the objection would be is there's not a logical, objective basis by which
to by which to define what is good and evil apart from the existence of some outside party, outside
being like in the case of Christian would be God. And so, so again, I don't think, I think that's
kind of the issue is, you know, what is, where do we find the basis, an objective basis for morality
to be able to call things like child sex trafficking, evil, and not just less than ideal.
Do you have an opinion on that? What would be your thoughts on that?
Yeah. I mean, I had people ask me as well, like, what do I base my system of ethics upon? And like
any good anarcho-capitalist, I base it upon the non-aggression principle. Now, I mean, I kind of
see objective morality in the same vein as intrinsic value, which is that I'm not really
sure that that's a thing. I do, I generally see a lot of this stuff as being relative.
Like even within religions though, you have many different religious systems. You could argue even
then that many people base their set of ethics upon different things. Like, you know, if you're
one of the religions that believes in reincarnation, then there's your major impetus for being moral is
not to go to heaven, but to ascend to a higher sort of level of consciousness.
Not end up a bug or something. Yeah.
Exactly. And so I see the value in having systems of religious beliefs and supernatural deities
that command a more objective way of looking at morals and ethics. Because,
kind of going back to what we were saying, people are lazy and don't really think for themselves.
And so perhaps the macro outcome of having more people with a simpler, agreed upon set of beliefs
results in a better world because of that. It's certainly possible it could be an interesting
debate in and of itself. But I think this is one of those things where ultimately a lot of the way
the world operates, or at least individuals, it is anarchy, right? It is everybody deciding for
themselves how they are going to operate and figuring out what are the actual constraints
that I'm working under. Now, I have a general belief, and I probably would have trouble
coming up with, I guess, a proof of this, but I believe that human society and even Bitcoin
only functions because the vast majority of people are what you might call moral or good or ethical.
And that everything that we've built in human civilization, whether it's our religions and
moral systems or our systems of government and law enforcement or whatever, that would all crumble in
an instant if even 10 or 20% of people were psychotic, sociopathic, amoral people. It seems
like a lot of these systems that we have built are mainly to deal with these edge cases of people
whose brains don't work the same way as the rest of ours and just don't work in a way that is
conducive to acting within a group that is healthy for the group. - Yeah, I think I agree. I think,
again, that the challenge is, because, again, it's real easy to define laws in terms of,
define them negatively, like don't do this or don't do this and don't do this. And so the 10
commandments, when people largely think of what morality is, it's consistent of, it's phrased in
the negative. It's don't do this, don't do this. But I think this is where it gets really important
is, and this is where, again, as we're in this super secular moment and we're at this point of
definitional crisis on a bunch of levels, in terms of, basically, I mean, down to the very core of,
what is a man and what is a woman? I'm very sympathetic to, we're at a moment where the
question is, we found liars in every single part of life. We have liars in offices of governmental
offices, in religious offices. We've seen all kinds of abuse. We see so much cause for distrust.
So how do we know what is? How do we know what things are? And so I think that this is,
it's a very difficult situation we find ourselves in. It's a tough thing to figure out, again, by
what standard are we making these things? Is it just positivism? Is it just, this seems right to
me, and then we move on. That certainly isn't, again, even this can, you could debate this,
but I would say historically, there's clearly been, I mean, the American founders were very
clearly looking at Roman democracy. They're clearly looking at the scriptures. I mean,
you can go back and read, they're appealing to Deuteronomy and the 10 commandments in terms of
shaping what morality was. They clearly, even if all of them weren't Christians or theists in the
individual, we all would agree with the sense, they all recognized that they were very aware of
the fact that you have to have some sort of basis for law that is outside of just our own desires
or the, again, the positivistic, a positivistic move on the part of a politician or sovereign.
And so they were, when they appealed, when they tried to, they justified the rebellion against
Great Britain by saying, "We are endowed by our creator with certain rights." And so they weren't
just saying, "We're just doing this because we want to." They're saying, "God has created people
to do X and Y. Great Britain is not allowing us to do that. And so we have a basis by which to
object to these things." And so I think that this is, again, the reality is that morality and these
things, it does, at least on paper, it does stem from these deeper, more foundational questions of
what are people, who are we, how did we get here? We have to have these questions to orient
ourselves. And if we don't have some sort of existential anchoring for those things,
then we're at the mercy of the strong man who comes along and wants to try to create or fabricate
or present another version that's much more simplistic. And I would argue over the last
hundred years has been much more damaging. You've seen tens, if not, tens of millions of people
killed by dictators who tried to set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of truth. And that's
kind of the situation that we're in, is just trying to figure out how do we understand these
things? How do we make decisions? And again, I would just look at the United States in a political
climate where nobody trusts each other. Short question is, why do you thank God for Bitcoin?
And is it because Bitcoin is truth? I would say, I thank God for Bitcoin, because this is,
I love how you've become the interviewer. This is fantastic. I would say, I thank God for Bitcoin,
because I think Bitcoin is money the way that God intended it to work. It's money that doesn't
favor, doesn't let the powerful and rich leverage their power at the expense of, or gain strength at
the expense of other people. It's one set of rules that applies to everybody. And so again, I'm not,
I'm not a socialist, I'm not a communist. I don't think that having the ends based equality is
possible or would be good. But I think that one set of rules that applies to everyone,
that everyone can plan and live according to, is something that again, to our other point,
is something that is freeing. And so I think that when humans have that kind of a standard,
it's been good for people throughout history. And I think Bitcoin, again, Bitcoin presents a much
more equitable system than the current one that we have that enables endless war and all kinds of
other abuse and waste and theft. So I think that that'd be why I would appreciate Bitcoin.
How about you? What would be your two sentence articulation or few sentence?
Yeah. Well, I mean, the reason that why I originally got into Bitcoin was because I saw
it as a way to leverage technology to empower individuals. So you could look at that as
disempowering authorities that can continue to amass more and more power and change the rules,
however it suits them. And I think that's a tremendously valuable and good reason to be
involved in. So I'm glad to have you articulate that. In closing, I'll give you one more
opportunity. You can kind of say whatever you want to say, where people can find you,
or just if you want to end by making some other argument or just kind of laying out
some other thing, go for it. This is your chance. No specific argument. I think that part of the
process of being involved in Bitcoin, you can be as involved as you want, right? This is an open,
collaborative project. This is also why I originally got interested in the space was because
I had never really thought about the function of money. Like most people, you just use what's
presented to you. And when I saw both the computer science aspects and the philosophical aspect of
treating this concept of money as an open, collaborative project, I felt like that was
the best way to get towards what you might call an equitable type of solution.
Of course, it doesn't mean everybody is going to have the same amount of money and the same outcome,
but hopefully it means that there will not be a small group of people who have the power to
essentially outweigh, outvote, manipulate everyone else to their own advantage. And while I don't
know that this is necessarily going to fix many major aspects of society, at least anytime soon,
I do think that it's at least moving in the right direction. Whereas, as you've said,
a lot of aspects of the world are moving in what we would probably consider to be
the wrong direction, at least to the detriment of the masses. And if you're going to be
participating in Bitcoin more than just from the financial or holding aspect, if you want
to help give your input to steer the system, and there's many ways to do that, then I think that
this is the type of constructive dialogue that needs to happen essentially in perpetuity, is
that the optimal form of money is still out there. I don't think Bitcoin is perfect. There's a lot of
things that it can't do. It has constraints and limitations that many of us as engineers would
like to see continue to improve. Better security, better privacy, better scalability. And we have to
continue discussing with each other, what are the possible paths for us to go forward? There's
constraints from technical level, economic perspectives, and even philosophical perspectives.
So really, the most important thing that we can do is to have these intellectually honest
debates with each other and try to understand other people's perspectives.
- Agreed. I'll just close. So in Proverbs 27, 17, it says, "As iron sharpens iron,
so one person sharpens another." And so I think this is one of these things where
any of us who've spent any amount of time online, we get fatigued. You know in your head that it's
good to have arguments, but there comes points where you're just exhausted. You personally are
just tired of having them. And it's just easy to just wish away and just wish that you could
have a world where it wasn't difficult, that wasn't just such work to try to rub away at what
is not real and temporal so that what is good and longer lasting or eternal can come through.
But again, I just really thank you, Jameson, for your time and for this conversation. I hope this
is beneficial to people and hopefully this won't be the last conversation that we can have here on
the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast with you. So again, just give people where they can find you online,
give them your website and stuff like that, and then send it out on that.
- Yeah, you can find really everything about me that I've done over the past decade at my website.
It's lopp.net.
- All right, guys, go check out Jameson's work. I know I've benefited from in the past from his
articles. Again, he's one of the people who spent more time than anybody thinking about what Bitcoin
is. And yeah, I'm grateful for his work in this space.