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@ Guy Swann
2025-04-30 15:14:04
First, crypto has everyone confused because they think this is stocks of equity. When it’s actually a massive fundamental shift in how you can get a huge group of disagreeable, or even malicious people, to safely know that they all have consensus on the state of a network. And the most powerful use of that breakthrough is in money, which is just a record keeping system.
Second, that the history of the internet can largely be traced back to a tiny group of cryptographers and cypherpunks that kinda built every major protocol and tool we use today. It’s the greatest and least known group of people who basically made all of the internet as we know it possible. And the big vision was about how you could make a network of completely unreliable devices reliable, and how you could have open systems where any attacker can join, safe from the attackers with out needing a master, who could end up as the attacker themselves. These are insane problems that took decades to solve because it’s an entirely different way of thinking about how to create rules and security through openness rather than closed and permissioned access.
Third that there was a 20 year history of these cypherpunks trying to solve this problem already that most people have no clue about. 5 major project each solved one tiny piece of it, but couldn’t sustain an entire system, until Bitcoin.
Fourth he asked about mining and I gave him a short rundown of my analogy I used in a 6 minute video that I’m currently editing and have been working on for a few weeks. That went really well because I think it demonstrates extremely well that Bitcoin is not a little toy on the internet, but the most insanely secure digital record on earth. And I think that clicked so that he could “see” that if he owned some Bitcoin, it was well and truly his and there was nothing anyone could do about it. (Rather than explaining that again I’ll just get the video done)
Then he basically said “yeah I’ve been really thinking I need to look at it, but just had no idea how. I really probably just need to start buying some. Do you have some sort of “begin here” episode of your show?” And that was about it. Sounds like a lot but I’ve gotten really good at covering the big ideas pretty quickly. I managed to get through this in the course of a short appointment and I was surprised at the timing. I’m improving 🤣
The path I take is always different for different people though. I have to judge which topic is one likely to strike interest or be relevant to their way of looking at things. He was a doctor so I went the “internet history/system design” route and I think letting him see it as a groundbreaking system for making cheaters obsolete without anyone in charge was interesting for him to see. Luckily there’s about 100 different angles to come at the idea of bitcoins breakthrough, the difficulty is in knowing which path to take.