This is the full transcript of Bitcoin Infinity Show #138 with Jeff Booth. If you'd like to support us, check out https://bitcoininfinity.com for all our books, merch, and more! ​   **Jeff:** Jeff, welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show, Ah, thanks for having me again Luke and Kurt, **Knut:** We're off to a good start. **Jeff:** Yeah, **Knut:** Always lovely to see you, Jeff. **Jeff:** we've had a lot of good times. **Knut:** yeah, we have had a lot of good times. And it's always a pleasure. I don't remember when last we did this, like, was it like more than a year ago now, maybe? **Jeff:** It was actually, It wasn't that long **Knut:** Yeah, but we met a couple of times in between, and we've done other stuff, **Jeff:** and you're going to Columbia too, right? **Knut:** Yes, I am. So we'll see each other in mid January. So I'm doing the Medellin conference in mid January and then at the end of January there's a Plan B conference in El Salvador I'm doing. So I'm planning to, like, use those two weeks to see El Salvador, because it'll be my first time there, so looking forward to that a lot. **Jeff:** It's awesome. I'll probably do the same. I've already been to El Salvador, but I'd like to go again. So I might do the same. Maybe we'll be traveling together. Totally. **Knut:** a replay of a favorite thing, a bus tour. **Knut:** We've, actually had some, very cool, experiences through this world and Bitcoin, haven't we? swimming in the pools in Spain and, going on the strange lifts in Madeira and traveling around Bulgaria. Yeah. They're really cool. Anyway, We don't know what we're here to talk about, but we're here to find out what we're about to talk about. **Knut:** So, # What Jeff Is Excited About **Knut:** so let's start off with how's your year been? what are you excited for? What are you worried about? All the things. **Jeff:** You say it all the time. Bitcoin is imposing this reality on the world for the first time, for the first time ever, we live in a global free market. And you don't have to believe it to live in it, right? If you want to measure that, from the other system, you can, but Bitcoin's imposing the global free market on people and repricing people who don't believe it. **Jeff:** if you're living in that world and measuring from that world, You see what should happen in the world and prices falling. Most people, even when they're talking about the fiat based instrument, they're converting bitcoin to their fiat unit to be able to price the world, and they think prices are still going up. **Jeff:** But what's really happening is you have global deflation. Global productivity gains, driven by Bitcoin is repricing everything from that energy based, decentralized, secure protocol. so it's wild to be, To know that and to be living in that and with a whole bunch of other people that are doing the same. **Jeff:** And it's just that knowledge is expanding kind of person by person and moving to the new system that is going to unite 8 billion people on this planet. # Bitcoin Is Backed by Energy **Knut:** Yeah, couldn't agree more, and this is great that we start off here, because I read a Rothbard book on my way to Amsterdam, to the conference in Amsterdam a couple of months back. there he touched on some things that we touch on in the new Clown World book, and that is that, money is, it's often described as a, store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. **Knut:** but the store of value part is kind of, it's a metaphor and it's not optimal because you can't really store value since value is subjective, right? so we prefer the term medium of exchange over time. And that is what Rothbard, and Mises himself described money just as a medium of exchange and nothing else. **Knut:** And Rothbard explains that more. The book I read is, What Has Government Done to Our Money? I don't know if you read it or not, but it's a great **Jeff:** read it. **Knut:** so he describes that money, all fiat money or all money before Bitcoin was a receipt for something. So usually a commodity in a bank vault and usually gold. **Knut:** And if, if you didn't get the amount back that you put into the vault at some point, someone is stealing from you. And this is always true. And he makes that point very clear that no inflation is ever okay, because what we are having is a receipt for another commodity. And so I started to think about that and think about what that means for Bitcoin, because Bitcoin isn't a receipt for anything. **Knut:** This is what some no coiners, don't get. they ask, what is Bitcoin backed by? But the thing is, Bitcoin is backed by, if you put in a certain amount of energy or time and energy in your workforce to acquire a certain amount of Bitcoin. Then if you don't get that value back in the future, then the receipt didn't work. **Knut:** So it's sort of, and since Bitcoin is incorporating like the, all the energy and time and focus of every other person on earth, then that pie is inevitably growing forever. it's just that it goes up and down before we reach, you know, Get closer to a hyperbitcoinization point, but theoretically it cannot go down on any longer time frame. **Knut:** What are your thoughts? **Jeff:** Yeah. so it's completely in line with what I see in this system. These are all different ways of explaining a system that has never existed before in humankind to transition to that. They're just fractals of the transition to be able to explain it. **Jeff:** Because in Rothbart and Mises and time, there was no way to escape what I'm about to say. 5, 000 years, we've always lived in extractive systems. Somebody had to lose for us to win, right? And so we would rise to top of emperors or nation states or kings, and they would invade other lands and put them into servitude and steal their resources, to be able to have the people within the one land have success. **Jeff:** So it's always been extractive and then those extractive systems decayed over time because they centralized more and more and more and they became less productive and a new extractive system. would emerge. And the history of Humans has always been through that and we've always consolidated money to, to be able to do that to other people. **Jeff:** Whether we did it on gold, to be able to extract somebody else's gold, and, and resources and put it in them in slavery. Whether we did it on, whether we reprice the gold, 'cause we won the war, whether we ensured our own citizens because we repressed the gold, but we always, always did that. So in 5,000 years of human history. of our thoughts on what the world must look like are within an extractive system that it's always looked like. And that's why this is so hard to understand for people, because this is a cooperative system and, and, and it's, and you can't change the rules. It's imposing that cooperative system on society and you don't have to even agree with it. **Knut:** It'll impose the cooperative system on you, right? because if you're outside of the cooperative system, operating in the dishonored system. No, it's super beautiful, and it's, the way I see it from a praxeological or Austrian economics lens is that you have the catalytic competition and biological competition, right? So you have fang and claw in the world of nature, which is the biological competition where the winner takes all and there's always a loser involved. **Knut:** And catalytic competition is the free market process, in which at least theoretically both parties win, or at least both parties think they have something to gain from the interaction, because it's consensual. And Bitcoin is moving us away from the fang and claw and into the cooperation thing. So it's, it's super simple. **Knut:** Like, the civilized way of doing things is pretty simple. Not aggressing against the other actor, and the barbaric way is to shove an axe into his forehead, so, and we're going away from that. **Jeff:** Yeah, but why this is so important? Because most people's mindset is still in the other model. Most people's mindset, they believe that they can win. In a model that's extracting from other people and they don't realize that if you're in the U. S. and you're at the, let's say if you're in middle of the U. **Jeff:** S., then you're extracting a great deal from those in Africa and South America and other regions in the world. through a system that must be extractive. So you think, you put your head in the sand and you say, it's not me, those people aren't working hard enough, or those people, because you don't even know that you live in an extractive system. **Jeff:** And so, a different way of saying this, Knut, which is just what I said in my book, People understood. The natural state of the free market is deflation. That might be deflation, because we use things that give us more value, and the free market, when you said it gives us more value, we trade with people we don't like to gain more value, and both of us win. **Jeff:** we don't need to be told to do it. We just naturally do it because it gives us more value, and that competition constantly competes. So the only way to be able to create a monopoly inside of that system is to regulate it, to stop the free market, right, to stop the natural process from happening. **Jeff:** And if the natural process happened. by the way, and I'm not saying if, because it is happening on Bitcoin, you have, the natural extension of that process is you have 8 billion people in service of 8 billion people and the amount of ideas that you remove people from the extraction, where they can't even live. **Knut:** Or they can't think like this and you move them to an area of contribution. Everyone wins. add 7. 5 billion minds. Two ideas, that compete for us in service of us. And that's what Bitcoin's doing. It's crazy. Yeah, it's super beautiful, and I think this is why it's so hard to grok for people, because it's almost too simple. We do things without any violence. We exclude, we remove all the violence and everything gets better. we cooperate. **Jeff:** it's because of the idea is so profound and it's never existed before. It creates a cognitive dissonance in our brain, right? And it does for every single person going through Bitcoin, including me and including you. When you first understand Bitcoin. So if you use. that cognitive dissonance of the free market is deflationary, then creates this break against all of your previous past and what your brain does is tries Defend the reality that you live in while trying to hold this thought, because it is true. **Jeff:** Both thoughts are true, right? And so what does it mean in the world that you live in? It means you've always lived in an extractive model. It means every single system, communism, free markets, socialism, capitalism, all of those systems are on top of a system that was always a control system. And so it forces that break and what happens in our brains is we try to resolve the conflict and can't resolve the conflict. **Jeff:** The conflict becomes so big for many people, especially experts in this. I'm just going to ignore it because it's too, I don't want to change my mind. I don't want to, because my mind, I was always right. and that forces inside. **Jeff:** And that adapted in your mind to realize everything the construct that I believed in the world to be true wasn't true. And sometimes that's our ego holding us into that other thing that we cannot let go because it changes our perception of us. That's why this is such a hard journey for a lot of people because they can't let go of their previous. **Jeff:** Mental construct to be able to understand that this, this is in service of everybody because they're trying to rationalize their old beliefs, right? And that cognitive dissonance, it creates a break in people's brains, right? And you can see even in my book, we talked about this with Peter McCormick, that they read the book a bunch of different times, listen to the podcast, Interviewed for tons of different times and still kept going back and you see most people in Bitcoin at some point enter and they're still measuring Bitcoin from the other system and they're trying to resolve that conflict, but they'll all eventually resolve the conflict because it doesn't actually care. **Jeff:** Right? it's, Forcing that, **Knut:** it's so simple. I see sometimes now that Bitcoin is touching a hundred thousand dollars, that some Bitcoiners To virtue signal, they say that, oh, but that's not just for inflation, and you should measure against gold, but measuring against anything is pointless, because this, to begin with, money is not a yardstick, but bitcoin is so different, they don't understand, it's not digital gold. **Knut:** It's a number in your head. It's not a commodity. It's a number in your head. It's a secret you keep from someone else that enables you to be friendly to your enemies. to collaborate with anyone regardless of what they think about you and what you think about them. # Understanding Bitcoin **Jeff:** That's why you very rarely find Bitcoiners who go down to the depth of the understanding that then go back up, right? Because what it means, if I go to the depth of the understanding of what this means and then go back up and choose something different, what it actually means is, I want to steal from other people to get rich fast. **Knut:** Exactly. **Jeff:** And what it means is, and I talk to Odell a lot about this in Nashville a little while ago, and he's been in it longer than I have, and he goes it's interesting to watch what happens because everybody that tries to cheat bitcoin cheats themselves in the end. Because a cooperative system, just being cooperative in it. **Jeff:** You do better. **Knut:** Yeah, it's the honey badger don't care. Like, that's exactly what that means. Honey badger doesn't care. and it's so beautiful. And like, we've talked a bit about this, many times and I've fleshed out the whole idea of, How the bitcoins exist within you. **Knut:** I truly believe that on the deepest level, a bitcoin, a satoshi is not a thing on the internet. It's a thing within human beings because the ability to move them is just a secret. We keep from one another, and the protocol is nothing but an agreement on a fixed set of rules that we agree on, because they're more expensive to try to break than to just follow, which enables this trust, ironically enough. **Knut:** Don't trust verify becomes global trust and it points out, I think it's also Bitcoin as a mirror, a mirror for the world and a mirror for everyone in it to see themselves through and see the world through. One of the things is this KYC bullshit, because like money was. Invented to, in order for people to not have to do KYC, like within a family, you know, everyone, like, so, so everything in Fiat land is so clownish and so absurd at this point. **Knut:** it's like when you go to the bank and they ask you what you want to use your money for, like a bank is basically a multi sig, two out of three multi sig between you, the state and the bank at this point. And, and then they have no money. # Trapped In The System **Jeff:** what is also true is, most, just about everyone I know is still trapped in some regard in the other system. And a lot of Bitcoiners are still trapped in the other system and they're measuring price go up. and what they're doing is actually strengthening the derivative instrument of Bitcoin by, by thinking prices go up and Bitcoin goes up faster than prices. So if you just think through that, these two systems are incompatible. The free market is incompatible over a long time with an inflationary based system because it has to steal more and more and it has to centralize more and more. The two opposite systems. and so, so if you're strengthening the fiat system by, by pricing in fiat, then you're strengthening the system that's extracting from you. eventually, like if everybody did that, they won't, and the won't is because what you said before, Knut, is, what protects Bitcoin? Us. We are Bitcoin. And there's too many of us that already have seen it behind the veil. and are building the next and the next and the next to keep, make sure this stays decentralized and secure in a medium of exchange and private and all of these other things that are coming to be able to, that the existing system has no idea they're even coming, right? because those people know that this is, A state change for humanity to move to 8 billion people in service of 8 billion people. That's what those people know. and there's more of us every day. Like if you look at what it was four years ago or eight years ago, there's more of us every single day, adding our voices and adding our minds to be able to protect this and see. **Jeff:** And then there's a whole bunch of new people coming in that aren't quite there. But when you tell those new people, like sometimes when you go so deep as we're going right now, it's like you're talking crazy talk because they're still measuring Bitcoin in that other system. **Jeff:** all of their work, their houses are going up in value, their entire structure is still in that old system and they're just trying to buy Bitcoin as a store of value or I need to get this to get rich quick to be able to trade Bitcoin. And some of those people will trade it and they'll lose out. **Jeff:** And they'll constantly, they'll do the same thing and then a bunch of them will get wrecked and they'll move, a bunch of those people will move down and be like us in this new system and contribute all your time to this new system as this permeates across time and space to all people, right? That's that. **Jeff:** So just such a natural evolution. and there's all different levels. When we say Bitcoin on a decentralized and secure protocol, everybody understands it at a different level. Bitcoin And so you just have to, I tend to think, I don't need to do anything but let somebody else be where they are. I'm not trying to, like, I just know my truth. **Jeff:** I know what I'm doing. It's just, eventually they'll see it. **Knut:** Yeah, there's no use in being mad at anyone. # Bitcoin and the Dollar **Knut:** two things there. I hear from some Bitcoiners, some big names, that own, 200, 000 bitcoins or more, that, the dollar and Bitcoin can coexist for a long time to come and I don't see that. **Knut:** I think Bitcoin is the antidote to the dollar in the long run. so how long can they coexist? And is there a world where these two paths exist at the same time? And it's not obvious that the new system is better. **Jeff:** this is a very nuanced question that you have to break down in a whole bunch of different stages. I might, even in breaking it down, because there's so much kind of taking aside in this, let's try to, so push me on some of this. let's start with, The U. **Jeff:** S. dollar system. For the U. S. dollar system to work, inflation is required. And that inflation extracts more from other nations than it does the U. S. So those countries have to fail faster. But most people in those countries want the U. S. dollars. **Jeff:** Can you just explain why inflation is necessary? So, a credit based system has to have inflation because deflation is the natural state of the world. So it has to have inflation to counteract the deflation because deflation would kill the credit based system. It has to. And then inflation has to keep on rising to be able to pay back the debt. **Jeff:** It's just a piece of paper that's worthless and eventually it has to, it has to resolve. Why the U. S. dollar lasts so long is they keep finding tricks to be able to extend its life first from the, take it off the gold reserve and then tie it to energy in the form of oil. and now they're likely going to tie it to Bitcoin and to be able to remove the debt in Bitcoin terms and start the process over. **Jeff:** And most people within that, in Bitcoin terms from people in Bitcoin, as U. S. builds treasury and other nations compete for treasury, denominated in U. S. dollars, that's a centralizing function in Bitcoin, right? They're competing to centralize. on a system, that looks like that, from that system, it would appear you could make your debt go away because you're repricing as you're buying it. **Jeff:** And then from that new stability of a system, You could lever it up again, and most people wouldn't know, and they would be trading in the derivative instrument because it wouldn't be as bad inflation as it's always been. And so they wouldn't know what's happening. They would think you've resolved the debt problem. **Jeff:** And they would start again. and in other nations, they would even do it more because the U S dollar would, right. And, and because they would want the U S dollar too. And there'd be a race for U S dollars, the derivative instrument on Bitcoin instead of Bitcoin itself. And so that's a centralizing function. **Jeff:** most people are going to be completely blind to that. In fact, all of the people right now that are trading their Bitcoin for other kind of holding a contract for Bitcoin and somebody else's self custody. Because they think Bitcoin is going up, whether it's any ETF and everything else, they're doing the same thing. **Jeff:** I'm gonna get rich in this new system, it's going to reprice the other system. and that trick is likely to be successful. and then what would that mean? It would mean you'd resolve the debt crisis. Just like you resolved it from going to gold to the oil, you were able to bring it down into a more serviceable area and it'd all start again. **Jeff:** And it's still an extractive based system. And because most people would live in that system and they would be pricing not in Bitcoin, they wouldn't be spending in Bitcoin. They would be spending in the thing. Then as that centralized, because that system has to be inflationary, as that centralizes more and more, then the attack to Bitcoin comes from there later, a lot later, right? **Jeff:** Because people will give up their self custodial, they'll give up their, or some people would, if enough people, let's just imagine, in thinking through these things, it's worth, we're thinking about our human action. Right? And what most people do, whether they say they'll do it or not. so today, everybody's yelling at the government, How dare you? **Jeff:** How dare you? How dare you? Well, they would never vote for a deflationary spiral, because everything, every bank would collapse, every house, they own houses, all those houses would be worth zero, or, or a hundred dollars, because you would have no financial system, the whole thing would fail. Everything, all of these people, So there is no they, it's only us. So what would those people do in this new system? They're more than likely to trust other centralized actors. 'cause it would appear that they were getting richer than other people in Bitcoin. And that trust, while they would all make like the US dollars had a lot of strength, right? **Jeff:** It has strength right now as other countries, collapse, that would be a centralizing function. And many people would eventually not understand the true risks. if that gained enough centralization and the powers from that centralization, then the attack vector would come to how do we and, the incentives from who? **Jeff:** Kind of who's going to go against microstrategy, who's going to go against the US government, on a bunch of these different things versus a repricing, repricing event or fork or whatever of Bitcoin. So that attack is still probably a long ways away and a lot of people don't understand that that attack has to happen. Has to, because you have two incongruent systems. One has to be inflation. One's deflation. But if you're pricing Bitcoin and you're in self custodial and you're building to, so what does, and then, That has nuance as well. That has nuance because, and that has nuance that even goes in beyond Bitcoin, like some of the different protocol or some of the different coins that said Bitcoin will fail because it doesn't have security or just isn't private are actually kind of right. **Jeff:** In a different time frame, right? But they centralize their privacy coin to try to achieve it, and that wouldn't work. So privacy comes in other layers. Privacy comes in another layer on top of Bitcoin that gives it the privacy. And keeps the decentralization and security and that's what, that's what Fedement would be, that's what Cashew would be. **Jeff:** And so you're building this parallel path that some of the people, if you, if you, you could just say binary, they're all shit coiners. Or you could say inside some of the ideas of the shit, Bitcoiners were important ideas for Bitcoin as well. They didn't understand this was a protocol. **Jeff:** They thought it was a technology. And so if you take the idea of privacy instead of the naming, those people are bad. These people are good. If you just take the idea and you realize it's going to come into a different layer, then those layers are going to be increasingly important in the next fight. # Centralization of Bitcoin **Knut:** think I have a slightly different view here. **Knut:** But that's good. Yeah, so let's, let's see what you think about this. ​   **Knut:** my hope and what I think is true, it is that there are already enough hodlers of last resort to prevent that centralization of all the money from ever happening. so, and I based that on that, like most of the coins have already been mined. **Knut:** Like it's somewhere between 90, 95%. I think it's like 93, 94 or something. All of those coins are already on the market. very many of them are already held, by individuals, and individuals who we don't know who they are. And, so, so governments and, and, and micro strategy for that matter can throw as much money as they want onto this thing. **Knut:** MicroStrategy owns like a bit more than 1 percent of the total supply, and how many billions have they put into it now? it, like, in Bitcoin, it's the, it, in fiat land, they say that the first million is the hardest. In Bitcoin, it's the other way around, right? The first million sats are the easiest, and it gets exponentially harder the more you try. **Knut:** And what you're doing at the same time is you're giving power, political power, economic power, everything, to Those who got it before you did, and the earlier they got it, the more likely it is that they are actual Bitcoiners and that they have these actual deep insights, if they still have the coins. **Knut:** Otherwise, they would have spent them, so their conviction is not that deep. What are your thoughts? **Jeff:** Yeah. so I agree with those thoughts and I think, but just here's maybe a different way in 5, 000 years of human history, many people have always known this, the secret that we now know that deflation and how money is controlled against us. **Jeff:** Many people understand the risks of it. And we've never been able to prevent it because of the centralization of that and that means we must be part of the centralization. And, maybe we never had the technology to be able to do, but your hope. I have a way higher bar because I don't think people understand the incentive. They make trade offs for the short term incentives versus long term and they don't understand this. I agree with you, there's more and more people coming down all the time and more and more people keeping this decentralized and secure. **Jeff:** So I'm actually not at all worried about the failure of Bitcoin at all because we are there and there's more and more people. Because they're going to, they're going to be price and maybe nation states and everything else, they are going to be building from a debt based system and an inflationary based system and all of what that means against a neutral reserve assets that's deflationary. **Jeff:** And if Bitcoin, a really simple axiom you could use is if Bitcoin failed as a medium of exchange. It will fail as a store of value. **Knut:** this is where I don't follow because how **Jeff:** so, because if you didn't use it ever and you just, or you used it to lend against it, and you held it and you just created the lending environment again, all you have is new kings and those new kings would eventually be overthrown by a centralized, structure. **Jeff:** This has to be a medium of exchange. It has to be a peer to peer medium of exchange to stop the centralization of that, so, it will be. It is already. it's building more privacy tools to be able to resist that. So I'm not worried that it won't be. But it has to be used as a medium of exchange to your point on Rothbard in the beginning. It's a medium of exchange. **Knut:** Yeah, but medium will change over time and space. So here's the counter argument to that from a slightly technical level. if I think this comes from your presentation, Luke, like the two transactions per lifetime figure. So if you divide all the Bitcoin between all the people, We each get like something like 232, 000 sats, or something like that. **Knut:** Well, I think that's the figure of 218, 000 or whatever it was. And there's enough, if we take a lifespan to be somewhere around 80, 85 years, and everyone on earth is on Bitcoin and on chain, not on lightning, but on chain, we all get to do two transactions. during **Knut:** our lives. that's **Knut:** all there is block space for. **Knut:** So, we need transactions to pay the miners. The miners need some income, especially after the last block is the last halving has played out. So, we need some activity on chain, but I'm not worried about that at all, because of the simple fact that block space is so limited, so there will be a free market for making those transactions, and I think that's enough, and if you don't, please explain why. # Bitcoin Layers **Knut:** I don't think he was. So if it ended up being that on on chain, that's why it won't ever look like that. It's a protocol. that moves it into lightning and, to be able to transact at high volumes, around the world. And then it moves from there, into Fediments and free banking, it's completely private. **Jeff:** And so you have a security and decentralized layer. you could trade on it if you want, or you could trade, lots of money on it if you want. And that's very open for people to see. If it was only that, and it was open to people to see and everybody were trading on this other thing, and not very many people could trade on this, then eventually the government being that big, would come and find those people and stop that. So it has to move up into, liquid lightning, whether it's ARK, an interoperability layer. That is on top of that. for two reasons, it has to move that because if you didn't have the interoperability layer on top of that, then people would try to force changes onto the base layer that could end up leading up to breaking Bitcoin. **Jeff:** So you move the interoperability layer up into lightning and everything else. Now people can trade with it all over the world and it's more private. **Jeff:** and it still can't reach 8 billion people. Doing the transactions that they do even on lightning and liquid. It might be able to get close, but fees would go higher and higher and higher through that. So then you have something that's extraordinarily private, Um, and Secure, and Fediment, and Cashew. **Jeff:** That almost acts like the cities, so you have the base layer, then you have the interconnectivity layer to the cities, and your city could be arbitrarily as big or small as you want it. Your city could be your family. Your city could be, a million people in your federation. And the trade off in that federation is the bigger the federation it is, the more risk in that private banking model, that the guardians rug pull you. what gives that the ability to scale infinitely is you have the choice. you can be in 10 banks at the same time, and you can have whatever trust model you want in that. And you can move money instantly without any fees and completely private within that, **Jeff:** And that projects in layers, **Knut:** what people don't realize is that most of these things are already here. **Jeff:** Yeah, that's it. That's it. They're already here and they're already emerging. They're emerging and they're growing really fast. And, just like Bitcoin has been here for 16 years, and if you bought it in the beginning, then your worldview, the world was always deflationary. And if you didn't get it until, last year, you were living in an inflationary environment until you got it right, # It's Already Here **Knut:** Yeah. **Jeff:** but all these things, all these things exist. they're already here and they're expanding really fast because more people are starting to understand the implications and move their time over   **Knut:** let's build up a pretty optimal scenario here. that most Bitcoiners, they get both the number go up technology, function and the, or I should say purchasing power go up instead of number go up **Knut:** way better So they get the purchasing power go up aspect of it. And they get the, necessity of the medium of exchange thing from it. so that everyone realizes that their stacks should grow so big in purchasing power that they can use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, just a small portion of their entire stack so that the increasing purchasing power of the stack will increase, so that they never have to worry about money again **Knut:** There's no compound interest the other way where someone pays debt, but like right now, it's very, it's very expensive to be poor and very, cheap to be rich in this world. And if you measure in fiat in Bitcoin, it's, that's equalized. **Jeff:** So I, I, I just said this on a different podcast, but, I don't like to, I'm not trying to be a Bitcoin speaker. I donate my time to a lot of conferences or podcasts to be able to move this out. But sometimes, like, I just to be able to actually almost stop all the demand on my time. **Jeff:** The, I hired an agent that just kind of. is speaking gigs, but I charged a lot for it. Because it's not something I want to spend my time doing all the time. So, a personal version of what you're saying. so what was the fee that I wanted to charge if I said yes and I was free to do it? **Jeff:** The fee was half a bitcoin. So now my fee, is in Canadian dollars, almost 70, 000 an hour, right? And maybe I move it a quarter bitcoin. that fee will come down if I want to do that job. **Jeff:** Because it'll be forced to in the free market of competitors and other people wanting to do that job. every single thing from that mindset is exactly the same. Like your house value is falling, all energy prices are falling, all prices are falling relative to that as the global free market competes in that. # Still In The Matrix **Jeff:** And it's just a unit bias that people have. to their old system that is keeping them trapped in the trap system. And most people are taking Bitcoin to convert it to the piece of paper to then price the world. they're still in the unit bias, right? they're still in the matrix. **Jeff:** They think they're out of the matrix because their purchasing power is going up in US dollars. Versus other people that is going down if you don't hold Bitcoin, but they're still in the matrix. **Knut:** yeah. So this is so fascinating because like in a way that, that effect you just described about your price pricing, your talks, maybe Bitcoin is trying to tell you something like maybe Bitcoin is trying to tell you, this is like, so. You should follow the market signal, right, if you want to make money. And that means, you allocate your time and resources to what people want to do, want you to do the most so that you're of most value to other people. **Knut:** But Bitcoin and pricing things in Bitcoin and your, your own value and how you value yourself is going up. So maybe the market tells you to be home with your family more and not work as much. # Inflationary vs Deflationary **Jeff:** Well, yeah. So it's, it's so that this thing, because it has to touch it's, it's the only non counterparty asset or non counterparty that's not centralized in the world. Every other thing. Every other thing is priced from the system, GDP, all of these things are all within the matrix. And then you have this bound, you have this open decentralized protocol bounded by energy that is telling you the truth, that's a truth machine. **Jeff:** And so it's, it's describing this 8 billion people in service of 8 billion people. And what should ha, what should happen in the deflationary system? What should happen is productivity growth is faster deflation. What should happen. that's, that's why it's actually so simple. It's so simple because if you're in this system, what should happen is actually happening everywhere, right? **Jeff:** It's having faster and faster rate because it doesn't matter if a government wants to get way bigger. It doesn't matter if a government wants to print 10 trillion. It doesn't matter any of this thing. This is imposing this discipline on the world. and prices should be falling on everything. And they are falling on everything. **Jeff:** It's just most people still think they're rising in their bill. and it doesn't matter. Like, you know, the, Weimar chart, that massive, deflation, inflation, deflation, deflation. And if you were whipsawed across that and trying to make choices within that system, you'd get, Flushed out on one side, flushed out on the other, flushed, flushed, flushed, because you're inside an unstable system. **Jeff:** And we laugh at that and all the people say, oh, those people, how didn't they understand it? And they're doing that right now. all the people in the world are doing that right now at some sort of relative debasement. Let's imagine both scenarios, right? So the world's balance sheet is 900 trillion dollars. Your house. is in that 900 trillion dollars. it's backed, by 400 trillion dollars of debt. you probably have a mortgage on your house. That 400 trillion dollars that is backed by all of that debt, and I'm not talking unfunded liabilities, I'm just talking known liabilities, that 400 trillion dollars. **Jeff:** It's already insolvent. It would take, 12, 873, 000 years paying back a dollar a second to pay back that debt. so you know this, we talk about it all the time, but if you just say, insolvent, but then carry to the logical thing, that means your house isn't worth the same price. Because if that debt is insolvent, and your house is on top of that, if the debt ever became insolvent, your house is worth it. **Jeff:** You couldn't sell your house because there'd be no money to be able to buy your house. Nobody would have it. It would be, that would be such a cleansing and a deflationary spiral. Everything would fail. Every bank would fail. Everything would fail. And you would be begging governments to print more money to make your house because your, that means your debt that you have on your house would fail and you would be in servitude to the debt. **Jeff:** And if that happened before the bank failed, right? And you would be begging the governments to centralize And bail out the economy. So that's our human action. And we say it's all those other people, but it's us, right? and that's why if you just look at really binary or really end, examples and you understand what would human nature look like in that environment? **Jeff:** Then you can understand this at a, then you can kind of play all of the different scenarios on the way through. But if that happened, that tail event happened, which it won't. But if that tail event happened, then Bitcoin would be the only thing of value. There wouldn't be anything else. And all of the other prices would fall so far that your Bitcoin would still be infinite, **Knut:** This **Jeff:** right? **Knut:** divided by **Jeff:** divided by that. And if the other event happens, The inflationary event, which is far more likely as currencies continue to do this. Then if you're measuring from the current currency, it will appear bitcoins just going up faster than the inflation rate, A lot faster, like a 50 percent IRR, whereas if you own a house, the IRR for the last 100 years is 8. **Jeff:** 5 percent because what's the, what's the IRR of a house? It's exactly the M2 rate of money printing. It hasn't gone up. It's just the money that's gone down, but people, and so, so in both appearances in on both those tail events, it actually doesn't matter. Bitcoin is repricing the world in any event. It doesn't, it doesn't care. **Jeff:** Right? And then let's do the math on that. So the math on that is if it, and it's not exact math because, but I'm just saying your perceived purchasing power, if you had a house with a million dollars of equity and 200, 000 of debt, you believe your perceived purchasing power is about 800, 000. **Jeff:** You believe it's a bank that you can, you can spend. You think like that and lots of people do. I can always draw on my house to be able to spend. So our perceived purchasing power of 900 trillion, balance sheet, divided by 21 million, or what if you could divide it by 17 million if you said lost coins, but if you, it's 43 million dollars today. In perceived purchasing power, if we just advance next year, next year, next year, we know the 900 trillion won't be 900 trillion. We know it's going to be higher and the 400 trillion won't be 400 trillion. It's going to be in the quadrillions because the money printing machine has to go crazy. So the perceived purchaser purchasing power of Bitcoin. **Jeff:** So when people talk prices in Bitcoin, I get crazy. Because, they're talking about these things from this nonsense, measured in the nonsense, without taking all of the variables, into account. So they're actually reinforcing the nonsense. but in purchasing power, and all Bitcoin has to do is stay decentralized and secure for this to happen. **Jeff:** In today's purchasing power of a Bitcoin, in time, is 43 million dollars against today's balance sheet. now add another variable, and this is probably a bigger variable, and this is where this heals the world. You could never spend that, ever. You couldn't come close to spending that, ever. **Jeff:** Because in this world, prices will always fall. So the purchasing power of that 43 million goes up and up and up. Because the productivity rate of the world flows to you. # The Greatest Noise Remover **Knut:** it's so beautiful. Like, this reminds me of, an old article you wrote called Finding Signal in the Noise. And we have our own take on that in the book as well, which is that Bitcoin is not the signal. Bitcoin is just the greatest noise removal tool ever invented. Because what it does, what you're describing here is exactly that. **Knut:** This is like taking away all the layers of noise. So that you can find your signal, like where you're needed, where you can be valuable to others, where you can do most good, and where you can fit in to make the planet a little better when you leave it than when you entered it. **Jeff:** So I loved this take. I'm going to, credit a friend of mine, Tom, that, he found my book. He read, rockstar real estate. but I saw him do an interview, that, took some of my work and actually then expanded on it in a very personal way. And so why do we choose a job and what do we do? **Jeff:** And a lot of times, a lot of humans are trading what they do best. For what they need to get the most money from. so today my son wants to go into finance. Why does he want to go in finance? And I'm trying to talk him out of it like crazy, because I said that's where all his friends think they can make the most money. **Jeff:** and a lot of these people are the best musicians or the best artists or the best anything that have ever existed, but they've trapped their time in a system working because they need to make money in that system. **Jeff:** So they give up on who they really are, the genius that they could give us. because of the trap of the system, and we all lose because of that. I'll bet you a whole bunch of people listening to this podcast right now are doing that in the other system, because they need to make the money. **Jeff:** one day I'll get out if I just make enough, and it's getting further and further away from them, and they're feeling trapped, and they don't know they're trapped from the very same thing. And you can just move your time, and you start moving your time. And you see something totally different. **Knut:** Absolutely, like, this, back to the signal and noise, like, I think this is, when you listen to this undistorted market signal that is with all the noise removed, which is Bitcoin, like, or what the market is trying to tell you to do, That is the same thing as dropping your ego. It really is because your ego is what you're describing right now that you're in the fiat system where you want to do stuff because you want to make the most amount of money the quickest way. **Knut:** That is your ego trying to achieve something, that is not really good for you and, not good for your psyche, not as good for you as it would have been to just follow your heart and also listen to the market tell you where you're needed the most. So like, if you're good at carpentry, you could be a **Jeff:** it might not be like, so it could be just like, if you think about kind of. somebody what they tell themselves, I have to have this. maybe at a higher level enlightenment it is around ego, but I don't want to call somebody out, because their world is true for them, and it's just a mere reflection, but if you feel like you can't, Pay your bills, and you need two jobs to be able to pay, pay your bills so your family can, no matter where you are in the world, or if you're somewhere else and you have to get on a boat to save your family against the excruciating, punishing system, who am I to be able to judge that person? **Jeff:** Because from their point of view, it might not be ego at all, it might be survival. **Knut:** No, no, it's being enforced. Like, so it's being imposed upon people. **Jeff:** they just **Jeff:** don't **Knut:** a deliberate choice.   **Knut:** just most people just don't know that they actually do have a choice. and that choice in, It can help you find this ego dropping state that comes 10 years down the line. **Jeff:** totally, because we all go through the same thing in Bitcoin, we have to resolve the paradoxes in our own mind as we go deeper and deeper and we see the world for what it really is or was, but we didn't know it before we started the journey either, right, even if we could sense it, like the, for me, the, it's always something I could sense, but I couldn't put my finger on it, **Knut:** I feel exactly the same. **Jeff:** I had to unlearn a whole bunch of the things I took for granted to be able to really understand the depth of what we're talking about here. **Knut:** Yeah, it's truth goggles. That's why I think that old John Carpenter movie, They Live, that's one of the best memes, my favorite memes in Bitcoin, where the guy has the truth goggles and he puts them on and he sees the world for what it really is. **Jeff:** Yeah,   # Deflation is the Natural Market State **Knut:** That's exactly what Bitcoin feels like, like just seeing the world through this lens, like the prices should be going down. **Knut:** It's obvious, like, if you practice doing something, do you get better or worse at doing that thing? You get better. So, why aren't all prices going down forever, always? Like, that's the inevitable, like, that should be the follow up question. **Jeff:** that's the point, and it's such a record skip, like it just drags across your brain, and most people when you hear, when I say that the natural state of the free market is deflation, it's crazy how many people nod. but then go directly back to their old system. **Knut:** but it must be the bias comes from having lived for 5, 000 years in the opposite system. **Jeff:** Yeah, we talked about this, we kind of went deep, on a spiritual level on our last podcast and how that comes into action, for all of us. where does a thought come from? it's emergent from what we're talking about. It's emerged. So if we lived in a system of extraction, then you would expect most thoughts from that system to be on top of that. **Jeff:** So to be able to see something that's totally different, where you don't have a mental model, you don't have the mental lattice to hold on to this. it's why, what you do on your podcast, what others do on their podcast, is actually exploring these things. **Jeff:** There are this fractal of all different ways to be able to describe this, this thing from something that most of us and none of us at one time had a mental model. We don't have the neurons firing to hold onto that thought. So it's easier to hear it. And then go back to the perceived safety of the other system. **Jeff:** 'cause all of our thoughts reside in that. But once you do have a mental model of what it actually looks like. by the way, I can see, in my mind's eye even if I can't describe it But yeah, totally how beautiful this world looks like. **Jeff:** how fast the cooperation happens, what it actually looks like for people when you unlock seven and a half billion brains in service of eight billion people, what we will find, what we will discover in service of us, we are Bitcoin. # Channeling The Power Of 8 Billion Brains **Jeff:** Yeah. I mean, all this talk about AI, like this combined brain power of 8 billion brains. Yeah. Take that chat GPT. Yeah, but what is the idea, you heard in Madeira, I said about this, how do these thoughts, this is what I was trying to explain in Madeira, I don't know how well I did or not I did, but the idea Let's, let's use Faraday, right, as an example. Most people don't even know who he is, but electromagnetism was always all around us. It was all, it was always all around us and it was discovered in his mind And then we reside on top of those thoughts where James Maxwell Clarke created the math to be able to describe what he just saw in his mind, that then we make use of all lighting, electricity, electric communications, everything. **Jeff:** And so we, most people don't even know who he is. Let alone that idea that was always there at all times for somebody to find, that couldn't have been found unless somebody had an idea for a printing press that unlocked his mind to be able to contribute it. and now if you just extend that and all of those ideas from the printing press were the age of enlightenment and a lot of things we take for granted without even knowing those people that helped us. **Jeff:** Live in the world that we, all the failures, all the successes, all of those people, we sometimes look at the heroes, just like we look at the hero of Satoshi, but we don't look at all of the tries on net from all the cypherpunks. Had to fail to be able to get to the discovery that Satoshi had to be. **Jeff:** And so all of those people are also instructive in creating the world that we reside on. All of us, we are completely connected. Now connect 8 billion more minds on a system of cooperation. And it's so unbelievably profound what that means. Cause we're going to find tens of thousands of Einsteins. that are right now working in the Democratic Republic of Congo to dig up cobalt. because they're slaves to our system and we're going to unlock them in service of us, in service of them, in service of us, and they don't know they can unlock right now because Bitcoin is an open protocol. **Jeff:** They don't know, they don't need to wait for the U. S. government to say yes. They could do it, just do it right now. They don't need, they don't need it to wait for anybody. They could just move a little bit of their time. How does that happen throughout society? how does your and my relationship spur some of these conversations? That then build, Oh, what about that way? What about that way? And we both come away from every talk, maybe a little bit more enlightened, we both come away from this discussion and as many people that, That will listen to that. This we are the ai, we're the, we're the supercomputer. **Knut:** I prefer the Terry Pratchett quote here, real stupidity, beats artificial intelligence every time, and we're the real stupidity, it's just that there are eight billions of us, eight billion of us, It's good to be reminded, and to go back down into the rabbit hole and just really explore how beautiful this thought is. **Knut:** so what do you think of this? I don't know if I told you this one before, but, just like electromagnetism was always there, even before Faraday, So was Bitcoin. It's just that the hash power was zero before 2009.   **Jeff:** what have we always done in humanity to be able to, overcome scarcity and produce an abundance. Anything that's ever been scarce, our mind solves that problem. **Jeff:** It's all from our mind that creates margin, or creates an opportunity to be solved, and we solve problems. We constantly do. It's never ending. If you think about powering the zoom call and powering the computer that runs your computer here right now, it is a silicon chip that's made of a grain of sand. **Jeff:** We took sand. Made, and re-engineered it to make the base, of computers. You think about what we're capable of, together to be able to create all of the efficiency and all of the things that we create in our lives. but what's happening today and what's happening for a long time is. **Jeff:** We steal that efficiency and we aggregate it up in only very few people instead of letting it flow to all people in the form of, this connection, but from Bitcoin, it is flowing to all people and all of these things that we will, so now connect that into Bitcoin and the timing in Bitcoin, if you zoom and take yourself out of the mix and you said it was another planet, Right? **Jeff:** And you had a evolution of history and biological, evolving and then at some point they would have to trade with something and they'd probably eventually use the hardest material there. And then they would go through this exact same thing and they would create, this fight because if you could extract more from somebody else, you would, and that would keep going as technology, it might move further and further. **Jeff:** and it would reach a breaking point where your weapons and the fight would either destroy the civilization completely, because the weapons would be so powerful, or you could step off of an extractive model to a cooperative one, and it would look the same if you just thought, you know, How would things emerge? **Jeff:** It would look the same anywhere, because that's what we're doing right now are Satoshi's gift, and many of the cypherpunks before Satoshi that understood what this looks like. It's almost the thing that had to come at the time that it had to come because of the same scarcity and the same what would happen to society under the outhold model created the need for the new transition. **Knut:** It's almost a solution to the Fermi Paradox. # Feeding The System **Jeff:** That's the way it is. It is a solution to the Fermi paradox. If you think about right now, what the world through the monetary lens has always been that it's, it's, you extract your, eventually, eventually the extractions become so great to let's use people moving to the U. S. and the U. S. fight for independence was everybody moving to a free market. **Jeff:** Free market was more productive, became the most successful. And those people left. The closed markets, right, the control markets, they fought for the independence, it was more productive, and then it got captured by the banking system that then creates opportunity, for another nation to be more productive and in this system that we're currently trapped in. **Jeff:** we always have been trapped in, how we reset is we go to war and we convince, we easily convince, first we convince inside our country that it's those people against, like you're the smart one, it's those other people. When that happens, then we consolidate power. Some, we give power to some dictator or somebody who removes our individual rights and freedoms because we believe they can, they're the only person that can save us. And then it can't work because it's a structural problem. So what do they do? They create an enemy outside the borders and convince you to go fight to kill somebody else because it's those other bad people that you're going to do. And if we win the war. We reset the currency. Say we promise not to do it ever again. We put up institutions to solidify that promise because we'll never act like that again. We've learned our lesson. We do it started again. Entire history of us through that lens is exactly the same thing that repeats through time based on an extractive system. **Jeff:** And right now we're at the brink of that same thing. most people are giving the strength to that system, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's, whether it's Palestine, and they're feeding it with all of their energy. I was with a YPL friend last night, and he literally said, those people are good. **Jeff:** Those people are bad. I said, Oh my God, how do you define good bad? It's like defining when cold turns into hot. What do you mean by that? Right? Because you're listening inside the system and you're making it stronger with that bias. If good is sitting inside a system and preaching good because you're stealing money from that system and somebody else has to lose, now he doesn't know this. **Jeff:** These things, that's why they repeat in time because we're so easily fooled. And this discovery of Bitcoin, I was just, Gary read Satoshi, and now us in Bitcoin is putting a new path forward that society forever is going to get out of this extractive model. The question is, can we make it before we blow ourselves up? # Prisoner's Dilemma **Knut:** that's the big question. Like, we explore a similar thing in the book, but you have to zoom out a bit and go into biology as well. If you take, like, the evolutionary process from The smallest amoeba and up to Janet Yellen, for any other being that exists now, a fruit fly, if you look at the, Prisoner's Dilemma, game theoretical scenario, when you have two people that have the choice either to rat out on the other prisoner or to, collaborate and, well, they can either, collaborate or just, rat on one another. **Knut:** Defect is the word. Yeah. Or defect. and it turns out that if you, if you play this game once, then what you should do is, cheat. But if you play it over and over again, the, best mathematical way to do that, to optimize the game when you know that you're playing the game forever is to cooperate. **Knut:** And if the other player, does something bad, aggresses. then you should retaliate appropriately, like eye for an eye, and then go back to trusting the other guy again when the punishment has been carried out. And so this happens in nature all the time. And this is why free markets win, because the optimal strategy for all beings is to cooperate and not to fight. **Knut:** And it depends on. The scale and all sorts of things and organisms within organisms. And, there's always this balance in nature between fang and claw, but catalactics is just as much a thing in the animal kingdom as well. From this perspective, it's collaboration or. Fighting one another. It's just that with Bitcoin, and I think these cycles of war and totalitarianism or not, it's the same. **Knut:** It's that playing out in humanity. So it's, it's a mixture of collaboration and fang and claw. We still have a handicapped monetary system. It's still, it still works to a certain extent. The thing that's happening though, in the long run is that free market, the free market forces are more powerful than, the pure, aggressive forces. **Knut:** Yeah. So, so in a way this was inevitable, like it's just the free market winning, and the computer revolution and everything, from Gutenberg and the printing press and so on, has accelerated the process so much. So we're living in this exponential, the hockey stick is already here. **Knut:** And with Bitcoin, the hockey stick is like insane. **Jeff:** we're moving the Nash equilibrium from a, I have more weapons than you, that you have to compete with me. or you have cooperate with me, so I cheat, but you have to, you have to, and we're moving the Nash equilibrium to, to a model of cooperation, and so I explored that in my book as well, and it's just, a really crazy, crazy thing in game theory, this move, Right? **Jeff:** That we've never been able to move before. **Knut:** No, and it's one of my most popular quotes from the second book, like when, when you cannot know how much another person owns and you cannot take it by force, the, the only way to extract value from that other being is to, is to collaborate rather than to, to attack. And, and it changes everything, **Jeff:** I love your ADD brain thought. **Knut:** thank you, so does Luke, think, anyway, # Bitcoin Mining Incentives **Knut:** The question is, is this also true for bitcoin mining or do Bitcoin miners actually have an incentive to attack one another? Because attacking the other miner and also blaming the third miner for the attack, could give you a competitive advantage in mining. **Knut:** think it's such short term, like it's just the biggest incentive structure in my, having a monopoly in mining. Is actually typically a negative for your, for your company, because the cost of the capital reproduction, trying to find energy cheaper in that size of a size of, system is, is always going to incent like the incentivist, where a monopoly competes today and the incentivist for the monopoly, because they can block competition. **Jeff:** The incentive in Bitcoin mining is to the new person because they buy the new equipment and they find energy at lower costs and a more diverse. and because the energy is cheaper and they have more newer mining equipment, they make more money. So, and that's, you want a free market force. **Jeff:** That's why mining is such a hard business. because you have to be counterintuitive, you have to be countercyclical, you have to sell when everybody else is buying, and then you have to buy when everybody else is selling, and you have to constantly chase cheaper energy. Constantly. I use an example, the This is a story for some of the people who have heard this before, but it's probably a good one for people who don't know what mining would look like. I use the example, you have a bakery. I walk into your bakery and I say, can I buy all the stuff you throw out at the end of the day? but I just want a discount. The next day, you produce too much bread, and I come in, I buy it all. The next day, you're hoping I show up, I buy it all. **Jeff:** The next day, you say, well, this is a good gig. I'm going to buy more ovens. I'm going to hire more people. I'm going to produce 10, 000 times more bread. I come in, I buy it all. by having a buyer, an always on buyer, I've financed your, building of abundant bread. I've created abundance. **Jeff:** Now insert energy for bread, and that's all a Bitcoin miner is. And it's competing against a whole bunch of people wanting to make abundant bread all over the world. and chasing abundant energy. it's always been abundant on our planet. it's a way of how do we harness it? **Jeff:** How do we pay for it to become abundant? And you've just inverted the entire paradigm of capital to create abundance and energy. It's such a simple concept, but owning a Bitcoin miner, it means you're competing in the free market against all of those other people trying to create abundant energy. And they can be anywhere. **Knut:** Yeah, we just attended a mining conference in Slovenia where we heard some interesting ideas about mining, and one of them was that, the miners today, a lot of the big mining pools and everything, they are leveraging the fiat system, so they have access to cheap loans, artificially cheap loans, and that's why they can mine so much, and that allows them to be fiat minded. **Knut:** right now and sell the bitcoins fast, but over time, as, rewards go down and everything, and the fee market might not keep up and all of this, then, mining necessarily has to be, Like the energy used in mining cannot only be used for mining. You will have to use the excess heat for heating a greenhouse or something else on top. **Jeff:** drying coffee beans, drying chocolate, **Knut:** Which in turn means that the miners who value the Satoshi higher are the winners. Like the miners who value the fiat higher. they will be out competed by miners who can actually hold on to the Satoshi and see the actual value of the KYC free Satoshi they just got. **Jeff:** you have a global swarm, anybody, globally, that can, when we went to Malawi, you have this, but I'll finish the other thought first, you have a global swarm, if you use Saylor's version, cyber hornets, that are, that are descending on energy, to make more money, and nobody can stop them. That's what's backing this. **Jeff:** And the more decentralized you are, the more the cheaper energy you are, the faster you can do this, the more money you make. And it just keeps on doing that forever. So we were in Malawi last December and there's these projects in Malawi, like just these brutal projects. Government projects, IMF type of projects, they have to, they have to drive solar in their economy, solar for charging of cars. **Jeff:** There isn't an electric car anywhere to be seen in Malawi. They don't have the money for an electric car, yet you have these electric solar systems to charge electric cars. That is just a money loot, like it's just such a useless use of capital because it funded somebody else to be able to say, let's impose what we want for Malawi. **Jeff:** so what do you think happens there? A whole bunch of people in Malawi are plugging in their miners to this free source of power and distributing. Why? Because there's money to be made there. The bakery example. this can't be stopped. **Jeff:** And it's completely inverting the power structure of What energy looked like. **Knut:** Yeah, I met the guy in, Buenos Aires, the Malawi guy, what's his name, was it Erik? name escapes me. **Luke:** We both met him on Madeira. **Knut:** we both met him on Madeira do you remember his name, Erik, Erik, yeah, Erik with a K, I believe. **Knut:** Yeah, it's cool. So you're seeing these things pop up in the free market, right? Yeah, it's super beautiful. **Knut:** Jeff, we've been going for one and a half hours. I want to let Luke in because I haven't yet. so let's see what he has for you. **Luke:** Jeff, oh my goodness. I can't think of a conversation that's been more optimistic ever on this show. This has been amazing. I really have liked your lucid explanations of these things that are so high up there in the clouds, I think, for most of these things. I really feel a sense of optimism that we are, in fact, going in the right direction, which is just awesome. **Luke:** appreciate that. **Luke:** Yeah. But, I think maybe just my only question is to bring this in a little more practical. # Challenges in the Coming Years **Luke:** What are you thinking about in the coming year, a couple of years, because everyone is still, concerned about the now, like we were sort of talking about, what do you see the effects of, this? **Luke:** Purchasing power go up. And, maybe the part two to this, if we get there is, what challenges are you foreseeing in the immediate future that we'll need to overcome? **Jeff:** Yeah, so I just think this isn't like, depending on what system you're measuring from, it's either a challenge. It's, it's not a challenge at all. It's a crazy opportunity or. Or from the other system, it's a really big challenge, right? and every single person on the planet right now has a choice of which one they want to decide, right? **Jeff:** So, it's a personal choice that people can measure whatever system they want. They don't, might not know it. And that personal choice that they don't know will lead them to still divide and fight and everything else within that. So those are some of the greatest challenges because most people don't know this yet, but podcasts like yours are touching more people and then those people will touch more people and then those people will touch more people like All great change happens. **Jeff:** it just permeates across society because people choose the better way. So, but that's bound to be messy and chaotic because we've never lived in a system like this. And it's a misunderstanding of what this means. but you can be immune. You can be mostly immune from that. If you've just moved your time and energy into the new space and you, you know, this Luke from going to a bunch of Bitcoin conferences and as people get deeper into this, the connection to those people also is so deep which would make natural sense because to understand this at a deeply, philosophical point of view. **Jeff:** spiritual level, like to go down that deep into what this means to cooperate, you have to abandon a whole bunch of the things that you thought ruled your life before. So of course you see the beauty in humanity. Of course you see that. **Jeff:** It's just such a natural extension because you're living in it all the time and you're seeing people all the time. But that, in some people, and they're so deep in there and then the clown world is so crazy, they can't let other people be them and find it in their own time. They yell, because they want to be right. They want to be, and that's typically an ego thing, because they need to be the one that told them, right? I have to be the one. if you just be you in this new system, if you're kind of in this, and let somebody else be them, whatever they are, and just, Talk your truth. **Jeff:** I find it just more, it, and let, it's not orange pilling somebody else. Every single person, I don't know somebody who says that person orange pilled me. Everybody thinks they did it themselves, right? and so, but, we talk about orange pilling people, orange pilling people. That's just an ego thing. **Jeff:** So let people find it in their own time. You be the best you, but It's going to be chaotic. people are going to mismeasure the system, what's happening. But every time on the way down through that chaos, you're going to mint more and more people on Bitcoin that are never going back. **Jeff:** Right? That are never, that are never, no matter what, they're never going back. And so, that is bound to just be Over time, transition across the society over a long, long arc of time.   **Luke:** this is so beautiful. I mean, yeah, that was not what I was expecting. I'll, yeah, seriously, because, because I'd, I'd, listen to your, your pod with, with Saifedean about, about Feddy and some other things you've talked about recently. I was somewhat expecting a little bit about that maybe we've got some immediate term challenges just in the perspective of that there are immediate threats to Bitcoin that might be executed on. **Jeff:** no, I'm with, I'm with Knut here. There, it will feel like that to some people that are doing this and a whole bunch of people, but you can even see some of the attacks and some of the, you can see inside the community. People are aware of this and they're fighting and, and, and it's creating, it's creating. **Jeff:** Different sides of an issue, even within, within Bitcoin and that side of that issue is like, I like Saylor. Saylor has been really, really great with us, but I also disagree with Saylor that this is not a U. S. based system. It can't be. It's a global system of cooperation and for, and so it might in the meantime look like consolidation. **Jeff:** The U. S. might be able to get out of their debt just like Gil Salvador is getting out of their debt by collecting Bitcoin. That's likely to happen. It has to be a medium of exchange in time, and it will be a medium of exchange in time, so I have no worry about that, I can respect somebody a lot, and like them a lot, and disagree with them too, we don't have to agree on everything else, you can, Care about somebody deeply, and you don't have to agree with them on everything else, it's not about the person, it's about the issue or the idea, **Jeff:** and so I can easily dissociate the, and even if somebody attacks me, it's not about their view of what that looks like, it's their welcome to that view. it's more for me about the ideas. **Luke:** Yeah, I've had this for a long time. The ideas that have helped me the most have come from people that are getting attacked from all sides. Jordan Peterson through Joe Rogan, etc. Lots of J's. But it's, yeah, when an idea works and it actually helps people, that's it. And even if the messenger is a flawed person, we're all flawed people, right? **Luke:** And all genius, right? We each have our own genius. The world emerges from that genius, those flaws of us competing on ideas. Here's an interesting thought on a company that people might know # One Minor Disagreement **Jeff:** We funded a new company that is essentially, Building, records into the blockchain, using, open sets. and so what if history couldn't be changed? What if you owned your real history? And it might not be true, but it's true for you. But history couldn't be changed. It couldn't be rewritten. 'cause we've always lived in a world where the winners write the history books and then we repeat errors throughout time. **Jeff:** So what would AI look like? And what would our history look like if we could learn from the real history, the immutable truth, rather than somebody's interpretation of what it was through their lens. So as you inscribe this into, into this, and I'm not talking inscriptions, but I'm talking, the, but as you take this protocol and you actually, you do that. **Jeff:** With historical records and everything else or voting records or, or this, it produces a learning for all of humanity, just like we're doing right now. We make mistakes, we update our model. We've, we fix them. we have fixed a mistake. And so, so if we can do that as a global civilization, that's, we're encoding our truth in each thing. It doesn't have to be right. But we learn from it, **Knut:** This is also a, where I strongly disagree. For once, I strongly disagree. I think every, every other use case that then money for, for Bitcoin is, is in a way an abuse case because just like, jewelry makes, gold a worse form of money and industrial use cases make gold a slightly worse form of money than, Any other use case for Bitcoin than, than Satoshi's that we can send through time and space, I think that's, not optimal. **Knut:** and, we're valuing like the whole system is, it has this internal mechanism that is at the same time robust and it's delicate and robust at the same time. And the robustness comes from the Satoshi being the, the special thing that is completely different from anything else and anything that can tie that Satoshi to something else, just reduces the power of the Satoshi and I love Satoshi so much that I wouldn't want to dilute them with anything, regardless of how a good record of history it was, I want my time chain to be as Un, besmirched by other information as possible. **Knut:** that's my stance and that's what I'm going to fight for with everything I got. I even dislike Chancellor Umbrink of the second bailout for banks. I wish that wasn't there. I wish this was only about the Satoshis. **Jeff:** right, but again, in the free market, people are going to do this. And if the value to them is that I actually, I tend to agree with you from a standpoint of a whole bunch of the nonsense that's come on, The, if there's a use case for, my will to put a timestamp on my will, and maybe it's not the entire thing, but it's a timestamp saying I did this will at this time. **Jeff:** That proved, that proved it was me at that time and that was my last will. I might want to do that. **Knut:** that's about as far as I'm willing to go. Open timestamps are kind of awesome. **Jeff:** Yeah, so, that's actually what I'm talking about. I'm talking open timestamps. I'm not talking about written inscriptions. **Knut:** As usual, this, debate is, manufactured. **Jeff:** Yeah, # Wrapping Up **Knut:** But, no, I mean, there's so much more to explore. I wish we had all week to talk and maybe we do in January. And I'm looking forward to that a lot, if that's the case. Now, Jeff, this has been an absolute pleasure. is there anywhere where you want to send our listeners? **Jeff:** I think most of your listeners know where to find me, just not on Twitter, on Nostr.   **Jeff:** all the best. too. **Luke:** Thanks again for the awesome conversation. **Jeff:** Right back at you, Luke. **Luke:** Take care.