All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 1, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:06:57
Delingpod 30: Dr. Craig Wright
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I'm very excited about this week's guest.
He is back for a second time.
His name is Dr.
Craig Wright.
Craig, two doctorates, right?
Working on two more.
That's correct.
You're a kind of polymath and you're the kind of person that I'm definitely not.
Because if I had your money, I think I would be...
On a desert island with my kind of Bond girls cultivating my volcano.
But you kind of live the life of the mine, don't you?
Well, I prefer that, actually.
I mean, I do the occasional getaway to the island.
The volcano island?
Well, no, there's no volcano in Antigua.
But I get back over there because I'm an Antiguan citizen as well.
Where are you?
Is that for tax reasons?
Tax, and it's just also a good place to set up companies and things like this if you want to be global.
Right.
A lot less red tape.
Just to remind everyone, the special friend who hasn't yet heard the previous Craig Wright podcast, but Craig made his fortune, well, the bulk of it, I imagine, from Bitcoin.
Fairly much, yes.
It all goes back to Bitcoin, really, and other inventions which are all to do with Bitcoin and 99% of it anyway.
The last time I interviewed you, I got various emails from people saying, you do realise he's not Satoshi.
This seems to be a matter of great concern in the world of Bitcoin.
Well, it goes right back to the early days.
So there was actually another James, James A. Donald, who I had arguments with before Bitcoin was even launched.
So much less amicable than my conversations with yourself.
But him and other people like him were much more anarchist.
And they would argue that Bitcoin's really about this distributed system that kills government and all this stuff and had this idea that every person needs to run a node.
And I'm sitting there going, no, it becomes commercial.
Eventually it scales so that you get data centers and things like this.
Then I put things in like the alert system and they ran around going, Satoshi's centralizing the system and craziness.
And so they don't want my view of my creation so that they hate the fact that my view of my creation is different to what they want.
But that's the thing.
Bitcoin's not about this everyone is equal thing.
I mean, that's called communism.
And it's not libertarian.
Libertarians allow companies.
If you read Mises in one of his books on liberty, he said that anarchists were basically deluded.
And there's a big difference between being libertarian and having small government and having only sort of non-nanny state features such as a police force and courts and rules.
Because capitalism needs rules.
I mean, you can have different forms of capitalism.
You can have the capitalism that...
It came about in the Balkans and places like this in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
And that's sort of your mafia capitalism.
And no one really wants to be part of that, not in the real world.
And that's where you see equality and inequality in the real way that matters, not the arguments we have in the West.
But where you see the guy with the big gold chains who blocks off a street and everyone lets them because they're so afraid.
I mean, that's the difference.
Even if you're rich, if you're Bill Gates or something like that, unless you hand everyone on that street a shitload of money, then they're not going to let you block off the street.
Whereas equality without the rule of law is a different scenario.
So that's your concern, because you're right.
I mean, definitely the anarcho-capitalist in me, I don't think he's the dominant part, but there's definitely a bit of him there, thinks...
Yeah, Bitcoin is the great defence against the man, the authoritarian state.
The central banks with their money printing, it's a way of actually having a form of currency which cannot be manipulated by central bankers for communitarian, authoritarian purposes.
I mean, is there anything in that argument?
Yes and no at the same time.
So you could actually have a Keynesian state based on Bitcoin.
I don't think it'll happen anytime soon, but the way that Keynes actually wrote in the theory of money and credit and whatever else was that...
A government in the good times could save money, and then in the bad times could spend.
And even with Bitcoin, you can do that.
You can still have loans.
I mean, someone can go out there and take money as a loan against Bitcoin.
But for instance, a government where they run surpluses in the good times, and then when things are bad, they start releasing and actually speeding up the economy would be a good thing.
And in his utopian idealistic dreams, Keynes actually thought that that would be possible.
Yeah, right.
He obviously didn't speak to many real politicians who realized that in the good times you can spend money, and in the bad times you can spend money, and then when it's good times again you can spend even more money.
That is how it works, isn't it?
Exactly.
I mean, that's the reality of it, though.
People don't think, well, it's the good times.
We should be a little more cautious and save money.
They start thinking, it's the good times.
We should spend more.
But just, I've said a thought here, which is, are you as nervous as I am about this abolition of cash that seems to be going on?
In some ways, yes.
I mean...
Cash isn't anywhere near as anonymous as people think for a start.
It's not been for a long time.
But if you go around Europe now, it's becoming more and more difficult.
I mean, Spain, you try and get money out and they limit what you can do in a day and they've made it illegal to pay people more than a certain amount of cash.
It's getting a little bit ridiculous.
I mean, There are definite extremes in parts of the world on what they're trying to do.
But is it not the case that we ordinary consumers think, this is fantastic, I don't even have to fumble around with shrapnel and notes in my pocket anymore, I can just...
Touch my card against this and I can get my coffee so easily and this is great.
Yeah and it can be on credit too so I don't need to worry about repaying it until I have an extra 20%.
So that's okay so that's so that's that's the obviously the upside but the downside is look at this country for example we've got a an alleged conservative government and yet the tax rate is The tax rate is the highest it's been for, I think, 40 years.
That's why they lack inflation, because inflation moves the brackets all the time.
You've got bracket creep because of it.
I mean, this is a great thing when you've got an incremental tax system.
If you inflate the economy, every year you get a little bit more back.
Yes, exactly.
Which is why we're never going to get that beneficial deflation, which is, I think, what Austrians would probably argue that is a good thing.
Well, see, the reality in my point of view is what causes deflation in the normal economy is growth.
When you think about it, the computer you buy is cheaper year by year.
The phone you buy is cheaper year by year.
Even if you're paying the same amount, you're getting more.
My phone, I've got a Samsung, and I've got a terabyte worth of storage on my phone now.
Have you?
Which is ridiculous when you think about it.
Actually, that is ridiculous.
And I can see it's studded with diamonds and rubies.
I can't see those.
I don't know what you've been smoking.
Yeah, I think.
And it's got a kind of laser device on it for killing your enemies.
Oh, I wish.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah.
So, what I was coming around to is...
governments around the world seem not to have got the memo from people like us that actually government almost invariably makes things worse when it steps beyond the basics of defence of the realm, property rights, things like that.
On the contrary, we seem to be heading towards a form of, I hate to even use the word qualifier, soft, but soft authoritarianism, soft collectivism, or indeed collectivism as bad as any other form of collectivism, but wearing the mask of, well, to use Theresa May's phrase in her farewell speech, common purpose.
Yes.
Yes, unfortunately, going back to people like Hayek and Mises once again, we start to see that government will start creeping into everything and the idea of being progressive.
We need to help these people whether they want it or not.
And what we're really doing is making a dependent class.
I mean, what we need to do is give people dignity.
And you don't give people dignity by giving them a dole.
You give them something where they can earn money, where they can get out there.
I read something the other day in Spain where they were complaining that the economy is so bad that people have to go out there and create their own jobs.
They're not getting jobs.
I'm reading that, I'm going, this is great.
They're creating an entrepreneurial class.
And the government's actually going, we need to stop this.
How dare people actually get up and do something themselves and not just take handouts?
I'm presuming that the Spanish government is socialist, isn't it, at the moment?
Very much, yeah.
Like the Portuguese.
I've just been in Portugal for the weekend for my wife's birthday.
And I felt so sorry for these people having this...
Well, this is the thing.
We go to school and we read about the Nazis and we read about how terrible they are and we look at the Soviet Union and we realise that communism doesn't work.
And yet...
We're members of the European Union for the moment, and the European Union is just another version of the Soviet Union or the Nazi Germany.
Unfortunately, too many European politicians follow sort of the golden lie of Plato.
They ignore Aristotle.
They have this...
We have different people and classes.
We don't want them to see that, but there's us as the golden classes, politicians, and we're the...
The philosophers who know what's best for everyone.
And then you have those other people that you don't want to mix with, like the iron class, because they're just workers.
Well, I agree with you.
And I'm about to throw a reference at you, which you won't get because you don't watch TV, do you?
Not much, no.
Exactly.
In fact, earlier on, while we were having lunch, you revealed something quite extraordinary.
This is how abstruse Craig is.
I said to him, did you watch our big sporting victory at the weekend?
Yes.
And he said which sporting victory and who won and he didn't know that England had beaten New Zealand at the cricket.
I do now.
You do now.
Exactly.
But there was a fascinating documentary.
On the BBC. Inside the European Union.
And there was a guy...
Have you heard of Guy Verhofstadt?
Guy Verhofstadt is this Belgian...
Belgian Eurocrat.
Quite high up in the European Union.
And that attitude that you described was very much there.
He's...
In his hobby, in his spare time, he likes to race saloon cars.
And it was clear that he really did believe that actually the European taxpayer, part of their duty was to fund his hobby and his Brussels lifestyle.
In return for doing the square root of fuck all.
I mean, really.
I do not...
Well, they do go out and have lunches.
They do have...
They're very good at that.
I mean, it's really hard work.
I mean, then you have to go to the gym afterwards and burn all that extra wine off.
I was going to say, those more frites don't eat themselves, do they?
Exactly.
But just as John Bolton once said that you could remove the top ten floors of the United Nations headquarters without making any difference or anything, I think that if you...
Only the top ten?
Yeah, well, no, that was my response.
If you demolished the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels, I'm not sure that anyone would suffer.
I mean, apart from the rent seekers and the parasites who actually work there.
And I suppose their dependents.
Oh, someone would walk past and go, why is there rubble there?
We should build something.
Yeah, what would they build?
Hopefully not another one.
Yeah, well, exactly.
That kind of brings me onto the discussion I had planned, because I'm thinking, if you were even richer than you are, if you were kind of, because you're not Bill Gates rich, are you?
No, not that I've checked.
So you're not that level of stupendous richness where you see your job as going around changing the world and making it a better place, which of course all megalomaniacs want to do.
They want to make it a better place.
But if you were a good megalomaniac, like we would be, what is the kind of thing that you would do to arrest the decline of Western civilization, which we see going around us?
I would start people actually learning and having a proper education.
A combination of education and training.
And they're different.
Education is what teaches us about society and how we fit in and all the rest.
And that should be traditional values.
And by that I mean things like learning about Plato, not that I agree with much of what he says, but Aristotle, and then Thomas Aquinas, and the whole history of culture.
actually works.
Not some of the wacky stuff that started with Kloon and others where they started thinking that we could be technocrats and control everything.
Yeah.
But actually where people started building and creating and innovating and understanding that science and mathematics works and that they explain the world.
Yes, but I was going to stop you there and say this has kind of been tried in that you know about the Australian, I think it was, billionaire who offered some money.
To any university in Australia that would set up a course in Western civilization, much on the lines you've just described there.
And none of the woke universities in Australia would accept this free money because they found the notion of a course celebrating Western civilization...
So toxic, so inimical to their communitarian multicultural values that they did not want to be tainted by this free money and this free education.
Well, Harvard actually removed all of this.
So they stopped teaching it because it was anti-equality and anti-everything else.
And Plato, of course, was sort of totally against what they believe now.
He was sexist and all this other stuff.
Although if you actually read Plato, he's probably the opposite of that for his time.
He actually has equality between men and women in many areas and part of why they probably killed him.
Teaching weird ideas like that to the youth, like women actually be able to work.
I mean, that goes back 2,600 years and it ended up with him being forced to commit suicide because of those sort of ideas that changed and opened up the West.
And yet we now say that he didn't go far enough.
My great friend Christopher Booker, before he died, was writing a book about groupthink.
And he was tracing the origins of this kind of madness which has beset our culture.
I don't know about you, but you don't read the newspapers, but if you did...
I read newspapers again.
Okay.
Every day, one reads the newspapers and one sees yet another piece of incredible stupid...
For example, there's so many examples, but I think today I read in the papers or on Twitter, which is kind of my newspaper these days, that the National Theatre has decided that it wants to...
Do the classical plays, but this time make them relevant.
Because of course they weren't relevant before.
But...
What was the point I was trying to make?
It's that...
It's all very well, people like you and me, saying that...
Our civilization is going to the dogs and all we need to do is to establish a few courses where children learn proper stuff.
But actually we're fighting against the current which began, I think, I've found my point now.
Booker describes the moment where I think it was at Stanford in the 1980s.
Which is when Elon Musk was studying there, and the students boycotted this course saying, hey, my, my...
Something, something, something, something.
Western Civ has got to go.
What would it mean?
Yes, I remember.
Yeah.
I think that actually stems even further back with Nixon and his crazy little bit about removing the need for media to be fair and objective.
There was actually laws in the US that required that if you were going to report a story, you had to actually give both sides of it.
This was Nixon's idea?
Yes.
Yeah, and he was supposed to be a Republican.
Yeah, they thought it would actually be better if they could have one-sided news that would help the Republicans.
They didn't want all the stuff that showed the other side of Vietnam and everything.
So, unfortunately, it bit them in the ass because the reality is it just made sort of partisan news on both sides and no one actually tries to find out the full story anymore.
Yeah.
So...
I don't see how your plan...
You could found, say, 10 universities around, put them around the world, and it would be very nice, and a few people might send their kids together.
But still, I imagine that employers would be wanting kids who'd gone to Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and who'd been indoctrinated with the kind of messages which it seems to me that the corporate world, for example, actually rather welcomes.
Every corporation in the world now has become basically cucked, hasn't it?
Well, we don't.
I hate that and have to beat it out of some of them.
You mean your company?
Yeah.
Yeah, but you can do that because you're the boss and probably you're not beholden to anyone.
Actually, let me ask you that.
Oh, everyone's beholden to someone.
Welcome to this modern world.
Well, this is interesting.
This is a roundabout way of addressing this point, but I'm going to try and get that.
My brain seems not to be working properly today, but I'm going to try.
Again, you won't be aware of this because you don't watch much TV, but the BBC has this really annoying diversity casting policy where now it...
Even in historical dramas it will cast black actors for the sake of diversity even though it's very unrealistic.
Yes, I've seen some of that.
I was watching because they've got a version of Romeo and Juliet where it's Romeo and James or something.
Oh, so they're gay?
So they're gay, yes.
So they're gay and one guy's a black man and one guy's an Asian and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah, okay.
So there's a part of me that thinks, well, okay, this is okay because in a free market, people will flee from the BBC and go for the slightly less woke Netflix or rather they go for those parts of Netflix.
YouTube, Instagram.
Yeah, exactly.
But here's the problem.
BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, now subscribes to this view that it will not give awards to films, for example, which don't have the same diversity policy as the BBC. So what I mean is that you get this interconnected network of institutions,
all of which gradually become SJW Converge, so that their values make it impossible for...
Even if you wanted to ignore this, you couldn't because they would impose their laws on you.
And in the same way, I was going to ask you, this is my question...
Do you find that with your company, you have to do business with companies that say, well, what's your diversity policy?
What's your...
Not when it comes to me.
I think anyone filters any of those sort of people away from talking to me because I think they realize that I'd probably tell them where to fuck off.
Yeah, you would.
Okay.
But that's...
You see, you're in a luxury position.
Most companies...
Do not have that problem.
I've got friends who have their own businesses and are very, very high powered.
And even they have to have all this kind of bullshit in their philosophy and probably printed quite prominently on their web pages and stuff about how...
I'm very simple.
I don't give a fuck whether you're black, white, gay, straight, whatever else, as long as you do the job.
That, I think, is the view that most entrepreneurs...
That's diversity.
No.
Most entrepreneurs I know share your position.
And actually, when it comes down to it, we're in a global market, particularly in tech.
You know, you'd be mad if you were shutting out, say, Eastern European Python programmers from Cluj-Napoca or people from the Indian subcontinent where there's a massive amount of...
And you wouldn't care whether they were Muslim or whether they were Hindu or whatever.
You just want the people who can code really well.
But nevertheless...
Is it, say you were the anti-Bill Gates, which you'd have to be, because Bill Gates is woke, isn't he?
I mean, all his causes, he and his, and probably the wife's even worse.
I mean, wives normally are, aren't they?
Yeah, I think the whole reason he does all that stuff is the wife.
Yeah, and God knows what Mrs.
Bezos is going to turn out, the new Mrs.
Bezos.
I know, she gets half.
Yeah, exactly.
And we've got a similar problem coming up with the future Mrs.
Boris Johnson.
I mean, that's going to be worrying because she's pretty woke.
She's pretty green.
And so all those voices in the Conservative Party that are going to be saying, Boris, we've got to rein in this green horse shit.
You mean the watermelons?
Yeah, the watermelons.
And Boris is going to be, yeah, but I might not get any sex tonight if I... Well, look out of me probably won't anyway.
So going back to our original, I'm not sure that despite being sufficiently clever to have made yourself a multi-million pound fortune, I'm not sure you've actually nailed the problem yet.
That how in a woke world, where woke is bloody everywhere, how can we, how can individuals, assuming we are kind of Bill Gates rich, how can we Save the world.
Well, I don't know about we, but what we're doing here, I mean, where Bitcoin goes is what we're creating now is what we call MetaNet.
And the idea here is replacing the internet altogether.
So we're going to have a commercial system.
It's going to be capitalist.
It's going to not allow all the trolls and anonymous sock puppets, etc., So it will mean that things like Twitter aren't just paid armies of people sending false information, which is anything from companies even...
Do you realise 20% of the GCHQ budget is sort of fake Twitter accounts and they spend even more in Russia?
You're not serious?
I am, actually.
How do you know this?
I've had friends in the past who were with them, so...
Sorry, just run that one by again.
20% of the budget of GCHQ is sock puppet accounts on Twitter.
Yes.
That sounds like a great conspiracy theory, but I'm prepared to take it as a conspiracy fact if you...
Yeah, it is.
And that's not as bad as the NSA and some of the others.
And this is the West, where it's not even as bad as other countries.
They get more money out of doing all this stuff to change public opinion than they do out of hacking and finding out what's really happening anymore.
Well, that's very worrying, isn't it?
Okay, changing public opinion.
Who's deciding what public opinion should be changed to?
Well, this is my problem with some of the things like NSA and GCHQ. They're not really like good old-fashioned human intelligence or anything anymore.
It's all about trying to align popular opinion with the views of a few bureaucrats.
Yeah.
And they're not even elected.
Yeah.
And so I'm quite excited by this thing you just told me because I let the release sprung it on me because I didn't know about this.
So you're going to create a new internet?
We already have been.
So it's already starting.
There are a number of applications like Twitch and whatever else that commercial sort of versions of things like Twitter and whatever else where people have started actually...
Posting information that's immutable, can't be altered, and costs money.
So they're only micropayments, so fractions of a cent for every time you send something.
So for the average person, it doesn't matter.
But when you start adding that up for fake accounts, when you're running tens of thousands of fake accounts, suddenly it becomes expensive.
So the cost of creating fake news, of doing other things like that, actually skyrockets.
Okay, but...
I'd always thought that fake news...
Okay, so there were sites in Macedonia which put out fake news.
But I didn't think that this had the power to make any difference to anything or anyone.
But look at what people are reading and getting information from now.
They're getting it from things like Twitter and Reddit and 4chan and things like this.
I trust 4chan, don't you?
Oh yeah, definitely.
You're being sarcastic though.
Slash yes.
I like 4chan, don't I? Of course, you've been told to.
Come on, I trust 4chan more than I trust the BBC. Yeah, but that doesn't say much.
No, well, I agree.
That doesn't.
But it's an improvement.
Isn't it sort of...
Do you not think that...
I discussed this on my last podcast with my brother Dick...
that there's quite a few of us now...
who are so sick of the dishonesty of the mainstream media...
and the way it's been controlled by...
taken over by the liberal left...
That we've just given up on it.
And we now get our information from...
Okay, maybe I was exaggerating with 4chan.
I probably only looked at it about twice.
But I like the kind of things that these kids do.
But...
I get...
I mean, I trust Paul Joseph Watson and Sargon of Akkad more than I do, well, anything on the BBC or CNN. Yes, but then again, when you're talking about the BBC these days, I mean...
The quality of journalism has really gone down.
I mean, if you look at what you used to get in a piece of journalism where people actually fact check and now they take, I mean, even Forbes, they have paid articles and they don't put them up there as an advert anymore, which they should.
I thought that was illegal.
Right.
No.
Advertorial kind of thing, but without the...
Well, they don't actually advertise anything.
They're just putting up news the way that they want to sell.
So it's not an advert.
So if you're selling an idea, you don't need to put it down as an advertising thing.
It's really about manipulating people and what they see and what they view.
And sometimes people even change them.
So they put them up there and then remove them later.
But that's too late.
People have read the article and then you go, oh, well, people complained, so we'll change it back to something else that's more acceptable for when the government reviewers come in and step in and we can say, look, we acted.
But so what?
You've already had people read.
They're not going to reread and go, ha, they changed it on me.
Right.
Okay.
So I can see why blockchain technology would be good at keeping a permanent record.
But so this new… It's also about commercializing.
If you then actually have people sort of attesting and having to stand by what they're putting out there and being able to be attributed, And you don't allow people to just be sock puppets.
Part of why Bitcoin's about is the nature of removing sybils and sock puppets.
And if you allow sybils and sock puppets, then people can start manipulating things without being known.
I mean, this is why people don't get...
Bitcoin's not anonymous for a reason.
It's pseudonymous.
And there's an audit trail.
It's expensive to follow that audit trail.
It's economic security.
That means it gives you privacy by being expensive.
So someone like the government can follow that audit trail.
But only, and I mean only if it's actually justified, it has to be cost effective.
Right.
So you're not going to follow every person in Britain.
You're going to find the guys who are major drug dealers, people smugglers, major money launderers.
So you're not going to come after me for buying a bit of pink kush, whatever it is?
No, I mean, that's the thing that people don't get.
If you're talking about some guy buying a little bit of weed at home, that's one thing.
But if you're talking about someone who's moving shipping containers of people who've signed up to be maids and have now found out that they're actually being sold into prostitution.
Yes, that's horrible, isn't it?
I know.
I've seen Lilia Feather.
That film is so depressing.
Yeah.
And this is what gets me.
I'm all for markets and things, but there needs to be regulation to an extent because if you look at, well, slaves were markets too, but it doesn't make them right.
So there's always limits.
And what people don't seem to think about when they're looking at this is the first book that Adam Smith wrote was on moral sentiments.
So he talked about what limits were in the market and interactions, and then he wrote this other book about capitalism.
And capitalism works when it's actually a system that we want to be part of, not when we're selling people or we're selling things that kill our children or anything like this.
It works when it's a system that actually everyone wants to be part of, that they're proud of.
Well, this is what conservatives...
Often criticise libertarians, because they say that what's missing is the element of morality, and I suppose to a degree tradition, which is why somebody like Roger Scruton would never call himself a libertarian.
But that's education.
I mean, that's one of the key aspects of what it should be.
And if you read on liberalism by Mises...
You find that he's not anti-government.
He thinks government have a place, but the free market should also be there, but within limits.
And there needs to be something where society can actually see what's going on.
I mean, it needs to have a level of transparency.
And people like to say, we don't want anyone watching me.
Well, you make it too expensive to watch unless there's a problem.
And we need transparency.
We need to stop anonymity because it's not even you that it's really the issue.
Anonymity helps drug dealers, the big ones, the smugglers.
It helps corrupt officials, corrupt politicians, and it helps big companies who are corrupt.
It helps banks.
I mean, at the moment, if you look at countries that everyone loves to go on holidays to, like Dubai...
Yes.
One of the big problems there.
Dubai is probably the biggest center for smuggling gold in the world.
Right.
And they're one of the biggest money laundering companies in the world.
And the reason they get away with this is so many politicians have money stuffed there.
Right.
And the way that it works is people, after they opened up the foreign purchase of land, why the land goes up so much in this big bubble that they have in Dubai is people buy land using any tainted money from any source and then they can take it out legally and it becomes perfectly laundered.
Why?
Because we sit there and go, it's Dubai, it's okay.
Right.
Yes.
So, are you going to change all that?
I mean, is this your plan?
I'm hoping to.
That's part of why I get a lot of hate.
When you start talking about creating systems that will make it really difficult for politicians, for large corporations and whatever else to actually get away with corruption, I think you get a big target painted on yourself.
Well, surely.
But how feasible is this plan of yours?
Well, next 20 years we'll see.
It's quite a long time to wait.
20 years.
Everything takes time.
I mean, we're working on it now.
It's already starting to roll out.
We're already getting people to build.
Bitcoin's been going a decade now.
Things are all happening and changing, so...
People are going to be, let's face it, most people's interest in Bitcoin is, is it going to go up?
Is it going to make me loads and loads of money?
And I know you disapprove of all that, but let's speak for the ordinary mortals for a moment.
Bitcoin is what?
Around 10,000?
Well, that's Bitcoin Core or PTC. I won't really call that Bitcoin.
That's a sort of modified version of what I created.
And the one that you've got, the one that you prefer, is called what?
Bitcoin SV. SV. And you can trade, you can buy Bitcoin SV. Yeah, you can use it too, which is even better.
Right.
So what's Bitcoin SV at the moment?
I wouldn't have a clue.
No, but presumably, like most cryptos, it basically moves, it ebbs and flows with the Bitcoin price.
Yeah, but that'll actually change in the next few years.
Right.
What we're starting to do is get transaction volume going through, and we've got people coming in who will be using it.
We've been creating patents and technology around things like EDI. What's EDI? Electronic data interchange.
So things like bills of exchange and other things that allow businesses to interact easier and have records that they can't lose, that reduce the chances of things like Enron-type frauds.
And over time, I mean, under FinCEN rules, et cetera, in the US, it's required that all public companies and all traders and all brokers and everything like this have immutable records for every trade, for every sort of transfer that they do.
And the senior officials even need to have immutable records of things like their social media postings.
So all of those things will be able to be stored much cheaper than the current version of what's happening.
Right.
That's quite scary for those of us who'd like to be able to airbrush out elements from our past.
So everything is going to be indelible.
Well, if you're talking about some of these things, they already are.
If you're a CEO of a large American company, then everything you do has to be already kept.
It doesn't mean it will be public.
That's where people go wrong.
You can actually have it so that it's immutable in there, but it could be encrypted so that only certain people have access.
So you don't need to give it to the world.
And so when this world you describe, this technology comes, what's the, how do you say it?
On stream?
No, online?
Becomes more widely adopted.
When it becomes more widely adopted.
Is the world going to be a better place?
Well, I'm hoping so.
I actually have a little bit of a different theory of booms and busts and economic cycles than many people.
I actually think it comes down to like a fraud cycle.
So what we have is you have new technologies are created and introduced.
And then people will defraud the industry and lie and cheat and oversell everything for a while.
And that creates part of the bubble cycle, the hype.
All the fake industries and money going into things that don't really exist.
But Tesla.
Yeah.
No comment.
But if everyone was actually investing in things that were real technologies and real promise, then we would just see continuous growth.
But the reality is you have a new hype cycle and everyone...
Tells people about this new technology and how it's going to...
And they take money.
ICOs were a big one there.
I got angry at a conference a few years ago because a guy was up before me and he was talking about how he managed to raise $50 million.
And now his first idea was shown to be stupid, but now I've got $50 million that I can sit around in my pajamas until I come up with a new idea.
And my comment was...
You shouldn't have $50 million.
You've taken investors' money and you haven't returned it.
The reason we end up with government regulating us into nanny states is because of assholes like that who take other people's money, steal, and then think it's okay.
I mean, the reality is what he should have done is everyone who chucked money into that ICO, when he said, no, this isn't a good idea, whatever was left over, he should have returned and given back.
Yes.
Didn't something similar happen with Twitter?
Wasn't Twitter born out of a failed idea that then got mutated into something else?
It was still a micro blog and things, but they've changed it and moved.
But they actually created something.
That's the difference.
I mean, in this ICO scam world, people take money and then pivot, but don't It's certainly true that sort of venture capital companies...
They might whittle down potential investment targets to maybe 10 companies.
And what, maybe one of those will end up producing anything worthwhile and the rest are just kind of...
Not even that.
But is that not the nature of tech?
And in a way, hasn't it always been like that?
You think about the early days of the motor car.
There were loads and loads of models which no longer exist.
Yeah, but there's a difference between having people who know what they're doing choose a whole lot of potential ideas...
And going out there and raising money with the promise of something, and not just small amounts.
I mean, venture capital goes through different cycles.
You raise like $50,000 and show...
A proof of concept.
And then you raise a little bit more and you raise a little bit more.
And you can sit there going, wouldn't it be nice if I had $50 million?
But no, it actually wouldn't.
Because if you chuck too much money at people too quickly, it's a recipe for disaster as well.
Basically, like this other one, you stop working and you just go, well, it's nice that I have $50 million now.
I can just sit in my pajamas.
And when an idea comes up, I mean...
Is this not a function of years of central bank manipulation and artificially low interest rates and money printing, which means that it's very hard for people to just put money in the bank and live off the interest or whatever.
In order to generate returns, they have to engage in increasingly risky ventures, which inevitably means that we've got this bubble economics like you've described.
In part, and as I've been saying, I mean, some of that comes down to frauds.
And it's not just frauds in like the Ponzi's and whatever else of the past.
It's also big organizations, even banks and things like that.
I mean, the whole nature of what caused the 2007-8 sort of financial crisis, collateralized debt obligations were really, I mean, they were a scam.
Yeah.
Actually, look, I'm sure I've discussed this on a podcast before, but it does actually leave me slightly gobsmacked, that I remember somebody I know a few years ago who hadn't gone to as good a university as me, probably wasn't as clever as me, talking about this new vehicle that his bank was involved in called Collateralized Debt Obligations.
And I was impressed at the time.
I thought, well, this is the kind of crazy voodoo shit that I don't understand.
But hey, I guess these guys are worth their money.
I look at my contemporaries from Oxford who went into more lucrative careers than I did.
And I'm really not sure how the money they made is justified.
Because I don't think they were actually creating value.
I think they were just conjuring money.
Well, a lot of this is a zero-sum game.
When you're creating value, it's not a zero-sum game.
A lot of the financial games that we're playing are actually, when you take the losses and the tax and everything like that, they're less than a zero-sum game.
And moving money around the table to move money around the table isn't creating value.
What banks are meant to do is allocate funds.
They're meant to give out loans to businesses and allow people to buy assets that they can pay off over time.
They're really a vehicle so that you can take short-term and long-term sort of differentials and match them.
So you can have lots of little tiny investments, but also match those with long-term investments without a loss.
Because none of us can, when we're starting out, throw a whole lot of money in that we're going to lock away for 20 years.
And there are some investments that need to be locked away for a long time.
Like when you're buying a house.
You don't want to have to go and renegotiate your mortgage every six months unless you're one of these silly people who, as the merry-go-round was going, were trying to buy more and more property and leverage more and more.
They would have done well, though, wouldn't they?
My goodness.
Until they didn't.
Yeah, but that hasn't happened, has it?
I mean, the big property crunch, people who...
Well, some did.
I mean, if you look at the state in America around that time, there were a lot of people who just walked away from houses.
Okay, there was that period.
But I'm thinking in this country, my God, it's been a buyer's market.
I know that the London market's just started to turn down 4%, I think.
I suppose it's quite a lot.
But generally, people who've over-leveraged...
Have done really well.
And in my view, immorally.
I mean, I don't blame them personally for taking that decision.
They were lucky.
But I think it is immoral, a society which allows the haves to take huge risks and be rewarded, not because of anything they've really done to deserve it, but just because the markets have been rigged in such a way that asset prices have been inflated by government intervention.
Is that a fair...
Yeah, the intervention is the problem.
This concept that everyone needs to own a house, I mean, that's actually problematic in many ways.
When you start manipulating the market so that people can artificially own houses, then you start inflating the value and you start people owning more than one property because it's going to allow them through leverage to own even more property.
And they get subsidized because of interest rates, the inflationary currency, etc.
And it actually disadvantages people who save and invest and build in a more traditional way where they're actually creating something.
And contrary to what people think, I mean, having a lump of land isn't actually really creating anything.
Well, I suppose you disapprove of what's known as rent-seeking.
Yes, I'm not a fan of rent-seeking.
I mean, I understand why people do it.
They're incentivized to.
And everything in economics is really about incentives.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, we have a society that, because it's politically sort of motivated to allow people to do some of these things, because it gets you votes, we have more and more of this coming out.
Wow.
Earlier on, I asked you whether you'd seen...
Well, first of all, had you seen The Matrix?
And you said you had, which I was quite surprised by because I didn't know how to touch you with so much stuff.
Not quite that out of touch.
I said, which character...
I said, would you have been Red Pill?
And I thought you probably would.
And I said, which character?
And you said, you're...
Is it Morpheus or Orpheus?
Morpheus.
Morpheus, yeah, yeah, exactly.
A bit more of an Orpheus.
You're the one handing out the red pills, which I like that answer, but it does imply that you have a degree of power, which I like.
I mean, I like the idea that...
I consider you one of the good guys because you share my kind of small government, sort of libertarian-ish philosophies.
But how will we know when you're winning, if you're winning?
I mean, this stuff, this alternative internet you're talking about, which strikes me as pie in the sky at the moment.
What signs will we see that your technology is coming through?
Over time you'll start to see more and more of these technologies on a single blockchain and you'll start to find more and more sort of fraud cases for a while because there'll probably be more prevalence of these things popping up as people start getting caught before everyone realises how difficult it will become to get away with things they'll start being caught out.
And then there'll be new forms of fraud because fraud will move.
Hopefully it won't be anywhere near as prevalent.
And we'll start to see people having to actually figure out that they are actually able to be held accountable for their actions.
So not just the small guys and whatever else, but right up through corporations, right up through law firms, right up through everything.
Right.
That's good.
At the same time, part of me thinks, you know when the Swiss banks were forced to reveal who their clients were and what was it in the Virgin Islands where there was that case where...
Part of me thought, well, actually, no, I can't even pretend a part of me did.
I thought, this is bad news, because actually, I think that we all have a sacred duty not to give the government any more than we have to.
And actually, given that, you know, you look at...
In a country where Philip Hammond is Chancellor of the Exchequer, do you really want to do anything other than avoid giving tax to the government?
It seems to be not just a sensible thing but a morally right thing to do because the government's going to spend it on absolute shit.
How do you reconcile that view that government is a big problem with this new world where it's going to be much harder to avoid government oversight?
I'd like more transparency.
If people can actually see where their money's going, where they have full transparency on what's being spent, the scenario with $5 trillion being lost by the Pentagon and all this sort of stuff will be more difficult.
Right now we have a world where it's easy to fit all the books and hide things.
And transparency is really what it comes down to.
It's the old sunshine principle.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant and the street light is the best police officer.
I mean, that's not a new sort of view of things.
It goes back to an American judge from around 100 years ago.
But the reality there is where you do have sort of oversight, where you do have transparency, then you have less corruption.
People can actually start dealing and trusting.
And what about places like China?
Is this going to rein them in at all?
I think it will change them radically.
It won't happen overnight, but once people start getting more access to real information, once they start being able to buy and trust and see what's happening, and once they see what's happening with their own leaders in a way that they're not now, it's going to stop and once they see what's happening with their own leaders in a way that
And God knows, God only knows what a billion people sort of entering even more strongly into the global economy, understanding their rights as consumers will do.
But I think it's going to be… That's… I mean, this is the subject of another podcast I've got coming up with a special guest who thinks that actually all our problems date back to 2001 when China was admitted to WTO, and that this is why we've…
well, I mean, everything, the sort of the generational gap, for example, the generational wealth gap, is all explained in terms of admitting this nation of, what, 1.2 billion people with wage expectations far lower than you get in the West, and bringing them into the Western economy, etc., etc.
China, we've seen, has done a very, very good job of insulating itself against this Western values, against freedom and stuff.
To a point, even that is starting to seep in.
I mean, as much as they try, people go in, visit different countries, come back with ideas.
And 9% of them have got passports, I think.
And that's still a lot of people.
But they're probably the sort of the nomenclature, aren't they?
The ones who kind of be relied on not to be corrupted by them.
But they're probably spying on us, rather.
But even then, I think it slowly seeps in.
Over time, the concepts and views and what they see in the world is changing them.
Right.
So China's becoming more and more capitalist over time, and in a much better way than what you'd have in Russia.
So I'm sure there are better ways China could have done it, but they certainly did it much better than the kleptocracy that became Russia after the Soviet collapse.
Yeah.
So, final question for crypto freaks.
Your version of Bitcoin, tell me again, the Bitcoin?
SV, which is the original version.
The original, okay.
Bitcoin SV. You don't know what price it is now, but is it presumably...
If it's a key part of this new internet, it's going to reach the stratosphere, isn't it, in terms of its price?
It'll go up from what it is now and people will use it more.
And we're releasing later this month upgrades that allow us to get to two gigabyte blocks, which effectively now we're doing around 2,000 transactions per second.
And that will be even bigger again in the February upgrade.
Right.
So we're basically going to be able to handle 10 times the transaction volume of PayPal and approaching Visa on an average but not peak day now.
And next year we'll be able to take that up to more than Visa type levels, but it may be a thousandth of a cost of Visa.
And presumably, in this new world, you're not going to be censored or censured for your politics in the way that companies like Mastercard seem to be doing.
I mean, have you noticed this?
These woke credit card companies are now actually denying trade, denying money, effectively, to people they deem politically unacceptable.
Right.
Well, that's the thing people don't understand with Bitcoin.
It is actually censorable, but it costs a lot of money to do.
So if you have a big address, the way that people sort of falsely use things now, rather than having lots of little coins, then that's actually censorable.
So the...
Laws of tracing and other such things, because it's really a distributed clearinghouse, allow courts to step in and act.
The reality, though, is if you're doing lots of small transactions, there's no way to stop it.
Because if you consider a court action costing maybe 10 to 20 million pounds, and being able to run that through and globally stop or block transactions...
No one's going to do it to stop your $200 transaction.
They might do it for your large stolen exchange value, like the Quadriga or CX or even Mt.
Gox in the old day type scenarios, where governments will be able to come in there and force that to be reversed.
But that's because if you're recovering $100 million worth of funds and it's costing you $10 million to $20 million, then it's actually economically viable.
On the other hand, if you're talking about blocking someone buying something like sensitive materials or whatever else, even for $1,000, then too bad.
Don't do it.
Right.
Okay.
I've suddenly realized a flaw in my argument, which is that actually the problem is the interface between fiat currencies and Bitcoin.
I mean, in order to be able to buy your cryptos, you've first got to have Bitcoin.
In order to be able to buy the Bitcoin, you've first got to go through that sort of AML procedure and all the kind of checks.
You've got to have a conventional bank account.
So that's where the man will still get you.
With one of the companies we've invested in, Centby, for instance, in South Africa, they've actually started a whole lot of small purchase sites.
I'm not sure what the equivalent of 7-Elevens and things around Africa now allow you to buy vouchers and load that to your phone.
And it's very simple and easy.
So people on low incomes can actually buy and use Bitcoin.
Not so that they can hoodle or do it, but so that people who are earning money in places like Tenziah can send money back to their relatives in South Africa instantly and then exchange it quickly.
we're only talking only talking small amounts these people are only earning a few dollars a day so they might be sending a hundred and fifty dollars at a time and it it's actually really good because um you have in the past a lot of female workers who would send money back to their husbands who would go out and drink and drink it as you just said um but now they're able to actually look at what their hubby's doing and send them back just the amount it's
So he can go to the store and they'll pay remotely for the groceries minus his beer and do all this sort of stuff.
And I'm sure there's a few husbands not happy about this, but that's never the mind.
I mean, at least the kids get fed now.
Right.
That's good.
And that's sort of woke in a good way, isn't it?
Exactly.
So you start changing how people interact.
And you need low fees for doing that.
If you're going to do this whole idea of Bitcoin as Bitgold type idea where fees hit 20 plus dollars, then these people can't do that.
But when we're talking unlimited block size and people can send sort of dollars or whatever, just single dollars even if they want and only pay a fraction of a cent in fees, then they can start controlling their lives again.
And they can actually look at what people are doing and pay not...
In a block once a month as they get paid, but as they get money, they can choose when they send.
Well, also, this would be like my fantasy for journalism, because it seems to me, I'm very pissed off, for example, that I don't have the column I deserve on The Sun or The Mail.
A few years ago, it might almost have been possible, but newspapers are so woke now that even conservative ones won't have the likes of me.
But I still think there is a massive market for me and I think the way of rewarding people like me who sort of...
who slip down the cracks of political correctness is micropayments, surely.
I agree.
And on a platform that no one can take down.
Yeah.
So not one where you're going to be censored by Google or whatever else because people don't agree with you and the advertisers want to take you down.
the advertisements um which i don't particularly like the modern ad industry no way um you actually earn by getting people to pay you money and no matter i don't really care i'm not going to say uh what's good and bad i mean there are plenty of things where people make money because it's populist and stupid um that's all right but I like stupid.
I mean, stupid's good.
Yeah, people do a lot of that.
I mean, as long as it's good stupid, not Extinction Rebellion stupid, which is just bad stupid.
Yeah.
But people then earn money by actually doing that, and you get to see who's really popular because it's not sock puppet accounts.
Okay, so how far away is that world?
That golden world that I'm quite looking forward to.
It's already starting.
So things are being rolled out.
As we're scaling, more and more will happen.
We've got things like Weather SV, which is a peer application around the world where people feed weather information from their phones.
Oh, that's right.
It's like crowdsourcing meteorology.
And it's lots of little transactions and it records global weather and it's growing and it's immutable so guys in the UN can't manipulate the results.
Yes, like they do at NASA and NOAA at the moment.
They cook the books.
So you've got the raw data, whether you like it or not, that's what's recorded.
What that presupposes is that the measurement techniques used to record this raw data is… Yeah, but then if you're doing peer sourcing and you have outliers, you can isolate them.
So if you have, say in London, you have 10,000 10,000 people recording the weather in the city, and one of them records it at 38, and the others are all between 34 and 34.5, then you just exclude the guy who had 38 as an outlier.
Right.
By the way, can I just end by apologising to my special listening friend who's probably thinking...
God, there's so many more interesting, intelligent questions I would have asked Craig Wright than the ones you asked.
And you obviously hadn't a fucking clue.
But I'm sorry, but the difference is I'm here with Craig and you're not.
But Craig, why are you my friend anyway?
It's weird.
I don't know because I'm sure there are lots of people who'd like to sort of hang out with you.
And what is it that you like about me?
I'll put you on the spot there.
Yeah, I mean, you call yourself anarcho-capitalist.
I wouldn't.
I mean, you're not really anarcho.
You're more freedom.
Yeah, yeah.
And I like your sort of crazy conservative, not that it's really conservative type view of small government and stick it to the man and whatever else type attitude.
Yeah, so that's how you get to be Craig's friend.
LAUGHTER Good.
Not too radical and not too not radical and whatever else, but willing to actually voice your opinion.
Good.
Well, I'm going to let Craig now go on with his business of creating this new internet, which is going to save us from the man, I hope.
And I've taken too much of his time already because that's kind of an important task.
So thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Yeah, thanks, Craig.
▲
Export Selection